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October 2009

With pop in their bats, Phils pop champagne corks

Mon, 10/26/2009 - 19:45 — admin

PHILADELPHIA – Pedro Martinez broke out the first bottle of champagne, Ryan Howard and Jayson Werth puffed on victory cigars, and beer flew everywhere.
Celebrations are becoming a tradition for the Philadelphia Phillies. It doesn't get old.
"We won the World Series last year, but we want to win it again," pitcher Cole Hamels said. "We've done everything right to get there. We want to go to the next level."
The defending champs beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 5 of the NL championship series Wednesday for their second straight pennant, the first team to do that since the New York Yankees in 2000-01.
The Phillies, who beat Tampa Bay in last year's World Series, are trying to become the NL's first repeat champion since the Cincinnati Reds in 1975-76. The Yankees were the last team to win consecutive titles when they captured three in a row from 1998-00.
While they enjoyed the party after eliminating Manny Ramirez & Co. in the NLCS for the second straight year, there's still some work to do.
"This is great and all that, but we have four games to win," said Werth, who hit two of his five postseason homers in the clincher.
Now, the Phillies have to wait nearly a week to play again. The World Series begins next Wednesday night in New York or Anaheim.
Rust shouldn't be a concern for these Phillies. They were in the same position last year. Philadelphia had six days off while the Rays only had two after defeating Boston in seven games.
The waiting isn't a problem, either. After all, the Phillies have looked forward to this moment since they paraded down Broad Street last October. A few more days is no big deal.
Manager Charlie Manuel gets a chance to set his rotation and players have plenty of time to rest. After a day off Thursday, the Phillies will return to the field for a workout Friday.
"Having to go through 162 games and understanding there is another season after that, you kind of get impatient at times and you really want it to come to an end faster than it does," said shortstop Jimmy Rollins, whose two-out, two-run double in the ninth inning capped a dramatic comeback in Game 4. "But you can only take it one day at a time and then when it gets here, it goes by pretty fast."
The Phillies cruised to their third straight NL East title this year despite a problematic pitching staff. Hamels, the postseason hero last October, struggled all season. Closer Brad Lidge, who was perfect in 2008, had 11 blown saves and lost his job a couple times. Three-fifths of the original rotation ended up in the bullpen and two of those pitchers weren't on the NLCS roster.
But first-year general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. made key moves in acquiring two former Cy Young Award winners — Cliff Lee and Martinez.
Lee has been this year's version of Hamels in the postseason, going 2-0 with an 0.74 ERA in three starts. Martinez pitched seven scoreless innings in a 2-1 loss to the Dodgers in Game 2 and could get the ball for the second game of the World Series.
Lidge has even turned things around in the playoffs. He's 1-0 with three saves in three chances and hasn't allowed a run in five appearances.
Still, Hamels' inconsistency is an issue heading into the World Series. Joe Blanton and J.A. Happ, both reliable in the regular season, each got one start and also have pitched out of the bullpen in the playoffs. One of them will be counted on to pitch at least one game next week.
"I've seen our pitching better," Manuel said. "I think in order for us to really have a lot of success in the series, we're going to have to have better consistent starting pitching. But we are very capable of doing that. I know we can win the World Series again. But things have to be right for us, and plus we've got to play the best."

The Phillies have almost the same group that won it all last year with three notable additions. They replaced left fielder Pat Burrell with All-Star Raul Ibanez last offseason, signed the unemployed Martinez in mid-July and acquired Lee from Cleveland before the nonwaiver trade deadline.

A powerful offense has carried the Phillies in these playoffs. They've averaged 6.1 runs a game. Howard, the NLCS MVP, is batting .355 with two homers and 14 RBIs. Werth is hitting .281 with five homers and 10 RBIs. Shane Victorino (.361), Carlos Ruiz (.346) and Chase Utley (.303) are also hitting above .300.

"Our offense came alive," Hamels said. "Last year, the pitching is what really got us to the top. This year, it's the whole team. That's what really shows."

