Compound Presentations

Question: What aromatic compound should I pick for a chemistry project? I am doing a project for chemistry where I have to pick an aromatic compound and give a presentation on it. Does anyone have any ideas of what an interesting choice would be?

Answer: luminol... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminol used in forensics...to detect blood.. find out how that works...

Question: Could someone please explain compound interest to me? Is most credit cards an example of this? I am doing a presentation for school and need to be able to explain a real life example.....

Answer: Alot of the finance majors at school are really into their "cool million" plans. Albert Einstein himself deemed the power of compound interest "the greatest mathematical discovery of all time"... According to the "Cool Million" calculator: if at age 21 you began saving $100 a month at 8% interest, by 65 your account would be worth over $450,000. Increasing the monthly contribution to $200 would double that to more than $900,000. And, by saving $300 a month, you'd reach $1 million by age 61. Pretty sweet hey?

Question: What compounds do you find interesting? I'm doing a presentation on a chemical compound and having trouble choosing one... I'd like to do oxytocin, but my partner doesn't want to embarrass herself. Haha...

Answer: Just plain water is amazing. That it gets most dense at 4C and then gets 11% lighter at freezing point. That is the product of two gases, one an oxidizer and one a fuel , yet the product is liquid that exhibits properties completely different from any of the gases. It's amazing heat capacity, it's universal solvent appeal (used in almost all solutions and has capability of dissolving almost any compound given enough time) It's strange hydrogen bonding properties, It's water vapor phase that is both visible (fog and clouds) and invisible (humidity). Ability to carry electrons through ions. It's just an incredible substance and life can't exist without it

Question: Who discovered oxycodone and how is it made? I've got a chemistry project to finish in the next few days and I'm going to give a presentation on oxycodone> i need to know who this compound is made, who discovered it, how they made it,

Answer: The Germans discovered this opioid in 1916. The synthetic process can be found under US Patent 7071336.

Question: What molecules are in polluted water in 3rd world countries? As a teacher, I need to do a short presentation for a chemistry class about polluted water for a lesson on Catholic Social Teaching. I need to directly relate the polluted water troubles of other countries (or our country) to a chem lesson. We are doing covalent compounds in the next chapter and discuss properties of water. I was hoping to fit it in at that time. Any ideas?

Answer: Arsenic is a problem in water in parts of India and Bangladesh, I believe it leaches from the soil and bedrock. Interesting chemistry, no doubt. Simpler is the chemistry of nitrogen compounds. Urine contains urea, which breaks down to ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate. Nitrite in high concentrations causes "blue baby disease" - methemoglobinemia. Is NO2 ion covalent?

Question: how to prepare powerpoint presentation on formation of one ionic&one covalent compund.? Details on formation of one ionic &one covalent compound.

Answer: ionic - electrons are transferred between atoms covalent - electrons r shared. wikipedia them.

