And why shouldn’t we all be thrilled the National Football
League is back in action? Pro football is the ultimate viewing
experience – edge-of-seat good, heart-thumping good, and as the
season comes to its climax, epic-entertainment good. Frankly,
over the past decade or so, the NFL has designed the perfect
product, thanks to the leveling effects of the player draft and
the distribution of TV revenue.

It’s inimitable.

And that’s exactly why the NFL strike shouldn’t become the
sports trivia factoid it’s destined to become starting, oh, as
soon as next week, when a full schedule of well-refereed games
puts the whole debacle behind us. Because the NFL strike offers
a great business lesson. Not for the NFL, actually, but for
every company with high market share, like, say, Apple, Google,
Facebook, and most important, maybe for you.

Look, the NFL strike occurred, very simply, because pro
football has become a virtual monopoly. When you need your
football fix, there is no other serious major-league option. And
as much as we love baseball, basketball and ice hockey, none of
them offers the same superhuman theatrics, downright dazzle and
consistent wow factor. That reality is a testament to the acumen
of the NFL team owners and management, who have earned their
dominant market share with years of continual innovation and
exceptional execution.

But monopolies, and more to the point here, most companies
approaching monopoly status because of sustained success, almost
invariably become breeding grounds for arrogance, complacency
and my-way-or-the-highway mindsets. That has to be what happened
with the NFL’s ordinarily smart and savvy owners, who
successfully settled their differences with the players in 2011
and later that same year signed TV deals worth some $27 billion
through 2022. Otherwise, there’s no explanation for why the
commish, Roger Goodell, and the owners to whom he reports took
on the refs without a viable game plan, i.e., without a cadre of
proven replacements.

Regardless, enter negotiations the NFL owners did, only to
quickly encounter another immutable law of business: You can’t
aggravate your customers. It saps goodwill. It damages trust. It
hurts the product. It undermines the brand. It’s just bad
business.

Aggravated customers are one sure-fire way you become
vulnerable. Goodell must know that now. Maybe that’s why in
announcing an agreement with the refs, he apologized to the
fans.

Because of its dominance, the NFL will recover from this
ball-dropping blunder. But most high-market-share companies
wouldn’t have the same luck. High market share is not the same
as forever market share. Indeed, even if you own 75 percent of
your market, you need to constantly keep believing in your
bones, feeling in your skin, and reminding yourself at every
turn that somewhere a competitor is out to eat your lunch. It
could be a scraggly group of engineers in a garage three miles
away. It could be a well-funded company in India or China just
waiting for a chance to erode your hegemony. You may think
you’re inimitable. They’re betting their future on the fact that
you’re not.

Eighteen years ago, legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove coined
the phrase, “Only the paranoid survive.” Its meaning, simply
put: fear the competitors you don’t see more than the ones you
do, and always, always, always put your customers first.
That credo, it could be said, doesn’t really apply to the NFL
with any kind of urgency.

But the NFL strike is a great reminder that it applies to
nearly everyone else.

(Jack and Suzy Welch)

It ain’t good.

Well, big surprise, we don’t agree. We consider
entrepreneurs American heroes and, as we’ve opined recently, we
think many corporations brim with humanity. Business can’t
operate unfettered, of course, without any form of oversight or
control. But our view, essentially, is that business is a source
of great good for society, with the power to create hope and
opportunity like no other institution going.

Indeed, the positives so outweigh the negatives that lately
we’ve been trying to identify why some people hate business so
fervently. After all, the risks of this movement’s efforts to
demonize business are frighteningly high.

Here’s where we’ve landed.

First, there’s clearly a group of people that disdains
business because they support some or all of the fundamental
leveling tenets of socialism. This ideology is too multifaceted
to summarize here and is well-known in any regard, but suffice
it to say that its adherents believe, as the president once put
it, “You’ve got to spread the wealth around.”