The Phillies enter the World Series on a postseason roll. They're 18-5 since the start of the 2008 playoffs and 16-4 in the last 20 games. That's the best record over a 20-game span by an NL team in postseason history.

"The playoffs are a whole different animal," Howard said. "You're one of eight teams that are left, and you're going for the gold. You just know that in order to get to where you want to be, you've got to step your game up and you've got to be on your 'A' game and just go out there and get things done."

Poll: US belief in global warming is cooling

Mon, 10/26/2009 - 18:21 — admin

WASHINGTON – Americans seem to be cooling toward global warming. Just 57 percent think there is solid evidence the world is getting warmer, down 20 points in just three years, a new poll says. And the share of people who believe pollution caused by humans is causing temperatures to rise has also taken a dip, even as the U.S. and world forums gear up for possible action against climate change.
In a poll of 1,500 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, released Thursday, the number of people saying there is strong scientific evidence that the Earth has gotten warmer over the past few decades is down from 71 percent in April of last year and from 77 percent when Pew started asking the question in 2006. The number of people who see the situation as a serious problem also has declined.
The steepest drop has occurred during the past year, as Congress and the Obama administration have taken steps to control heat-trapping emissions for the first time and international negotiations for a new treaty to slow global warming have been under way. At the same time, there has been mounting scientific evidence of climate change — from melting ice caps to the world's oceans hitting the highest monthly recorded temperatures this summer.
The poll was released a day after 18 scientific organizations wrote Congress to reaffirm the consensus behind global warming. A federal government report Thursday found that global warming is upsetting the Arctic's thermostat.
Only about a third, or 36 percent of the respondents, feel that human activities — such as pollution from power plants, factories and automobiles — are behind a temperature increase. That's down from 47 percent from 2006 through last year's poll.
"The priority that people give to pollution and environmental concerns and a whole host of other issues is down because of the economy and because of the focus on other things," suggested Andrew Kohut, the director of the research center, which conducted the poll from Sept. 30 to Oct. 4. "When the focus is on other things, people forget and see these issues as less grave."
Andrew Weaver, a professor of climate analysis at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said politics could be drowning out scientific awareness.
"It's a combination of poor communication by scientists, a lousy summer in the Eastern United States, people mixing up weather and climate and a full-court press by public relations firms and lobby groups trying to instill a sense of uncertainty and confusion in the public," he said.
Political breakdowns in the survey underscore how tough it could be to enact a law limiting pollution emissions blamed for warming. While three-quarters of Democrats believe the evidence of a warming planet is solid, and nearly half believe the problem is serious, far fewer conservative and moderate Democrats see the problem as grave. Fifty-seven percent of Republicans say there is no solid evidence of global warming, up from 31 percent in early 2007.
Though there are exceptions, the vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is occurring and that the primary cause is a buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal.
Jane Lubchenco, head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told a business group meeting at the White House Thursday: "The science is pretty clear that the climate challenge before us is very real. We're already seeing impacts of climate change in our own backyards."
Despite misgivings about the science, half the respondents still say they support limits on greenhouse gases, even if they could lead to higher energy prices. And a majority — 56 percent — feel the United States should join other countries in setting standards to address global climate change.
But many of the supporters of reducing pollution have heard little to nothing about cap-and-trade, the main mechanism for reducing greenhouse gases favored by the White House and central to legislation passed by the House and a bill the Senate will take up next week.
Under cap-and-trade, a price is put on each ton of pollution, and businesses can buy and sell permits to meet emissions limits.
"Perhaps the most interesting finding in this poll ... is that the more Americans learn about cap-and-trade, the more they oppose cap-and-trade," said Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who opposes the Senate bill and has questioned global warming science.
Regional as well as political differences were detected in the polling.
People living in the Midwest and mountainous areas of the West are far less likely to view global warming as a serious problem and to support limits on greenhouse gases than those in the Northeast and on the West Coast. Both the House and Senate bills have been drafted by Democratic lawmakers from Massachusetts and California.
One of those lawmakers, Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, told reporters Thursday that she was happy with the results, given the interests and industry groups fighting the bill.