Question: the actual decision of the case and the legal issues? NEW SOUTH WALES SUPREME COURT CITATION: Ehsman v Nutectime International [2006] NSWSC 887 CURRENT JURISDICTION: Equity FILE NUMBER(S): 5189/05 HEARING DATE{S): 31 March 2006 DECISION DATE: 01/09/2006 PARTIES: Patricia Mary Ehsman (P/A) Nutectime International Pty Ltd (D1/R1) David Neilan Brady (D2/R2) Francis Joseph Frasca (D3/R3) David Bruce Paix (D4/R4) Timentel Pty Ltd (D5) JUDGMENT OF: Austin J LOWER COURT JURISDICTION: Not Applicable COUNSEL: R Harper SC (P/A) M J Cohen (D1-4/R1-4) SOLICITORS: McDonald Johnson (P/A) Sparke Helmore (D1-4, R1-4) CATCHWORDS: CORPORATIONS - statutory derivative action - application by 35% shareholder/director to bring derivative proceedings after company's assets were transferred to a company from which the applicant is excluded - inadequacies of proposed points of claim - whether those inadequacies prevent the court from determining the application under s 237 - distinction between personal and derivative claims - whether court is satisfied concerning good faith, best interests of company and serious question to be tried - ancillary order for applicant to indemnify company with respect to costs of derivative proceedings - considerations relating to the bringing of derivative and personal claims in single proceedings ACTS CITED: Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) ss 180-184, 232, 236-242 DECISION: See under heading "Conclusions" JUDGMENT: IN THE SUPREME COURT OF NEW SOUTH WALES EQUITY DIVISION CORPORATIONS LIST AUSTIN J FRIDAY 1 SEPTEMBER 2006 5189/05PATRICIA MARY EHSMAN V NUTECTIME INTERNATIONAL PTY LTD & 4 ORS JUDGMENT 1HIS HONOUR: Before me is an application by the plaintiff, Mrs Ehsman, for leave under s 237 of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) to bring proceedings on behalf of the fifth defendant company, Timentel, by filing and serving a further amended originating process and amended points of claim. 2 , 3, 4, 5 and 6 Deleted The plaintiff's case 7The parties agree that Mr Brady and Mr and Mrs Ehsman came together in a business venture before Timentel was formed. Mrs Ehsman owned some patents for a split face wristwatch display, and she wished to exploit them commercially. Mr Brady had some marketing experience. There are disagreements about the commercial utility of Mrs Ehsman's patents, and as to the precise terms of their arrangements, which need not be resolved for present purposes. It is common ground that they respectively brought to the business of Timentel, when it was formed in 1998, the patents (such as they were) and a measure of marketing/commercial input. 8When Timentel was formed, Mrs Ehsman granted it a licence over her patents, for no consideration (although she received shares in the licensee entity). There is disputed evidence as to whether, as Mrs Ehsman asserts, she entered into the licence agreement in reliance on the assumption, encouraged by Mr Brady, that the licence would always be held by a company in which she would be a director and shareholder. The licensee's interest in the licence agreement was assignable. Mrs Ehsman claims, and the defendants deny, that it was a term and condition of the licence agreement that the licence would not be assigned by Timentel to a company in which Mrs Ehsman was not a shareholder and director. 9Initially the only shareholders were the Ehsmans and Mr Brady, and Mr Brady and Mrs Ehsman were the directors. Mr Brady's evidence is that he devoted very considerable time and effort, and expense, to travelling to Europe to negotiate for the commercial exploitation of the split face wristwatch display. According to him, the people he consulted in Europe told him that Mrs Ehsman's patents were just concepts and it would be necessary to work out the most efficacious interior wristwatch mechanisms to support the split face. That is disputed by Mrs Ehsman. But it is clear enough that Mr Brady did do some amount of developmental/marketing work in Europe, the cost of which was shared or partly shared with the Ehsmans. 10Mr Brady's evidence is that he came up with the idea of having movements in each half of the split face watch case for the forward and return hand movements, all controlled by an electronic integrated circuit, and that Mr Claude Ray, an experienced watchmaker, carried out the necessary design work. The eventual product, which he called a "hinged electronic watch", was based on ideas that were fundamentally different, he said, from Mrs Ehsman's patents. These matters are contested. 11Mr Brady said he negotiated a development agreement with Mr Ray's company, using a company with which he was associated, Renaissance Management, for that purpose. In turn he caused Renaissance Management to enter into an agreement with another company with which he was associated, DNB Global Corporation (registered in the Philippines), which made advance payments to Mr Ray's company. At a final hearing of this case it will be necessary to explore these corporate relationships and their purpose, and to understand better the nature of Mr Brady's interests. DNB Global appears to bear his initials, but there is some evidence that he is just one of five directors and is indirectly a shareholder. DNB Global is important in this case because, according to Mr Brady, it incurred substantial expenses through payments for development work, for which Timentel reimbursed it out of monies borrowed by Timentel from Mr Brady, Mr Frasca and Mr Paix. But Mrs Ehsman questions whether loans were ever in fact made by those three directors. 12Mr Brady said the development of the hinged electronic watch was very expensive and under the arrangements between them, Ms Ehsman was to contribute to that development. He alleges that she defaulted in that obligation. He claims that by March 2005 she owed and had not paid about $86,000. That is contested. According to Mr Brady, the development was eventually successful and the hinged electronic watch is protected by patents in various countries, procured at a cost to DNB Global, recoverable from Timentel. 13In about June 2002 Ms Ehsman and Mr Brady decided to bring in two other parties, namely Mr Frasca and Mr Paix. There is quite a bit of evidence, not all consistent, about the circumstances in which Mr Frasca and Mr Paix were invited into the company. What is clear is that Mr Frasca and Mr Paix joined the board of directors and acquired shares, they provided some capital, and in due course they sided with Mr Brady and against Mrs Ehsman. After they joined the board, the company's issued 100 ordinary shares were divided as follows: Mr Brady 35 shares, Mr and Mrs Ehsman 35 shares, Mr Frasca 15 shares, and Mr and Mrs Paix 15 shares. 14During 2002, it seems, Mrs Ehsman visited Europe and met with one of Mr Brady's contacts, Manuel Spode of Les Artisans Horlogers. There is conflicting evidence as to what happened at the meeting. Mr Frasca gives evidence in his affidavit that the meeting led to Mrs Ehsman being criticised by the other directors for intervening secretly without the board's authority, and for her suspicious approach. Mr Frasca also says that at a meeting he had with Mr and Mrs Ehsman in 2003, they told him that they were determined to bring Mr Brady down. These matters are also disputed. Nevertheless it appears that, some time after Mr Frasca and Mr Paix arrived on the board, if not earlier, the relationship between Messrs Brady, Frasca and Paix, on the one hand, and the Ehsmans, on the other hand, deteriorated. By now the relationship has completely broken down. 15There is a considerable amount of correspondence in evidence, and minutes of board meetings. I shall not describe this material in detail here. The correspondence shows that at least since early 2005, Mrs Ehsman has been concerned about verifying payments allegedly due by Timentel to DNB Global, and also about the financial management of Timentel more generally. The evidence is that the only bank account of Timentel has been relatively dormant at times when, the defendants allege, Timentel made payments to DNB Global. Mrs Ehsman's solicitors have written to Timentel's solicitors about these matters. 16Mr Brady claims that by about May 2005 there was a pressing need for capital for Timentel, to pay invoices to DNB Global of about $216,000 and certain other smaller debts. It appears that at this time Mr Brady, Mr Frasca and Mr Paix developed a proposal to lend Timentel up to $246,000 for a term of 60 days with interest of 17% compounding monthly, secured by a registered charge. Mrs Ehsman asked the copies of the draft loan facility and charge documents but received them only after they had been executed. A board meeting attended by Mr Brady, Mr Frasca and Mr Paix, but not Mrs Ehsman, on 9 May 2005 approved the loan proposal and authorised execution of the documents. Mr Brady, Mr Frasca and Mr Paix, acting as directors of the company, purported to authorise the company to enter into the loan facility and charge agreements in which they were the counterparties, without the consent of the other director/shareholder, Ms Ehsman. 17The defendants claim that the loan facility was drawn down and the money was used directly for payment of outstanding debts of Timentel, rather than for deposit into Timentel's bank account. Mrs Ehsman, by her solicitor, sought to verify the making of the loan but she says she has not received proper documentation. The evidence includes minutes of the board meeting of DNB Global on 18 August 2005, at which the directors of that company confirmed that the company had been paid for certain invoices, but the evidence is incomplete because, for example, the identity of the paying entity is not given. 18On 11 July 2005 Messrs Brady, Frasca and Paix as lenders made a formal notice of demand for payment to Timentel of an amount of about $247,000. But they gave the company a limited extension of time to repay. Mrs Ehsman's solicitors alleged in correspondence that any attempt to enforce the charge would render it void under s 267 of the Corporations Act, because the chargees were "relevant persons" for the purposes of that section. 19The security was not enforced but instead, at some stage it was proposed that the company would enter into an asset sale agreement and a deed of assignment of the licence, in favour of the other three directors or their vehicle, for a price supported by a valuation by Les Artisans Horlogers. In correspondence, Mrs Ehsman's solicitors endeavoured unsuccessfully to obtain information about the valuation - indeed, they approached the valuer directly without success. They alleged that the valuation did not cover all of the assets sold. They strenuously opposed the proposed transaction, on several grounds including that the transaction would be in breach of the contractual arrangements and understandings between Mrs Ehsman and the other three directors. 20Nutectime was formed in August 2005. The directors are Mr Brady, Mr Frasca and Mr Paix. The company has issued 100 ordinary shares. Mr Brady owns 60 shares, Mr Frasca owns 20 shares in Mr and Mrs Paix own 20 shares. Mr and Mrs Ehsman do not hold any shares. 21The asset sale agreement and the deed of assignment of licence were entered into by Timentel and Nutectime on 2 September 2005. The transaction was considered at a board meeting not attended by Mrs Ehsman. Messrs Brady, Frasca and Paix went through a procedure of formally disclosing their interest in the purchaser but then they proceeded, purporting to act as directors of the company, to approve the transaction. It appears that the contract was made and completion took place on the same day. The total sale price $277,000. According to Timentel's solicitors, the sale proceeds were used to pay out and discharge the charge over the company's assets. That appears to have meant that the bulk of the sale proceeds were directed to Mr Brady, Mr Frasca and Mr Paix. It is not clear from the evidence whether there was any actual movement of money. 22Up until May 2005 Mrs Ehsman had been a director and (with her husband) substantial shareholder of Timentel, which was the licensee for no consideration of her patents. On one view, the company owed a substantial amount of money to DNB Global, but it had procured substantial development work for its split face watch design. Any profits from the realisation of that development work would have come to Timentel, and Mr and Mrs Ehsman would have had a 35% interest in those profits. After 2 September 2005, Mrs Ehsman was still a director of Timentel and Mr and Mrs Ehsman remained 35% shareholders. But the company's substantial assets, and any prospect it may have had of earning profits from the development of the split face watch, had gone. Mrs Ehsman was still the licensor of her patents, but she was entitled to receive no consideration for the licence. The new licensee, Nutectime, was a company in which she had no interest, and that company had acquired Timentel's assets and any profit-making opportunity relating to the split face watch. The controllers and shareholders of Nutectime were her fellow directors and shareholders of Timentel. The draft APC and draft FAOP 23From this brief account it appears that if Mrs Ehsman could substantiate her allegations, this would be a case of self-dealing by her co-directors to her considerable disadvantage, and unauthorised diversion of a corporate opportunity. Experience shows that in such cases it is important for the plaintiff to identify with particularity the precise duties said to have been breached and the circumstances of the breach. That is important in the interests of clarity of presentation of the plaintiff's case, and to ensure that the defendant is not surprised by having to meet a case at trial different from what she had been led to expect. These considerations strongly suggest that in such a case, the plaintiff should proceed by statement of claim. Where the plaintiff is proceeding in her own right, invoking the oppression remedy, and also seeking to assert the company's rights in a derivative action, the need for clarity of pleading is especially strong. 24 Deleted 25I have endeavoured to identify those allegations that relate to some right of Timentel, and distinguish them from allegations relating to some right of Mrs Ehsman personally. In summary, for reasons given below, paras 7, 18-21, 22, 23-26, and 27-29 (and the claims to relief in paras 1-5, perhaps 7, and 8) of the draft APC are claims made on behalf of Timentel, and paras 8-16, 17, 30 and 31 (and claims to relief in para 6 and perhaps 7) are claims made by Mrs Ehsman personally. 26It is important to maintain the distinction between derivative and personal claims in the interests of clarity. But nothing in Part 2F.1A requires that a derivative action be in a separate proceeding in which no personal claims are made by the person who has carriage of the proceeding. For example, in Fiduciary Ltd v Morningstar Research Pty Ltd (2005) 53 ACSR 732 the plaintiffs were an individual and corporate plaintiffs, and leave was granted under s 237 so as to permit the individual plaintiff (who was a shareholder and officer of the corporate plaintiffs) to assert the rights of the companies in a proceeding in which he also asserted rights of his own. The combination of corporate and personal claims was not unlike the combination of claims in the present case, though the pleading was by an elaborate statement of claim. In that case, and here, the asserted derivative and personal rights arise to a large degree out of the same alleged facts. 27Here the sole plaintiff is Mrs Ehsman, and Timentel is a defendant. It is not proposed that Timentel should become a plaintiff if s 237 leave is granted, because Timentel is properly a defendant to some of Mrs Ehsman's claims. Nor is it proposed that the derivative action be constituted as a separate proceeding, because there are substantially overlapping facts concerning the derivative and personal claims, which should therefore be heard together. Section 236(2) says that proceedings brought on behalf of a company must be brought in the company's name. But there is now a substantial line of decisions holding that, despite the literal wording of s 236(2), leave under s 237 can be given where the company is a party to the proceeding as a necessary defendant in respect of other claims, without requiring the company become a plaintiff or insisting that the derivative action be brought in a separate proceeding: see especially Keyrate Pty Ltd v Hamarc Pty Ltd (2001) 38 ACSR 396, per Santow J at [18]-[19]; Metyor Inc v Queensland Electronic Switching Pty Ltd (2002) 42 ACSR 398, per McPherson JA at [14]-[15]; Charlton v Baber (2003) 47 ACSR 31, per Barrett J at [5]. 28I turn now to consider the draft APC, paragraph by paragraph. 29After preliminary allegations, para 7 of the draft APC asserts that by reason of their appointment as directors of Timentel, Mr Brady, Mr Frasca and Mr Paix owed Timentel various duties. There is a list of the standard duties of directors. The list reflects ss 180, 181, 182 and 183 of the Corporations Act, and also a duty to act honestly in the exercise of their powers and the discharge of their duties as directors (a formulation no longer found in the statute). [deleted latter part of paragraph] 30Having made allegations about the defendants' duties as directors of Timentel, the draft APC (paras 8-16) makes allegations about the licence agreement, leading to the assertion that the purported sale by Timentel to Nutectime of its rights under the licence agreement was in breach of the licence agreement. That is a personal claim by Mrs Ehsman against Timentel (and no other defendant) for breach of contract. It is not a claim for breach of any duty owed to Timentel. 31Para 17 pleads that, by reason of matters pleaded in paras 8-11, the first to fourth defendants are estopped from asserting that Timentel was entitled to sell or assign to the first defendant the rights of Timentel under the licence agreement. This was said to arise because Mrs Ehsman entered into the licence agreement in reliance on the assumption, encouraged by Mr Brady, Mr Frasca and Mr Paix, that the licence would always be held by a company of which she was a director and shareholder. Clearly the allegation of estoppel is made for the benefit of Mrs Ehsman personally rather than to vindicate some right or interest of Timentel. The document does not reveal how the allegation can be made against any defendant other than Mr Brady, given that the assumption is said to have been created and acted upon at the time of the licence agreement, which was made well before Mr Frasca and Mr Paix became involved. 32Paras 18-21 make allegations about breaches of duties owed by the other three directors to Timentel. They allege that Timentel did not receive any of the proceeds of sale of assets, or received only part of the proceeds, and Messrs Brady, Frasca and Paix received those proceeds or part of them. It is claimed that their conduct in receiving those proceeds constituted a breach of all of the duties pleaded in paragraph 7. I find it impossible to justify that claim, with respect to some of the duties identified in para 7, even taking into account the "particulars" to para 21. Moreover, the mere assertion that Timentel did not receive proceeds of sale and the other three directors did (even when the "particulars" to para 21 are added) cannot, per se, establish a breach of any of the duties identified in para 7. These allegations fall well short of a proper pleading. 33Para 22 alleges that by reason of the matters alleged in certain other paragraphs, Messrs Brady, Frasca and Paix have been unjustly enriched as a result of breach of the duties referred to in para 7. Presumably this is intended to establish a ground of recovery for Timentel. Again, the precise matters that might constitute unjust enrichment have not been adequately pleaded and, moreover, it is not easy to see why para 22 combines breach of directors' duties with unjust enrichment. 34Paras 23-26 make allegations against Nutectime, intended to support orders declaring void and setting aside the purported sale of assets or requiring Nutectime to hold the assets in trust for Timentel. These paragraphs seem to assert some entitlement to relief on the part of Timentel rather than Mrs Ehsman, although the remedies would obviously operate for her benefit as well. The precise foundation of the remedies is not clear. The drafter has not invoked the equitable principles concerning accessory liability for breach of trust with any specificity or clarity. To the extent that entitlement to the relief is said to arise out of Nutectime being "knowingly concerned in the breach" there is a suggestion of statutory accessory liability, but the statutory directors' duties do not create any accessory civil reliability for being knowingly concerned in the primary breach. There is "accessory" liability under the statute for de facto and shadow directors, but the allegations in the draft APC do not in terms invoke that liability. 35Paras 27-29 allege that the deed of charge dated 9 May 2005 is void and should be set aside because Timentel did not receive the benefit, or received only part of the benefit, of the money purported to be advanced. This seems to be the assertion of rights of Timentel rather than Mrs Ehsman personally. A deed of charge merely provides security for advances made under some other arrangement such as a loan facility agreement. It is not easy to see why the fact (if it be so) that the chargor did not receive the benefit of loan monies purported to be advanced under a loan facility agreement should, per se, lead to the consequence that the security for the loan is void. If the charge is security for money advanced under a loan facility agreement, and no money is advanced to the chargor, then nothing is secured by the charge but the charging instrument is nevertheless valid. 36Para 30 contends that the other three directors repeatedly failed or refused to furnish information to Mrs Ehsman relating to the affairs of Timentel. Particulars are given. As expressed, this is an allegation of breach of duty to Mrs Ehsman rather than Timentel. There is no allegation of any particular duty but it seems that the drafter had in mind either or both of the statutory rights of a director to gain access to certain information under ss 198F and 290, or the director's general law right of access to the information needed to discharge her fiduciary duty (eg Edman v Ross (1922) 22 SR(NSW) 351). A director seeking to assert those rights is not required to show that inspection is sought in good faith and for a proper purpose, whereas a shareholder seeking inspection under s 247A must do so. Para 30 is not clear enough. 