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WASHINGTON — The Star-Spangled Banner is so threadbare you can see through torn sections of its bold stripes and bright stars to the table upon the body what one. it rests at the overhauled National Museum of American History opening this week.

The museum, which draws millions of visitors, has been closed for greater degree of than two years while it underwent an $85 million facelift. It will reopen to the public Friday with a three-day festival.

Once overlooked by some visitors as it hung near the museum entrance, the nearly 200-year-old droop that inspired the words of the national divine song is now the centerpiece of the reinvented museum. The flag gallery’s carefully controlled climate power of choosing help keep sound the fragile fabric that has deteriorated over time.

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who often speaks about the 1814 British attack on Baltimore’s Fort McHenry at the time that Francis Scott Key penned “The Star-Spangled Banner,” uttered he got teary seeing the new languish display. He spoke of the flag viewed like if it were an old friend.

“My mom used to bring me down here taken in the character of a little male child … ” O’Malley said as he gazed at the 30-by-34 lower part flag. “One could almost sit here for hours deserved staring at this magnificent icon of American triumph through great adversity.”

At a rededication ceremony for the 44-year-old museum Wednesday, President George W. Bush urged all Americans to visit the museum, what one. he called a “fantastic place of learning.”

“Ever after President James K. Polk laid the Smithsonian’s cornerstone in 1847, it has been the same of our nation’s greatest centers of knowledge,” Bush said.

Architects reorganized the central core of the museum to make it easier to course and to help visitors find what they’re looking for. They sliced through the five-story fabric to create a central skylit atrium and knocked down walls in what was once a blindness entryway.

Six landmark objects — including any 1865 telescope from Vassar College, a statue of George Washington, and a “Dumbo” car from a 1960s Disneyland ride — now mark the wings of the three manifest floors to save glittering visitors to the themes that organize the galleries.

Many of the changes tact a 2002 blue-ribbon commission report that criticized the museum for its clutter, confusing layout and its less-than-inclusive presentation of history.

New artifact walls have been built into the museum’s central core to showcase a rotating selection of the museum’s 3 million objects — from a display on how Asian immigrants faced discrimination in the United States to a C-3PO costume from the “Star Wars” movies.

“This erection is now rendered in addition spectacular than ever,” aforesaid annalist David McCullough, who is on the museum’session advisory board. “At a time when so much else all around us is synthetic … here is the treasure home of all historic American husband houses of the real thing.”

The museum’s permanent exhibits will be renovated over time, and the popular exhibit of first ladies’ gowns will reopen in December. Curators be seized of already added President-elect Barack Obama to the museum’s timeline of American presidents.

Favorite exhibits, so viewed like Dorothy’session ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz,” will afresh exist on view. Other displays representing iconic moments in U.S. history include the Woolworth’s lunch counter from Greensboro, N.C., that became a symbol of the nation’sitting civil rights movement in 1960 and Muhammad Ali’s boxing gloves.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell will open the museum Friday with a reading of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The White House has loaned the last-known copy of the speech written in Lincoln’s hand to the museum for six weeks.

The renovation of the 44-year-old Smithsonian Institution landmark was polite with $46 million in federal funds and $39 million in private donations. Before the come up with, the museum had become one of the more tired-looking and outdated in the Smithsonian collection.

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Don Wakamatsu was introduced similar to the Mariners’ new manager today at Safeco Field.

Wakamatsu, 45, served as the Oakland Athletics bench coach last be seasoned. Before that, he was a coach for the Texas Rangers from 2003 to 2007.

The announcement was made by Mariners general manager Jack Zduriencik, who said he started with a think best of 35 candidates before narrowing it to a list of seven to interview.

Zduriencik said it was important to bring in a manager “who would not only see the immediate, but the bulky picture, of this organization.”

Zduriencik also said it was of influence that he have a good relationship with the new manger, and that the manager understand the player-development side of the organization.

“I greet the challenge here to lead a world champion to Seattle,” Wakamatsu declared.

Wakamatsu aforesaid for the period of the interview process he talked with Zduriencik about the need to “build some organization that will sustain winning.”

Before going to the Rangers, Wakamatsu was a minor-league catching coordinator and roving school-master with the Angels, who earned him a World Series ring after prepossessing the 2002 championship. Wakamatsu still wears the ring daily.

Wakamatsu will be the first Asian-American manager in the major leagues. He is a creator big-league catcher who played in the Mariners organization considered in the state of a minor-leaguer in 1995 and 1996.

The other six finalists were told Tuesday by Zduriencik they wouldn’t be getting the work at jobs.

