Ponting puts Australia in charge,Ricky Ponting

Australia need just 30 runs to take a first innings lead against New Zealand after dominating day two of the second Test in Adelaide.

Brett Lee took 3-6 in a 27-ball spell as the Black Caps collapsed from 262-6 overnight to 270 all out.

Australia lost Matthew Hayden and Simon Katich early on, but Ricky Ponting (79) and Michael Hussey (69no) took charge with a crucial stand of 106.

Michael Clarke then batted impressively with Hussey to leave Australia on top.

New Zealand’s hopes of building on a battling first day batting performance were dashed in a hostile spell from paceman Lee.

A clever change of pace saw Lee dismiss the dangerous Brendon McCullum, the Black Caps’ main hope for a big total, for 30.

He also had Iain O’Brien caught behind before knocking Chris Martin’s middle stump out of the ground to inflict another duck on the number 11.

Australia’s reply did not begin impressively, with Hayden run out for 24 after threatening to mark his 100th Test in style.

The big Queenslander took off for a single but was stranded as Katich stayed anchored at the non-striker’s end.

Kiwi captain Daniel Vettori then had Simon Katich (23) caught at bat-pad by Jesse Ryder to give his side hope of restricting Australia.

But Ponting was in magnificent form and put Australia in control, making batting look easy and stroking 11 boundaries by the time he reached his half-century.

The Kiwis then applied the brakes to Ponting and he was out pulling a ball from O’Brien to mid-wicket ,where he was caught for 79 by the towering Peter Fulton.

Hussey and Clarke were relatively untroubled in the final session, with some patient but stylish batting to put on an unbroken 86-run stand for the fourth wicket.

Clarke strode to the crease and got off the mark with a textbook straight drive, while Hussey also played some memorable sweeps and pulls as Australia look to build up an unassailable first innings lead.

For New Zealand, Vettori bowled tirelessly over the final two sessions and finished with figures of 1-54 off 28 overs while Iain O’Brien took the important wicket of Ponting and has 1-63.

From a Marine to a Mediator:Obama’s NS Pick

WASHINGTON — James L. Jones, a retired four-star general, was among a mostly Republican crowd watching a presidential debate in October when Barack Obama casually mentioned that he got a lot of his advice on foreign policy from General Jones.

“Explain yourself!” some of the Republicans demanded, as General Jones later recalled it.

He did not. A 6-foot-5 Marine Corps commandant with the looks of John Wayne, General Jones is not given to talking about his political bent, be it Republican or Democrat. And yet, he is Mr. Obama’s choice for national security adviser, a job that will make him the main foreign policy sounding board and sage to a president with relatively little foreign policy experience.

The selection of General Jones will elevate another foreign policy moderate to a team that will include Robert M. Gates, a carry-over from the Bush administration, as defense secretary and Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. By bringing a military man to the White House, Mr. Obama may be trying to cement an early bond with military leaders who regard him with some uneasiness, particularly over his call for rapid troop reductions in Iraq.

But General Jones will also be expected to mediate between rivals, particularly in dealing with Mr. Gates, who has his own power base at the Pentagon, and with Mrs. Clinton, who has told friends that she does not expect the national security adviser to stand between her and the president.

And while other generals, including Colin L. Powell and Brent Scowcroft, have successfully made the transition to national security adviser, the experience has sometimes been rocky, as in the career of John M. Poindexter, a retired admiral who fought an uphill battle during the Reagan administration to mediate between George P. Shultz at the State Department and Caspar W. Weinberger at the Pentagon before finding himself caught up in the Iran-contra affair.

Mr. Obama is expected to announce his national security team on Monday in Chicago, with Mr. Gates at the Pentagon, Mrs. Clinton at the State Department, General Jones at the White House and possibly Adm. Dennis C. Blair, who is retired, as director of national intelligence. What is notable is that none of them have a long history with Mr. Obama, and none are known to be particularly close to him.

Among Mr. Obama’s previous inner circle of foreign policy advisers, both Susan E. Rice and Gregory Craig crossed swords with Mrs. Clinton during the presidential campaign. Ms. Rice may end up as ambassador to the United Nations, but Mr. Craig will become White House counsel. Two others, Anthony Lake, a national security adviser under President Bill Clinton, and Samantha Power, a Harvard scholar and author who left the campaign after she was quoted as making remarks critical of Mrs. Clinton, appear unlikely to end up with top jobs.

At the time of that presidential debate in October, General Jones had spoken only twice to Senator Obama, most recently to brief him on Afghanistan before the candidate made his first trip there. By contrast, he had worked since 1979 with Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, and regarded him as a friend. On the night of the debate he had just given a speech to a mostly Republican group in Pebble Beach, Calif.

