In an unusual joint interview with Israeli and Palestinian television broadcasters a day after she presided over the launch of the first direct talks in two years, Clinton said the rise of Iranian-backed extremist ideology in the Middle East is a major reason why time is short.

Iran’s suspected nuclear ambitions have surfaced as a new motivating factor for a Mideast resolution. There have been growing Israeli warnings that the nation might take military steps to blunt Iran’s nuclear program, and even some of Israel’s Arab neighbors have shown concerns.

The administration believes that a successful Mideast peace deal would limit Iran’s ability to use Mideast tensions to justify its behavior.

“I think that time is not on the side of either Israeli or Palestinian aspirations for security, peace and a state,” she said. Iranian-sponsored “rejectionist ideology” and a “commitment to violence” by those opposed to peace make reaching an agreement quickly all the more necessary, she said.

“The United States,” Clinton added, “wants to weigh in on the side of leaders and people who see this as maybe the last chance for a very long time to resolve this.”

Shortly before the interview, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed the peace talks, saying “the fate of Palestine will be decided in Palestine and through resistance and not in Washington.”

Iran supports the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, which along with the West Bank is supposed to form an eventual Palestinian state. Hamas also rejected the talks this week.

The Obama administration wants a peace deal concluded within a year and both sides pledged Thursday to try to meet that goal in successive rounds of talks. Despite early positive signals from Israeli and Palestinian leaders, hopes for an agreement rest on overcoming significant obstacles and decades of hostility and suspicion.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will meet for a second round of talks in Egypt on Sept. 14 and 15 and thereafter about every two weeks while lower-level negotiations continue on ironing out specifics of compromises that both sides will have to make.

After the meeting in Egypt, Netanyahu and Abbas will likely see each other, as well as President Barack Obama, again on the sidelines of the upcoming U.N. General Assembly session in the third week of September.

The talks will face their first tough test shortly after the U.N. gathering, when an Israeli freeze on settlement activity in the West Bank is due to expire. The Palestinians have threatened to walk out of the talks if the freeze is not extended. The Israelis have said the freeze will be allowed to expire.

“The Israelis think that it will be difficult to extend the moratorium, while this issue is very important for us,” said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. “It’s a make it or break it. It will not be possible to continue the negotiations if settlement activities continue.”

Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, allowed that the settlement freeze was “a major hurdle” to overcome. He said negotiators were “very intensely” discussing the matter but urged the Palestinians not to use it as a way of scuttling the talks.

“The Palestinians shouldn’t cherry pick one issue and make it a condition,” he told reporters in a conference call. He added that Israel was willing to discuss settlements in their entirety as “a core issue” in the talks.

Clinton would not address the settlement freeze in the interview and U.S. officials have said the way forward must be handled by the parties themselves, although they have made it no secret that they would like the moratorium to continue in some form beyond its Sept. 26 expiration.

Time and tides are conspiring to condemn the weathered old warrior to a fate two wars failed to inflict. Without a major refurbishment to its aging steel skin, the Olympia either will sink at its moorings on the Delaware River, be sold for scrap, or be scuttled for an artificial reef just off Cape May, N.J., about 90 miles south.

The 5,500-ton Olympia’s caretakers monitor every inch of its deteriorating lower hull and deck, already covered with hundreds of patches. Independent inspectors have concluded that the ship could decay to a point beyond saving within a few years if nothing is done.

“It’s an absolute national disgrace. It’s an appalling situation,” said naval historian Lawrence Burr, author of a book on Olympia. “She is a national symbol, and she marks critical points in time both in America’s development as a country and the Navy’s emergence as a global power.”

Olympia, which gets about 90,000 visitors annually, closes to the public Nov. 22 to await its fate. Visitors to the museum pay up to $12, which includes the chance to board the warship.

Since taking stewardship of the floating museum from a cash-strapped nonprofit in 1996, the Independence Seaport Museum has spent $5.5 million on repairs, inspections and maintenance. But it can neither afford the $10 million to dredge the marina, tow the ship to dry-dock and restore it to fighting trim, nor the $10 million to establish an endowment to care for it in perpetuity.

“She’s an icon,” said Jeffrey S. Nilsson, executive director of the Historic Naval Ships Association in Smithfield, Va. “She’s worthy of being saved.”

Efforts to secure private or public funding have been unsuccessful, a stark reminder of recessionary times. Museum officials are reluctantly mulling whether to scrap the National Historic Landmark, said to be the world’s oldest steel warship still afloat, or have the Navy sink it off the coast of Cape May.

The 344-foot-long protected cruiser ideally should have been dry-docked every 20 years for maintenance. Instead it has been dutifully bobbing — and quietly wasting away — in the Delaware since 1945 without a break from the wind and waves.