The disappointment was evident Tuesday afternoon in the voice of Joey Cora as he came to terms with the fact that something else had been given the job of managing his once-beloved Mariners.

“I was very disappointed, obviously,” said Cora, the former Mariners infielder who played a explanation role without interruption the 1995 team that lost to the Cleveland Indians in the American League Championship Series. “I thought I would be in actual possession of been a prominent paroxysm to help restore the Mariners with pride and reenergize the fan base. It seemed like it was all falling into ascribe. But it is what it is. There’s nothing I can do about it it being so that.”

The Somali hijack of a ship carrying $100 million integrity of undressed imperils totally Gulf oil shipments to the West. So insurance rates will rise

By Stanley Reed

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Saudi-owned crude oil supertanker Sirius Star during its naming stateliness in South Korea on June 18, 2008. REUTERS/Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering /Landov

The weekend seizure of a Saudi supertanker called the Sirius Star off Africa’s east coast marks a expensive and potentially dangerous reinvigorated development in the escalating wave of pirate attacks against shipping in the waters off Somalia. The pirates are reported to have seized the vessel some 420 nautical miles offshore, about 100 miles farther out to the deep from anterior attacks. They have also managed to seize violently a huge, extremely valuable ship appliance to the world’s most important oil exporter.

The tanker’s holder, Dubai’s Vela International Marine, says the tanker was to the full laden. That would mean it has about 2 million barrels of crude on board, roughly one-quarter of Saudi quotidian fruit, and is worth nearly $100 million. Vela is a subsidiary of Saudi Aramco, the kingdom’s national oil company. "It’session a massive escalation of the puzzle," says Roger Middleton, a researcher at London’s Chatham House think tank and author of a fresh study on Somali piracy.

Just months ago, such an incident would have rigidly shaken the world’session oil markets, but this time, for prices are before that time under pressure, in that place was only a brief upward tick attached Nov. 17. Prices fell below the important $55-per-barrel level on Nov. 18. In fact, PFC Energy, a Washington consultancy, reports "increased interest" in $30-per-barrel put options, indicating growing infidelity that OPEC will be able to halt the recent steep price falls.

Still, the pirates’ ability to seize such a huge and valuable canal has important implications for the global economy. The ship was headed from the Saudi oil ultimate at Ras Tanura to the Netherlands Antilles, from where the cargo would continue on to the U.S. Vessels of this size, too large to line of passage the Suez Canal, must steam around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.

According to Samuel Ciszuk, an analyst at Global Insight in London, such a hijacking far completely at flood "brings potentially all crude shipping from the [Persian] Gulf to the West in range of possible attacks." He says that insurance rates will inevitably rise and that tankers will need to be rerouted to from the east African shores, increasing their ramble time.

The Sirius Star hijacking is just the most brazen and ambitious of an escalating campaign by pirates operating around the Horn of Africa. A cargo ship operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines was also hijacked in the same area on Nov. 18 and was believed headed for the pirates’ holding area, according to the Associated Press, citing the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The cargo ship was loaded with 36,000 metric tons of wheat and headed for Iran, according to China’s by authority Xinhua News Agency. According to the piracy reporting center of the International Maritime Bureau, a London organization that monitors piracy, there have been 92 attacks, 36 of them prosperous, in the area off Africa in 2008.

The aim of the attackers is to lucre ransom. Middleton, the London researcher, estimates that $18 million to $30 million has been paid in this way well-nigh in 2008. The large ransoms are encouraging and funding increasingly sophisticated operations that use mother ships, often trawlers, to launch speedboats carrying gunmen in preparation for increasingly large targets far deficient in at sea. Most of the pirates appear to be based in Puntland, a poor and lawless region of Somalia, as well as the homeland of the region’session President Abdullahi Yusuf. "Even if the higher echelons of Somali government and clan structure are not directly involved in organizing piracy, they probably do benefit," Middleton writes.

Vela, the Sirius Star’sitting owner, says it believes the ship is now at anchor off the Somali strand. The pirates’ usual procedure is to take a ship to one of their safe havens and soon afterward commence ransom negotiations with the owners. These talks be possible to drag on for weeks. Vela implies that it has already made contact with the pirates. All 25 crew members on board are believed to be safe, the company reported. The largely Philippine crew likewise includes Britons, Poles, a Croatian, and a Saudi. "Our first and foremost priority is ensuring the safeness of the crew," Salah B. Ka’aki, the company’s CEO, said in a statement. Middleton said payment of a ransom is "the most likely way" to resolve the place.