But General Jones has long been respected and admired by both Republicans and Democrats. He is fluent in French, which he once spoke better than he spoke English after living in Paris from age 2 to 17. He played basketball at Georgetown University, served in Vietnam and has received all manner of decorations as a marine, including the Defense Distinguished Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters and the Bronze Star Medal with Combat “V.”

At 64, General Jones bicycles from home to work twice each week, riding the nine miles from McLean, Va., to the offices of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, two blocks from the White House, where he runs a task force on energy. Friends say he is a fan of Toby Keith, the country-music singer and songwriter.

In selecting General Jones, Mr. Obama has also picked a former supreme allied commander in Europe, a man who, at NATO, had to cajole, prod and bully recalcitrant nations. At NATO, he led the American operation in Kosovo. He served as the Bush administration’s envoy to set up an Israeli-Palestinian security model in the West Bank city of Jenin and has traveled to Afghanistan and Iraq on fact-finding missions for the Pentagon.

He has said the war in Iraq has caused the nation to “take its eye off the ball” in Afghanistan and warned that the consequences of a failure there were just as serious as in Iraq.

“Jones brings the same balance that Scowcroft did to the job,” said David Rothkopf, author of “Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power” (PublicAffairs). “Not only does he know how to work the Washington system,” Mr. Rothkopf said, but “he’s deeply steeped in Afghanistan, which is going to be a central front for us.”

But what is unclear, Mr. Rothkopf said, is how quickly General Jones can develop a close relationship with Mr. Obama and how successfully he, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gates can define their roles on issues like Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia and terrorism.

Because of his physical proximity — the national security adviser works in the West Wing of the White House and consults with the president several times a day — General Jones will automatically serve as a counter to the State Department. But a State Department that is at war with the White House is the last thing that General Jones wants, his friends and associates say.

“He’s not the sort of person who is going to be chasing down whether Hillary went through him or not,” said one of General Jones’s friends, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He doesn’t have that kind of an ego.”

General Jones, friends say, gets along well with Mrs. Clinton and has even hired some of her former staff members to work for him on the energy task force.

General Jones approaches things in a “get it done” fashion, associates say, with a propensity to think tactically. Sometimes, that can rub people the wrong way. When he began working on the security proposal for Jenin, some Israeli military officials grumbled that he thought he knew Israel’s security requirements better than they did. Israelis also worried that he would seek to impose an international force on the ground to maintain security, an idea favored by many in the international community but that still leaves some Israeli hawks queasy.

But things have changed in Jenin, much of it thanks to General Jones, both Israeli and Palestinian officials say. The city that once sent waves of suicide bombers into Israel now has Palestinian security officials who have restored order.

“He was able to force all of the different parts of the U.S. government to work together to make Jenin a model of economic hope, despite a very dreary past, and so far, so good,” said David Makovsky, an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “He brought clarity to a messy situation.”

Make Us Green:Arnold Schwarzenegger,Environmental Hero’s

On an unseasonably hot May day in Central Park, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — the pint-size billionaire whose last name needs no elaboration for anyone who knows anything about finance or the media — was talking about saving the planet. With the mayors of more than 30 of the world’s largest cities at his side, Bloomberg was opening a climate summit, highlighting his ambitious plan to slash the Big Apple’s carbon emissions. Together, the mayors pledged to enlist their 250 million constituents in the fight against global warming. “Unfortunately, partisan politics has immobilized Washington,” Bloomberg said. “But the public wants this problem solved. Cities can’t wait any longer for national governments to act.”

At a lab in Toronto a week later, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — the fridge-size multimillionaire whose last name needs no elaboration, period — was talking about eliminating disease. The Governator was announcing a new stem-cell partnership with Ontario, highlighting the $3 billion his state is investing in research the Bush Administration has opposed. In that unmistakable Ahhll-be-bahhk accent, the five-time Mr. Universe spoke of his father-in-law Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps founder who suffers from Alzheimer’s and no longer recognizes his family. “I look forward to curing all these terrible illnesses,” Schwarzenegger said. “We’re showing how powerful a state can be. Cahh-lifornia doesn’t need to wait for the Federal government.”