Then there are people who hate business not because of
ideology but because of personal experience – they’ve been
wrongly fired, endured a dreadful boss, or watched a schmoozer
get the promotion that, by rights, belonged to someone better.
Whatever the specifics, these individuals see business as a
place where good people get burned.

For still others, their hostility derives from the recent
financial meltdown, when the sheer negligence of many financial
institutions and rating agencies, they believe, resulted in
blameless Americans losing their jobs and their homes and
threatened to bring down the entire economy.

Finally, and perhaps most pernicious because of its outsize
influence, is the hostility toward business that radiates from
the intellectual elite – the opinion leaders in journalism,
academia and government. To them, business is rotten because
it’s just so completely unfair. Otherwise, how do you explain
the success of the party animal who lived down the hall in
college?

You know what we mean. With the intellectual elite, you have
a group of people who, once upon a time, took their studies very
seriously, ran their college newspapers and clubs and protested
for social justice in their free time. After graduation, they
took jobs where they felt they could fight the good fight, even
if it meant financial sacrifice. That was all well and good
until 10 or 15 years out, when they started hearing stories
about the obnoxious loudmouths in their college dorms who
majored in playing the angles and minored in beer pong. These
“lightweights” (in their view) had, horrifyingly, struck it rich
on Wall Street. And not by making the world a better place. No -
simply by showing up and chumming around.

O.K., so maybe that is enough to make you hate business.

Except, you shouldn’t. First of all, even if Wall Street
allows some former party animals to make a fortune, Wall Street
is but a piece of American business. It may show up in movies
and on TV as the archetype, but far more of U.S. business
consists of consumer and manufacturing companies making and
selling real stuff, family-run enterprises, startups, farms,
sports teams, ice cream shops, art galleries, summer camps,
record labels – you name it. American business is what America
does every day.

But just as important, you shouldn’t vilify American
business because it’s our only road back to a thriving country,
free of the noose of debt and offering opportunity to all who
are willing to work, create, compete and grow.

Everyone knows that our economy must improve, but it can
only improve in an environment that encourages business – and,
yes, even loves it. Atmosphere matters. When hostility reigns,
big enterprises worry about the regulations coming down the pike
that might crimp operations and profits, and most hunker down on
the capital spending front, human and otherwise. Entrepreneurs
worry it’s not the right time or climate to expand, borrow on
their credit line or hire, and they do the same.

Look, if you want jobs – and who doesn’t? – you have to come
to terms with reality. Hating business doesn’t just hurt
business.

It destroys the way forward for everyone.

Now, you’re in private equity, and well, hello. You’re a
heroic job creator – or no, wait, you take pleasure in firing
people. You’re a savvy executive who knows how to grow the
economy – or get outta here, you’re a vulture capitalist with
leadership skills, as Vice President Joe Biden recently put it,
that are no better than a plumber’s.

Hello, indeed, and with all due respect to the vice
president, and certainly with no offense intended toward
plumbers, we have a question.

Mr. Vice President, where in the world are you getting your
ideas about private equity?

Because we have an entirely different take, and we can tell
you where ours comes from – experience, 20-plus years of working
with PE firms and 11 years of working for one. And given that
experience, and given how private equity is at the epicenter of
the political debate now, we’d say it’s time for a reality check
about what private equity really does and what kind of leaders
it tends to produce.

Let’s start with what private equity firms do, which is
actually very simple. They buy troubled companies with the
intention of fixing them up. In time, they hope, that will
result in a big payday when the new-and-improved business goes
public or gets sold to an eager strategic acquirer. Yes,
sometimes these turnaround efforts fail, and companies and jobs
are lost. And yes, on occasion PE firms have bought in and
overleveraged a business’s assets. Then, as a result of an
economic downturn, the company has tanked, while the PE firm has
gotten out whole.

But the norm is different. Typically, that’s not what
happens. It’s just not. Indeed, research conducted under the
auspices of the World Economic Forum in 2010 shows the practice
of “strip and flip” during PE-led turnarounds is rare. What’s
far, far more common is this: PE firms buy “orphan” divisions
that no longer are a good fit with their big corporate owners
and have been left to fade away, or they snap up stand-alone
businesses that have lost their way and are almost in the throes
of death.