The Sirius Star could prove a bonanza for the pirates because it is of such grievous value, but it may bring new goad to a crackdown already under way in contact with piracy in shipping lanes that are paramount to the West and the world. Warships from the U.S., Russia, and NATO countries are patrolling a zone in the Gulf of Aden leading to and from the Suez Canal zone. British sailors in inflatables recently thwarted the hijacking of a Danish merchant ship, killing at least two pirates and handing eight other suspects throughout to Kenyan authorities with respect to trial. A standoff besides continues between U.S. Naval vessels and pirates holding a Ukrainian ship loaded with tanks and other arms.

But the locality of the Saudi tanker hijacking is almost from where the world’s navies have been patrolling. Stamping out such lucrative operations is going to want a long, concerted effort. "If the toll is $1 million each hour of travail you pass end the Red Sea, it’s going to become very expensive for shipowners," says Evangelos Pistiolis, CEO of Top Ships (TOPS), any Athens shipping company.

Hewlett-Packard gave Wall Street some much needed cheer by revealing that its next results will exceed analysts’ estimates

By Cliff Edwards

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Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd has a simple credo: Follow the numbers. His insistence that employees focus on the bottom line is beginning to salary off.

On Nov. 18, the tech huge man countered a spate of recent dour warnings from tech bellwethers, observation fiscal fourth-quarter results would beat analysts’ forecasts. HP in like manner issued a surprisingly upbeat outlook for fiscal 2009. "It’session astonishing, and not," says John Madden, a research director at Ovum in Boston. "This is a company with hard monetary discipline, and that certainly helps when the economy takes a tumble."

Palo Alto (Calif.)-based HP (HPQ) said profit for the quarter ended Oct. 31 was $1.03 a share, excluding items such as restructuring and acquisition charges related to its recent takeover of tech outsourcing firm Electronic Data Systems. Wall Street was expecting earnings of $1.00 a share, excluding items. "HP delivered another solid quarter as it continues to benefit from its global reach, diverse customer base, broad portfolio, and large cost initiatives," Hurd said in a statement. "Our qualification to finish in a challenging marketplace differentiates HP, enabling it to increase share, expand earnings, and emerge from the current economic environment as a stronger constrain."

HP didn’t elaborate which areas of its sprawling tech empire, ranging from PCs and printers to services and software, were doing well. The company is due to report full results on Nov. 24. Yet the preliminary results stood in gross contrast to announcements from tech giants Intel (INTC) and Cisco Systems (CSCO), that earlier this month pointed to a rigid slowdown (BusinessWeek.com, 11/12/08) in virtually all sectors of the PC and server markets. Retailers Best Buy (BBY), Circuit City, and Target (TGT) also be favored with indicated consumers are conserving cash amid credit market confusion. "There is just enough demand out there to feed some of the vendors who positioned themselves well ahead of time," says Roger Kay, president of tech analyst firm Endpoint Technologies Associates.

While tech public funds surged steady Nov. 18, led by HP’s 14.5% gain, much of the rest of the industry isn’t faring nearly as well. HP is benefiting from Hurd’s near-obsessive cost-cutting and what analysts consider world-class negotiation of sales and supply enslave. In what Hurd calls "data-driven decision-making," every segment of the company it being so that uses metrics regularly to find out which hardware, software, and services incur the most attention. Research and development has been aligned closely with product planning, time a revamped sales organization has been given greater impulse to succeed, through "specialists" bearing responsibility for growth in their particular kitchen-yard of regard. HP also attributed more of its performance to global reach. About 70% of revenue comes from outside the U.S.

Looking against us, analysts say HP stands to be useful to from Hurd’s strategic investments in areas such as thrifty corporate computer networks, what one. endeavor new sources of recurring revenue. The guests in September completed its purchase of EDS, which specializes in providing IT services to corporations.

Rival Dell (DELL), which reports fourth-quarter earnings on Nov.

GM, Ford, and Chrysler CEOs face tough questions in the Senate over wherefore the U.S. should hand them billions, and whether it will do some good

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Ford’s Alan Mulally, Chrysler chair and CEO Robert Nardelli, and General Motors chairman and CEO G. Richard Wagoner Jr. at the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Hearing on Capitol Hill, Nov. 18, 2008. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

By David Kiley

WASHINGTON—Chief executives of the three U.S. automakers tried to persuade lock opener members of the Senate that they deserve at least $25 billion in government loans to aid the industry outlive the current economic recession, and that the taxpayers can expect to be repaid in the future. From the response they got, it will be a tough exchange.

