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Today, remaining chilly, limited sun, high 40. Tonight, partly cloudy, cold, low
29, near 20 far suburbs. Tomorrow, little change expected, high 37. Weather map,
Page B8.

VOL. CLVIII . . No. 54,500

© 2008 The New York Times

NEW YORK, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2008


BILL CLINTON SAID TO ACCEPT TERMS OF OBAMA TEAM
‘WHATEVER THEY WANT’
Clearing Way for Mrs. Clinton — Daschle to Join Cabinet
By PETER BAKER and HELENE COOPER

STOCKS ARE HURT BY LATEST FEAR: DECLINING PRICES
DOW DROPS BELOW 8,000
Consumer Price Data — Deflation a Threat to Industry and Jobs
By VIKAS BAJAJ

WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton has agreed to all of the conditions
sought by President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team to eliminate potential
conflicts of interest if Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes secretary of state,
people close to the Clintons said Wednesday. Mr. Clinton accepted several restrictions
on his business and philanthropic activities to remove any obstacle to his wife’s
nomination if the cabinet job is formally offered and accepted, said the associates,
who insisted that they not be identified because they were disclosing confidential
negotiations. “I’ll do whatever they want,” Mr. Clinton said Wednesday at a
public appearance. The discussions came as Mr. Obama moved forward in putting together
the team he will bring to office in January. Mr. Obama has decided to nominate Tom
Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader, as secretary of health and human services,
Mr. Obama’s advisers said Wednesday. Mr. Daschle has accepted the offer, which
would make him a point man in Mr. Obama’s ambitious plan to expand health care
coverage. Although Mr. Daschle’s nomination will not be officially announced for
a while, the transition team did make public several expected White House appointments
on Wednesday. They included David Axelrod, who was Mr. Obama’s chief campaign strategist
and now will serve as senior adviser to the president, and Gregory B. Craig, who
was Mr. Clinton’s impeachment deContinued on Page A28

JACOB SILBERBERG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

It’s the R.F.K. Bridge Now
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke Wednesday at a ceremony in Queens to rename the Triborough
Bridge after his father. Among those attending were Ethel Kennedy, next to Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg; former President Bill Clinton; and Gov. David A. Paterson.

Al Qaeda Offers Obama Insults and a Warning Defiant Mayor Won’t Promise To Send
Rebate
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — In a propaganda salvo by Al Qaeda aimed at undercutting the enthusiasm
of Muslims worldwide about the American election, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy
condemned President-elect Barack Obama as a “house Negro” who would continue
a campaign against Islam that Al Qaeda’s leaders said was begun by President Bush.
Appealing to the “weak and oppressed” around the world, the Qaeda deputy, Ayman
al-Zawahri, said in a video released Wednesday that the “new face” of America
only masked a “heart full of hate.”

For years, the terrorist network sought to fuel anti-Americanism with prolific audio
and video recordings vilifying President Bush as the leading American “crusader”
against Muslim nations. The election of Mr. Obama, a black man who spent part of
his childhood in Indonesia and whose father was from a Muslim family, has muddied
Al Qaeda’s message. The Qaeda leader described the victory by Mr. Obama, who has
called for a troop withdrawal from Iraq, as the American people’s “admission
of defeat in Iraq.” But he warned Mr. Obama that the United States risked a reprise
of the Soviet Union’s failures in Afghanistan if the president-elect followed through
on

pledges to deploy thousands more troops to Afghanistan to carry on the fight against
Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies. And in a blunt personal attack on the incoming president,
Mr. Zawahri painted Mr. Obama as a hypocrite and a traitor to his race, comparing
him unfavorably with “honorable black Americans” like Malcolm X, the 1960s black
Muslim leader. The Qaeda video, provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors
militant Web sites, drew extensively on archival film of Malcolm X, and much of the
message juxtaposes a still picture of Mr. Obama wearing a yarmulke during a visit
to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem with a Continued on Page A14