The key point here is that PE firms virtually never buy
jewels – happy, fast-growing companies with glistening profits.
After all, such companies have access to other kinds of capital;
they don’t need private equity. And frankly, private equity is
generally not in the business of polishing things up for a
low-multiple return. It’s in the business of re-invention and
rebirth, with fireworks at the end.

During this kind of overhaul, do jobs get lost?
Unfortunately, in the early stages, they often do. It’s nearly
impossible to massively improve productivity by keeping
everything the same. But are companies saved? Again, yes. That’s
the whole point of private equity. You’re trying to get a
business from terrible to terrific, from dying to thriving. In
the process, some jobs may go, but in the best-case scenario,
with success down the road, many more will be created. And by
preventing a company from going under, jobs will certainly be
saved.

Now let’s talk about the leadership traits private equity’s
most successful practitioners tend to exhibit.

Every private equity acquisition begins with a sophisticated
negotiation between the PE firm, the corporate seller and the
employees of the business being sold. Usually, several firms are
vying for the business, but it’s not accurate to assume price is
the sole determinant of who wins. Many times, just as critical
is the case each private equity firm makes for itself, along
with its ability to bring contentious stakeholders to a shared
vision of the future. In short, most successful private equity
managers have well-honed skills in the art of getting tough
deals done.

Next, because of their familiarity with turning around
broken companies, private equity managers usually have a very
clear understanding of what it takes to establish a workable
balance sheet, how to develop strategy and how to execute that
strategy. Moreover, private equity managers tend to be very,
shall we say, un-academic about these pursuits. In the private
equity environment, fatheaded theories don’t get you very far.
Realism does.

Top private equity leaders also are typically very good at
talent management. You never hear that, but it’s true, and
here’s why. Everything about a successful turnaround depends on
people – picking the right ones to resurrect the broken company
and placing them in the right jobs from top to bottom to get it
all done. Think about it. In a well-run company, people make all
the difference. Imagine how much more important they are in a
rescue scenario. Which is why private equity people end up being
smart about building great teams – and doing so quickly.

Finally, when you’re trying to save a company these days,
rarely does the solution lie in hunkering down and keeping it
local. Rather, to regain your health, you need to globalize your
sourcing efforts, enter new markets, form a joint venture abroad
or set up a foreign R&D operation. Thus private equity firms
often goad their acquisitions into the borderless world, which
explains why most successful PE leaders tend to have global
mindsets about business, regulation, growth and geopolitics.

Which brings us back to Vice President Biden’s remarks.
Sophisticated negotiation skills, balance-sheet management,
strategy development and implementation, talent selection and a
global mindset sure seem like tools you’d want any president to
carry, don’t they?

Only politics would say it ain’t so.

(Reuters) – Once upon a time – i.e., eons ago – one of us had a summer internship that mainly involved playing golf with the boss, who appreciated the company of a college kid with a single-digit handicap. Not much work got done, but it didn’t seem to matter, particularly to the boss. The other one of us (the one whose handicap is so obscene it can’t be printed in a family publication) once had a summer job that revolved around asking, “Would you like your eggs bagged separately?” It was boring, sure, but the hours were great if hitting the pool is your kind of thing.

As the song goes, “Those were the days, my friends. We thought they’d never end….”

Well, they did. They really, really did. Today, due to economic conditions that need no explanation, most college grads have to fight and claw for entry-level jobs in their chosen fields, and many, perhaps as many as 25 percent, aren’t even able to get a well-shined shoe in the door.

So say goodbye to your father’s, or even your older brother’s, summer internship, when the office was, for all intents and purposes, where you passed the time between weekends at Cape Cod, and the best thing about going to work each day was that it meant – hallelujah! – you weren’t going to classes or taking exams.