The waterline is marked with scores of patches, and sections of the mazelike lower hull are so corroded that sunlight shines through. Above deck, water sneaks past the concrete and rubberized surface layers, past the rotting fir deck underneath, and onto the handsomely appointed officers’ quarters below.

“She generally looks good for her age, but her expensive pre-existing conditions make it daunting,” said Jesse Lebovics, longtime caretaker of Olympia. “We’re still hoping someone will step up. We’re hoping for an 11th-hour reprieve.”

Two local nonprofits — Friends of the Cruiser Olympia and The Cruiser Olympia Historical Society — are striving to drum up money, manpower and publicity from other historic preservation groups, veterans organizations and corporate sponsors.

“We don’t want to see the ship reefed and the museum doesn’t either,” said Jay Richman, president of Friends of the Cruiser Olympia. “We’re optimistic that a bunch of small groups working together for a common cause can save the ship.”

Olympia steamed out of San Francisco in 1892 and served most notably as flagship of the Asiatic Squadron in the Spanish-American War.

Its vertical reciprocating engines, refrigeration system and hydraulic steering previewed the technological advances to come; its vestigial sails and oak-paneled, parlor-like officers’ quarters marked the passing Victorian era.

From Olympia’s bridge on May 1, 1898, during the Battle of Manila Bay in the Phillippines, Commodore George Dewey uttered the famous command: “You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.” The Spanish fleet was decimated, making Dewey — and the Olympia — national heroes.

In a letter home after the victorious battle, Capt. Charles Gridley wrote: “We did not lose a man in our whole fleet, and had only six wounded, and none of them seriously. … The Olympia was struck seven or eight times, but only slightly injured, hardly worth speaking of.”

The ship later was active in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Mediterranean, served as a Naval Academy training vessel, and took part in the 1918 Allied landing at Murmansk during the Russian Civil War.

Its final mission was bringing home the body of World War I’s Unknown Soldier from France in 1921. The vessel was decommissioned in 1922 and was largely forgotten until it was nearly scrapped in the 1950s — and local citizens rallied with donations and labor to bring it back from the brink.

Olympia opened as a museum in 1958 but funding woes and threats of sale or scrap have been part of its history ever since. The Seaport Museum itself has weathered its own share of storms, most recently in 2008, when a former president of the organization was convicted of bilking the institution of more than $1 million.

Meanwhile, two other beleaguered vessels nearby are similarly awaiting saviors: the USS New Jersey battleship across the river in New Jersey and the historic 1950s cruise ship SS United States three miles downriver.

“There’s a lot of need out there, and the economy makes it worse … but we really can’t wait,” Lebovics said.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said an ISAF service member was killed in an insurgent attack in the east Sunday. No other details were immediately available.

There has been a sharp increase in foreign military deaths, many of them American, as foreign troops launch more operations to counter a growing Taliban-led insurgency that has spread out of traditional strongholds in the south and east.

At least five ISAF troops have been killed since Friday, including the first Georgian killed in the conflict.

Violence across Afghanistan has hit its worst since the Taliban were ousted by U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001. Military and civilian casualties are at record levels, with U.S. and NATO commanders warning of more tough fighting ahead.

The spiraling death tolls come despite the presence of almost 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan and will be another worrying statistic when U.S. President Barack Obama conducts a strategy review of the war in December.

Public support for the war is flagging, with a recent opinion poll by NBC television and the Wall Street Journal showing as many as seven in 10 Americans saying they did not believe the war would end successfully.

The traditional summer fighting period has taken a heavy toll on foreign troops this year. A total of 102 were killed in June, the deadliest month of the war, followed by 88 in July and another 80 in August, according to independent monitor www.iCasualties.org.

The latest casualties take to 2,068 the number killed since 2001, almost half of them in 2009 and 2010. Roughly 60 percent of those killed were Americans.

Despite the heavy military toll, ordinary Afghans continue to bear the brunt of the war.

A United Nations report released last month showed that civilian casualties had risen by 31 percent in the first six months of 2010, compared with the same period last year, with more than three-quarters of the casualties caused by insurgents.

The UAE says it will block BlackBerry e-mail, messaging and Web services Oct. 11 unless authorities can gain access to the encrypted data traffic — a demand by other countries warning of possible bans including India.

The proposed UAE action threatens BlackBerry service for an estimated 500,000 local subscribers and could tarnish the country’s reputation as the Gulf’s business and tourism hub with potentially millions of visitors left without key BlackBerry services.

Dubai’s police chief, Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, said that fears of espionage and information sharing by foe Israel — as well as UAE allies United States and Britain — helped prompt the possible limits on the popular BlackBerry.