"Today, to get 57 percent saying that the climate is warming is good, because today everybody is grumpy about everything," Boxer said. "Science will win the day in America. Science always wins the day."

Earlier polls, from different organizations, have not detected a growing skepticism about the science behind global warming.

Since 1997, the percentage of Americans that believe the Earth is heating up has remained constant — at around 80 percent — in polling done by Jon Krosnick of Stanford University. Krosnick, who has been conducting surveys on attitudes about global warming since 1993, was surprised by the Pew results.

He described the decline in the Pew results as "implausible," saying there is nothing that could have caused it.

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Associated Press Writers Seth Borenstein and Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press: http://www.people-press.org

Refs suspended for bad calls, what about Slive?

Mon, 10/26/2009 - 15:51 — admin

It won't be long before SEC commissioner Mike Slive regrets his decision to suspend an entire officiating crew for three glaringly bad calls in last weekend's Arkansas-Florida game, after an even worse one in Georgia-LSU earlier this month.
He might have cooled down the message boards and gotten the conspiracy theorists off his back for a few days. But as his counterparts running college and pro leagues can attest, it won't make the problem go away.
Unless Slive has proof that those calls were anything but honest mistakes — that one or more refs in that crew are crooked, easily distracted or downright incompetent — all he's done is give critics more ammunition the next time it happens.
And what about the next time a different ref or crew does the same? Suspend them, too? If so, how many refs will be eligible to work by the time the conference games roll around in December?
It's a fact of life that officials everywhere, in games big and small, blow calls. Set up a video camera over your shoulder and have the feed shown on a giant TV screen. Then have your supervisor and co-workers watch it live, plus as many replay segments as they want, and see how your review the next day goes.
What all the video footage the leagues endlessly pore over proves is that their refs do their jobs consistently better than the rest of us, players and coaches included. As NBA commissioner David Stern responded wearily last October to yet another question about his refs, if skeptics only knew how frequently they "monitored, metricized, rated, reviewed and developed, you get a completely different picture than the one that I think many fans have."
Yet even with a state-of-the-art program, NFL director of officiating Mike Pereira acknowledged it comes down to the law of averages.
There are about 1,500 plays in a week's worth of games and experts agree between four and five dicey calls in each of the 16 games. While instant replay has cut into that total, Pereira knows his crew is no more likely to be perfect than the players they're supposed to be watching. What causes him and the NFL sleepless nights is when those blown calls happen in clusters — a notable 2002 win by Green Bay over Minnesota included nine, eight in the final quarter — or at the end of the game.
"The levels of accountability are worlds apart," Pereira said in an interview not long ago. "You rarely see the blame for a loss get hung on one player because of one play. But let a ref blow a call late in a game and that's the only thing anybody wants to talk about."
The leagues brought this problem on themselves, mostly by feeding the myth that instant replay will make it possible to get every call right. But so long as humans make the first call and the final one — no matter how many safeguards are sandwiched in between — it's still possible to get it wrong.
We've railed against instant replay for years. It intimidates refs, makes the games drag on and, depending on the camera angle, might actually distort what happened. But it isn't going away anytime soon, so here's a more practical solution.
The reason the blown calls in the Arkansas-Florida game kicked up such a fuss is not just that they were clustered late in the game, but because there's a perception that the SEC's top-tier teams benefit from them more often than not. Arkansas had a shot to upset the nation's No. 1 team, and that's all the Gator-haters needed to fashion a conspiracy.
According to their theory, the league wants to ensure it has at least one representative in the national championship game each season to bring back a share of the BCS loot, and Florida is the anointed team this season. Never mind how silly it would be for anyone at the SEC office to communicate that desire to league officials, and put the reputation of a billion-dollar enterprise at risk.
That's what made Slive's knee-jerk reaction regrettable. More than a few conferences have suspended officials before, but almost always kept it private. By sending his officials home for two weeks, Slive will give them plenty of time to catch up on the hate mail flooding their inboxes and return calls from crazed fans. But by announcing it, he's practically encouraging all the loons.
Even while agreeing with the suspensions, Florida coach Urban Meyer said making them public was going too far.
"Why would you do that?" he said after practice Thursday. "I don't understand that part."
Besides, what does Slive think those officials will gain by taking two weeks off? Are they supposed to run around the house in uniform, throwing tissues at the upholstered furniture? Do eye exercises? Get hearing aids?
Crew chief Marc Curles has already acknowledged he made mistakes, and promised to learn from them. Here's hoping that Slive resists the temptation to sit down or make an example of the next ref who makes a mistake.