Say hello instead to a summer that offers what might be your best hope of landing a real, live job upon graduation. That is – if you can just remember two little things.

O.K., maybe they aren’t little.

The first is to be keenly aware of who is courting whom this summer. Sure, the cheerful hiring people might have assured you that your internship is designed to introduce you to the company’s wonderful staff and culture and help you gain valuable industry experience, which is all well and good. Take that stuff in. But the bottom line is that, whether you’re working at an investment bank or a radio station, your summer internship should be more about giving than getting. Indeed, it should primarily be about you giving a helluva performance, over-delivering, making an impression with your insightful, unexpected ideas and terrific, sweat-the-details kind of output that prompts people to say, “Holy Cow, this kid really wants it.”

You need to do stuff that makes your boss look like a hero. Suggest a small process improvement, come up with a cool packaging idea, offer deep-dive insights into a customer segment. Do something, anything, that might make your boss think, “It would really stink if this kid worked at one of our competitors.” That’s the kind of wow you’re after…every single day.

Our second “little” piece of advice is both easier and simpler. Be likable. Just that. Fun, upbeat, friendly, authentic, filled with positive energy, happy, agreeable, chit-chatty about sports and the weather and The Avengers, or frankly, whatever everyone at your company likes to be chit-chatty about. Get in the game and play, even literally, if there’s a softball game to be had. Let people know you. Let them hear you laugh. Let them see your humanity. Sure, some people are so freakishly smart, their personalities don’t matter and they don’t have to make the kind of nice we suggest. But those people are rare, and most of them don’t need summer internships anyway because they’re millionaires by age 18, with a couple of patents or apps to their name.

Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention one last summer to-do item, which is not to take place at work but rather in the privacy of your own cheap rental. The pastor and author Terry A. Smith makes the case that people are happiest when they are working in their “Area of Destiny” – that gorgeous piece of emotional and intellectual real estate that exists at the intersection of what you’re uniquely good at and what deeply interests and excites you. We couldn’t agree more; indeed, we talk about “Area of Destiny” so often with our own college-aged kids that they’ve been known to greet us by saying, “My area of destiny is fine today, thanks, how’s yours?”

They’re joking, but it’s not a bad question to ask yourself. So this summer, while you’re over-delivering and winning likability points in extremis, also think long and hard about whether you’re on the road to a career that someday will give you the chance to simultaneously do what you’re good at and what you love. Because that is the place you want to land. It’s where you belong.

And the first step in that direction, dear summer intern, is getting an A on the job right now.

(Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review.)

(Reporting By Chris Kaufman)

“She’s just bitter she didn’t get promoted.”

“He’s been shooting his mouth off for years – and it’s
always nothing.”

Those lines sound familiar? If you work in business, they
probably do – it’s how people talk about whistleblowers.
Shocking? It’s just the truth. Even though whistleblowers may
have a noble reputation in the media, gracing magazine covers
and prime-time TV spots, when they surface within a company,
management almost always brushes them off with a discrediting
back story or a little piece of history that explains away all
their annoying accusations. And here’s why that happens: In the
vast majority of cases, whistleblowers are, to some degree,
crazy or vengeful or both.

Until, one terrible, awful day when, speaking out of
vengefulness or ethical earnestness, the whistleblower also
happens to be telling the truth. And then, well, you get a
crisis like the one Wal-Mart finds itself tangled in
today.

Now, make no mistake. We think Wal-Mart is a great company.
It’s created upward mobility for thousands of people and a
million-plus jobs around the world, and it remains the American
consumer’s greatest ally in the war against inflation.
Furthermore, the recent accusations against Wal-Mart are just
that – accusations.

But those allegations, proven true or not, still offer an
important lesson to everyone in business, and we don’t mean the
one that’s being widely bandied about right now – that big
companies like Wal-Mart, because of their size and power, engage
in corruption because they can. We don’t think that’s generally
true. Nor do we think the biggest take-away from the Wal-Mart
story is how hard it is for American companies to do business
abroad without bribery. Actually, it’s perfectly possible to
operate globally – and win – while playing by good old American
rules and regulations.