37Para 31 asserts that, by reason of the matters asserted, the other three directors have conducted the affairs of Timentel in a manner oppressive to, unfairly prejudicial to or unfairly discriminatory against Mrs Ehsman, or contrary to the interests of the members as a whole, contrary to s 232. Mrs Ehsman has personal standing to complain under that provision. The difficulty with para 31 is that it relies globally on all of the other allegations, some of which do not seem to be pertinent (for example, the pleadings against Timentel itself based on breach of contract and against Mr Brady based on estoppel). It should be re-formulated with more precision. 38 Deleted 39The draft FAOP contains the same claims for relief as the draft APC, and therefore suffers from the defects just noted. It also contains a prayer for an order under s 237. This is inappropriate, given that the interlocutory application presently under consideration seeks a s 237 order and also leave to file the FAOP, so that the question of s 237 leave will have been addressed before the FAOP is filed. Further, in the draft FAOP the application is said to be made pursuant to ss 232, 236 and 237. Sections 236 and 237 do not need to be mentioned, for the reason just given, and s 232 appears from the draft APC to be only one of the statutory provisions under which relief is sought, the others being the various directors' duties provisions. 40My conclusion is that the draft APC and the draft FAOP are seriously defective, and therefore I shall not accede to Mrs Ehsman's application for leave to file and serve them in their present form. What is needed is a carefully considered pleading by statement of claim. However, my view is that the draft APC identifies in broad terms, though imprecisely and at times in a confused way, some derivative and personal causes of action that emerge on Mrs Ehsman's account of the evidence. The causes of action are: (A)a personal claim by Mrs Ehsman against Timentel for breach of contract arising out of Timentel's purported sale and assignment to Nutectime, sounding in damages (paras 8-16); (B)a personal claim by Mrs Ehsman against Mr Brady based the allegation that at the time of the making of the licence agreement he encouraged her to assume that the licence would always be held by a company of which she was a director and shareholder - though the appropriate remedy, if this ground is established, is debatable (para 17); (C)claims by Timentel against Messrs Brady, Frasca and Paix for breach of ss 182 and 183 and their general law duty to avoid conflicts of interest, by virtue of their self-dealing in the loan and security transactions and then the sale and assignment transactions, leading an order for an account of profit or an order setting aside the transactions, or a compensation order under s 1317H (paras 18-21 and 22); (D)a claim by Timentel against Nutectime for accessory liability under equitable principles which apply to a person who assists in a breach of fiduciary duty or receives property transferred in breach of duty, leading to an order requiring Nutectime to hold acquired property on trust or to account as a constructive trustee (paras 23-26); (E)a personal claim by Mrs Ehsman against the other three directors asserting infringement of her right of access as a director to information of Timentel, under the general law and perhaps under ss 198F and 290, leading to an order for access or to restrain obstruction (para 30); (F)a personal claim by Mrs Ehsman for relief under the "oppression" remedy in s 232, arising out of specifically pleaded facts and circumstances, leading to a range of possible remedies to address the oppressive or unfair conduct (para 30). 41I am not persuaded that there is any viable course of action underlying paras 27-29. 42I think the appropriate course is to dismiss the application for leave to file and serve the amended points of claim, and to direct Mrs Ehsman to file and serve a statement of claim to give effect to her personal and derivative claims having regard to these reasons for judgment. 43Section 237 authorises the court to grant leave to permit a person to bring proceedings on behalf of a company. Part 2F.1A does not explain the word "proceedings" or give any direct indication of the level of specificity of pleaded allegations and prayers for relief that the applicant for leave must achieve. Typically the applicant will provide the court with a draft statement of claim or (as here) points of claim, or some other document giving particulars of the derivative claims. But in my view it cannot be the case that a full statement of the derivative claims must be presented before the court can consider and determine a leave application. Were that to be required, any subsequent amendments to the pleaded case would need to be treated as a leave application under s 237 to which the criteria in s 237(2) would have to be applied. That, in my view, would be an unnecessary burden for case management. 44In my opinion the applicant for leave must identify and describe the proposed proceedings with sufficient precision that the court can properly assess the application having regard to the criteria that it is required to consider under s 237(2), and the opponents can respond to the application in terms of those criteria. That may be achieved by presenting the court with a draft pleading, but it may be achieved in other ways such as by outlining the claims in affidavit evidence. It is not hard to envisage an application that falls so far short of identifying the derivative causes of action to be asserted that the court is left unable to assess, for example, whether it is in the best interests of the company that the applicant be granted leave, and whether there is a serious question to be tried. Here, however, Mrs Ehsman has done enough in her draft points of claim (defective though they are) and in the voluminous evidence that has been adduced, to permit me to identify the causes of action broadly described in paragraphs (A)-(F) above, of which paras (C) and (D) are derivative claims. I am able to consider the application for leave under s 237 as an application for leave to bring proceedings on behalf of Timentel by a statement of claim that would assert the causes of action identified in paras (C) and (D) and seek appropriate equitable and statutory relief. The requirements for leave to bring a derivative action 45Section 236(1)(a) allows a member or officer, inter alios, to bring proceedings on behalf of the company with the court's leave. Ms Ehsman has standing both as a member and an officer of Timentel. 46Under s 237(2) the court is required to grant the application for leave if it is satisfied of five matters set out in subparagraphs (a) to (e). Subsection 237(3) and (4) establish a rebuttable presumption that the granting of leave is not in the best interests of the company in certain circumstances, but it is agreed that those circumstances have no application to the present case. There is no suggestion of the members of the company purporting to ratify or approve the conduct of the other three directors, so as to invoke s 239. 47Of the five matters that the court must address under s 237(2), the parties agree that the notice requirement in subparagraph (e) has been satisfied here. The defendants did not concede, in terms of subparagraph (a), that it is probable that the company will not itself bring the proceedings, or properly take responsibility for them, or for the steps in them. However, the evidence before me plainly establishes that this criterion is satisfied, in respect of proceedings to pursue any derivative claims of the kind identified at paras (C) and (D) above. Timentel is under the control of the other three directors, who are acting together in respect of the company's dealings with Mrs Ehsman. The other directors (and spouse, in the case of Mr Paix) are the majority shareholders. They have caused the assets of Timentel to be passed to Nutectime, a company in which they but not Ms Ehsman are the directors and shareholders. They have asserted, in answer to the present application, both on their own behalf and on behalf of Timentel, that there is no foundation for derivative claims to be brought. It is clear from their attitude, revealed in the evidence and upon the application, that they would not authorise the company to bring such proceedings. 48That leaves for consideration subparagraphs (b), (c) and (d) of s 237(2). In their submissions, the parties referred me to a substantial number of decided cases. It seems to me, however, that the courts' approach to these subparagraphs has become relatively clear in the course of decisions, and it is unnecessary for me to refer to authorities extensively. Additionally, I have reached the conclusion that this is a plain case in which all three criteria have been established, and that extensive exposition is unnecessary. Good faith 49In the Swansson case, Palmer J expressed the opinion at least two questions are generally relevant to this issue: namely, whether the applicant honestly believes that a good cause of action exists and has reasonable prospects of success; and whether the applicant is seeking to act in a derivative capacity for such a collateral purpose as will amount to an abuse of process. This approach has been followed frequently in subsequent cases. I was referred, inter alia, to the discussion by Brereton J. in Maher v Honeysett & Maher Electrical Contractors Pty Ltd [2005] NSWSC 859, at [30]. 50The evidence shows that Mrs Ehsman believes that a derivative action exists which has reasonable prospects of success. She has given sworn evidence in para [24] of her affidavit of 9 December 2006 to the effect that the company has a good cause of action with reasonable prospects of success for the claims that she outlines. I can see no proper basis in the evidence for doubting that this belief is honest. The highest the evidence goes is in the affidavit of Mr Frasca, where he deposes to a discussion with Mr and Mrs Ehsman in 2003 in which, on his version of it, they conveyed an implacable desire to destroy Mr Brady. But that evidence is contested and in any event, if accepted, it would not point to any lack of honesty in Mrs Ehsman's belief at the present time of her prospects of success in a derivative action. 51Mr Frasca's evidence might be taken to point to a collateral purpose on the part of Mrs Ehsman. But the evidence, if accepted, relates to a conversation some years ago, and the assertion of a collateral purpose is inconsistent with Mrs Ehsman's affidavit evidence. It seems to me that if Mrs Ehsman succeeds in making out her factual contentions, there is a plausible derivative action along the lines of paras (C) and (D) above. If such a derivative action is pursued successfully it will have a beneficial effect on the position of Mrs Ehsman in Timentel. Those conclusions, arising out of the evidence as a whole, makes it difficult to maintain that Mrs Ehsman's purpose in pursuing the derivative cause of action is a collateral one. As Brereton J remarked in Maher v Honeysett (at [33]), the objective facts and circumstances speak louder than an applicant's words about her honesty and purpose, and here the objective facts and circumstances, supported by much evidence, are reasonably eloquent. 52My conclusion is that Ms Ehsman has succeeded in satisfying me that she is acting in good faith for the purposes of s 237(2)(b). Best interests of the company 53In Maher v Honeysett, at [44], Brereton J observed that the phrase "best interests" directs attention to the company's separate and independent welfare, a notion that imports the familiar concept of the interests of the company as a whole. Here it is unnecessary to investigate the qualifications to that proposition arising where the company is insolvent or near to insolvency. In the present case Mrs Ehsman's pursuit of derivative claims will, if she is successful, enure to her benefit, as I have explained. 54As Brereton J pointed out (at [45]), "the existence in an applicant of a personal interest in the outcome of a proposed derivative action, or even of a personal animus against the company or other members of it, cannot be significant, let alone decisive, because they are usual concomitants of the types of disputes which lead to derivative actions, and few if any such actions would be brought but for personal interest on the part of the relevant applicant and in the absence of animus against the company or other shareholders". I respectfully agree. The fact that Mrs Ehsman has a personal interest in the outcome of Timentel's derivative claims, and even the existence of personal animus against Mr Brady (if Mr Frasca's disputed evidence is excepted), are not matters standing in the way of the conclusion that the pursuit of the derivative claims is in the best interests of Timentel. 55Relief having the effect of returning Timentel's assets or their beneficial ownership to the company cannot be obtained by Mrs Ehsman 's pursuit of personal claims (except perhaps through some creative orders on the "oppression" ground). The most direct and obvious way of recovery of the property is for Timentel to assert claims for recovery orders derivatively through Mrs Ehsman. If those claims are successful the result will be orders for the restoration of Timentel's property, an outcome which will be in the best interests of the company, although obviously not in the best interests of the majority shareholders. 56In my view it is appropriate for the derivative claims to be pursued in proceedings in which Mrs Ehsman also asserts personal claims, provided that great care is taken to distinguish the two categories of claims and the ingredients of the case to prove each category. I hope that a first step along that path will be taken by the preparation of a statement of claim. Although there is a risk of confusion in allowing a single proceeding that asserts personal and derivative claims, there is considerable advantage in doing so where, as here, there is a substantial common substratum of fact underlying the two categories of claims (see Maher v Honeysett at [53]). 57In all the circumstances I am satisfied that it is in the best interests of Timentel, for the purposes of s 237(2)(c), that Mrs Ehsman be granted leave under s 237. Serious question to be tried 58In my view this case should be treated as a case where the applicant is applying for leave to bring derivative proceedings, rather than to intervene in existing proceedings. The effect of my granting leave to her to file a new initiating pleading will be, if the job is done properly, to overhaul and substantially reconstitute the proceedings, as proceedings in which she pursues clearly articulated derivative and personal claims. Where the applicant is applying for leave to bring proceedings, s 237(2)(d) requires the court to be satisfied that there is a serious question to be tried. 59As Barrett J explained in Charlton v Baber at [55], the applicant bears the onus of proving sufficient material to enable the court to make this determination. But as I explained above, referring to Palmer J's judgment in Swansson (and see Maher v Honeysett at [19]), the court does not normally enter into the merits of the proposed derivative action to any great degree. The evidence must reach the same standard as applies for an interlocutory injunction, set out in such cases as Castlemaine Tooheys Ltd v State of South Australia (1986) 161 CLR 148 and Australian Broadcasting Corporation v Lenah Game Meats Pty Ltd (2001) 208 CLR 199. The standard has been described as "relatively low" (Maher v Honeysett at [19]). 60In this case Mrs Ehsman has filed quite extensive evidence, which she relies on for the purposes of the application, and I also have before me substantial evidence on behalf of the defendants. I infer that the evidence before me is substantially the evidentiary cases of the parties for final relief. This is certainly not a case of affidavits hurriedly cobbled together to meet the exigencies of an interlocutory occasion. Having considered the evidence my view is that, although there are many disputed questions of fact, which I am not in a position to resolve, Mrs Ehsman's allegations are sufficiently substantial to cross the "serious question to be tried" hurdle. I am therefore satisfied that s 237(2)(d) has been met. The court's powers 61The court is empowered by s 241 to make any orders, and give any directions, that it considers appropriate in relation to proceedings brought with leave, or an application for leave. That section affirms the court's power under the Civil Procedure Act 2005 (NSW) to make an order requiring that the proceedings be brought by statement of claim, a step that I shall take for the reasons I have explained. It also expressly permits the court to make orders requiring mediation, a step that the court is also empowered to take by s 26 of the Civil Procedure Act. During the course of the hearing, I floated with the parties the question whether it would be appropriate to make an order for compulsory mediation. The suggestion was not opposed and I formed the view that if the parties did not voluntarily agree to mediate I should make an order. Unless the parties have, in the meantime, organised for mediation to take place, I shall include a mediation order in the orders that I make pursuant to these reasons for judgment. 62Section 242 permits the court to make any orders it considers appropriate about the costs of various persons, including the company, in relation to proceedings brought with leave under s 237 (see Fiduciary Ltd v Morningstar Research Pty Ltd (2005) 53 ACSR 732, at [56]). In such a case as the present, where the company is essentially a vehicle to pursue the commercial interests of four parties, one of whom is at odds with the other three, who oppose the bringing of derivative claims, and the plaintiff wishes to combine derivative claims with personal claims largely arising out of the same facts, it seems to me appropriate to require the plaintiff to indemnify the company in respect of costs it may incur, either directly or by virtue of a court order against it, with respect to the pursuit of the derivative claims. If the indemnity were not given, the other three directors would as a practical matter be required to bear the burden of 65% of the company's costs of pursuing derivative claims which they do not want it to pursue. Obviously, to the extent that the plaintiff makes a personal claim against the company, she should not be required to give such an indemnity. Further, the indemnity needs to be qualified so that it does not apply to any cost order made by the court with the intention of overriding the effect of the undertaking. The main purpose of that qualification is to enable the trial judge to make such order as to costs as he or she thinks appropriate after the final hearing, untrammelled by an undertaking that may cause an order for costs against the company to rebound against the plaintiff; but the qualification may also be useful to allow the court to override the undertaking in circumstances not presently foreseeable. 63Mrs Ehsman has succeeded in establishing that leave should be granted to her to bring derivative proceedings on behalf of Timentel, and to file and appropriate pleading to initiate those proceedings (and also to clarify her personal claims). That suggests that she should have her costs of the interlocutory application of 12 December 2005, against the defendants other than Timentel. In my view the fact that she will be required to give an undertaking as to the company's future costs is immaterial to the question of the costs of the application. Although I have found that the draft amended points of claim are seriously defective, they nevertheless convey plainly enough the nature of the derivative claims that Mrs Ehsman wishes to pursue. The defects in the pleaded case did not, in my view, provided a justification for the attitude of complete opposition to the application that the defendants presented to the court. Conclusions 64For the reasons I have given, I propose to make orders along the following lines: (1)Subject to the condition identified in order (2), grant leave to the plaintiff, under s 237 of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), to bring proceedings on behalf of the fifth defendant against the first, second, third and fourth defendants, asserting the causes of action generally identified in these reasons for judgment and seeking all or any appropriate remedies; (2)Order (1) is subject to the condition that, before any such proceedings are brought, the plaintiff must indemnify the fifth defendant for and in respect of all costs that the fifth defendant may incur (either on its own account or under an order of the court) by reason of the bringing, maintenance and conduct of the derivative proceedings, provided however that the indemnity is not required to extend to costs that the fifth defendant may incur in the proceedings as a defendant in respect of any personal claim made by the plaintiff, and shall not apply with respect to any final order for costs in the proceedings; (3)Direct the plaintiff to file and serve a statement of claim to give effect to her personal and derivative claims, having regard to these reasons for judgment, by no later than a date to be specified; (4)Order the first, second, third and fourth defendants to pay the plaintiff's costs of her interlocutory process filed on 12 December 2005, as agreed or assessed; (5)Subject to orders (1), (2) (3) and (4), the plaintiff's interlocutory process filed on 12 December 2005 is dismissed; (6)Order that the proceedings be referred for mediation by a mediator agreed to by the parties, such mediation to take place by no later than a date to be specified; (7)Liberty to apply to Austin J on 2 days notice. 65However, I shall give the parties the opportunity to draw my attention to any particular matters that might affect the question of costs, by (for example) causing me to award costs on a different measure or to limit the order for costs in some way. I shall also give them the chance to consider my proposed orders. I shall stand the matter over for the purpose of hearing any such submissions and making orders.