Tamim told a conference on information technology that the proposed BlackBerry curbs are also “meant to control false rumors and defamation of public figures due to the absence of surveillance,” according to a story posted Friday on the website of the UAE newspaper Al-Khaleej.

Tamim, whose remarks are often considered to reflect the views of Dubai’s leadership, did not elaborate on the spying accusations in the article. He did not respond to calls by The Associated Press for further comment.

The police chief gained international attention as the pointman in the probe into the January slaying of a Hamas commander in Dubai, which Emirati officials have blamed on Israel’s Mossad spy agency.

UAE officials reportedly are still in talks with BlackBerry maker, Canada-based Research in Motion Ltd. Tamim’s comments, however, point to a hard line by Emirates security chiefs who demand access to BlackBerry data.

Blackberry traffic is encrypted and routed through servers operated by RIM. The company has said it would not disclose details of discussions with regulators in any of the more than 175 countries where it operates.

This week, India gave RIM a 60-day window to offer ways for authorities to monitor BlackBerry traffic. Saudi Arabia last month allowed BlackBerry services to continue, citing “positive developments” after talks with the company. It’s unclear whether the Saudi reprieve is permanent.

Other countries such as Indonesia and Lebanon have also noted security worries about BlackBerry services.

Two intelligence officials say three missiles hit a house in a village near Miran Shah, the main town in North Waziristan, on Friday evening.

They say the identity of the slain is not yet clear. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information to the media.

The region is dominated by the Haqqani network, an Islamist militant group bent on driving U.S. and NATO troops out of Afghanistan.

The strike came hours after a suicide bombing targeting minority Shiites killed 43 people in the southwestern city of Quetta.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) — Suicide bombings targeting religious minorities killed at least 44 people in Pakistan on Friday, sharply driving up the toll of sectarian assaults in a country already battered by massive flooding.

A blast killed at least 43 people in the southwestern city of Quetta at a Shiite procession calling for solidarity with Palestinians, Police Chief Ghulam Shabir Sheikh said. He said 78 people were wounded and several were in critical condition.

Protesters dragged wounded people into private cars as burning motorcycles sent clouds of black smoke billowing through the streets. The bodies of the dead and wounded lay strewn across the road.

Some Shiite youths fired in the air after the blast, and Qazi Abdul Wahid, a senior police official, said officers were trying to control the situation.

Shiite leader Allama Abbas Kumaili appealed to participants to remain peaceful.

“We understand these are attempts to set Sunni and Shiite sects against each other,” he said.

The attack in Quetta was the second this week on Pakistani Shiites, who by some estimates make up about 20 percent of the population in the mostly Sunni Muslim country, although figures are imprecise and disputed.

A triple suicide attack Wednesday night killed 35 people at a Shiite ceremony in the eastern city of Lahore.

Kumaili said the attacks against minority sects were a result of government failure.

“Our government concentrates all its efforts to secure VIPs. Common men are not their priority,” he said.

Government officials have said they cannot protect outdoor gatherings from attacks, and Interior Minister Rehman Malik called Thursday for Shiites to hold religious ceremonies indoors.

Baluchistan provincial Police Chief Malik Iqbal said officials had warned organizers of the Quetta ceremony to stick inside a security cordon after intelligence agents received reports about a possible terror attack.

“They violated the route,” Iqbal said. “We had warned them not to extend their rally out of the cordon.”

Wednesday’s attack in Lahore, and a host of other assaults on religious minorities, was claimed by the hardline Sunni Pakistani Taliban, which is seeking to overthrow a Western-backed government shaken most recently by flooding that has caused massive displacement, suffering and economic damage.

Earlier Friday, a suicide attack on a mosque belonging to the minority Ahmadi sect killed at least one person and wounded several others in the northwest Pakistani town of Mardan.

Military and law-enforcement officials also have been battered by militant violence, particularly along the border with Afghanistan. Officials said a roadside bomb attack in the capital of the northwest’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province Friday killed one police officer and wounded three others.

The floods, spawned by heavy rains weeks ago in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and elsewhere in the mountains of northern Pakistan, have killed more than 1,600 people and affected about 20 million people. The waters are still swamping rich agricultural land in the southern provinces of Sindh and Punjab.

Flood victims say they have received little government help, and most assistance has come to them from private charities. The International Committee of the Red Cross warned Thursday that survivors’ anger was beginning to hamper those aid efforts.

About 500 survivors blocked a key road in the Sindh town of Gharo on Friday to protest inadequate food and drinking water.

“We have blocked traffic today to draw government attention toward our problems. We are living at a government building without food,” said Deedar Ahmad, 25, who said he fled with about 1,000 people from a nearby flooded village.