No, to us, the Wal-Mart story is most importantly a reminder
of the pervasive, even understandable, impulse within companies
to ignore whistleblowers because they’re so often time-wasters.
And it’s a reminder of why you can’t turn your back on them.

Ever.

In fact, the only way to deal with a whistleblower’s
accusations – again, every single time and often against your
own instincts – is with a hyper-bias toward believing that the
informant is onto something big. Such a bias must impel you to
investigate every claim ferociously. You may think it’s a waste
of time and money, and will go nowhere; you should be so lucky.
And for goodness’ sake, don’t let the investigation be conducted
by the boss who’s been accused of wrongdoing! Bring in an
outside agency to do the sleuthing, or at the very least,
executives outside the scope of the alleged problem, with no
relationship to the people involved. Yes, you may hate the whole
mishegaas and so might everyone it touches. But it’s the only
way to overcompensate for the propensity to wish whistleblowers
away with the perfunctory spot check or the “Everything OK?”
kind of look-see that usually occurs.

Now, in the months ahead, Wal-Mart will very likely
experience the five steps that characterize virtually every
organizational crisis. First, the company will quickly come to
see that its problem is actually much worse than it originally
appeared. That’s the nature of these kinds of things; the first
report of wrongdoing is usually just the tip of the iceberg.
Second, Wal-Mart will find there are no secrets in this world.
Every last detail of the Mexico situation – and of the corporate
cover-up, if there was one – will eventually seep out. Third,
Wal-Mart’s handling of the crisis will be depicted in the press
in the worst possible light. Being vilified goes with the
territory. And fourth, there will be “changes.” That is, someone
at Wal-Mart will be fired for what’s happened, and maybe many
more “someones” will share the fall.

Finally, though, Wal-Mart will become a better company for
it. That’s the good news about every ugly crisis. It teaches you
something your organization desperately needed to know and
usually ensures the same mistake will never happen again.

It’s too bad, though, that this crisis had to happen in the
first place. And it wouldn’t have, if Wal-Mart had done a very
hard, very necessary thing.

Taken every whistleblower at his word.

But ask those same people, “So, what morning show do you
watch?” and you’d just as likely get one big chorus back,
saying, “‘Today’”, of course!”

The “Today” show’s ratings domination is legendary.

Actually, make that “was” legendary. During the week of
April 9, the program drew 13,000 fewer viewers than its longtime
(and formerly distant) rival, “Good Morning America.” The loss,
as was so gaspingly reported, broke “Today”‘s epic 852-week
winning streak.

To which we say, “What a lucky break!”

No – not for GMA, but for “Today,” because its loss means
something very exciting is about to happen. The show is about to
start experiencing business as it should always be experienced
by every organization: as if each and every day were the last
quarter of the Super Bowl.

Gordon Gekko famously proclaimed greed to be the central
tenet of business. What tripe. The real, galvanizing truism
about business is that competition is good. In fact, it’s great.

Look, competition is what makes work more than clocking
hours and turns it into something powerfully exhilarating,
something about pushing harder, reaching farther and building
the future. How? By making companies think smarter, run faster
and operate more sharply. By driving teams to coalesce and
getting people to share ideas across all sorts of boundaries. By
sparking innovation in everything from product design to process
engineering.

But perhaps best of all, competition transforms work because
it takes people’s focus off the Byzantine internal workings of a
company – who’s got the bigger cubicle, who went to lunch with
the boss on Tuesday – and puts it where it belongs, on the
external world of customers and market dynamics. It replaces the
all-too-human proclivity for office politics with a much more
productive fixation on results, as in, “Let’s promote that new
guy Sam right away. Sure he’s a little rough around the edges,
but the customers adore him.”