Human nature being what it is, at least he won't have to wait long for the next opportunity to come along.

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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org

Schwarzenegger, Paterson find friendship in crisis

Fri, 10/16/2009 - 14:02 — admin

ALBANY, N.Y. – One is the courtly governor of the Empire State, the other the flashy star of the Golden State.
But a fiscal crisis hammering New York and California, the shared priority for a future of clean, renewable fuel sources, and a couple twists of fate have quietly brought together New York's David Paterson and California's Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Paterson: a slight, studious Democrat who quotes classic poetry from memory. Schwarzenegger: a Republican who once ruled the bodybuilding world and the ultimate showman, armed with a cache of jokes and "Terminator" catchphrases.
Both governors acknowledge an alliance that would appear unlikely to the outsider but that makes sense to them.
"Maybe we're sort of bicoastal twins," Paterson told The Associated Press this week. "We have the same kind of problem, we have different sorts of origins. ... We're in different parties, but there's certainly a connection."
The friendship began with what could have been seen as a snub. In February, at the National Governors Association conference, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine asked Paterson — with just a half-hour's notice — to sub for him in a global warming presentation to be led by Schwarzenegger.
Paterson just had to sit there as the designated Democrat, maybe throw in a comment or two.
An hour passed, then two. Schwarzenegger was nowhere to be seen.
"Then they turned to me," Paterson said.
So he did something actors like Schwarzenegger know well: He improvised.
Paterson recalled sweating the spotlight and having to rely heavily on Governors Association staff for information that was supposed to have been presented by Schwarzenegger.
"Everyone was whispering, and I'm really getting annoyed because it's clear I have to get so much direction," he said. "In fact, at one point I said to the other people at the seminar that I didn't mind being the puppet, I just hated when they let the strings show."
Schwarzenegger finally arrived and went straight to Paterson.
"He comes in and leans in and says something like, 'I'm sorry,'" Paterson said in his best Schwarzenegger impression. "He had a great excuse, but that wasn't helping me any."
The apology led to dinner the next night with Paterson's wife, Michelle, and Schwarzenegger's, Maria Shriver — along with a bit of drama.
Paterson left the table to take a phone call. His 80-year-old aunt had fallen ill while visiting family in Toronto. Paterson's cousin wasn't sure if the local hospital was prepared for the complications and wondered whether the family should risk rushing her to a Buffalo hospital, almost two hours away.
Schwarzenegger told Paterson that the Toronto mayor, David Miller, was just a couple of tables away, and Schwarzenegger got him. The mayor phoned the hospital, learned how it was prepared for the situation and briefed Paterson, who directed his aunt to Buffalo, where gall bladder care was a specialty. Paterson's aunt was soon en route to the care that helped save her.
"Gov. Schwarzenegger enjoys a productive relationship with Gov. Paterson as they both pursue similar goals on climate change," said Aaron McLear, Schwarzenegger's spokesman. "He was honored to have Gov. Paterson participate in the Governors' Global Climate Summit and looks forward to working together to protect the environment while creating jobs."

For that appearance two weeks ago, Schwarzenegger called Paterson directly to get a critical big state to attend his global warming summit. Paterson had earlier declined the event as he wrestled with a newly predicted state deficit of at least $2.1 billion. In opening remarks, Schwarzenegger singled Paterson out among a half-dozen governors at the second annual summit.