Survivor Ali Nawaz said the government had housed flood victims but was not providing food, electricity, water or adequate shelter.

“We cannot sleep because of the fears of snakes,” he said.

The flooding, and anger over the government response, has raised fears about the stability of Pakistan’s government, seen as a problematic but essential Western ally in the fight against Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s own restive tribal areas.

The Pakistani Taliban has issued veiled threats against Western aid workers but a recent wave of attacks have focused instead on religious minorities, particularly Shiites and Ahmadis.

Police official Ahsanullah Khan said the bomber in Friday’s attack on the Ahmadi mosque in the northwest town of Mardan appeared to have detonated himself after he was prevented from entering the building.

In May, two teams of seven militants armed with hand grenades, suicide vests and assault rifles attacked two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore, killing 97 and wounding dozens.

Many mainstream Muslims consider the Ahmadis heretics for believing that their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was a savior foretold by the Quran, Islam’s holy book. They say Ahmadis are defying the basic tenet of Islam that says Muhammad is the final prophet.

Ahmadis argue that their leader was the savior rather than a prophet.

Under pressure from Islamists, Pakistan in the 1970s declared Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority. Pakistani Ahmadis — who number between 3 million and 4 million — are prohibited from calling themselves Muslims or engaging in practices such as reciting Islamic prayers.

I approach President Obama’s address to the nation Tuesday night as one whose interest in war is principally an interest in ethics. I am intrigued by arguments over what justifies a war, not in international law but in the language of morality. From that point of view, what was striking about Obama’s address was how Bush-like it was. Many might view this as a criticism of the president. But that is not my intention. When President Bush spoke about war, even when I disagreed with him, I was always impressed by the fundamental American-ness of his arguments, and by the unyielding commitment to the nation’s security that lay behind them. In Tuesday night’s address, Obama made three major points about the ethics of war, each an echo of his predecessor’s approach.

American presidents, whatever their espoused differences over any particular conflict, often converge when it comes to the details.

Point 1: “The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given. They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people.” Here, the president seems to move tantalizingly close to a proposition he has resisted since his days in the Senate: that the war in Iraq might just have been a just war after all. To be sure, the requirements of politics make it difficult to praise the armed forces if you truly believe the war that have been fighting has no justification-the slogan “I oppose the war but I support the troops” is harder to maintain ethically than it might appear-but still, the concession is a significant one, given Obama’s reluctance in the past to say anything to suggest that the coalition forces in Iraq might have been pursuing a mission of genuine moral importance.

Point 2: Once the Iraqi regime was defeated, American troops “shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people; trained Iraqi security forces; and took out terrorist leaders.” It is the last clause that is fascinating: “took out terrorist leaders”—meaning, killed them. The president made a similar point in his eulogy this past February for the seven Central Intelligence Agency officers killed by a suicide bomber in Khost Province in Afghanistan. Praising the agency’s work, he referred to “the extremists who no longer threaten our country—because you eliminated them.” Among the most controversial aspects of Bush’s approach to the terror war was the proposition that America must get the terrorists before they get us. Obama has, in a sense, doubled down on this strategy. So, for example, his administration evidently makes far greater use of targeted missile attacks against accused terror leaders than Bush did.

Point 3: “American influence around the world is not a function of military force alone. We must use all elements of our power—including our diplomacy, our economic strength, and the power of America’s example—to secure our interests and stand by our allies.” This is a rather direct channeling of his predecessor. If one reads the 2002 West Point commencement address in which Bush announced the doctrine named for him, one will find this very point, made more than once.

What has struck me in my years of writing and teaching about the ethics of war is that American presidents, whatever their espoused differences over any particular conflict, often converge when it comes to the details. History teaches that there is not a Democratic way of war or a Republican way of war. There is an American way of war, and it involves a steadfast confidence in the rightness of our cause, and a ferocity in the manner of pursuing it. Bush took that view; now, it seems, so does Obama. As to what this convergence portends for America’s future, we will have to wait and see.

Stephen L. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, where he has taught since 1982. His seven nonfiction books include God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs. His first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), spent 11 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His fourth novel, Jericho’s Fall, was published in July; his next book, The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama, will be published in January by Perseus.

Sharif El-Gamal, 37, the owner of the building at the center of the storm over the construction of a “ground zero mosque,” is a quintessential American story, a man who went from waiting tables in New York’s A-list restaurants to buying and selling properties.

But new revelations are emerging that present a very different narrative. And it could lead to a split between the forces behind the mosque.