Competition, you see, is all about having the guts to make
status-quo-busting decisions on a daily basis. It’s about
playing as though you’re not winning even if you are. Yes,
that’s hard, especially when your numbers are all right. And
especially when you’ve been comfortable for a good long while.
But if you ever hear yourself saying something like, “We’ve got
things under control,” slap yourself. If you don’t operate in a
heightened state of paranoia about even the competitive threats
you cannot yet see and don’t want to imagine, you’re asking to
decay, or worse, to be demolished. Just ask RIM, Nokia, Circuit
City, Sony and Best Buy.

Of course, it practically goes without saying that the
biggest beneficiaries of heightened competition are consumers.
When companies are trying to outdo each other, obviously the
customer experiences the upside of the fray. (Indeed, to see the
reverse of this theory in action, all you have to do is visit
your local DMV to witness the mind-numbing effects of monopolies
in action, so to speak.) The good news is, when consumers win,
so do many of the companies creatively competing to serve them.
It’s the ultimate virtuous economic circle.

So, sure, the people on the “Today” team must have felt
disappointed when their winning streak hit a wall. But to
repeat, we’re excited for them. We’re excited for any company
that gets to experience that kind of exhilaration – and the
flat-out fun that a good competitive fight brings to the game of
business.

And like millions of other customers, we can’t wait to enjoy
the results.

Of course, at the time, you sort of understood why the Bigs
had promoted the guy in the first place, and why they held out
hope for so long. He’d been a superstar salesman. Best the
company had seen in ages. But in the end, it turned out that all
the things that made him great as an individual performer made
him lousy as a people manager.

It happens all the time at work. A brilliant engineer
promoted to run R&D. A gifted reporter elevated to editor. A
cutting-edge scientist made head of the lab. First, cheers.
Then, after a bit, confusion about organizational direction,
mixed signals about values, hurt feelings left and right and,
eventually, chaos.

Look, in business, some people can really knock it out of
the park in their current jobs. They just can’t lead.

Smart companies get that reality. In fact, most have learned
the hard way that actually being a great leader involves unique
skills that even the most promising candidate for a leadership
job simply may not possess.

But do the American people get that reality, too?

You have to wonder. Because there’s an awful lot of noise
out there right now about campaign styles. President Obama has a
reputation built on his soaring oratory, while Mitt Romney,
clearly no fan of crowd scenes, can’t seem to get through a week
without an awkward (or worse, foot-in-mouth) moment.

The president really knows how to run for office, the
pundits note. Romney – not so much.

As if it matters.

It doesn’t, of course. Just as in business, in politics,
being very good at one job (like delivering well-written
speeches from a teleprompter) doesn’t necessarily make you very
good at the next (like leading the free world).

What voters need to do right now is stop focusing on stump
skills, or lack thereof, and start fixating on which candidate
will be the better president once the campaign is long over.
They need to stop asking, “Who’s more appealing on TV?” and
start asking, “Who’s got the right stuff to get America working
again?”

Yes, in some part, every person’s answer to that question
will be driven by the issues – from healthcare to taxes to
energy policy. And in this election, the ideological divide is
stark indeed, with Obama supporting government centralization
that borders on European-type socialism and Romney in favor of
decentralization, state and individual rights and free-market
capitalism.

Stark, too, is the difference between the candidates’
leadership styles.

Over the past three years, Obama has taken a sort of
divide-and-conquer approach, amassing a list of enemies that
would make Richard Nixon proud: bankers, healthcare insurance
providers, oil companies, wealthy taxpayers, Congress and, most
recently, the Supreme Court. Surely his supporters must think
this particular tactic is effective, but there can be no denying
that the country is more polarized than when Obama took office.

Without doubt, Romney is not the model leader (his apparent
lack of authenticity can be jarring), but he has a quality that
would serve him well as president – good old American
pragmatism. Perhaps that’s the businessman in him. Or perhaps
you just learn to do what you’ve got to do when you’re a GOP
governor in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts or the man
charged with salvaging the scandal-ridden Salt Lake City
Olympics. If Romney’s long record suggests anything, it’s that
he knows how to manage people and organizations to get things
accomplished without a lot of internecine warfare.