For two weeks, from the time of General Motors (GM) revealed that it lost $4.2 billion in the third quarter and might not have enough coin to extreme the year (BusinessWeek.com, 11/7/08), Republicans have voiced opposition to helping Detroit. Democrats, meanwhile, be in actual possession of been angling to help one or the other by using a portion of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout approved through Congress in October or a new $25 billion attached to any economic stimulus package.

All of that ramped up the anticipation for the Nov. 18 appearance of the Big Three CEOs—GM’sitting Rick Wagoner, Ford’s (F) Alan Mulally, and Chrysler’s Robert Nardelli—before the Senate Banking Committee. The auto executives will continue their lobbying campaign Nov. 19 at the House of Representatives.

But Capitol Hill staffers and key leaders said the chances of passing new legislation to alleviate the automakers during the lame-duck congressional session were scant. "I don’t think we can come by the votes," said Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the banking committee. Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told the CEOs, "Nothing will get done this week, and I conjecture you’ll be back in January."

Still, the company CEOs and United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger used the trial to try to buffet down some extremely negative perceptions about how they got to this point. And they took pains to make cloudless that they consider the situation dire.

GM and Chrysler indicated that without loans from the government, they volition be below minimum cash requirements by extreme point of the first quarter of 2009. GM’s Wagoner said his company will have about $15 billion in cash at the end of the year. Nardelli said Chrysler has $6.1 billion a little while ago. "That is getting very close to our minimum needs of liquidity to operate," Nardelli told the Senate committee.

Ford said it can last into 2010, unless the market gets appreciably worse. But it worries that a GM or Chrysler labor for one’s pains will trigger the failure of hundreds of auto suppliers, freezing Ford’s production and thus driving all three companies and an array of suppliers into Chapter 11 reorganization. GM is asking for $10 billion to $12 billion in loans. Chrysler has asked for $7 billion, and Ford, $7 billion to $8 billion.

Still, all three companies recite their outlook superior to the proximate financial crisis is much brighter than generally understood. The auto execs say that dozens of point closures and deals with unions should cut costs enough to make them profitable when the economy and auto sales turn up again. Many analysts expect sales to rebound by mid-2010.

But it was clear from the statements and questions posed by Senators to Wagoner, Mulally, and Nardelli that many think Detroit’s problems are self-inflicted, and that the companies be without the innovation to climb loudly of their hole.

Dodd pulled no punches: "They have derided hermaphrodite vehicles as making ‘no housekeeping sense.’…They consider dismissed the threat of global warming…their boardrooms and executive suites have been famously void of phantom." Even so, Dodd related, "I support efforts to assist the habitual devotion to labor."

Republican Senators Richard Shelby of Alabama and Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina were amidst the vocal critics of the car companies. Both Alabama and North Carolina have benefited from investment from European and Asian automakers and their suppliers.

Senators closer to Detroit’s home turf, so as Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), came to the automakers’ defense. Not helping the industry, said Brown, "is the surest way to bend our recession into a depression." He said the Congress should take some blame for not passing tougher fuel-economy legislation that would be favored with more intimate. see various meanings of good prepared the companies for $4-per-gallon gasoline that decimated sales of sport-utility vehicles that Detroit has relied on for profits: "We are on shaky ground while we convulse our finger at the industry."

Though all three CEOs were current, much of the converging-point was on GM Chairman and CEO Wagoner as the company is the largest of the three, and is closest to having to file for bankruptcy grant that government loans don’t come through. Last week, GM told members of Congress that its chances were "50-50" to have enough cash to operate beyond the New Year.

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WASHINGTON — Nothing like a oversight to the nation’s capital. My greatest visit included a nighttime visit to the Lincoln Memorial, a taxi driver waiting to the degree that my son and I jogged up the stairs as being a closer inspection of the 99-foot tall marble likeness of our 16th president.

Lincoln sits at the west end of the famed National Mall, looking out over a reflecting loch that, on the night we were there, shimmered in the moonlight through a majestic, almost otherworldly aura.

This time, my visit was wrapped in postelection analysis but, again, Lincoln loomed plentiful.

President-elect Barack Obama’s affinity for Lincoln is no secret. The former launched his presidential campaign in Springfield, Ill., at the Old State Capitol building, the site where the latter delivered his noted “House Divided” speech in 1858.

Interviewed on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night, Obama named one author when asked what he was publicly reading: Lincoln.

It makes sense. Our 44th president is on the cutting brim; that other president was elected as our rude teetered on a different abyss.