Court records from Florida to New York state reveal that Sharif and his younger brother, Samir “Sammy” El-Gamal, 35, a partner with him in his company SoHo Properties, both have a history replete with intersections with tax and debt issues, dating back to at least 1994 and continuing into this year. In one instance, Sharif told a court he didn’t hit a tenant from whom his brother and he were trying to collect back rent. He said to police, the tenant’s “face could have run into my hand.”

I now don’t think the mosque will be built at the location staked out near ground zero.

After tracking Sharif’s finances and talking to acquaintances about his rough-and-tumble business style, I now don’t think the mosque will be built at the location staked out near ground zero. According to people familiar with the mosque project, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan, a community leader, were blindsided by the revelations about Sharif, making a partnership unlikely. Moreover, Sharif’s domineering personality troubles them because it doesn’t fit into the slow, methodical, and even boring work of building a nonprofit.

I expect that Rauf and Khan will gracefully bow out of this project near ground zero, lead an interfaith community effort to build an Islamic center elsewhere, and welcome Sharif and his family in the congregation with open arms. To me, that’s the best solution out of this political—and now PR—debacle. I’m also certain that somewhere in there the businessman in Sharif will see a profit.

Earlier this summer, I left the humble Jersey City home of Rauf and Khan, with my son, Shibli, 7, believing in their vision. But, over the next weeks, I got a funny feeling about the project. Four years ago, I had started an organization with three other Muslim moms, Muslims for Peace. Sharif had asked one of the moms if the new mosque effort could raise money using Muslims for Peace’s nonprofit status. That didn’t feel right to me, nor did the insistence on the location near ground zero, amid so much opposition and hurt. I recused myself from the mosque effort. With conspiracy theories circulating, I wrote a story that Muslims for Peace had raised less than $9,000 for the mosque. The Muslims for Peace fundraising effort was later nixed because Sharif felt betrayed by the public disclosure, and I stepped down from the organization (though I’m still a Muslim for peace, lowercase).

The New York Post reported yesterday that Sharif and SoHo Properties are “tax deadbeats,” owing $224,270.77 in back property taxes on the site, and that a Sharif company “failed to pay its half-yearly bills in January and July.” (An El-Gamal spokesman told the Post the taxes had been paid.)

On the trail of the El-Gamal brothers is a Sarasota, Florida, private investigator, Bill Warner, whose interest got piqued when he started getting phone calls last month from New Yorkers saying that the whole story about Sharif wasn’t out. Warner is posting his findings on his website and sharing it with the media. He provided me with leads that allowed me to see more clearly the trail of troubles that lies in Sharif’s wake.

• Asra Q. Nomani: The Mosque is the New Balloon Boy• The Money Behind the MosqueThe El-Gamal family’s immigrant journey is like that of many other American-Muslim families. The patriarch, Mohamed A. El-Gamal, an Egyptian, arrived in the U.S. during the late 1960s or early 1970s with a first wave of Muslim professionals and graduate students. According to media reports, he married a Catholic woman of Polish descent. Blond and blue-eyed, Sharif was born in Brooklyn two days before Christmas 1973. His younger brother, Samir, was born in the summer of 1974.

The family hop-scotched between the U.S., Liberia, and Egypt, and Sharif graduated from New Hyde Park High School in Nassau County, Long Island.

According to friends, the brothers ran with a fast crowd in their twenties. Sharif waited tables at the posh restaurant Serafina, while Sammy waited tables at Tao. For a short while, Sharif worked as a waiter at Michael Jordan’s, named after former basketball star. But, according to people familiar with that restaurant, he was fired within two months for arriving reeking of alcohol, among other things. This is around when Sharif started acquiring a criminal record, say people familiar with his life.

This past weekend, capturing this period of Sharif’s life, the Daily News ran a headline, “Park51 developer Sharif El-Gamal has a history of run-ins with the law,” including pleading guilty in 1994, 1998, and 1999 to disorderly conduct in Manhattan, as well as pleading guilty to disorderly conduct in 1990, a DWI in 1992, and attempted petit larceny in 1993 in Nassau County, N.Y.

According to Broward County court records, on March 3, 1999, Hollywood, Florida, police arrested Sammy, then 25, for “theft/to deprive,” a misdemeanor. Later that year, Sammy pleaded guilty, and Judge Sharon Zeller fined him $143 and required him to attend a “substance-abuse through education” course. Just two years ago, during the summer of 2008, the court filed “financial obligation suspension” papers for Sammy’s failure to pay his fine.

Neither Sammy nor Sharif responded to a request seeking comment.

After the 9/11 attacks, Sharif told New York magazine that “he just felt like praying.” Sharif first started attending Manhattan Masjid, known in the community as “the Salafi mosque,” for its adherence to a rigid, puritanical interpretation of Islam, espoused, among other things, on its website. Then, he discovered Masjid al-Nur, or “Mosque of Light,” where Rauf preaches. It’s nicknamed “the Sufi mosque” by congregants.