The champion bodybuilder from Austria and New York's first black governor were both fed skepticism that they could ever lead a state. Now, as they try to do the job, they are mired in their lowest approval rating poll numbers — Paterson at 20 percent, Schwarzenegger at 27 percent.

In all, this month's 36-hour trip to California led to a sharing of information and strategy about heading off deepening deficits and a commitment for a follow-up trip by New York Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch to Sacramento.

It also led to a bit of political advice from Schwarzenegger, famous for speaking or inspiring Hollywood one-liners, to Paterson, who admits he's had some trouble getting his message through to critics: "He said you have to keep pounding away until people get it."

"He said it would be worth it, and it was," Paterson said, then added: "I was pumped up."

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Associated Press writers Tom Verdin and Juliet Williams in Sacramento contributed to this report.

French farmers torch hay on Paris' Champs-Elysees

Fri, 10/16/2009 - 11:35 — admin

PARIS – French farmers struggling with slumping grain prices blanketed the Champs-Elysees with bales of hay and set them ablaze Friday and blocked highways around the country as they demanded government help.
About 150 farmers blocked traffic and unloaded hay and tires onto the most famous shopping street in Paris. The protesters set the hay on fire but firefighters quickly extinguished the flames.
Grain farmers were staging nationwide protests to call attention to their debts and other difficulties that have mounted as food prices have fallen from record highs in 2007.
More than 50,000 farmers, with 7,000 tractors and 1,000 animals, disrupted traffic throughout the country, from Toulouse in southern France to Calais on the English Channel and Moselle in the northeast.
In Rouen, in Normandy, farmers tried to attract attention to their cause by offering their products for free in front of the city's famous cathedral.
"Mr. Sarkozy, agriculture merits as much as the banking or automobile sectors," the FNSEA union said on its Web site, referring to emergency aid the French government offered banks and carmakers to help them weather the global economic crisis.
Agriculture is still one of the most shielded economic sectors in the 27-nation European Union, but it has not been able to protect farmers from the global financial crisis, which caused demand to plummet. EU officials insist they still intend to gradually create freer markets for European farm products.
French farmers receive subsidies under the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy, which in 2008 disbursed euro50 billion, or $71 billion, mostly to large companies.
FNSEA chief Jean-Michel Lemetayer appealed to the government for a "major emergency plan" including tax cuts to help French farmers compete with European rivals. Lemetayer also wants euro1 billion ($1.5 billion) in loans for farmers, with the interest and fees paid by the government.
Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire appeared ready to meet some of the demands, saying he would urge President Nicolas Sarkozy to reduce the tax burden on farmers this year.
Le Maire predicted overall agricultural revenue would drop by up to 20 percent in 2009 after a 20 percent drop in 2008, though farmers say the decline this year is the worst in decades.
After the Champs-Elysees action, farmers gathered in front of the gold-domed Invalides, home to Napoleon's tomb. Some wore signs with a picture of a drowning person, with the caption: "Sarkozy: Agriculture, should it pay such a price?"
Fabien Pigeon, a wheat farmer from the Paris region, said he is euro230,000 ($341,872) in debt.
"We sell at less than 30 percent the cost of production. The cost to produce a ton of wheat is euro134, but the price of a ton is less than euro100. Two years ago, the production cost was euro110 and the price was euro200," he said.
Gerone Porthault, a 27-year-old who works with his father and brother on their wheat farm near Rambouillet, southwest of Paris, said he was not asking for more subsidies but for globally regulated prices.
The grain farmers' fiery protest comes after dairy farmers dumped rivers of milk across fields in France, Belgium and other countries to protest collapsing milk prices. Dairy farmers had urged the EU to limit production through quotas to drive up prices and shield them from market fluctuations.