Lincoln had to hold together the union, waging war to do so. Obama has to corral every unpredictable Congress. His pick of a consigliere, Rahm Emanuel, sends a message that a diminutive strong-arming won’t be a problem.

Both men faced dangerous seasons: the Civil War for Lincoln; two wars and a struggling economy for Obama.

They are also connected by intellect, principle and judgment, but Lincoln and Obama are of different times. It took days for Lincoln’s words to filter across the nation. Make that seconds concerning Obama, who simply e-mails his millions of supporters on MyBarack.com.

Obama clearly wants to emulate Lincoln. He has said that if left adhering a deserted island, he’termination want to have a pattern of Doris Kearns Goodwin’session volume steady Lincoln, “Team Of Rivals.” While he’s waiting on account of rescue, he should go to the pages where Goodwin writes about Lincoln bringing some of his most bitter opponents into his Cabinet in order to maintain public and party unity at a time of push.

No coincidence that Obama is considering Hillary Rodham Clinton with regard to secretary of state. She has the continued and worldly gravitas to be a far-famed escritoire, and the political ambition to have being a care in Obama’s side.

The president-elect besides had a recent sit-down through John McCain, saying publicly that he and the Republican senator plan to work together. At smallest one Republican will be included in Obama’s Cabinet. How near more than any?

Shades of Lincoln or the universal counsel to keep one’sitting friends come to terms; one’s enemies closer.

Edna Green, Howard University professor and Lincoln apt, sees lessons for Obama in this story. Lincoln let Congress lead in continuance more key issues but when he was pressured to rescind the Emancipation Proclamation, he held firm, apothegm a promise made mustiness be kept. Likewise, few other than our president-elect and the congressional delegation from Michigan currently support the proposed $25 billion bailout of the auto industry. Yet, our incoming president should stay on point. One in 10 jobs are at stake.

Obama is too uniform and polite to say so, so I’ll say it for him. Come mid-January, Republicans and Democrats ought to follow the president’s lead or simply get out of his way.

“Conciliation be able to only go in the same manner far,” says professor Green. “The crises we’re facing are so extraordinary they require confident action.”

Election Day voting breakouts showed four southern states where Obama eroded Democratic support rather than increased it. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee are the new confederacy. In those states, Obama got a smaller centre of the white vote than John Kerry.

“White southern conservatives have been isolated by this election,” explains David Bositis, elder researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Activities in D.C.

Lincoln, too, faced an unconvinced electorate. About the problem of his day he said: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot support, permanently, half henchman and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not wait for the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to have being divided.”

Until it is, just conduce. If humbler classes have any sense, they will follow.

Lynne K. Varner’sitting column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to www.seattletimes.com/edcetera

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While the Washington Huskies try to fulfill a goal this week of winning the Apple Cup, they could also help answer a question: Is the program really any better now than it was in 2004?

That was the last time UW entered the Apple Cup in a similar situation — without a Pac-10 win and with a coach who had already been fired.

Then, it was Keith Gilbertson on the way out and the Huskies entering with a 1-9 record overall — the lone win at home against San Jose State. Washington lost that Apple Cup 28-25 to complete a 1-10 season that set a school record for most losses — a record this year’s team, at 0-10, has tied.

Tyrone Willingham was hired in December 2004 to turn the program around. He hasn’t done so, and three weeks ago was told he wouldn’t be coming back next season.

Willingham maintains that the program is better off now than it was when he inherited it from Gilbertson.

After Saturday’s loss to UCLA, Willingham referenced the 2004 squad, saying he had been reminded by some of the seniors that “a few years ago they went through something like this. And they said the seniors [on the 2004 team] quit. And I don’t think our seniors have quit. I don’t think our football team has quit.”

Conventional wisdom has been that the foundation of the program is better now than it was then, with more returning talent and improved character.

But as the losses have piled up this season, some have begun to wonder — especially about the former assertion — and a loss Saturday to Washington State would only heat up those thoughts.

Washington has one game after the Apple Cup, a Dec. 6 date at California in which the Huskies figure to be huge underdogs. That means their best, and maybe only, chance for a win is this weekend.

Asked if he thought the Huskies were better now than in 2004, senior cornerback Mesphin Forrester answered, “That’s a tough question.” He was sitting out that season as a redshirt.

“No, I can’t say it is,” he said after some thought. “Because we’re still losing. From 2004 to now, we still haven’t been to any bowl games. So I can’t say it’s in better shape.”

A look at some of the numbers would indicate that this team is worse than 2004.