The Hollywood brute and the Wall Street mogul may look like the oddest couple since Twins, but there’s a reason Schwarzenegger calls Bloomberg his soul mate. They’re both self-confident, self-made men who rose to stardom from middle-class obscurity — Bloomberg in Medford, Mass., Schwarzenegger in Thal, Austria — through Tiger Woods-level determination and Donald Trump-level salesmanship. They’re both socially liberal Republicans who have flourished in Democratic political cultures; Schwarzenegger is even a member of the Kennedy clan, through his marriage to Maria Shriver. They both bounced back from poison-ivy approval ratings to easy re-elections in influential places — Bloomberg in the world’s media and financial center, Schwarzenegger in what he calls “the nation-state of California,” the world’s entertainment trendsetter and eighth-largest economy. They’re less scripted than most politicians and seem to have more fun. Despite their image as a cutthroat businessman and a shoot-’em-up macho man, they try to avoid political confrontation. And they’ve both been talked up as centrist Presidential candidates — Bloomberg in 2008, even though he says he’s not running, and Schwarzenegger someday in the future, even though the Constitution currently prohibits immigrants from running.

They’re also doing big things. Specifically, they’re doing big things that Washington has failed to do. In a time of federal policy paralysis, when partisanship-on-crack has made compromise almost impossible, when President George W. Bush’s political adviser is a household name but his domestic policy adviser was unknown even in Washington until he was arrested for shoplifting, cities and states are filling the void. Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger happen to be the best examples of this phenomenon as well as the best known. Bloomberg is 65; the Last Action Hero is turning 60; they’ve got better things to do than bicker and posture. “These are two exceptional and forceful guys who don’t need the job at all; they had pretty damn good lives before they got into politics,” says their mutual friend Warren Buffett. “They’re in office to get things done. And they’re doing that a lot better than anyone in D.C.”

Look at global warming. Washington rejected the Kyoto Protocol, but more than 500 U.S. mayors have pledged to meet its emissions-reduction standards, none more aggressively than Bloomberg. His PlaNYC calls for a 30% cut in greenhouse gases by 2030. It will quadruple the city’s bike lanes, convert the city’s taxis to hybrids and impose a controversial congestion fee for driving into Manhattan. And Schwarzenegger signed the U.S.’s first cap on greenhouse gases, including unprecedented fuel-efficiency standards for California cars. (He’s already tricked out two of his five Hummers, one to run on biofuel and another on hydrogen.) The feds have done nothing on fuel efficiency in two decades, but 11 states will follow California’s lead if Bush grants a waiver. After signing a climate deal with Ontario — on the same day as his stem-cell deal — he said he had a message for Detroit: “Get off your butt!” He had a similar message for Washington. “Eventually, the Federal government is going to get on board,” he said. “If not, we’re going to sue.”

But they’re tackling not just the climate. Bloomberg is leading a national crackdown on illegal guns, along with America’s biggest affordable-housing program. He also enacted America’s most draconian smoking ban and the first big-city trans-fat ban. And he’s so concerned about Washington’s neglect of the working poor that he’s raised $50 million in private money, including some of his own millions, to fund a pilot workfare program. Meanwhile, after the Bush Administration rebuffed California’s appeals for help repairing the precarious levees that protect Sacramento, Schwarzenegger pushed through $42 billion worth of bonds to start rebuilding the state’s infrastructure. He’s also pushing a universal health-insurance plan and hopes to negotiate a deal with Democrats this summer. “All the great ideas are coming from state and local governments,” Schwarzenegger told Time. “We’re not going to wait for Big Daddy to take care of us.”

Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg are too unusual in too many ways to call them a new breed of government leader; they don’t even accept government salaries. After all the late-night jokes about Conan the Republican and the Running Man, it’s still hard to believe the hulking dude with the funny accent who got pregnant in Junior is leading 36.5 million people. It’s still surreal to watch kids squealing for his autograph after a speech extolling public-private partnerships, or reporters asking if he intends to pardon his fellow celebrity Paris Hilton. In some ways, Bloomberg is an even less likely politician; he doesn’t seem to crave public adulation, and he’s not much for dutiful clichés. After he announced new restrictions on campaign donations — the tightest in the nation — Bloomberg was asked if he was being hypocritical, since he had spent more than $150 million of his own money to win two elections. “I would suggest that before anyone runs for office, they should go out and become a billionaire,” he replied. “It makes it a lot easier.”

So they’re not exactly playing politics as usual. But their model of crossing party lines to act where Washington won’t is increasingly common. As D.C. politics has become more of a zero-sum partisan game, Mayors and Governors in both parties have taken on predatory lending, obesity, energy, health care and even immigration. “It’s innovation by necessity,” says Stephen Goldsmith, a former Republican mayor of Indianapolis who oversees Harvard’s Innovations in American Government awards. This year hardly any federal programs applied. “Very unusual,” Goldsmith says.

