Shorts (right)
Former New York Times editor to teach at Harvard
Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, will teach undergraduate courses in narrative nonfiction at Harvard this fall, the university announced Thursday.
Abramson was abruptly dismissed last month by the newspaper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Her firing, less than three years after she was appointed the paper’s first female executive editor, stunned The Times newsroom and the media world.
Sulzberger said she was dismissed because of her management style. Some published accounts speculated about whether gender played a role or whether she was let go because she complained that her compensation was less than that of her predecessor, Bill Keller, an accusation that Sulzberger denied. The dispute played out in articles by The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and dozens of other news and media outlets.
Harvard said in a statement that Abramson would be a visiting lecturer in the Department of English for the 2014-15 academic year and would teach in the fall and spring semesters. In the statement, Abramson said she was “honored and excited.”
Narrative nonfiction, she said, “is more important than ever. Its traditions and how it is changing in the digital transition are fascinating areas of study.”
Abramson previously taught journalism seminars at Yale and Princeton.
Abramson, a 1976 Harvard College graduate, has a tattoo featuring the school’s H logo, as well as a tattoo of the T from The New York Times masthead.
She was replaced as the top editor of The Times by Dean Baquet, who had been her No. 2, the paper’s managing editor.
—Ravi Somaiya, The New York Times
In India, another woman is hanged from tree
NEW DELHI — The body of a 19-year-old woman was found hanging by her scarf from a eucalyptus tree in a village in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Thursday morning, the police said.
It was the third similar gruesome discovery in the state in two weeks.
Relatives of the dead woman, who was last seen alive Wednesday, have filed a report alleging that she was raped and murdered by two men who they say had been bothering her, according to Jagdish Singh, an official at the police station where the complaint was filed.
Singh said that no arrests had been made in the case.
R.K. Saxena, the district police information officer, said in a telephone interview that a preliminary postmortem examination found no external injury marks to suggest that the woman had been raped.
Pressure has been mounting on the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Akhilesh Yadav, over the deaths. Yadav has resisted calls for his resignation, saying that comparable crimes had occurred elsewhere and that law enforcement “is fine in U.P. and better than in many other states.”
Yadav made the comment in New Delhi, where he was meeting with potential investors Thursday.
Many Indians were horrified two weeks ago by the news that two teenage cousins had been found dead, hanging by their scarves from a mango tree, in the Baduan district of Uttar Pradesh.
An autopsy found that the cousins had been raped and then strangled.
Then on Wednesday, a 45-year-old woman was found dead in another part of the state, hung from a tree by her sari, according to The Indian Express, a daily newspaper. Relatives of the woman said she was gang-raped and murdered.
Separately, police officers at a local police station in the state were accused earlier this week of gang-raping a woman who went to the station to inquire about her husband’s arrest.
—Malavika Vyawahare, The New York Times
Russia sees American ‘adventurism’ in Ir
MOSCOW — Expressing alarm over the conflict in Iraq on Thursday, Russia said it had long predicted that U.S. and British “adventurism” there would end badly.
“We warned long ago that the adventurism the Americans and the British started there would not end well,” said Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, according to the Interfax news agency.
Without referring to President George W. Bush by name, Lavrov said, “The situation in Iraq has been deteriorating at an exponential rate” ever since the U.S. president declared a victory for democracy in Iraq 11 years ago.
The Russian foreign minister accused the United States of withdrawing its forces prematurely for domestic political reasons, without finishing the task of preparing the Iraqi military to protect the whole country.
Now, he said, Iraq is being overrun by terrorists and is at risk of breaking apart.
“Iraq’s unity has been called into question,” Lavrov told reporters at a news conference. “Terrorism is rampant there because the occupation forces paid virtually no attention to the internal political processes, and didn’t facilitate national dialogue, but pursued their own interests exclusively.”
Russia’s foreign ministry published a separate statement on its website Thursday from its spokesman, Alexander Lukashevich, echoing those remarks.
The statement repeated that the “adventurism” of some Western nations led to the destabilization of Iraq.
“There is no doubt that those who invaded Iraq over 10 years ago, and continued to impose their decisions and their will on the nations of the region, abetted the start of the destabilization process to a large extent,” said Lukashevich, adding that the results are now evident throughout the Middle East.
The foreign ministry also strongly condemned attempts by the “terrorists” to consolidate their strength in Iraq, Syria and other unspecified parts of the Middle East.
—Neil Macfarquhar, The New York Times