Look, Obama may be a great campaigner and Romney (to date)
somewhat the opposite. But neither man is running to be
Campaigner-in-Chief.

In politics, as in business, the leader’s job needs to be
filled by a leader, and no effective leader, regardless of
ideology, keeps an enemies list.

“Tensions are running very high here. I think we need to let things calm down, return to a more normal atmosphere, and then get on with business,” Crocker said in an interview from Kabul on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

He added that a full investigation of the incident was underway at the Bagram airbase near Kabul.

“This is not the time to decide that we are done here. We have got to redouble our efforts. We’ve got to create a situation that al Qaeda is not coming back,” Crocker said.

“If we decide we’re tired of it, al Qaeda and the Taliban certainly aren’t,” he said.

U.S. forces are scheduled to cede the lead role in combat operations in Afghanistan next year, but will keep fighting alongside Afghan troops under American plans announced recently.

The U.S. forces have been fighting in Afghanistan since a 2001 invasion that toppled the Taliban rulers who harbored the al Qaeda leaders responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States.

President Barack Obama apologized on Thursday in a letter to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the burning of copies of the Koran, which he called “inadvertent” and an “error.” Crocker added that Karzai accepts both publicly and privately that the burning was inadvertent.

Still, anger raged in Afghanistan for a sixth day on Sunday over desecration of the Muslim holy book.

Seven U.S. military trainers were wounded on Sunday when a grenade was thrown at their base in northern Afghanistan. At least four American troops have been killed in apparent revenge attacks in the past week, and dozens of Afghans have been killed or wounded in protests over the incident.

In a CNN interview from Rabat, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Sunday others need to join Karzai in calling for an end to the violence. “It is out of hand and it needs to stop.”

Crocker noted that Karzai has called for calm “almost since the beginning,” and Afghan security forces were working to quell the demonstrations. “They are very much in this fight trying to protect us,” Crocker said.

‘DANGEROUS SITUATION’

U.S. personnel working alongside Afghans in government ministries were removed on Saturday after two U.S. officers were killed at their desks in apparent retaliation for the Koran incident.

Clinton chided Republican U.S. presidential candidates for continuing criticism of Obama’s apology. “I find it somewhat troubling that our politics would enflame such a dangerous situation in Afghanistan,” she said.

“It was the right thing to do to have our president on record as saying this was not intentional, we deeply regret it,” Clinton said.

A leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, on Sunday stepped up his criticism of Obama. Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Romney said that for many Americans, considering the thousands of American deaths in Afghanistan, the apology “sticks in their throats.”

Pulling U.S. forces and civilians out of Afghan ministry offices after two U.S. officers were killed in the Interior Ministry in apparent retaliation for the Koran incident was, Romney said, “an extraordinary admission of a failure.”

His chief opponent, Republican Rick Santorum, said Karzai should apologize to the United States for the violent reaction to “something that was clearly inadvertent.”

“I think the response needs to be apologized for by Karzai and the Afghan people – of attacking and killing our men and women in uniform,” Santorum said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That’s the real crime here, not what our soldiers did.”

(Additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro, Writing by Jackie Frank; Editing by Will Dunham and Eric Beech)

“We put out the plan that reflects where the president
intended to go. This is our plan,” White House chief of staff
Jacob Lew said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

Lew said no religious organization will be required to pay
for or facilitate the coverage that it disagrees with since the
insurance companies are the ones who will pay.

Asked what incentive insurance companies would have to
provide contraception, Lew – Obama’s budget director until a few
weeks ago – said it would be cost effective just like other
preventive healthcare coverage.

“As somebody who’s done budgets for a lot of years, when
people tell me things don’t cost money, I ask a lot of
questions,” Lew said on ABC News’s “This Week with George
Stephanopoulos”.