In the past, national policies often bubbled up from cities and states; think of the New Deal or welfare reform. It’s especially common when cities and states enjoy surpluses, as they do now. And in the Bush Administration, domestic policy has understandably yielded to foreign policy. But it has also yielded to politics; even before Claude Allen was caught boosting goodies at Target, everyone knew Karl Rove was the real domestic-policy adviser. (Now the title belongs to Karl Zinsmeister — yes, the Karl Zinsmeister.) So while the Administration has embraced a few domestic issues — cutting taxes, promoting faith-based initiatives, requiring schools to test students, subsidizing prescription drugs and pushing (unsuccessfully) to restructure Social Security — its hacks have consistently outflanked its wonks. And while the new Democratic Congress has vowed to revive domestic policy, so far the only measure it has persuaded Bush to sign has been a minimum-wage increase. Thirty states had already raised their minimum wage.

“Nature abhors a vacuum,” says Bruce Katz, director of metropolitan policy at the Brookings Institution. “And the vacuum at the national level is immense.”

As a boy in the Boston suburbs, Michael Rubens Bloomberg became an Eagle Scout. He later got an engineering degree at Johns Hopkins, where he learned rigorous thinking and data analysis, and a business degree at Harvard, where he learned that some credentialed élites weren’t as smart as they thought. After graduation, he took a $9,000-a-year job as a Salomon Brothers clerk, made sure to arrive earlier and leave later than anyone else and worked his way up to partner. According to Wall Street legend, he used to brag that he could run the firm better than its leaders. In his 1997 autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg, he said he didn’t remember saying that, but he didn’t deny it either.

After Bloomberg was ousted from Salomon in 1981, he used his $10 million payout to start Bloomberg LP, which now includes Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Radio and Bloomberg Television as well as the ubiquitous Bloomberg terminals that have served as the company’s cash machines since they started appearing on desks everywhere financial information was needed. In his autobiography, he called his name “a synonym for success,” describing his branding strategy thusly: “I was Bloomberg — Bloomberg was money — and money talked.” In 2001, after the lifelong Democrat joined the Republican Party because the Democratic mayoral primary was too crowded, he self-funded his way to city hall. An endorsement from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani helped, but mostly, money talked.

Bloomberg inherited a tough situation. The city was hemorrhaging jobs after the Sept. 11 attacks, and Giuliani’s second-term spending spree had left the city in a financial hole. Bloomberg raised property taxes 18% to attack the deficit, and he made some modest but politically difficult spending cuts, including the closing of several firehouses. He also engineered a hostile takeover of the city’s troubled schools and banned smoking in the city’s restaurants and bars. His approval ratings sagged into the 20s; his constituents booed him at parades. “They’ll come around,” he told aides.

They have, because the city has. Bloomberg hasn’t etched his personality into the city’s soul, but major crime has dropped 30% in New York in the Bloomberg era, without the racial antagonisms of the Giuliani era. Test scores and graduation rates are up, unemployment is at a record low, welfare rolls are at a 40-year low, construction is booming, the deficit has become a surplus, and the city’s bond rating just hit an all-time high of double-A.

As a candidate with no political base, no political history and no political debts, Bloomberg came into office beholden to no one. Even when they don’t agree with his decisions, New Yorkers seem to sense that he’s set aside his conglomerate and his four vacation homes for public-minded reasons; his approval rating has hovered around 70% for nearly two years. His administration has made mistakes — an ill-fated stadium plan, a school-bus snafu — but it’s been scandal-free, and every major media outlet endorsed his re-election. Bloomberg likes to think big: as a businessman, he aimed to make financial markets transparent; as a philanthropist, he’s funding research designed to eliminate malaria by building a better mosquito. “I was hired to solve problems,” told Time. “Yes, I’ll fix potholes, but that’s not why I wanted this job.”

There’s a good view of Bloomberg’s problem solving from the roof of the 123-unit building Ken Haron just developed in Harlem. That neighborhood was once a national symbol of urban decay — drugs, violence, all the classic inner-city problems — but now its main problem is that it’s so desirable, its housing is unaffordable. And in recent decades, the feds have stopped building subsidized housing. So Bloomberg has leveraged private money for a $7.5 billion effort to create 165,000 affordable apartments, enough to house the population of Atlanta. It’s already one-third complete. Haron charges some tenants market rents of about $3,000 a month, but he has to reserve 80% of his building for lower-income families that won lotteries to pay as little as $700 for apartments with the same granite countertops. On the roof, Haron points out similar mixed-income projects in every direction: “That one’s in the program. So is that one. That one’s condo; it’s ours too.” Its penthouse is for sale for $1.7 million, but moderate-income families will pay $250,000 to live in the same building. “There’s stagnation at the federal level, so we had to get creative,” says Bloomberg’s housing commissioner, Shaun Donovan.