TLC network says it is suing Jon Gosselin

Fri, 10/16/2009 - 08:14 — admin

NEW YORK – The TLC network says it's suing Jon Gosselin (GAHS'-lihn) for breaching his contract as star of the reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8."
The lawsuit, filed Friday in Maryland, alleges that Gosselin hasn't met the obligations of his contract as an exclusive employee, has appeared on other programs for pay and made unauthorized disclosures about the show.
Gosselin has starred for two years in "Jon & Kate Plus 8," which has been consumed in recent months by marital turmoil as Gosselin and his wife, Kate, feuded, then filed for divorce. The couple are the parents of young twins and sextuplets.
Recently, TLC announced the show would be renamed "Kate Plus Eight," with a reduced presence by Jon Gosselin. A TLC spokeswoman, Laurie Goldberg, has said the show's longtime future remains in question.
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TLC is owned by Discovery Communications, LLC.

Twin suicide blasts kill 11 in NW Pakistan

Fri, 10/16/2009 - 06:07 — admin

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) –
A twin suicide attack tore through a police compound in Pakistan on Friday, killing 11 people and heightening public anger over security breaches behind a wave of recent attacks.

Pakistan, a nuclear-armed power with a weak government on the frontline of the US-led war on terror, has been battered by assaults that have left more than 170 people dead in 11 days. Timeline of attacks

A woman suicide bomber on a motorbike and a car bomber unleashed fresh chaos Friday, detonating near a police investigations office in a garrison area of the northwestern city of Peshawar, bringing down a side of the building, police said.

"Police tried to intercept a woman sitting on a motorcycle ... She blew herself up and after that there was another blast when a suicide attacker sitting in a car exploded," said Liaqat Ali Khan, city police chief.

It was only the second suicide bomb attack by a woman in Pakistan. The twin blasts flung human limbs across the street, splattering blood on the ground and scattering shoes, said an AFP reporter.

"There are two women and a child among the dead. The car exploded close to the police building. The building was badly damaged," Sahibzada Mohammad Anees, the top administrative official, told reporters.

Officials said that 11 people were killed in all, including three policemen, and that seven wounded were in critical condition.

The blood-soaked identity card of a second-grade school boy lay on the ground as rescue workers pulled bodies and the wounded from the rubble.

The main gate of the two-storey police Central Investigation Agency building was destroyed, the upper portion of a mosque on the premises was damaged and a crater was punched out of the road in front, an AFP reporter at the scene saw.

"First I saw a blue flame then a loud explosion. When I got there I saw six bodies lying on the ground. I helped gather up body parts," witness Saadat Changhzi told AFP.

Home to 2.5 million Pakistanis, Peshawar is the largest city in the northwest and lies on the edge of the lawless tribal belt where Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants sheltered after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

Critics rounded on the civilian authorities for being unable to act on intelligence to prevent militants, some in their teens, from blasting their way into police offices on Thursday and trading fire for up to three hours.

At least 40 people died Thursday in a string of assaults on security buildings in Lahore, at the heart of the country's political heartland, and in bombings in the northwest.

Residents in Lahore, the cultural capital noted for its secular elite, asked how militants could have penetrated so far and so easily from their sanctuaries in the deeply conservative tribal belt on the Afghan border.

At least 10 attackers blasted their way into the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) branch in Lahore, a police academy in the suburb of Manawan and an elite commando school on the outskirts.

Militants had already carried out bloody attacks on the Manawan academy in March this year and on the FIA building in March 2008.

"The second attack on Manawan was a major security lapse," a former member of parliament for the district, Khalid Javed Ghukri, told AFP. "People are scared of coming out of their houses."

The press was also scathing over the security lapses that allowed attackers to reportedly climb a wall into the commando school on Thursday and besiege army headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi at the weekend.

"In times of war there can be no room for mistakes, especially ones that lead to death and destruction on this scale," wrote The News newspaper.

Police said dozens of people had been picked up in overnight raids in slum areas of Lahore and neighbourhoods populated by Afghans.