Career-wise, Sharif was heading into real estate, collecting commissions off rental leases. He was no big shot, and really never has been, building just a small portfolio of property. In late 2003, he created a website, sohoproperties.com. The three partners were Sharif, Sammy, and Nour Mousa, the young nephew of Amr Mousa, secretary general of the Arab League, a relationship that would later become a lightning rod for critics of the mosque.

On September 10, 2005, New York police arrested Sharif for alleged assault on a Manhattan renter, Mark Vassilieve, when Sammy tried to convince Vassilieve to pay his rent. The charges were dropped when Vassilieve filed a civil suit, which Sharif settled.

On January 24, 2006, according to court records, Nino and Nicola Gaudio won a judgment of $3,300 against Sammy, as well as permission to evict him from property they owned. On February 1, 2006, they won another $3,300 judgment, and on April 6, 2006, N&S Realty won a judgment allowing them to have forcible entry against Sammy. The Gaudios couldn’t be reached for comment.

Big things were still in the air though. According to electronic records, Sharif created a website, retailsoho.com, in April 2006. (A visit this weekend showed nothing on the site.) That year, Sharif told the Daily News, he hired a teenager, Francisco Patino, to scout for a new mosque location, when he spotted him on a TV at a Sharper Image store, charming TV viewers of the reality show American Inventor. That same year, according to media reports, Sharif bid on the property at 45-47 Park Place.

The next year, on March 13, 2007, New York state issued a state tax warrant against Sammy for $19,895, according to court records. On April 30, 2007, Sharif bought apartment 6C in a building on W. 93rd Street for $1.075 million with his wife, Rebekka, an American-born convert to Islam.

By this time, the El-Gamal brothers knew Imam Rauf well. In December 2008, Rauf officiated Sammy’s wedding to Allison Poole, a scarf delicately draped over the bride’s golden brown locks. The young couple clasp hands and gaze softly into each other’s eyes in a photo taken at the wedding, as Rauf led the ceremony, smiling, with a microphone hooked to his loose tunic.

On July 7, 2009, after buying the property where he wants to build the Islamic center, Sharif created two companies, 45 Park Place Partners LLC and 45 Park Place LH, LLC. The next day, he started Soho Properties General Partner LLC as a foreign limited liability corporation. On October 16, 2009, Sharif created Soho Properties Inc., naming himself chairman.

Since the controversy erupted, the media has largely portrayed the man behind the mosque effort as Imam Rauf, an Egyptian-born progressive Muslim cleric who could be Sean Connery’s body-double. His wife, Khan, a Muslim community leader born in Kashmir, India, occasionally shares the spotlight. Known inside the Muslim community as unabashedly ambitious, the couple has irked Sharif and others in his camp. Last week, in a conference call with interfaith partners and others, set up by the Council on Foreign Relations, Khan said, “one of our congregants, Sharif El-Gamal, took it upon himself” to find new space for the overcrowded mosque where Rauf led prayers. Otherwise, there wasn’t another word about the Brooklyn-born Sharif. Khan directed folks to the website of the Cordoba Initiative, an interfaith nonprofit her husband runs, not the developer’s website for the effort.

Ironically, in one of Sharif’s SoHo Properties newsletters, Sharif’s company declared to its potential partners: “We look forward to a prosperous partnership!”

Two servicemen died in bombings Sunday in southern Afghanistan, while two others were killed in a bomb attack in the south on Saturday and three in fighting in the east the same day, NATO said. Their identities and other details were being withheld until relatives could be notified.

The latest deaths bring to 42 the number of American forces who have died this month in Afghanistan after July’s high of 66. A total of 62 international forces have died in the country this month, including seven British troops.

Fighting is intensifying with the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops to bring the total number of international forces in Afghanistan to 120,000 — 100,000 of them American. Most of those new troops have been assigned to the southern insurgent strongholds of Helmand and Kandahar provinces where major battles are fought almost daily as part of a gathering drive to push out the Taliban.

The five campaign workers had been snatched Wednesday by armed men who stopped their two-vehicle convoy as it was driving through remote countryside. Five others traveling in the vehicles had earlier been set free, according to a man who answered the phone at the home of candidate Fawzya Galani and declined to give his name.

Residents of Herat’s Adraskan district reported finding the bodies early Sunday. They were later transported to the local morgue for identification by family members, district chief Nasar Ahmad Popul said.

No one has claimed responsibility for the killings, although Taliban insurgents have waged a bloody campaign of murder and intimidation against candidates and election workers in hopes of sabotaging the Sept. 18 parliamentary polls the 249 seats in the lower house.