To Bloomberg, Washington means gridlock, extremism and pettiness. It’s the place where homeland-security funds were “spread out like peanut butter” for political reasons, so that rural states got more per capita than New York. And it’s the place that’s blocking him from cracking down on illegal guns. In 2005, after a rash of shootings, Bloomberg’s aides told him that 90% of the illegal guns used in local crimes came from out of state and that 1% of U.S. gun dealers supplied 60% of its crime guns. And the Bush Administration had stopped tracking the problem; in fact, the G.O.P. Congress had enacted N.R.A.-backed language restricting federal officials from sharing gun-trace information with local police. Bloomberg appealed to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales but got the brush-off. So the mayor hired investigators to run stings in gun shops nationwide and sued 27 of the shadiest dealers; a dozen are now under court supervision. He also started Mayors Against Illegal Guns to fight the information-sharing restrictions; the group has recruited more than 220 mayors in a year, but Congress has not reversed the policy. “Ultimately, you have to blame the public,” Bloomberg says. “They’re not holding Washington accountable.”

Politicians aren’t supposed to blame the public. Or fly their own planes or pepper their autobiographies with sentences like “I dated all the girls.” (He’s now divorced with two daughters; he’s dating New York’s former banking commissioner.) But Bloomberg isn’t typical. He’s a press mogul who seems perpetually annoyed with the press. He broke with 200 years of tradition by rearranging city hall into a bullpen modeled on a trading floor, with his desk in the middle of 50 aides. (Perhaps transparency breeds loyalty, because his senior staff has barely changed in six years.) And now he wants to charge $8 to drive into busy parts of Manhattan on weekdays.

Bloomberg was initially skeptical of congestion fees because he feared the effect on outer-borough New Yorkers. But the data showed that few of them drive into Manhattan, and most who do will be served by the transit improvements the fees will subsidize. “What good is a 70% approval rating if we don’t take risks?” he asked his aides. So far, that rating hasn’t budged, which has given political cover to New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and even the Bush Administration to support his efforts to reduce emissions. “The naysayers who think global warming is too big a problem just don’t have any vision,” he says.

Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger has never liked naysayers: the ones who said bodybuilding would never be more than a cultish sideshow for musclebound freaks, the ones who said a Teutonic hulk with a long name and a thick accent could never be a movie star or the ones who said a Hollywood celebrity who announced his candidacy on the Tonight Show could never be Governor. But at about the same age Bloomberg was becoming an Eagle Scout, Schwarzenegger was in trade school learning to be a salesman. And he’s used those skills to prove the naysayers wrong. “I’m a big believer in selling,” he says.

His promotional genius helped transform bodybuilding into a lucrative business with a worldwide audience. And in Hollywood he was renowned for his intense focus on marketing and branding, if not for his dramatic range. He focus-grouped scripts and trailers; he honed his image through clever catchphrases and publicity campaigns. Critics mocked him, but he had a knack for giving people what they wanted, Red Sonja notwithstanding. “The successful star in the blockbuster era had to be a pretty good politician,” Joe Mathews notes in his Schwarzenegger book, The People’s Machine.

Schwarzenegger turned out to be a very good politician. He considered running for Governor in 2002, even though his only prior public service had been chairing President George H.W. Bush’s fitness council. Instead, he decided to sponsor a wildly popular ballot initiative to fund after-school programs. The next year, when a fiscal crisis and an electricity crisis fueled an effort to recall Democratic Governor Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger jumped into the chaotic race to replace him. After a two-month campaign too quick to get deep into policy specifics, he had a new job in Sacramento.

If Bloomberg is a technocrat, Schwarzenegger is a populist; he’s never stopped trying to give people what they want. In fact, he’s never really left the campaign trail, spending much of his time pushing ballot initiatives. The most prominent was the stem-cell measure. The $3 billion referendum was a clear rebuke to President George W. Bush, and some Schwarzenegger advisers warned him that supporting it would alienate his Republican base. But he adopted the initiative as his own, named the Democrat who wrote it to be his top stem-cell adviser and became a global spokesman for California’s medical-research industry.

“I like to do everything big,” Schwarzenegger says. But he’s not a superhero anymore. He’s still got that incredible jaw, but he looks almost life-size, and he seems to have inherited Strom Thurmond’s hair dye. He’s still an enthusiastic salesman — everything is “fantastic” or “terrific” or “greatgreat” — but his constituents didn’t want what he was selling in 2005, rejecting all four of his initiatives. He recovered in time to get re-elected by apologizing and reaching out to the Democrats who run the legislature. If the Bloomberg administration’s symbol is the bullpen where the mayor manages, the Schwarzenegger administration’s symbol is the smoking tent outside the state capitol where the Governor schmoozes while he lights up his cigar. “Our Founding Fathers would still be meeting at the Holiday Inn in Philadelphia if they wouldn’t have compromised,” he said in a blistering anti-Washington speech in February. “Why can’t our political leaders?” He suggested that Bush should get himself a smoking tent.