Answer: The Plainitff was granted leave to commence both sets of proceedings, provided she agree to indemnify the 5th Defendant for any costs of the derivative action; she does not have to indemnify the 5th Defendant for costs of her personal action. The Plaintiff must file the proceedings on a date to be fixed. The 1st-4th Defendants have to pay the Plaintiff's costs of this application. On all othe rmatters, the Plaintiff's application is dismissed. The claims are to be referred to a mediator. All parties may approach the judge on the issue of costs if they wish to make further submissions on that point. The issue was whether the Plaintiff should be granted leave to commence proceedings personally and on behalf of the 5th Defendant, against the 1st-4th Defendants. If you don't actually understand the Corporations Act and its application to this case, you need to concentrate more during your law classes.

Question: What kind of game should we play for our presentation? At school we are doing this project where various groups teach lessons on parts of speech like nouns, verbs, pronouns etc. Our group got adjectives. We have to cover certain terms in our presentation which include: articles, nouns as adjectives, proper adjectives, compound adjectives, demonstrative adjectives, interrogative and indefinite adjectives. What do you think would be a good game/class activity we could play in class? I was thinking something along the lines like Bingo but a lot of people are doing that. Any ideas? All are appreciated. :) Thanks.

Answer: well in my school the best easeist and popular game is jeporady.