In a similar attack in Herat, male parliamentary candidate Abdul Manan was shot and killed on Saturday on his way to a mosque by an assassin traveling on the back of a motorcycle.

Meanwhile on Sunday, two suicide bombers attempted to climb over the back wall of a compound housing the governor of the far western province of Farah, but were spotted by guards and shot, provincial police Chief Mohammad Faqir Askir said.

The men’s vests exploded, although it wasn’t clear if they detonated them themselves or if it was because they were hit by bullets, Askir said.

The explosions blasted a chunk out of the wall and blew out windows in the compound, but there were no other reports of deaths or injuries, he said.

NATO said eight insurgents were killed in joint Afghan-NATO operations Saturday night in the province of Paktiya, including a Taliban commander, Naman, accused of coordinating roadside bomb attacks and the movement of ammunition, supplies and fighters.

Automatic weapons, grenades, magazines and bomb-making material were found in buildings in Zormat district along the mountainous border with Pakistan. Afghan leaders frequently complain that Pakistan is doing to little to prevent cross-border incursions and shut down insurgent safe havens inside its territory.

Just to the south in Khost province, U.S. and Afghan troops raised the death toll among insurgents to more than 30 in simultaneous attacks Saturday by around 50 fighters on Forward Operating Base Salerno and nearby Camp Chapman, where seven CIA employees died in a suicide attack in December.

Insurgents wore replica American uniforms and at least 13 had strapped themselves into suicide bomb vests, NATO said.

The early morning raids appeared to be part of an insurgent strategy to step up attacks in widely scattered parts of the country as the U.S. focuses its resources on the battle around Kandahar.

The Afghan Defense Ministry said two Afghan soldiers were killed and three wounded in the fighting, although NATO said there had been no deaths among the defenders. Four U.S. troops were wounded, NATO officials said.

U.S. and Afghan officials blamed the attack on the Haqqani network, a Pakistan-based faction of the Taliban with close ties to al-Qaida. In follow-up operations Sunday, a Haqqani commander involved in the attacks and two other insurgents were detained in Khost’s Sabari district, NATO said.

NATO also said it launched an airstrike in the northern province of Kunduz on three insurgents, including a commander with the Taliban-allied Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan responsible for recruiting foreign fighters and leading attacks. At least one of the three was killed and another wounded, the alliance said.

NATO has stepped up efforts to provide security to allow an election whose outcome will be generally accepted as credible, hoping that will help stabilize the nation’s fractious politics that are helping fuel the violence.

Yet frictions have continued to mar the relationship between the government of President Hamid Karzai and its international partners, largely over the knotty question of endemic official corruption.

On Saturday, the government criticized U.S. media reports that numerous Afghan officials had allegedly received payments from the CIA — including one who reportedly took a bribe to block a wide-ranging probe into graft.

A presidential office statement did not address or deny any specific allegations, but called the reports an insult to the government and an attempt to defame people within it.

The statement came the same day as a top graft-battling Afghan prosecutor said he had been forced into retirement.

Deputy Attorney General Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar has complained that Attorney General Mohammad Ishaq Aloko and others are blocking corruption cases against high-ranking government officials. He said Aloko wrote a retirement letter for him earlier in the week and that Karzai accepted it.

Officials said Sunday that Faqiryar had been retired because he was 72, two years over the mandatory retirement age.

The Democratic comptroller’s spokesman, Scott Sieber, said Liu supported the project. The center has sparked an intense debate over U.S. religious freedoms and the sanctity of the Trade Center site, where nearly 3,000 perished in the September 11, 2001 attack.

“If it turns out to be financially feasible and if they can demonstrate an ability to pay off the bonds and comply with the laws concerning tax-exempt financing, we’d certainly consider it,” Sieber told Reuters.

Spokesmen for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor David Paterson and the Islamic center and were not immediately available.

The proposed center, two blocks from the Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, has caused a split between people who lost relatives and friends in the attack, as well as conservative politicians, and those who support the project. Among those who support it are the mayor, civic and religious groups, and some families of victims.

The mosque’s backers hope to raise a total of $70 million in tax-exempt debt to build the center, according to the New York Times. Tax laws allow such funding for religiously affiliated non-profits if they can prove the facility will benefit the general public and their religious activities are funded separately.

The bonds could be issued through a local development corporation created for this purpose, experts said.

The Islamic center would have to repay the bonds, which likely would be less expensive than taxable debt.

New York City’s Industrial Development Authority could not issue debt for the center because the state civic facilities law, which governed this type of financing for non-profits, was allowed to expire about two years ago.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s presidential office condemned U.S. media reports that Afghan government officials received payments from the CIA in return for information. A presidential office statement did not address or deny any specific allegations, but called the reports an insult to the government and an attempt to defame people within it.