Schwarzenegger made his most important compromise last September, when he signed a Democratic bill capping greenhouse-gas emissions. With his Hummers, his private plane and his conspicuous delight in conspicuous consumption, Schwarzenegger is an unlikely environmentalist, but he’s become a global salesman for the war on carbon. His message, as usual, is that the naysayers are wrong: you can clean up the environment and still have a growing economy with big houses and big cars. He talks about green technology as California’s next gold rush, its next Internet boom: “One plus one can make three!” He scoffs at environmental buzzkills who want Americans to drive wimpy cars and live like Buddhist monks. “Guilt doesn’t work,” he says. He sees the future in the Tesla, a hot new electric car that goes from 0 to 60 in 4 sec. His model cost a mere $100,000.

It’s not exactly the Sierra Club message, but he’s a powerful messenger. He was in Vancouver to sign another climate deal when news broke that Bush would reject Europe’s push for climate caps at the G-8 summit and would propose a meeting instead. “We don’t need another meeting on global warming,” Schwarzenegger told a crowd of reporters. “We need action.” Action, of course, is Schwarzenegger’s thing. He was never much for dialogue. In an interview, he marveled at Bush’s notion that America shouldn’t cap its own emissions until China and India agree to do so. “That’s not what leadership is about,” he said. “We don’t care if Arizona is going to do the right thing; we take action ourselves.”

That love of action is the real link between Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg, and the real source of the recent Bloomberg-for-President buzz. There’s no obvious niche for a candidate who supports gay marriage and gun control while opposing the death penalty and deadlines for withdrawing troops from Iraq. But there is an obvious appeal to a businessman who can work across party lines to get things done — and could drop $500 million on a campaign without even noticing it was gone. Buffett thinks it’s a great idea, and when he first heard it, he turned to the Constitution. “I wanted to see if Schwarzenegger could be his Vice President,” Buffett said. “I think he could.” It states that the President must be native born, but it’s silent on the Vice President. “That would be one hell of a team, wouldn’t it?”

No Miracle on 34th Street,Black Friday,New York

The best way to make sure you get up in time for the 5 a.m. early bird specials on Black Friday is never to go to bed the night before. That’s how Christian Perdomo, 15, was able to snag one of the 200 free Samsung MP3 players that Old Navy gave away at its megastore on 34th Street in New York City, along with the $120 worth of clothes he had purchased by 6 a.m. But even though there were still some 200 people in line at dozens of registers by 10 a.m., Liz, a cashier, said, “I think last year was a little busier.”

The Black Friday shopping frenzy was palpable in midtown Manhattan on Friday as dozens of clothing retailers touted their “door buster” sales of 50% or more off everything from diamond jewelry to cotton hoodies. Crowds even broke one of the doors at Macy’s Men’s Store. That paled in comparison to the death of a Wal-Mart worker in Long Island who reportedly got trampled to death by bargain hunters. But by mid-morning on 34th Street, many stores were half empty and some sales staff said they had noticed that shoppers were holding back this year.

“It’s slower. They’re not buying the big stuff,” said a sales person at Macys flagship store in Herald Square, who asked not to be named. A $400 diamond bracelet had been marked down to $99, but there were more sales people standing near it than customers. Instead, shortly after 7 a.m., a crowd was hovering around a display of costume jewelry priced at $9.99 each.

A block away at Steve Madden, manager Francesca Ruggiero lamented that the store hadn’t even sold $4000 worth of footwear by 9 a.m., even though it had opened at 6 a.m., an hour earlier than last year. Next door, Victoria’s Secret manager Linda Petar told TIME, “We’re on target,” although by 8:45 a.m. the shop had sold less than $80,000 worth of merchandise toward its goal of $650,000 for the day. Other stores, including Perfumania, Fossil and Aerosoles all looked fairly desolate by 8 a.m., despite the perky signs beckoning, “Come In. We’re Open.”

Yet even with the recession, some folks were still making big purchases. Millicent Davis, a nighttime home health aide in Long Island City, says she hits the Black Friday sales every year. Her hours got cut back from seven days a week to just three this year, but she still bought a $300 North Face jacket for her son at Macys. She decided to pass on a $128 handbag for herself, however. Across the street at Old Navy, Viviana Alonso, 26, was packing a red Samsonite suitcase full of handbags, sweaters, socks and shirts inside the entrance. On vacation from Caracas, Venezuela, she had just bought the $150 suitcase that morning, and estimated that she had spent about $1000 in all since 5 a.m.