Question: plz. help me to write the main idea of this article in the NY Times. in two pages.? November 5, 2006 Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi By DEXTER FILKINS 1. London, August 2006 Many miles away in a more dangerous place the dream is ending badly. The bodies pile up. Good people stream to the borders. Leaders pile money onto planes. The center is giving way. The apartment on South Street in London is an antidote to Baghdad in nearly every respect. Where the Iraqi capital rings with chaos and violence, the sidewalks of Mayfair are quiet enough to hear your own voice above the cars. Baghdad is treeless and tan; the South Street apartment opens onto a private park filled with the lushness of an English garden. Just across the way is the Anglican church where General Eisenhower, stationed here as the commander of Allied forces during the war, came to pray. A maid greets you at the door, an elderly Lebanese woman who doubles as an Arabic teacher for the children. The parlor is neatly appointed and filled with art, most of it European, different from the Baghdad house, where most of it is Iraqi. There is “Sketch of a Woman,� by Lucien Pissarro, the French painter who propagated Impressionism in London; it catches the light nicely. The furniture is expensive, the kind that makes you hesitate to sit down. But the place has a lived-in quality too; family members come and go, clutching bags and calling to one another down the hallways. No one seems the least bit awed by the man of the house, who is dressed in a bespoke suit and carries himself like a monarch, and who, until now, hasn’t spent more than a day at a time here since before the Iraq war began. For Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq is an abstraction again. Once again, his native country is a faraway land ruled by somebody else, a place where other people die. It’s a place to be discussed, rued, plotted over, from a parlor on an expensive Western street. Iraq’s new leaders, the men who excluded Chalabi from the government they formed this spring, still call for advice — several times a day, Chalabi says. He is here in London, his longtime home in exile, temporarily, he says, taking his first vacation in five years. At lunch at a nearby restaurant an hour before, he ordered the sea bass wrapped in a banana leaf. He walks the streets unattended by armed guards. But the interlude, Chalabi says, is just that, a passing thing. His doubters will come back to him; they always have. As ever, he wears a jester’s smile, wide and blank, a mask that has carried him through crises of the first world and the third. Still, a touch of bitterness can creep into Chalabi’s voice, a hint that he has concluded that his time has come and gone. Indeed, even for a man as vain and resilient as Chalabi, his present predicament stands too large to go unacknowledged. Once Iraq’s anointed leader — anointed by the Americans — Chalabi, at age 62, is without a job, spurned by the very colleagues whose ascension he engineered. His benefactors in the White House and in the Pentagon, who once gobbled up whatever half-baked intelligence Chalabi offered, now regard him as undependable and — worse — safely ignored. Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration. Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster. “The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,� Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.� Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately — the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him. The Americans, in all likelihood, could have gone home. They certainly would have been home by now. “We would have taken hold of the country,� Chalabi says. “We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up.� Chalabi’s notion — that an Iraqi government, as opposed to an American one, could have saved the great experiment — has become one of the arguments put forth by the war’s proponents in the just-beginning debate over who lost Iraq. At best, it’s improbable: Chalabi is essentially arguing that a handful of Iraqi exiles, some of whom had not lived in the country in decades, could have put together a government and quelled the chaos that quickly engulfed the country after Hussein’s regime collapsed. They could have done this, presumably, without an army (which most wanted to dissolve) and without a police force (which was riddled with Baathists). In fact, the Americans considered the idea and dismissed it. (But not, Wolfowitz insists, because of him. His longtime aide, Kevin Kellems, said that Wolfowitz favored turning over power “as rapidly as possible to duly elected Iraqi authorities.�) The Bush administration decided to go to the United Nations and have the American role in Iraq formally described as that of an “occupying power,� a step that no Iraqi, not even the lowliest tea seller, failed to notice. They appointed L. Paul Bremer III as viceroy. Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake. “It was a puppet show!� Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.� It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included. “In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,� Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’ “What I didn’t realize,� Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.� Turkish coffee is served, then tea. I consider Chalabi’s predicament: the Iraqi patrician, confidant of prime ministers and presidents, the M.I.T.- and University of Chicago-trained mathematics professor, owner of a Mayfair flat, complaining of being regarded, by the masters he once manipulated, as a scruffy, shiftless native. “I’ve been a friend of America, and I’ve been its enemy,� he says. “America betrays its friends. It sets them up and betrays them. I’d rather be America’s enemy.� And so he is. Sort of. With Chalabi, it’s hard to be certain, and not just because his motives are so opaque, but because he is never still. He is enigmatic, brilliant, nimble, unreliable, charming, narcissistic, finally elusive. The journey to Mayfair is a long one. What happened to Chalabi? Well, you might ask: What happened to Iraq? 2. Mushkhab, January 2005 The election is coming, and we are heading south. Twenty cars, mostly carrying men with guns. They hang out the windows, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the terrified drivers. Get out of the way or we shoot, and maybe we shoot anyway — that’s the message. But that’s Iraq. We move quickly, weaving, south in the southbound, south in the northbound. Very fast. Unbelievably fast. Drivers veer and career. We go where we want. We’re low on fuel, and a gas station beckons. It is one of the strange and singular facts of Iraqi life that despite sitting atop an ocean of oil, Iraqis must wait hours — often days — for gasoline at the pumps. Lack of refining capacity, smuggling, stealing, insurgent attacks, Soviet subsidies: it’s complicated. On the road outside Salman Pak, the line is perhaps 300 cars long. The Chalabi convoy cuts straight to the front of the line. No one protests. It’s the guns. The Iraqis wait for days, and our effrontery brings no protest. Not a peep. We get our gas and we speed away, guns out the windows. Very fast. An hour later, we arrive at our destination, Mushkhab. It’s a mostly Shiite town about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It is friendly country — to Chalabi, and still, then, to Americans. The whole town — the males, anyway — gathers round. Chalabi stands in the center, dressed in a dark gray Western suit. The Iraqis clap and read poetry; some of it they sing. It’s a tradition, a kind of serenade to the honored guest. “Hey, listen, Bush, we are Iraqis,� the poet says, and everyone is clapping. “We never bow our heads to anyone, and we won’t do it for you. We have tough guys like Chalabi on our side — be careful.� Everyone laughs. We move inside the mudhif, a tall, long, fantastic structure woven of dried river reeds, a kind of pavilion of rattan. The room is laid with hand-woven carpets, and on the walls hang framed yellowed photographs of the leaders of the tribe, Al Fatla, meeting with their British overlords many years ago. A pair of loudspeakers are set up in the front. Chalabi takes a microphone. “My Iraqi brothers, the Americans pushed out Saddam, but they did not liberate our country,� Chalabi tells the group. “We are asking you to participate in this election so that we can have an independent country. This is not just words. The Iraqi people will liberate the country.� He goes on a little more, warming to the Iraqis assembled about him. “On my way here, I saw a huge line of people waiting for gasoline,� Chalabi tells the group. “Some of them were there for two nights, carrying blankets with them. It makes me very sad to see my brothers wait for days to get gas at the station.� Shameless, huh? I thought so, too. Almost a thing of beauty. It was so outrageous I almost wanted to forgive him, as a teacher might her sassy but cleverest boy. And that’s the thing about Chalabi: he’s very difficult to dislike. It may be his secret. It was Chalabi, after all — a foreigner, an Arab — who persuaded the most powerful men and women in the United States to make the liberation of Iraq not merely a priority but an obsession. First in 1998, when Chalabi persuaded Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (in turn leading to payments to his group, the Iraqi National Congress, exceeding $27 million over the next six years) and then, later, in persuading the Bush administration of the necessity of using force to destroy Saddam Hussein. And when it all went bad, when those nuclear weapons never turned up, the clever child shrugged and smiled. “We are heroes in error,� Chalabi told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Almost with a wink. Lunch is served: a long table heaped with rice and roasted lamb. No seats. Everyone stands, dozens of us, and we dig in with our fingers. After a time, we prepare to leave. The table and the ground around it are littered with rice and lamb bones. We re-form into a convoy and speed toward the holy city of Najaf. By the time we arrive in Najaf, it’s dark. The fighting between American soldiers and the Mahdi Army irregulars laid waste to the city only a few months before, but on this night, Najaf seems remarkably calm. The pilgrim hotels lie in ruins, but the golden dome of the shrine of Imam Ali shimmers under a January moon. Chalabi exits his S.U.V. and strides inside through the 20-foot-high wooden doors. A clutch of Sunni leaders, whom Chalabi has agreed to show around, trail in step. The curiosities intersect: the Sunnis are not Shiites, and this is the holiest of Shiite places, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Holy Prophet and the very heart of the Shiite faith. But they are still Muslims, and they are allowed to pass. As a non-Muslim, I wait outside in the street. More unlikely than the presence of the Sunnis is their tour guide, Chalabi. Or it was unlikely. Not anymore. Chalabi, the Westernized, Western-educated mathematician, has entered his Islamist phase. It’s not terribly convincing. He does not don a turban. He has no beard. He does not pray. He does not, really, even pretend. But as a practical politician — as an exile come home to a strange land getting stranger by the day — Chalabi had to do something. Relations between Chalabi and the Bush administration began to sour almost immediately after the fall of Hussein, when the Americans decided against putting Iraqis — presumably Chalabi — in charge. Bremer considered him an egomaniac. When no W.M.D. turned up, more and more Americans came to blame Chalabi for the war. Chalabi’s association with the Americans grew more disadvantageous by the day. The break came on May 20, 2004, when the Americans, accusing Chalabi of telling the Iranian government that the Americans were eavesdropping on their secret communications, swooped in on his Baghdad compound. American troops sealed off Mansour, the neighborhood where Chalabi lived, while scores of Iraqi and American agents kicked in the compound doors. One of the Iraqis, Chalabi said, put a gun to his head. “Look, I think they tried to kill him,� Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser and longtime Chalabi friend, said of the American and Iraqi agents. “I think the raid on his house was intended to result in violence. They had sent 20 or 40 Humvees over there. Chalabi was being protected by a force of about 100 guys with machine guns. It is a miracle that it didn’t result in a massive shootout.� No shots were fired, but the break seemed final. Isolated, Chalabi turned to Islam — and, in particular, to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric and leader of two armed uprisings against the Americans and the Iraqi government. Sadr is an erratic and unpredictable young man who sometimes ends his sermons with apocalyptic visions of the “hidden� 12th imam revealing himself. He is also the most popular man in Iraq. In the anarchy that ensued following the fall of Hussein, Iraqis, once known for their largely secular outlook, ran headlong toward Islam. Religion and anarchy moved together: the worse conditions got in the streets, the more Islamic Iraqis became. In the three and a half years that I have known Chalabi, I never once saw him pray. Or give any indication that he harbored religious beliefs at all. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser and a devout Shiite, told me once that when he and a group of five senior Iraqi politicians visited the Imam Ali shrine in 2004, all of them prayed but Chalabi. While the others knelt, Rubaie said, Chalabi stood quietly with his hands folded in front of him. On this return visit to the Imam Ali shrine, Chalabi and his Sunni colleagues spent 10 minutes inside and exited without saying a thing. But word travels quickly down Najaf’s narrow streets, and by the time our convoy sped back to Baghdad, there were very few people in Najaf who did not know that Chalabi had come. Once, when I asked Chalabi about his flirtation with the Islamists, he answered not in terms of religion but of politics. Moktada, he explained, was not essentially dangerous but merely misunderstood, an outsider who could be coaxed into Iraq’s new democratic order. Chalabi was happy to act as the bridge, and if he benefited politically from his efforts, he was not complaining. “The Americans made a mistake when they excluded Moktada in the beginning,� Chalabi told me. “Our real business is to persuade everybody that Sadr is better inside than outside, and to provide some measure of comfort to the middle class that he is not going to eat them up.� Indeed, Chalabi and Sadr are not as unlikely a pair as they may seem. Musa al-Sadr, the late Iranian-born ayatollah and Moktada’s cousin, presided over Chalabi’s wedding in Beirut in 1971. Chalabi’s wife, Leila, is the daughter of Adel Osseiran, a leader of the Lebanese independence movement. Musa al-Sadr was the founder of Amal, which became the prototypical Shiite party in the Middle East. It seemed like a game, and not one that Chalabi liked to give away. Whenever I asked him about his coziness with Moktada, and how it squared with his own religious beliefs, I usually received a curt retort. For a time, Chalabi — and the Americans — got the better of the deal. Moktada fielded candidates in the January 2005 election, and his militia, though still untamed, fell into line behind its leader. He endorsed something less than an absolute role for Islam in the Iraqi Constitution. By early 2006, parties loyal to Sadr held the largest bloc in the Iraqi Parliament. As for Chalabi, Moktada kept him afloat a little longer. But in siding with the Islamists, Chalabi helped make them stronger than they were, and he threw his weight behind a number of trends that were only then becoming dominant: the Islamization of Iraqi society, the division of Iraq into sectarian cantons. Those trends later spiraled out of control, into the de facto civil war that is unfolding now. Some Iraqis who watched Chalabi then still don’t forgive him — and they think that ultimately, the Islamists got the better of him. “Ahmad’s problem is that Ahmad is usually the smartest man in the room, and he thinks he can control what happens,� I was told by an Iraqi official who worked with Chalabi at the time and who would speak only anonymously. “But these guys don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in math; they’ll kill you. In the end, things went way past the point where Ahmad thought they would ever go. I can’t imagine he wanted that. But he helped start it.� 3. Baghdad, October 2005 Chalabi is standing on the rooftop of his ancestral home in Khadimiya, a heavily Shiite neighborhood known for its shrine. Mansour, the area where he has lived since Hussein’s fall, has slipped into anarchy. The final round of nationwide elections is a couple of months away. For the moment, Chalabi is the deputy prime minister, behind the affable but ineffectual Ibrahim Jaafari. Across the street stand a pair of grain silos built by his father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. Downstairs, on a wall in the sitting room, there is an old British map dating to the 1920’s, showing Baghdad, which was much smaller than it is now. North of Baghdad, in what was then farmland and what is now Khadimiya, a dot indicates a town. The dot says, “Chalabi.� At the time, Chalabi’s family owned nearly two and a half million acres throughout Iraq. Those vast holdings are reduced to the compound where Chalabi now stands. It’s about 10 acres, including the main house, which a team of workers is renovating, a large swimming pool, a grove of date palms and, in the back, a mudhif. There is a row of garages, decrepit now, where workers once serviced the machinery and trucks that brought the wheat and dates to market. “Imagine,� Chalabi says, turning to me. “And C.I.A. says I have no roots here.