“This is actually one of those exceptions to the rule. If
you look at the overall cost of providing healthcare to a woman,
the cost goes up, not down, if you take contraceptives out.”

Lew said the White House had not expected universal support
for contraceptive coverage, but did find backing from several
affected groups, including Catholic hospitals and charities.

“We didn’t expect to get the support of the bishops or all
Catholics,” Lew said on “Fox News Sunday.” He added on CBS’s
“Face the Nation” that the White House has “broad consensus, not
universal consensus. This is an approach that’s right.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a
statement saying Obama’s proposal involves “needless government
intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions”.

The Catholic leaders urged Congress to overturn the rule and
indicated they would also take up the issue in the courts.

COMPROMISE NOT ENOUGH, OPPONENTS SAY

The regulation at the center of the controversy requires
religious-affiliated groups such as charities, hospitals and
universities, but not churches themselves, to provide employees
with coverage for birth control as other health insurance
providers must do.

After an outcry from Catholic groups and Obama’s Republican
opponents, the president announced that religious employers
would not be required to offer free birth control to workers and
the onus would instead fall on insurers.

The compromise sought to accommodate religious organizations
like Catholic hospitals and universities that did not want to be
forced to provide free contraceptive coverage to employees.

“We think it is a very good resolution of the problem,” Lew
said on CNN. “It’s gotten the support of a wide range of
organizations from Catholic charities and the Catholic Health
Association to Planned Parenthood.”

But many still oppose it, including the Republican
candidates vying to become their party’s nominee to face Obama
in the Nov. 6 presidential election.

Republican congressman Paul Ryan called the compromise an
accounting trick and said there were enough votes in the House
of Representatives to block it.

“They’re forcing religious organizations, either directly or
indirectly, to pay for something that they find is a deeply
morally wrong thing and this is not what the government should
be doing,” Republican candidate Rick Santorum said on NBC’s
“Meet the Press”.

Santorum, a staunch Catholic who has attracted social
conservatives in his bid for the White House, said he has no
problem with the public policy of allowing women access to
contraception.

“The question is whether some religious organization should
be forced to pay for something that they believe is a moral
wrong,” he said. “And the answer to that is no and under the
Obama administration policy they are continuing to be forced to
do so.”

Jack Piotrowicz, a parishioner at a Catholic church in the
Philadelphia suburb of Glenside, criticized Obama for meddling.

“I see a government that is trying to do too much,”
Piotrowicz said. “This compromise to me, it seems like a kind of
cheap accounting trick. I don’t think this compromise is the
right move.”

Jose Florez, a Boston doctor, was not in favor of it either
and said the compromise did not go far enough.

“This represents a departure from a time honored practice in
U.S. traditions and it is an intrusion of government in
religious matters and private conscience,” he said after
attending a morning mass in Boston.

“There are other ways to achieve the goals of the
administration without forcing people to go against their
conscience,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Dave Warner in Glenside, Pennsylvania,
Lauren Keiper in Boston and Matt Spetalnick in Washington;
Writing by Deborah Charles; editing by Christopher Wilson)

“During the three-year period covered by the study, the extent of violence and abuse related to religion increased in more places than it decreased,” according to the report “Rising Restrictions on Religion.” Only about one percent of the world lives in countries that saw more religious tolerance during those years, it said.

The Pew Center review of 198 countries found those deemed restrictive or hostile in the previous report were growing even more so, while the opposite was found for those with more religious tolerance. A substantial rise in public hostility toward religious groups was seen in China, Nigeria, Thailand, Vietnam and Britain, while government restrictions rose substantially in Egypt and France.

The Pew Center looked at laws or other government policies aimed to ban particular faiths, limit preaching, give preference to particular religions or prohibit conversions. To measure hostility, it looked at sectarian violence, harassment over religious attire and other types of intimidation.

The countries most restrictive or hostile toward certain religions included India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Iran, China, Myanmar, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam, Nigeria and Bangladesh — although most of these did not show much change in the three years.

Read the full report here.

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