By DAVID W. CHEN and MICHAEL BARBARO

New York Police Fight With U.S. On Surveillance
By DAVID JOHNSTON and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

WASHINGTON — An effort by the New York Police Department to get broader latitude
to eavesdrop on terrorism suspects has run into sharp resistance from the Justice
Department in a bitter struggle that has left the police commissioner and the attorney
general accusing each other of putting the public at risk. The Police Department,
with the largest municipal counterterrorism operation in the country, wants the Justice
Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to loosen their approach to the
federal law that governs electronic surveillance. But federal officials have refused
to relax the standards, and have said requests submitted by the department could
actually jeopardize surveillance efforts by casting doubt on their legality. Under
the law, the government must in most cases obtain a warrant from the special Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court before it can begin electronic monitoring of people
suspected of spying or terrorism. The requests are subjected to sharp Continued on
Page A22

SITE INTELLIGENCE GROUP, VIA REUTERS

Ayman al-Zawahri used the words of Malcolm X, right, against President-elect Barack
Obama.

With Mammoth Genes, Scientists Ask: What If?
By NICHOLAS WADE

Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct
species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that
a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million. The same
technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain
hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000
years, the effective age limit for DNA. Though the stuffed animals in natural history
museums are not likely to burst into life again,

these old collections are full of items that may contain ancient DNA that can be
decoded by the new generation of DNA sequencing machines. If the genome of an extinct
species can be reconstructed, biologists can work out the exact DNA differences with
the genome of its nearest living relative. There are talks on how to modify the DNA
in an elephant’s egg so that after each round of changes it would progressively
resemble the DNA in a mammoth egg. The finalstage egg could then be brought to term
in an elephant mother, and mammoths might once again roam the Siberian steppes. The
same would be technically

possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly,
but there would be several ethical issues in modifying modern human DNA to that of
another human species. A scientific team headed by Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller
at Pennsylvania State University reports in Thursday’s issue of Nature that it
has recovered a large fraction of the mammoth genome from clumps of mammoth hair.
Mammoths, iceage relatives of the elephant, were hunted by the modern humans who
first learned to inhabit Siberia some 22,000 years ago. The mammoths fell extinct
in Continued on Page A24

One city lawmaker called it Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s “Let them eat cake”
attitude. After being dealt a rare public embarrassment by the City Council, which
forced his administration to acknowledge on Monday that he was legally required to
send out $400 rebate checks promised to hundreds of thousands of New York homeowners,
a defiant Mr. Bloomberg said on Wednesday that he had no plans to release the money.
At a news conference, Mr. Bloomberg described the rebates as “up in the air.”
Asked what he would tell homeowners who have been depending on the money to pay bills
or buy holiday gifts, he responded: “Plan for the worst, and hope for the best.”
When pressed, the mayor said: “I just answered your question. You just don’t
want the answer.” The mayor has argued that the city cannot afford the rebates
this year. Still, Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks left people in the political world scratching
their heads, with some accusing him of profound insensitivity to those who lack fat
bank accounts, especially as job losses and foreclosures mount in the city. “It’s
the height of arrogance and insensitivity,” said Councilman Lewis A. Fidler of
Brooklyn, who also said that Mr. Bloomberg had a “Let them eat cake” attitude
toward the homeowners. “They look at what does this mean to someone on the Upper
East Side or Central Park West and say, $400, so what?” Mr. Continued on Page A37