While everyone said they had risen before dawn in order to take advantage of Black Friday deals, there was little consensus on whether they were really saving money overall. “The recession is on and we’re trying to save money,” said Renita Raghubir, 22, who had just splurged on some Guess and DKNY jeans. Meanwhile, her mother had purchased a $350 handbag for her 17-year-old sister, and there were still more purchases to be made.

As in past years, many shoppers’ purchases were really gifts for themselves. Nicholas Luciano, 16, said he spent $400 that he had earned from an after-school job at McDonalds on six sweaters, three pairs of jeans and a pair of sneakers from American Eagle Outfitters. Although he bought one gift for his Mom, he still needs more. Now he has to find Christmas gifts for the rest of the family. Retailers can only hope that Luciano’s Black Friday enthusiasm is contagious.

Best Crime Of The Century:7 of 25

THE LANA TURNER AFFAIR, 1958

Lana Turner reigned as one of Hollywood’s box-office queens for more than two decades. Real life was much trampier. Her father, a miner in Idaho, was murdered after winning a craps game. She loved to hang out with men of ill repute and would eventually marry seven times. One marriage, to the actor Lex Barker, would end in 1957 after she accused him of molesting her daughter by a previous marriage, Cheryl Crane. True to her failings, she began a torrid and tumultuous affair with Johnny Stompanato, a man suspected of mob ties. When she tried to break it off, he grew violent. And on the night of April 4, 1958, Stompanato and Turner engaged in a ferocious argument at her Beverly Hills home, so violent in fact that 14-year old Cheryl ran for a knife and ended up stabbing Stompanato to death. The papers loved the story and the coroner’s inquest was one of the most sensational legal hearings Hollywood has ever seen. Turner’s tale on the stand was riveting: a wayward mother in distress and the faithful daughter who comes to her rescue. “I walked toward the bedroom door,” Turner testified. “He was right behind me. And I opened it and my daughter came in. I swear it was so fast, I truthfully thought she had hit him in the stomach … I never saw a blade.” A Stompanato friend’s outburst in court implied that it was Lana who wielded the knife, but the coroner declared the whole thing justifiable homicide. Turner’s career flourished into the 1980s.

Police declare Mumbai siege over,Mumbai Terror Attack Updated

he siege at Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel is over, officials say, three days after deadly attacks struck the city.

Police commissioner Hassan Gafoor said the hotel was now under their control. “All combat operations are over. All the terrorists have been killed.”

Commandos began a new assault early on Saturday aimed at ending fighting that has claimed at least 195 lives.

Commando chief JK Dutt told media three militants had been killed but his men still had to check all the hotel rooms.

Speaking to media outside the hotel, he appealed for any guests still hiding in the building to make their presence known and warned that small explosions might be heard as the clearing operation continued.

On Friday, almost 100 people were rescued from a second hotel, and six bodies were found at a Jewish centre.

India’s foreign minister has said “elements with links to Pakistan” were involved in the attacks on Mumbai.

However, his Pakistani counterpart has urged India not to bring politics into the issue, saying “we should join hands to defeat the enemy”.

The Pakistani government is to hold an emergency cabinet meeting on Saturday to discuss the attacks.

But it has reversed a decision to send its intelligence chief to India to help with investigations, following criticism from opposition politicians and a lukewarm response from the army. It will send a lower-ranking representative instead.

‘Ultimate sacrifice’

Extremely heavy and sustained gunfire was heard inside the Taj Mahal Palace hotel shortly before 0730 (0200 GMT) on Saturday, as soldiers rushed into the lobby in a bid to flush out the remaining few gunmen.

Firefighters then worked to contain fierce flames and thick smoke that billowed from the building’s lower floors.

All eyes will now be on India’s investigation of the attacks, our correspondent says, with questions already being asked about the failure of its intelligence agencies to uncover the plans.

The commandos suspect that the militants knew the hotel well because they were very mobile during the course of the siege, he says, making it extremely difficult for security forces to secure an area in order to evacuate guests.

Indian media have reported that one of the militants worked as a chef for 10 months at the hotel.

Some have described this as India’s 9/11, our correspondent adds, and people in India now want answers as to who is responsible.

Blasts had rung out for most of Friday after truckloads of commandos entered the premises.

A journalist and bystander outside the hotel were taken to hospital after being hit by shrapnel.

Indian commandos who managed to enter other parts of the Taj say they found at least 30 bodies in one hall.

Fighting appears to have ended at the other key flashpoints in Mumbai, chief among them the Oberoi-Trident hotel – where nearly 100 people were rescued and 24 bodies were found earlier on Friday.

But at Nariman House, the Mumbai base of Chabad-Lubavitch, a New York-based orthodox Jewish organisation, the news was grim.

