Alex Rodriguez told investigators and lawyers for Major League Baseball on Thursday that he was treated by a Canadian-based doctor now under investigation by federal authorities but did not receive performance-enhancing drugs from him, according to two people in baseball with knowledge of the meeting. In meeting with the Yankees’ Rodriguez for a three-hour interview sale mbt shoes
Thursday night in Florida, baseball officials ended up beating the federal authorities to the punch. The authorities have sought to interview Rodriguez for weeks but have not done so, although a meeting is expected to take place soon. Baseball officials and the federal authorities want to know what interactions Rodriguez had with the doctor, Anthony Galea, who has stated that he treated him in 2009 with anti-inflammatories after Rodriguez’s hip surgery.Rodriguez was accompanied to the meeting by several personal lawyers as well as a lawyer from the players union, the people said.Investigators from Major League Baseball’s department of investigations and at least one lawyer from the commissioner’s office questioned Rodriguez, the people said. Major League Baseball’s top drug-testing official, Rob Manfred, was not at the meeting.Officials for Major League Baseball wanted to meet with Rodriguez before the season began and have urged him to meet with federal authorities as soon as possible, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing the details of a meeting that was supposed to remain confidential.Rodriguez was in the lineup Friday when the Yankees played Baltimore in a spring training game in Tampa, Fla. After going 1 for 2 at the plate, he was taken out of the game and proceeded to meet with reporters in the Yankees’ christian louboutin shoes
clubhouse.He confirmed that he had met with baseball’s investigators, saying, “I cooperated; they were very happy.” Asked if he intended to meet with federal authorities before the Yankees open their season on Sunday night in Boston, he said, “I can’t really get into anything.”Rodriguez had planned to meet with federal authorities March 26 in Buffalo, where the local United States attorney’s office is heading the investigation into Galea, which is centered on the possibility that he distributed performance enhancers, including human growth hormone, to various athletes. However, that meeting was put off after Rodriguez’s lawyers expressed concern that widespread knowledge of the meeting would lead to a media spectacle.Federal authorities had previously tried to interview Rodriguez in Florida last month, but Rodriguez put off that session.Rodriguez’s relationship with Galea has left Major 传奇sf
League Baseball and the Yankees concerned, in part because the player’s representatives told the team in December that he had never had any interactions with the doctor.
Israeli warplanes struck at least four times across Gaza on Friday, damaging a number of structures that the military said were sites for weapons manufacturing or storage. An Israeli military spokesman said the strikes were in response to a Qassam rocket fired from Gaza on Thursday that hit the Ashkelon area on Israel’s central coast. The spokesman added that nearly 20 rockets or mortar shells were fired from Gaza mbt
in March, and more than 40 since the beginning of the year.Most of the targets in the airstrikes on Friday belong to Hamas, the militant Islamist movement that controls Gaza. Palestinians there said the targets included two training camps, one near a cheese factory in the southern part of Gaza City. Three Palestinian children, including a 1-year-old, were lightly wounded by flying glass near the factory, according to Mu’awia Hassanein, an official with the Health Ministry.A police station near the Maghazi refugee camp and the entrance to a Hamas media production facility in a former Jewish settlement also were hit.The Israeli military spokesman said he had no information on the factory.Al Aqsa, the Hamas-run television station, reported that Ismail Haniya, the leader of the Hamas government in Gaza, had condemned the Israeli attacks. The station also said that his government was contacting other Palestinian factions in an attempt to maintain calm.Tensions have risen along the Gaza border in recent weeks. A week ago, two Israeli soldiers were killed when, according to the army, they were pursuing militants trying to lay explosives near the border fence.In December 2008, Israel launched a three-week war on Gaza to stop the rocket fire. Since then, the rockets had mostly stopped. Those that have been fired have been attributed to groups other than Hamas.But the Israeli military said the border clash last week was claimed mbt shoes
by Hamas.A farm worker from Thailand was killed on March 18 in Israel by a rocket fired from Gaza. The attack came soon after the arrival in Gaza of the European Union’s top foreign policy official, Catherine Ashton.Ansar al Sunna, a small jihadist group that challenges Hamas, claimed responsibility for that attack.The worker, Manee Singueanphon, 30, was the first person to die from Gaza rocket fire since the end of Israel’s three-week military offensive in January 2009. The rocket struck an Israeli cooperative farm called Nativ Haasara, near the Gaza border.The day after the attack, Israeli aircraft fired several missiles at Gaza targets, including smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border and a metal workshop in Gaza City, Hamas security officials said then.Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave, has been largely isolated since Hamas seized control there in mid-2007. Hamas has refused to accept the conditions established by the international group that focuses on the Middle East, the sale mbt