NATO said at least 21 insurgents were killed — including four who were wearing suicide vests — and five captured in Saturday’s coordinated attacks.

Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry put the insurgent death toll in the attacks at 24, with five captured and no casualties on the police side. The Defense Ministry said two Afghan soldiers were killed and three wounded in the fighting.

The assaults on the sprawling Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khost province and nearby Camp Chapman came about 3 a.m., just as area residents were rising for early morning prayers.

The area, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) southeast of Kabul near the border with Pakistan, is a hotbed of activity by the Taliban and other insurgent groups, including the December attack on Chapman that killed four CIA officers and three contracted security guards.

In recent months similar attacks have been launched against U.S. bases at Bagram, Jalalabad and Kandahar.

Afghan police said about 50 insurgents attacked using rifles, heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons, but had been repelled.

After being driven away from the bases, the insurgents approached the nearby offices of the governor and provincial police headquarters but were driven off, said Khost provincial police Chief Abdul Hakim Ishaqzai.

“Given the size of the enemy’s force, this could have been a major catastrophe for Khost. Luckily we prevented it,” he said.

Small-arms fire continued through the morning, while NATO helicopters patrolled overhead.

NATO said two insurgents had managed to breach Salerno’s perimeter, but were observed cutting the fence and killed immediately.

Dead insurgents were seen wearing camouflage jackets and pants seemingly identical to those warn by U.S. Army soldiers.

Police captured a pickup truck laden with ammunition along with a light truck packed with explosives that had become stuck in deep mud, according to Maj. Wazir Pacha of the provincial police headquarters. Bomb specialists later destroyed the truck and its cargo, according to the Interior Ministry.

NATO said the dead insurgents were members of the Haqqani Network, a Taliban-affiliated group with deep ties to al-Qaida that is accused of launching frequent raids across the border from neighboring Pakistan.

An airstrike on a truck in which insurgents were fleeing killed Mudasir, a senior Haqqani explosives expert suspected of arranging suicide bomb attacks, along with two other militants, NATO said.

A statement Saturday from the presidential spokesman’s office called the reports of CIA payments part of an attempt to divert attention from the greater priorities of fighting terrorism, preventing civilian casualties, and disbanding private security companies blamed for lawlessness and corruption.

“Afghanistan believes that making such allegations will not strengthen the alliance against terrorism and will not strengthen an Afghanistan based on the law and rules, but will have negative effects in those areas,” the statement said.

“We strongly condemn such irresponsible allegations which just create doubt and defame responsible people of this country,” it said.

A former U.S. official told The Associated Press on Friday the CIA has paid members of the Afghan government to track various factions within it. The practice has raised concerns at a time when the United States is pressing Afghan officials to make the government less corrupt.

The New York Times reported the agency is paying Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for Afghanistan’s National Security Council, for information. The Washington Post also had the report on Friday.

In the southern provinces of Nimroz and Zabul, a total of seven Taliban were killed in fighting, police said. No police casualties were reported.

Separately, NATO said one of its patrols mistakenly fired on a vehicle carrying private security contractors in Wardak province west of Kabul, killing two men.

It said the patrol had come under Taliban fire early Saturday, then spotted a vehicle approaching fast from behind with a man shooting out its window.

“It is believed that the private security contractors were returning fire against the same insurgents who had just previously attacked the coalition vehicle, and had increased their speed to break contact,” the coalition said in a statement.

The incident was under investigation, it said.

Coalition forces and private security contractors frequently come under small-arms fire along the stretch of road known as Highway 2 that runs west through perilous country toward the city of Herat.

On Friday, homemade bombs killed three U.S. troops in southern and eastern Afghanistan, bringing the total number of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan this month to 55, including 35 Americans, according to a count by The Associated Press. July was the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, with 66 killed.

Also Saturday, 48 schoolgirls, boys, and teachers were hospitalized in the second case this week of suspected poisoning caused by an unidentified chemical substance.

Most were discharged within hours of becoming ill with nausea, headaches and dizziness at Kabul’s Zabihullah Esmati High School. Tests have yet to reveal whether the victims were poisoned. The Taliban, which opposes female education, has been suspected in similar cases.

NATO also issued a statement saying coalition helicopter pilots were not responsible for the deaths of three Afghan policemen killed Aug. 20 in what had been considered a friendly fire incident in Jowzjan province.

It said the helicopters showed up hours after fighting began, and it was possible the three were killed earlier. All Afghan forces had also been ordered to remain inside compounds at the time the two helicopters fired a missile and 80 30-millimeter rounds at an insurgent firing position, NATO said.