� Chalabi spent 45 years in exile. Under the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British after World War I, the ruling class of the new Iraq was largely made up of Sunni Muslims, as it had been under the Ottoman Turks. The Chalabis were part of the small Shiite elite; most of the rest of the Shiite majority formed a vast underclass. The remnants of that Shiite elite now form a sizable slice of the political establishment of post-Saddam Iraq. In addition to Chalabi, there is Adil Abdul Mahdi, the vice president, a Chalabi friend since boyhood; Ayad Allawi, the former president, who is a Chalabi relative by marriage; and Feisal al-Istrabadi, the deputy ambassador to the United Nations in New York. In the 1950’s, Chalabi, Mahdi and Allawi were schoolmates at Baghdad College, an elite Jesuit high school. Even in their class photos, nearly a half-century old, all three men are instantly recognizable: Mahdi, the soft-spoken intellectual; Allawi, the charming bully; and Chalabi, the boy genius in a bow tie. On July 14, 1958, King Faisal II, the British-backed monarch, was deposed and killed; a day later, the prime minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to the home of Chalabi’s sister, Thamina. She dressed Said in an abaya, the head-to-toe gown worn by women. With the army closing in, Thamina Chalabi took Said to the home of Feisal al-Istrabadi’s grandparents. Ahmad Chalabi, then 14, watched his mother and Bibiya al-Istrabadi weep as they pondered the prime minister’s fate. “Three or four hours later, Said was dead,� Chalabi told me. “He shot himself.� Chalabi fled Iraq a few months later, first for Lebanon, then England and then America, where he received a degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. (Dissertation title: “Jacobson Radical of Group Algebras Over Fields Characteristic p.�) He did not return to Baghdad until April 11, 2003. Chalabi’s homecoming, after the U.S. invasion, was not the triumphant return he hoped it would be. What should have been his principal claim to legitimacy — his central role in toppling Saddam — never carried him very far; it became a liability as Iraq descended into chaos. In the new Iraq, Westernized elites carried less and less authority. Power belonged to the clerics and to the populists. And then there was the scandal at Petra Bank in Jordan, the outlines of which every Iraqi, no matter how dimly educated, seemed already to know: that Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for embezzling almost $300 million. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, has long denied the charges, maintaining that they were cooked up by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam Hussein. Last year, the Jordanians signaled that they were willing to pardon Chalabi. But Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.) Even the small army of Iraqi exiles that Chalabi had raised before the war never grew to be much more than a personal militia. One poll, conducted in early 2004, showed him to be the least trusted public figure in Iraq — even less trusted than Saddam Hussein. Dexter Filkins The suspicions that ordinary Iraqis harbored about Chalabi were never relieved by his industriousness. As oil minister and deputy prime minister, Chalabi worked night and day, often on the minutiae of Iraq’s oil pipelines and electricity lines or the precise wording, in Arabic and English, of the Iraqi Constitution. I typically went to see Chalabi at night, sometimes at 9 or 10, and usually had to wait an hour or so while he finished with his other visitors. If it was true that Chalabi had returned to Iraq with the expectation of acquiring power, it was not true that he was unwilling to work for it. Chalabi, like all Iraqi political leaders, functioned in conditions of mortal danger at nearly all times. Even when he wanted to walk into his backyard, he had to be followed by armed guards. It’s an exhausting and debilitating way to live. But while many Iraqi exiles either gave up and returned to the West, or now spend as much time outside the country as in, Chalabi stayed in Iraq almost continuously following Hussein’s fall. For all the hard work, his zigging and zagging across the political spectrum frustrated many of the Iraqi elites — his only natural constituency — especially after his flirtation with the Islamists. “I don’t think Chalabi has any credibility left,� Adnan Pachachi, the 83-year-old former foreign minister, told me before the 2005 elections. “He is not acceptable to Iraqis. People don’t like him shifting all the time. This thing with Moktada — it’s ridiculous.� One who remained true was his friend Mahdi, who seemed, perhaps from his boyhood days swimming in the Tigris with Chalabi, to carry a deeper understanding of his old friend. “This is the style of Ahmad,� Mahdi told me just before the elections. “He was a banker. He works a dossier. Each time it’s different — he invests here, he invests there, he invests elsewhere. He has had successes, he has had maybe his failures. I can work with him.� Chalabi never grasped his essential unpopularity. In the first round of elections, in January 2005, Chalabi rode into office as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition pulled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader. Nearly every Shiite in Iraq voted for the U.I.A., and a name on its slate all but guaranteed a seat in the Parliament. The leadership of the U.I.A. was sharply Islamist. Nearly a year later, as the December 2005 elections approached, Chalabi veered again, away from the Islamists, away from Moktada. Chalabi publicly chided the Shiite coalition as being too Islamic-minded, declaring he didn’t want to be a member of a government that was planning to transform Iraq into an Islamist state. By that time, of course, Iraq was already quite Islamist anyway. “They’re Islamist, and I don’t want to be part of the sectarian project,� Chalabi told me just before the elections that December. I actually believed him, but given his association with Moktada, it didn’t seem that many other Iraqis would. The reality, anyway, was more complicated. In the weeks before the election, the Shiite alliance offered Chalabi and his supporters 5 seats on its 275-seat slate; Chalabi demanded 10. Some Shiite leaders told me that they had deliberately offered Chalabi a low figure in the hope that he would leave their alliance for good. Mahdi, the vice president, denied that this was true. “For four days I tried to convince him; I even threatened him,� Mahdi told me. “I said, ‘Ahmad, if you leave this room, we will be no more friends.’ I was not serious. I was only threatening.� So Chalabi went his own way. If he had wanted only a seat for himself, he could have taken his place in the Shiite alliance; plenty of other Iraqis did. In going alone, he must have known that he was risking disaster. He went ahead anyway. A few days before the election, I drove up to Chalabi’s compound in Khadimiya for a lunch he was holding for tribal leaders. In much the same fashion as in Mushkhab 11 months before, about 100 sheiks from Sadr City listened to a Chalabi speech before descending on heaps of lamb and rice. One of the sheiks, a man named Sahaeh Masif al-Kindh, approached me as he walked out. “Chalabi didn’t forget us when we were living under Saddam,� al-Kindh told me. “He was Saddam’s biggest enemy. We don’t forget that.� 4. Washington, November 2005 The second round of Iraqi elections is only a few weeks away, and the wheel is turning again. Chalabi, once in favor, then out, is back in. Ostensibly, he has been invited to Washington by Treasury Secretary John Snow to talk about the Iraqi economy. But it’s more than that. He’s going to see Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The allegations that prompted the raid on Chalabi’s compound 18 months before, that he tipped the Iranians to American eavesdropping, are mysteriously forgotten. Indeed, everything seems to have been forgotten. Chalabi is rising on the catastrophe that Iraq has become. The Bush administration is grasping for anyone who might help them. On paper at least, Chalabi has a shot at becoming prime minister. Most of the meetings are private. There is a dinner at the home of Richard Perle for some of Chalabi’s old Washington friends. One of the events, a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, is public. The room is filled. At the end of a speech, Chalabi is asked by someone in the crowd if he would like to apologize for misleading the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Chalabi nods as if he knew the question was coming. “This is an urban myth,� he says. The audience gasps. Chalabi told me later that his role as an intelligence conduit on weapons of mass destruction began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was contacted by the Department of Defense. Not vice versa. “They came to us and asked, ‘Can you help us find something on Saddam?’ � he said. “We put out feelers.� By that time, the autumn of 2001, Chalabi had a long record of working with the American government in its shadow war against Hussein. Throughout the 1990’s, however, Chalabi demonstrated time and again that he would pursue his own interests, even if they clashed with those of the United States. There was the time in 1995, for instance, when Chalabi, under the employ of the C.I.A. in the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil, launched an unauthorized attack on Hussein’s army. The attack failed to spark an uprising against Hussein; the Turks sent troops into northern Iraq; the C.I.A. was furious. It was a fiasco. “Very quickly he got out of control,� one retired C.I.A. officer who worked with Chalabi told me. “We didn’t know what he was doing over there. He was trying to provoke a war with Saddam.� Then there was the time, in 1996, when Chalabi interfered with a C.I.A. plot to topple Saddam. I heard the story not from Chalabi but from Perle, the Bush defense adviser and Chalabi friend. As Perle tells it, Chalabi called him in a panic from London, telling him that a C.I.A.-backed plot against Hussein was fatally compromised. The fact that the C.I.A.’s Iraqi front-man for the plot, Ayad Allawi, was a rival of Chalabi’s (as well as his relative) had nothing to do with his concerns, Perle said. As Perle tells it, he quickly telephoned the C.I.A. director at the time, John Deutch, who agreed to meet in downtown Washington. Perle said he spent an hour laying out Chalabi’s worries. “He was obviously concerned,� Perle said of Deutch. The plot went ahead anyway. It was a catastrophe. Hussein arrested as many as 800 people and reportedly executed dozens of high-ranking officers. As a final indignity, Hussein’s men dialed up Allawi’s headquarters in Amman, Jordan, on a C.I.A.-provided communications device they captured from the plotters and left a message: “You might as well pack up and go home.� Some people in the C.I.A. held Chalabi responsible, believing that he had spread word of the plot in order to deny Ayad Allawi the upper hand in the exile movement. “There was abiding suspicion in the agency that Chalabi blew it,� the former C.I.A. agent said. The fallout over the failed coup precipitated the C.I.A.’s decision to break ties with Chalabi. Chalabi dismisses those claims, and some in the C.I.A. from the period back him up. “Chalabi was as true to me as the day was long,� says Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. field agent in northern Iraq. “If Chalabi was going to blow the operation, why would he tell the C.I.A.?� There was the money issue, too. Throughout the 1990’s, as the C.I.A. and Congress funneled millions of dollars to Chalabi’s organization, the Iraqi National Congress, rumors swirled about corruption. One of the skeptics was W. Patrick Lang, a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 1995, Lang told me, he was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, when he overheard a group of Iraqis talking about the money they had received from the American government. “I knew who these guys were, and I heard them speaking Arabic, and it was obviously Iraqi Arabic,� Lang said. “So I went over and sat next to them and listened. So what they were talking about was how to spend the Americans’ money, going on shopping trips, stuff like that. Oh, they were talking about going shopping for jewelry for women, toys for kids. Consumer goods. They were also talking about Las Vegas. ‘We will sneak out of here and go to Las Vegas. We have a lot of money now.’ � A couple of years later, Lang said, he visited the office of Senator Trent Lott, then the Senate majority leader. After introducing an Arab businessman to Lott, Lang sat in Lott’s anteroom with a number of Capitol Hill staff members who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided millions of dollars to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. They were praising Chalabi: “They were talking about him, that Chalabi fits into this plan as a very worthwhile, virtuous exemplar of modernization, somebody who could help reform first Iraq and then the Middle East. They were very pleased with themselves.� Lang, an old Middle East hand who had worked in Iraq in the 1980’s, said he was stunned. “You guys need to get out more,� Lang recalls saying at the time. “It’s a fantasy.� Years later, Lang said, many of the same men who were sitting in Lott’s office that day became key players in the Pentagon’s plans for an invasion of Iraq. Which brings us back to Chalabi’s “urban myth�: the notion that he provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration and helped persuade them — or provide the pretext — to invade Iraq. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Chalabi exhorted the audience to turn to Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman report, a recently completed blue-ribbon investigation, which, he said, exonerates him. It does, in a way. The report does not say that Chalabi & Company played an important role in the events leading to the war. It says only that the Bush administration did not rely much on intelligence Chalabi handed over in making the decision to invade. “In fact, overall, C.I.A.’s postwar investigations revealed that I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact on prewar assessments,� the report says. This is also Chalabi’s version. In the run-up to war, he says, he provided only three defectors to the American intelligence community. “We did not vouch for any of their information,� Chalabi told me. One of the people whom the I.N.C. made available to American intelligence was Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, who claimed that he had worked on buildings that were used to store biological, nuclear and chemical weapons equipment. Chalabi told me that he made Haideri available to American intelligence at a safe house in Bangkok. He didn’t think much of Haideri or his information, he says, and was astonished to learn later that the information he provided became a pillar of the Americans’ charges against Hussein. “We told them, ‘We don’t know who this guy is,’ � Chalabi said. “Then the Americans spoke to him and said, ‘This guy is the mother lode.’ Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war? The intelligence community regarded the I.N.C. as useless. Why would the government believe us?� Perle, from his perch on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Advisory Committee Board, backs Chalabi’s version. He was privy to much of the intelligence the administration was collecting on Hussein in the days before the war. He says that American intelligence officials began from the premise that Hussein had never destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and that he had kept his programs alive. American spies were only looking to confirm what they thought they already knew. In any event, Perle said, very little of their information came from Chalabi. “I had all the security clearances,� Perle said. “I was pretty much aware of the people that the I.N.C. was bringing to the table to talk about what they knew. Everything they did came with a disclaimer. To the best of my knowledge, there was no single important fact that was uniquely conveyed to U.S. intelligence by anyone who had been assisted by the I.N.C.� Indeed, Chalabi says, much of the most important evidence that led America to war did not come from the I.N.C.: not the report on the uranium from Niger, and not Curveball, the Iraqi defector who made bogus claims about mobile biological weapons labs. “It’s not our fault,� Chalabi says. But the story doesn’t end there. A second report, released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2006, reached far more damning conclusions. The report states flatly that Chalabi’s group introduced defectors to American intelligence who directly influenced two key judgments in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which preceded the Senate vote on the Iraq war: that Hussein possessed mobile biological-weapons laboratories and that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. The report said that the I.N.C. provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, saying the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.� (Five Republican senators disagreed with the report’s conclusions about the I.N.C.) Chalabi’s denials are unconvincing for another reason. His role in the preparations for war was not just as a source for American intelligence agencies. He was America’s chief public advocate for war, spreading information gathered by his own intelligence network to newspapers, magazines, television programs and Congress. (A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was one of Chalabi’s primary conduits; in an e-mail message sent in 2003 that has been widely quoted since, she wrote that Chalabi “has provided most of the front-page exclusives on W.M.D. to our paper� and that the Army unit she was then traveling with was “using Chalabi’s intell and document network for its own W.M.D. work.