After gyrating wildly for weeks, the stock market lurched lower on Wednesday, falling
to its lowest point in nearly six years, as concern spread that the economy might
be facing a chronic and debilitating decline in prices. The Dow Jones industrial
average closed below 8,000 for the first time since early 2003 after new reports
painted a grim picture of the economy and raised the specter of deflation, which
would put more strain on hardpressed businesses and workers. The Labor Department
reported that prices of consumer goods and services fell by a record amount in October,
while another report showed that a measure of home building fell for the fourth straight
month, to its lowest level in the 49 years that the government has kept that data.
While most consumers might welcome the idea that things are getting cheaper, deflation
is an economists’ nightmare. It was a hallmark of the Depression and Japan’s
so-called lost decade in the 1990s. A big worry is that deflation would blunt the
impact of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, forcing policy makers to use
other tools to try to revive the economy. The Consumer Price Index, a measure of
how much Americans pay for groceries, entertainment and other goods and services,
fell by 1 percent in October, to an annualized rate of 3.7 percent, according to
the Labor Department. It was the biggest onemonth drop in the 61-year history of
the index and the lowest annualized gain since October of last year. Much of the
decline could be traced to a 14 percent drop in the price of gasoline, but the cost
of other goods — including clothes, milk and vegetables — also fell sharply.
The vice chairman of the Fed, Donald L. Kohn, said that the risk of deflation, defined
as a “general decline in prices,” remained slight but had increased. “WhatContinued
on Page A24

Declining Inflation
Year-over-year change in the Consumer Price Index
+6% +5 +4 +3 OCTOBER +3.7% +2 +1



Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
THE NEW YORK TIMES

ECONOMY IN TURMOIL
DETROIT DISAPPOINTED The chief executives of America’s Big Three automakers departed
Washington empty-handed after two days of pleading for a financial lifeline on Capitol
Hill. PAGE B1 COMPANIES FAULT PENSION RULES Stung by investment losses, some

of the nation’s biggest companies are pushing Congress to roll back rules requiring
them to put more money into their pension funds, just two years after President Bush
signed a law meant to strengthen the pension system. PAGE B1
CHINA’S ROLE IN RESCUE It will take the combined efforts of China and other emerging
nations to lead the global economy out of what is likely to be a long and painful
recession, say executives, government offiPAGE B4 cials and economic experts.

INTERNATIONAL A6-18

SPORTSTHURSDAY B12-17

NEW YORK A33-40

ARTS C1-9

OBITUARIES A40-41

Iran Has Enough Atomic Fuel For a Weapon, Experts Find
Iran has produced roughly enough nuclear material to make a single nuclear weapon,
according to atomic experts analyzing findings from inspectors. But experts are unsure
whether Iran is able to further purify the fuel and put it into a credible warhead
design. PAGE A12
NATIONAL A20-30

Mussina Is Set to Say Goodbye
Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina, who turns 40 next month, has apparently decided to
retire. In 18 seasons, he had a record of 270-153; only five pitchers have had as
many victories with a winning percentage as high as his .638.
PAGE B12
COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE MARKETPLACE B11

Conviction for Philanthropist
Alberto W. Vilar, an investor and patron of the arts known for his lavish lifestyle,
has been convicted of defrauding clients of millions of dollars. PAGE A33
HOME D1-10

Making Girls Dance
Girl Talk — that is, Gregg Gillis and his hit-sampling laptop — combines hip-hop
sex boasts with triumphal rock, a mix that brought pandemonium in the last of three
sold-out shows in Manhattan. A review. PAGE C1
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A42-43

Clive Barnes, Critic, Dies
Mr. Barnes, a longtime champion of expertise in theater and particularly dance coverage
in British and American newspapers, was 81. PAGE A41 Past articles and reviews by
Clive Barnes in The Times, and links to his work for other publications.
nytimes.com/dance

Voodoo Home Economics
As people who are used to spending freely try to cut back, many are making self-defeating
choices. PAGE D1
STYLES E1-11

Young Gain From Online Time
Good news for worried parents: All those hours teenagers spend socializing on the
Internet are not a bad thing, according to a new study. PAGE A20
OBITUARIES A40-41 CLASSIFIED ADS B13

More Inside The Times.
PAGES A2-3 ➤

The Midwestern White House
With Barack Obama in Washington, Chicago gets its day in the sun. PAGE E1

Nicholas D. Kristof

PAGE A43