The organisation confirmed that Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, had been killed alongside his wife, Rivka. Their two-year-old son survived.

The Holtzbergs had moved to India in 2003 from New York to run the Mumbai branch of the outreach organisation, which offers services and hospitality to Jewish travellers.

The bodies were removed from the building early on Saturday.

The stand-offs began late on Wednesday when gunmen armed with automatic weapons and grenades opened fire indiscriminately on crowds at a major railway station, the two hotels, the Jewish centre, a hospital and a cafe frequented by foreigners.

Indian officials says at least 195 people have been killed since Wednesday, with around 295 injured, the vast majority Indian citizens. The toll could rise further, they say.

At least 22 foreigners are known to have died, including victims from Germany, Japan, Canada, Australia, Italy, Singapore, Thailand and France. One Briton, Andreas Liveras, has been killed.

A claim of responsibility for this week’s attacks – the worst in India’s commercial capital since nearly 200 people were killed in a series of bombings in 2006 – has been made by a previously unknown group calling itself the Deccan Mujahideen.

How Quickly Will Recovery Come?,Mumbai Recovery Updated

By Saturday morning, the end of Mumbai’s nightmare was practically at hand. The day before, two of the three hostage sites in the city had been secured: the Oberoi Hotel and Nariman House, the site of the Jewish hospitality center, were finally wrested from terrorist hands. The siege of the Taj dragged on into the night, however, despite assurances earlier on Friday from authorities with the National Security Guard, an elite Army unit, that the agony of the ornate and historic hotel was nearing an end. As most of the city slept, the Taj suffered at least six more massive blasts into the early hours of Saturday. But by day, unconfirmed reports had the last terrorist gunman run to ground. Now, as the city slowly comes back to life, its residents are grappling with the attacks’ emotional and financial impact.

Mumbai has always been proud of its resilience, but there is a profound sense that the city will not recover as quickly as it did after the blasts of 2003 or the train attacks of 2006. Ashish Contractor, a doctor who lives in Colaba, near Nariman House, explained that this week’s attacks brought terror into the lives of Mumbai’s most privileged, those who always thought of South Mumbai as an oasis from the rest of the city. “This is a totally different segment which always thought of itself as immune,” he says. “Everybody in South Mumbai knows somebody who was at the Taj… The false calm is shattered.”

That sense of unease is making it difficult for lifelong Mumbaikars to return to the lives they knew before the attacks. Sheetal Mafatlal, owner of the retailer Mafatlal Luxury and member of a prominent local business family, went to her office in Nariman Point today mainly to shore up the morale of her employees. “It shows a lot of courage that they decided to show up,” she says. “We must get back to work.” But she is unsure what the future will hold. “There’s an economic meltdown on top of this. It’s going to take a while to recover.” She has shelved plans for a boutique in South Mumbai. “That’s a very far away possibility.”

Friday, however, had shown the government finally taking control, quelling much of the chaos that broke out on Wednesday night. Commandoes from the National Security Force,, began their assault on the Oberoi at about 11:30 a.m. local time. Within half an hour, the first batch of released hostages were coming out. By 2:30 p.m., the battle for the hotel was over, and the leader of the NSG team said that two terrorists had been killed in the fighting. In all, 148 people — both hostages and those who had been trapped in their rooms — were brought out safely. The bodies of 24 hotel guests were also recovered.

Their release gave the rest of the world a glance at what the siege looked like from the inside: hotel guests survived on drinks and snacks from the mini bar, with no official information reaching them. Among the first batch of released hostages was Kareem Sharif, an American-Canadian citizen, looking shaken but relieved. He said he’d been in the spa when the terrorists came in at 10:30 on Wednesday night and unleashed mayhem. He says they fired indiscriminately, and people took shelter wherever they could. David Jacobs, an Australian, said it wasn’t the lack of food and water that worried him most; it was the fire raging right outside his hotel room as the commandos moved closer.

The 12-hour siege of Nariman House began dramatically, as an Indian Air Force helicopter dropped commandos on the roof of two adjacent buildings at about 7:30 a.m. local time. They came in three sorties of 10, 15 and then five men, the last group also bringing a lot of equipment. By 9:30 a.m., the gun battle between the terrorists and the commandoes had begun, and would continue sporadically throughout the day. It was a bizarre scene: in the thickly populated neighborhood, with the gunfire raging in a cluster of buildings, people went about their lives just beyond the police cordons. The vegetable sellers in the nearby open market set up shop today, although most other businesses remained closed. The Nariman House siege ended in the evening only after the commandoes blasted each floor of the five-story building to make certain they were cleared of terrorists. When the operation was finally declared over, people shouted patriotic slogans in the streets.