�) Indeed, the press proved even more gullible than the intelligence experts in the American government. In a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the I.N.C. listed 108 news articles based on information provided by the group. The list included articles concerning some of the wildest claims about Hussein, including that he had collaborated in the Sept. 11 attacks. David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, offers one of the most compelling explanations for how pivotal Chalabi’s role was in taking America to war. Kay said that while the C.I.A. had long regarded Chalabi with suspicion, disregarding much of what he gave them, Chalabi had succeeded in persuading his more powerful friends in other parts of the government — Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, and Wolfowitz. The pressure brought by those men, Kay told me, ultimately persuaded George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., that the White House was committed to war and that there was no point in resisting it. “In my judgment, the reason George Tenet and the top of the agency came over to the argument that Iraq had W.M.D. was that they really knew that the vice president and Wolfowitz had come to that conclusion anyway,� Kay said. “They had been getting information from Chalabi for years.� Of Wolfowitz, whom he has known for years, Kay said: “He was a true believer. He thought he had the evidence. That came from the defectors. They came from Chalabi.� Kay said he continued to feel Chalabi’s influence with Wolfowitz even after the invasion, when Kay was leading the team searching for W.M.D. from mid- to late 2003. “Paul, when faced with evidence that we had developed on the ground, would say, Well, Chalabi says this, the I.N.C. says this, why are you not seeing it?� Kellems, the Wolfowitz assistant, disputed Kay’s story, saying that Tenet’s views were shared by officials across the government. “The position taken on weapons was the consensus view of the United States, including of the Clinton administration and other Western intelligence agencies — as well as that of Mr. Kay himself prior to visiting Iraq,� Kellems said. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in Bush’s first term, adds a final turn to the labyrinth. In the frantic days leading up to Powell’s speech at the United Nations in February 2003, when he laid out the case for war, Wilkerson said he spent many nights sleeping on a couch in George Tenet’s office. During those preparations, Wilkerson told me, Powell insisted that every point he would make at the U.N. had to be supported by at least three independent sources. “We had three or four sources for every item that was substantive in his presentation,� Wilkerson told me in an interview in Washington. “Powell insisted on that. But what I am hearing now, though, is that a lot of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the I.N.C.� Wilkerson said that the revelations, some of which he says he has heard from his own friends inside American and European intelligence agencies, have forced him to rethink how America went to war. “I have maintained pretty much the same thing that the president said, ‘Well, we all got fooled, it was lousy intelligence, and no one in the national leadership spun the intelligence,’ � Wilkerson said. “I am having to revisit that. And that is disturbing to me.� Wilkerson raises a crucial point. Assuming that Chalabi was a source for at least some of the bogus intelligence, we might ask ourselves: so what? Was the American national security apparatus so incompetent that it could be hoodwinked by a handful of shopworn engineers and an Iraqi mathematician to take the country into war? Or is the lesson more disturbing — that Chalabi simply gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear? “I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,� Wilkerson said. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he fed it to them. From everything I’ve heard, no one says he is dumb.� 5. Tehran, November 2005 Amid the debate about Chalabi’s role in taking America to war, one little-noticed phrase in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on W.M.D. offered an important insight into Chalabi’s identity. One of the principal errors made by the Bush administration in relying on Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the report said, was to disregard conclusions by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency that “the I.N.C. was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,� notably those of Iran. The Iran connection has long been among the most beguiling aspects of Chalabi’s career. Baer, the former C.I.A. operative, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby in Salah al-Din, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in 1995 while Chalabi met with the turbaned representatives of Iranian intelligence on the other side of the room. (Baer, as an American, was barred from meeting the Iranians.) Baer says he came to regard Chalabi as an Iranian asset, and still does. “He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,� Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections — he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.� Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts� with Iranian officials. “Here is what I think happened,� Lang said. “Chalabi went and told the guys at the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran: ‘The Americans are giving me money. I’m their guy. I’m their candidate.’ And I’m sure their eyes lit up. The Iranians would reason that they could use this guy to manipulate the United States to get what they wanted. They would figure that the U.S. would invade. They would figure that we would come and we would go, and if we left Chalabi in charge, who was a good friend of theirs, they would be in good shape.� Lang’s thesis is impossible to prove, and Chalabi denies it. And even if it were true, Chalabi’s role would be difficult to discern: so many different Iranian agencies are thought to be pursuing so many different agendas in Iraq that a single Iranian national interest is difficult to identify. Still, if Lang’s and Baer’s argument is true, it would be the stuff of spy novels: Chalabi, the American-adopted champion of Iraqi democracy, a kind of double agent for one of America’s principal adversaries. In late 2005, I accompanied Chalabi on a trip to Iran, in part to solve the riddle. We drove eastward out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden in south to Mushkhab earlier in the year. After three hours of weaving and careering, the plains of eastern Iraq halted, and the terrain turned sharply upward into a thick ridge of arid mountains. We had come to Mehran, on one of history’s great fault lines, the historic border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. As we crossed into Iran, the wreckage and ruin of modern Iraq gave way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. Another world. An Iranian cleric approached and shook Chalabi’s hand. Then he said something curious: “We are disappointed to hear that you won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,� he said. “We were really hoping you’d stay.� The border between Iraq and Iran had, for the moment, disappeared. More curious, though, was the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there. For starters, Chalabi asked me if I wanted to come along on his Iranian trip only the night before he left — and then procured a visa for me in a single day: a Friday, during the Eid holiday, when the Iranian Embassy was closed. Under ordinary circumstances, an American reporter might wait weeks. Then there was the executive jet. When we arrived at the border, Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and changed out of his camouflage T-shirt and slacks and into a well-tailored blue suit. Then we drove to Ilam, where an 11-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We jumped in and took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours, Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser. I interviewed Larijani the next morning. “Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons,� he said. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential figure. He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq.� Then came the meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi, dressed in a tailored suit, beaming. Then Ahmadinejad, wearing a face of childlike bewilderment. He was dressed in imitation leather shoes and bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad publicly called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, who is several inches taller, stood together for photos, then retired to a private room. At the time of Chalabi’s visit, Iran and the United States were engaged in a complicated diplomatic dance; the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been authorized to open negotiations with the Iranians over their involvement in Iraq. Still, Chalabi insists he carried no note from the Iranians when he flew to Washington the next week. Officially, at least, Iran and the United States never got together. As ever, Chalabi had multiple agendas. One was to learn whether the Iranians would support his candidacy for the prime ministership (the same reason he traveled to the United States). It makes you wonder, in light of the Baer and Lang thesis: was Chalabi telling the Iranians, or asking them for permission? Or making a deal, based on his presumed leverage in the United States? The possibilities seemed endless. Chalabi played it cool. “The fact that Iraq’s neighbor is also a country that is majority Shia is no reason for us to accept any interference in our affairs or to compromise the integrity of Iraq,� he said after his meeting with Ahmadinejad. Richard Perle, Chalabi’s friend, discounted the idea that Chalabi might be a double agent. “Of course Chalabi has a relationship with the Iranians — you have to have a relationship with the Iranians in order to operate there,� Perle said. “The question is what kind of relationship. Is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him? I think Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return.� For all of the skullduggery surrounding the trip to Iran, though, the greatest revelation came later in the day. When the meeting with Ahmadinejad ended, he asked Chalabi if there was anything he could to do to make his stay more comfortable. Chalabi said yes, in fact, there was: would he mind if he, Chalabi, took a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art? So there we were, in the middle of the Axis of Evil, strolling past one of the finest collections of Western Modern art outside Europe and the United States: Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, Gauguin, Pollock, Klee, Van Gogh, five Warhols, seven Picassos and a sprawling garden of sculpture outside. The collection was assembled by Queen Farah, the shah’s wife, with the monarchy’s vast oil wealth. And now, with the mullahs in charge, the museum is largely forgotten. The day we were there, the gallery was all but empty. We had the museum’s enthusiastic English-speaking tour guide all to ourselves. “Thank you, thank you, for coming!� Noreen Motamed exclaimed, clapping her hands. We walked the empty halls. Chalabi moved through the place deliberately, nodding his head, pausing at the Degas and the Pissarro. “Wow,� Chalabi said before Jesus Rafael Soto’s painting “Canada.� “Look at that.� A retinue of Iranian officials walked with us, unmoved by the splendor. Ahmadinejad had stayed behind. For all of the furies that emanate from the halls of the Iranian government, it has taken fine care of Queen Farah’s collection. Indeed, about the only way you would know you were not in a museum in New York or London was the absence of the middle panel from Francis Bacon’s triptych “Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendant,� which depicts two naked men. “It is in the basement, covered,� Motamed said with disappointed eyes. Finally, we came across a pair of paintings by Marc Chagall, the 20th-century Modernist and painter of Jewish life. The display contained no mention of this fact. Chalabi gazed at the Chagalls for a time. Then, with a rueful smile, turned, to no one in particular, and said loudly: “Imagine that. They have two paintings by Marc Chagall in the middle of a museum in Tehran.� The Iranian officials seemed not to hear. 6. Baghdad, December 2005 A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He’s talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes. As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask. “Chalabi good good,� the Iraqi man says in halting English. Whom are you going to vote for? “The Shiite alliance, of course,� the Iraqi answers. “It is the duty of all Shiite people.� When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.� He shrugged. But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free. No amount of deal making or of public relations foot-work, or of endorsements from friends, was able to save him. Chalabi may have helped bring democracy to Iraq, but it was democracy that finished him. He was, in the end, a parlor politician, someone from the world of his father or grandfather, or maybe of Victorian England: a brilliant negotiator and schemer who might settle a country’s problems over a cup of tea. But in Iraq, by late 2005, real power was no longer held by the parlor men, or by politicians at all. It was held by people like Moktada al-Sadr, populist leaders with a militia and a mass following in the street. The election results were a harbinger of the civil war. Iraqis voted almost entirely along sectarian and ethnic lines: Kurds for the big Kurdish parties, Sunnis for the Sunni parties and Shiites for the big Islamist Shiite alliance. Iraqis who tried to run on a secular platform — Chalabi, for instance, and his relative, Allawi, in another party — found themselves abandoned. Just two months later, in February of this year, following the destruction of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite temple in Samarra, the civil war began in earnest: Shiite gunmen, who had for years been restrained by the Shiite leadership in the face of the Sunni onslaught, were finally free to retaliate. Chalabi, shut out of the government, claimed that his sin was one of miscalculation. There was some truth to this: in all likelihood, Chalabi did not lose because he had been convicted of stealing millions of dollars from a Jordanian bank. Or because of the rumors swirling around Baghdad that he had looted the treasury. Or even because he was an exile close to the Americans. No: plenty of Westernized Iraqi exiles were elected to Parliament — among them Mowaffak al-Rubaie and Adil Abdul Mahdi — who, like Chalabi, didn’t have local followings and were trailed by similar questions. Practically speaking, Chalabi lost because he had broken from the big cleric-backed Shiite alliance that swept the election. “I had not realized how polarized Iraq had become,� Chalabi told me after the election. He might have gotten a seat in the cabinet, but that didn’t work out, either. That stung: the new Iraqi government is staffed with Chalabi’s old colleagues, many of them members of the exile alliance he once led. Jalal Talabani is president. Adil Abdul Mahdi, his boyhood friend, is vice president. Barham Salih, comrade of many years, is deputy prime minister. His old confidant Zalmay Khalilzad, who played a central role in forming the new government, is the American ambassador. In the end, they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — bring him aboard. “Chalabi really made a mess of things,� said one Iraqi political leader who now occupies a key post in the government. He declined to elaborate. As anticlimactic as was Chalabi’s fall, its real meaning lay in a paradox: democratic politics no longer mattered. For three years, the American-backed enterprise in Iraq rested on the assumption that the exercise of democratic politics would drain away the anger that was driving the violence. Instead of bullets, there would be ballots. But at the culmination of that long process — two constitutions, two elections and a referendum — the violence was worse than ever. It turns out that democratic politics does not stop violence; indeed, the elections, by polarizing Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities, may have helped push the country into civil war. Effectively, by the fall of 2006, the overwhelming majority of Iraq had no government at all. It was a failed state. Yes, there were Iraqis — Chalabi’s friends — who went to their jobs every day, toiling dutifully and not so dutifully inside the Green Zone, which every day seemed more and more divorced from the reality outside. In the Red Zone, as the real Iraq is called, Iraq was a nightmarish, apocalyptic place, where gunmen kidnapped children and sometimes killed them, where bodies turned up at the morgue peppered by holes from electric drills and corpses lay uncollected in the streets, along with the trash, for days on end. Ahmad Chalabi devoted his whole adult life to toppling a dictator and achieving power in the place of his birth. He felled the dictator, helping along a reckless gamble that wagered the future of a nation. The gamble failed, a nation imploded and Chalabi never ascended to the throne he so coveted. But in an odd turn of fortune, the throne no longer had anything to offer. 7. London, August 2006 The conversation is wrapping up. The talk turns to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the machinations of those around him, what the future might hold. Chalabi, in an expansive mood, gets up, goes into a closet and brings out a note that Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent, scribbled to him in that hotel lobby when the two men plotted a coup many years before. The talk, improbably, turns to memoirs; at the moment, Baer’s, “See No Evil,� was a best seller. I ask Chalabi, who is back on the couch, if it isn’t time that he write his own. He doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Too early!� Chalabi says. “Too early!�

Answer: I really thought about helping you out here, just because it would be fun to write. Then I looked at your profile and see that: 1. You answer other people's questions so obviously without care and thought and apparently just for points so you can go ask more questions. and 2. The people that are gracious enough to assist you or answer your questions most of the time don't even recieve the courtesy of you selecting the "best answer" but they are instead selected by voters. So instead I decide that if you are not interested in doing the right, then why in the world should anyone be interested in helping you?

Question: Tips on Presentation- How do you keep your cool in front of a large group of people? DONT FREAK OUT! YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ IT ALL! Tips on Presentation... give me all the advice u got. The Task Your firm wants to come up with the best idea for the town. This idea should help the environment, lower carbon dioxide levels, promote growth of crops, and increase water supply. As impossible as the task sounds, your employer wants your group to include as many ideas as possible. Therefore split up different areas of research and then meet to brainstorm what your group wishes to propose. i have everything done i just to present when school starts. here's the full project: Introduction It is the year 2030 in the town of Cabrillo-Carbonville. Widespread droughts have plagued the farmers this year with the majority of their crops dying off. Also the town has had to insist on mandatory water conservation methods in order to save their slowly diminishing water supply. To compound to the problem, it has been discovered that local dry cleaners and production plants have been discharging their solvents into the nearby creeks. Scientists have attributed the drought and severe weather conditions to global climate change due to excessive carbon dioxide levels. The town leaders have decided that they need to hire a consulting firm to address their problem of too much carbon dioxide and too little water. Otherwise they are going to have to import a lot of food and water in order to support their town's needs. Several firms are vying for this billion dollar contract and a decision will be made at next week's town council meeting.

Answer: Pick out 3 people in the audience to focus on. One in the middle and one on the right and left. Only look at them while u give the presentation. Keep switching eye contact between them so it would look like you are looking at everybody. Be confident. Oh and no gum.