Although there was no formal claim of responsibility, suspicion has fallen on Pakistan's Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) movement and Al-Qaeda, as well as homegrown Islamist groups Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Muhammad.

Officials have blamed militants from South Waziristan in Pakistan's tribal belt where the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are believed to have carved out safe havens and where an imminent military offensive is expected.

Afghan probe said to reduce Karzai's vote share

Fri, 10/16/2009 - 02:16 — admin

WASHINGTON (AFP) –
A fraud probe into Afghan elections has trimmed President Hamid Karzai's vote share to just 47 percent, a report said Friday, while a senior aide conceded a second round could be in the offing.

The much-awaited tally by the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission will trigger a run-off between Karzai and his nearest competitor, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, because Karzai's portion of the August 20 vote was lowered to below 50 percent, The Washington Post reported.

One official familiar with the tally, due to be finalized Friday, described the results to the newspaper as "stunning."

Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission had given Karzai 54.6 percent in its preliminary results, which would position him for a second five-year term. Those results gave Abdullah around 28 percent of the vote.

But Afghanistan's ambassador to the United States, Said Tayeb Jawad, conceded for the first time Thursday that the disputed elections could enter a second round and pushed to hold the run-off quickly. Related article: Afghan govt's "to do" list

He said he has not personally spoken to election authorities who are expected to make an announcement within days.

But Jawad, who has served as Karzai's chief of staff and press secretary, became the first member of his circle to speak publicly of plans for a new vote after Western-led allegations of major fraud in the polls.

"A run-off is a likely scenario," Jawad said at the US Institute of Peace.

"If that's what it is, everyone should work very hard to make that happen."

Jawad said the next round of presidential elections should be held quickly, charging that a delay would create headaches for other nations -- including the United States, where the administration of President Barack Obama mulls sending more troops to fight Taliban insurgents.

"The constitution requires a run-off be done within two weeks but that's impossible. So four weeks will push it into early November and that's the latest that it will happen because after that it will be extremely cold, especially in northern Afghanistan," Jawad said.

"But if it's delayed to spring, this is clearly a recipe for disaster -- this creates a lot of confusion, a lot of indecisiveness and also further complicated relations" with the outside world, he added.

Karzai has rejected charges of widespread irregularities as "totally fabricated" and "politically instigated," testing the patience of Western nations that were his key backers after the US-led military operation in 2001 that toppled the Taliban regime.

European Union observers said a quarter of all votes, or 1.5 million ballots, were suspect.

Afghan election authorities are reviewing disputed ballots. A senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, expected a final announcement on Sunday or Monday.

Ballots listing both candidates, printed in London in anticipation of a possible run-off, have already arrived at the UN mission in Kabul, a US official in Afghanistan told the Post.

The necessary indelible ink was also already on hand and polling station kits were expected to be readied for distribution this week, the daily said.

A run-off was planned if Karzai's valid votes fall below 50 percent as a result of the investigations, although questions remain about how effective a new poll would be.

"The big challenge (for new elections) is security," the US official told the Post.

Abdullah said in Kabul that he was hopeful investigations into ballot-stuffing allegations would result in a run-off.

But the urbane former foreign minister warned that if a run-off were not called, "those who are behind the fraud and tolerate fraud will be responsible for the consequences."

Fellow candidate Ashraf Ghani said on a visit to Washington that Karzai and Abdullah so distrusted each other and election authorities that only a deal between the two could break the impasse.

"When legitimacy is called into question, repeating an election with the same people and the same institutions... becomes problematic," he told US public broadcaster PBS.

Jawad was unusually open about Karzai's disagreements with Obama, who has been cooler toward the Afghan leader than his predecessor, George W. Bush.

While describing relations as improved, Jawad said that early in the Obama administration, "there was some oversimplification of the issues" and "even there was this lack of knowledge" about Afghanistan's complex ethnic patchwork.

Obama has made the fight against Islamic extremism a chief focus of his young presidency, and has been weighing a decision on whether to send tens of thousands more US troops to Afghanistan.



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