Input: Ben Bernanke Says Fed Decision Not to Raise Rates Was ‘Reasonable’
The Federal Reserve made a reasonable decision to hold off on raising short-term interest rates at its September policy meeting, its former chairman, Ben Bernanke, said Wednesday in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Bernanke, on a national book tour promoting a memoir released this week, has avoided speaking publicly about the choices facing his successor, Janet Yellen, as she considers unwinding the easy-money policies...
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It's about: The Fed made a reasonable decision to hold off on raising short-term interest rates at its September policy meeting, its former chairman, Ben Bernanke, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.


Input: Man allegedly tries to shoot arrow with marijuana attached into Wash. jail
A man is accused of trying to get marijuana into a Washington state jail by attaching it to an arrow he shot onto the roof.

A Whatcom County sheriff's employee saw the man step out of his pickup truck and use a bow to launch the arrow toward the jail's second-floor recreation area, but it missed its target.

Sheriff Bill Elfo says the man, identified as 36-year-old David Wayne Jordan, was arrested for investigation of introducing contraband into the jail, resisting arrest and obstructing law enforcement.

The Bellingham Herald reports Jordan served 20 days in the jail earlier this month for assault and resisting arrest.

The sheriff says Jordan told deputies he had been aiming at a squirrel, but he couldn't explain why he needed to attach marijuana to the arrow to go squirrel hunting.
What was this article about?
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It's about: A Whatcom County sheriff's employee saw the man step out of his pickup truck and use a bow to launch the arrow toward the jail's second-floor recreation area, but it missed its target.


Input: Slain General in Afghanistan Was Quietly Effective Leader, Known for Technical Skill
WASHINGTON — To Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, video games were simply another tool for soldiers headed to the battlefield, a way to rehearse for combat.

General Greene, 55, was one of the Army’s gadget gurus, an engineer by training whose missions usually did not involve guns and grenades. Instead, his goal was to integrate smartphones, video conferences and even virtual worlds into a military culture that often prized hardware rather than software.

It was the sort of technology that General Greene, who was killed in Afghanistan on Tuesday, used in frequent talks with his family back in the United States.

“One of the things he worked on over the years is the type of communications we use now,” his father, Harold F. Greene, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday night from his home in Guilderland, N.Y. “We conversed every week over videophone.”

Mr. Greene, 85, said they had discussed the war in Afghanistan, General Greene’s plans to return to the United States and his next career move.

A Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, said that a suspected Afghan soldier shot up to 15 people, including an American general who was killed, at a military training academy in Kabul.

General Greene’s last promotion came earlier this year when he was sent to Afghanistan to help complete the military transition from American to Afghan control as the United States prepared to withdraw. He was advising Afghan military officers on how to buy weaponry, how to staff battalions and how to acquire technology.

Unlike many high-ranking Army officers, General Greene, who was born in Albany and raised in upstate New York, did not go to West Point. He graduated in 1980 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he received a full Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarship, before receiving his commission as an engineer officer. He went on to earn a master’s degree in national security policy studies at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., and a Ph.D. in materials science from the University of Southern California.

In more than 30 years in the Army, General Greene had not seen combat before being sent to Afghanistan. Among members of the acquisitions and engineering staff, he was known for his interest not only in technology but also in more mundane matters.

“If you gave me one thing to fix tomorrow, it would be to rip out those godawful windows and put in state-of-the-art thermal windows and get some light in here,” he said in a 2011 speech as he was leaving his post as senior commander at the Natick Soldier Systems Center in Massachusetts.

His is a military family. General Greene’s wife, Col. Sue Myers, also served in the Army, and his son — he also has a daughter — is an active-duty soldier. And his father served in World War II.

“You’re talking about a guy who did his job, did it well, but not with a lot of noise,” one American military official said of General Greene, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to talk about the matter.

After working his way through the ranks — including posts in Athens and Istanbul, as well as in Fort Monmouth, N.J. — General Greene was promoted from colonel to brigadier general in 2009. At his promotion ceremony, Lt. Gen. Stephen M. Speakes, the Army’s deputy chief of staff at the time, called General Greene “somebody who has that singular ability to display wisdom” and “the rare abilities to make others better.”

General Greene’s military evaluations, his father said, praised him for inspiring others to work harder by fostering a collaborative culture that was not always the norm in the military.

“Their input was just as important as his,” Mr. Greene said of how his son worked with soldiers of lower rank.

General Greene’s collegial style and technical expertise helped him win another promotion in 2011, when he was assigned to be the program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors. He said in an interview after that appointment that improving night-vision devices and infrared technology would be crucial steps in helping soldiers.

When General Greene was finally tapped to go to Afghanistan this year, he did not hesitate.

“He felt it was part of his job,” Mr. Greene said. “He knew that what happened is a potential that goes with the job.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 6, 2014, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: A Quietly Effective Leader Known for Technical Skill. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
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It's about:
Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, a veteran acquisitions officer who had not seen combat before, was helping complete the transition to Afghan control.