so-called quartet — the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia. Those conditions include a renunciation of violence, the recognition of Israel’s right to exist and the acceptance of previous agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The sudden withdrawal on Wednesday night of the leading challenger in Sudan’s imminent presidential election has cast a cloud of uncertainty over the vote and almost instantly raised the prospects for violence — or possibly diminished them.Enlarge This ImageAshraf Shazly/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesYasser Arman, an opposition candidate for the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, during a news conference with other presidential candidates in Khartoum on Monday.Yasir Arman, who was the candidate of the Sudan People’s Liberation sale mbt shoes
Movement, the leading opposition group, announced on Wednesday that he was dropping out because, he said, it was “impossible” to hold an election in Darfur and that the whole process was “rigged.”However, he said that his party, which fought a long and bloody war against Sudan’s government, would participate in the parliamentary and local elections across the country, except for the conflict-wracked Darfur region.This partial boycott of the election, which is scheduled to begin April 11 and has been billed as the first meaningful vote in Sudan in more than 20 years, has left observers perplexed about what will happen next. It may have been a limited, tactical move by the opposition to avoid an embarrassing defeat or a sign that the election is unraveling even before it begins“This one still not very clear,” one American official wrote in an e-mail Wednesday night. However, the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said, “The message from Washington and others is ensure the elections are free and fair and deal with the electoral obstacles but move forward with the elections.”Several human rights groups have complained that the election is shaping up into a sham because Sudan’s ruling party has intimidated and tortured opponents, skewed the census in the ruling party’s favor, manipulated the media to essentially neuter any viable opposition, and used state money to bribe local chiefs.Because of these rising concerns, some Western election observers recently advised the Sudanese government to postpone the vote. That prompted Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been indicted on crimes against humanity for the bloodshed in Darfur, to threaten to cut off the election observers’ fingers.Sudan is a tightly controlled police state and few believed these elections would be a shining example of democracy. But the real risk to the country’s stability — and the stability of the wider East Africa region — is a planned referendum scheduled for early next year in which southern Sudanese will vote on whether to split off and form their own country. If that referendum is tampered with, many analysts say, it could be a recipe for another war between the north and the south.Despite all the media attention in recent years on the conflict in Darfur, which has claimed an estimated 300,000 lives, Darfur was a sideshow compared with Sudan’s north-south war that raged on and off for decades and killed more than 2 million people.Sudan is an extremely large and diverse country, and there mbt outlet
has long been an explosive fault line between the Muslim north and the south, which is dominated by animist and Christian peoples. It was the United States-backed peace treaty in 2005 that ended the north-south war which set in motion the upcoming elections and the southern independence referendum.President Bashir has vowed to scuttle the referendum if the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which is dominated by former southern rebels, boycotts the election. “If they say there will be no elections, we will say there will be no referendum,” he threatened at a rally on Monday.Such talk is clearly dangerous, because both sides have been rapidly rearming themselves in preparation for another possible war. Thousands of southerners have been killed in recent ethnic clashes that many Sudan analysts believe are fueled by the north.On Wednesday, Pagan Amum, the secretary general of the opposition party, told The Associated Press that President Bashir’s threats are “unacceptable.” “Self-determination was not a gift,” Mr. Amum said. “The southern Sudanese people have the capacity to defend themselves and their referendum.”Sudan’s ruling party accused the opposition of simply trying to “save face,” and northern officials said on Thursday that Mr. Arman knew he was going to lose badly to President Bashir and that is why he dropped out. President Bashir, the northern officials said, is actually quite popular across Sudan, despite being vilified in the West.But there is another theory, albeit a conspiratorial one. Some Sudan analysts say that a secret deal was cut between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and the ruling party in which the S.P.L.M. agreed to pave a clear path for Mr. Bashir to win the presidency outright and without a runoff in exchange for Mr. Bashir guaranteeing that he will stick to the referendum deal.There is little doubt that the southern political leaders care cheap mbt
much more about a vote for independence than they do about competing in national elections. That is one reason why the opposition party chose Mr. Arman, and not their highest ranking official, Salva Kiir, who is a vice president in Sudan, to run against Mr. Bashir.However, many from the south were still disappointed that Mr. Arman left the race.“I dreamed that the same thing that happened in America, would happen in Sudan,” said Mary John, a displaced southerner living in Khartoum. “But not any more. Maybe next elections.”