San Diego ex-mayor used charity funds to cover gambling debts

SAN DIEGO — She married a fabulously wealthy man decades her elder, and became the first female mayor of San Diego. But when Maureen O'Connor left public life, she spent countless hours seated in front of video-poker machines.

Over a nine-year period, she wagered an estimated $1 billion, including millions from a charity set up by her late husband, who founded Jack in the Box.

That was the portrait that emerged in court Thursday as the frail former mayor tearfully acknowledged she skimmed more than $2 million from a charity founded by her late husband, Robert O. Peterson.

O'Connor, 66, admitted in a plea deal that she had a gambling addiction and is nearly destitute. Her lawyer, prominent defense attorney Eugene Iredale, suggested that a brain tumor may have impaired her reasoning; he gave reporters copies of her brain scan from a 2011 surgery.

O'Connor's rapidly declining medical condition "renders it highly improbable — if not impossible — that she could be brought to trial," according to court documents filed by federal prosecutors.

"This is a sad day for the city of San Diego," said Assistant U.S. Atty. Phillip Halpern. "Maureen O'Connor was born and raised in this town. She rose from humble origins.... She dedicated much of her life, personal and professional, to improving this city."

The $1-billion gambling binge stretched from 2000 to 2009, according to court documents. In 2008 and 2009, when the fortune she had inherited was not enough, she began taking from the R.P. Foundation to cover her losses.

Despite being ahead more than $1 billion at one point, O'Connor "suffered even larger gambling losses," according to prosecutors. Her net loss, Iredale said, was about $13 million.

She was considered such a high-roller that Las Vegas casinos would send a private jet to pick her up in San Diego. Records show that O'Connor won $100,000 at the Barona casino in San Diego County, while at roughly the same time she needed to cash a $100,000 check at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

Those who knew the former political doyenne said she had become a recluse, inscrutable even to those she counted as friends.

"I considered myself one of her closest friends, but I would call her and she wouldn't return my call," said lawyer Louis Wolfsheimer. "I didn't want anything from her, just to know how she was. But it looked like she was becoming reclusive."

In a bargain with prosecutors, O'Connor agreed to repay $2,088,000 to the R.P. Foundation started by Peterson, which supported charities such as City of Hope, San Diego Hospice, and the Alzheimer's Assn., and was driven into insolvency in 2009 by O'Connor's misappropriation of funds, prosecutors said.

"I never meant to hurt the city," an emotional O'Connor told reporters gathered at a restaurant close to the federal courthouse. She promised to repay the foundation but declined to answer questions.

Prosecutors agreed to defer prosecution for two years. If O'Connor violates no further laws and makes restitution, the charge of making illegal financial transactions may be dismissed. Under the agreement, O'Connor acknowledged her guilt but was allowed to plead not guilty.

If convicted, O'Connor could have faced a maximum 10-year prison sentence and a fine of up to $250,000.

The daughter of a boxer who made his living as a cabbie and sometime bookie, O'Connor, a Democrat, rocketed to political prominence in 1971 when she was elected to the City Council at age 25. A onetime champion swimmer, O'Connor was working as a physical education teacher at a Catholic school and was pushed into politics when a group of students she took to a City Council meeting was treated rudely.

She met Peterson, 30 years her senior, when the Republican known for supporting liberal candidates and liberal causes offered to contribute to her council campaign. Political reform was in the air, and once elected, O'Connor helped persuade the council to adopt contribution limits, a reform later emulated by the state.

A close ally of then-Mayor Pete Wilson, O'Connor served two terms on the council and later was appointed to the Port Commission.

After marrying Peterson, O'Connor became a political anomaly in San Diego: although wealthy, she cultivated a base of political support in lower-income neighborhoods south of Interstate 8, the traditional dividing line of San Diego politics. When she traveled in minority neighborhoods, adults would come from their homes to wave at her; to all, she was known merely as Maureen.

As mayor, O'Connor organized a Russian arts festival and prowled the streets with the police chief, talking to prostitutes as she and Chief Bob Burgreen looked for information about a string of killings targeting streetwalkers. She went incognito as a homeless person to see how the homeless were treated in San Diego; she worked on a city garbage truck to experience the day-to-day life of blue-collar city workers.

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Israel Museum’s Herod Show Draws Anger Over Use of West Bank Objects

Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency

The exhibition “Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey” includes a reconstruction of his tomb, with his sarcophagus, center.

JERUSALEM — In one room sits a sarcophagus of reddish-pink limestone believed to have held the body of King Herod, painstakingly reconstructed after having been smashed to bits centuries ago. In another, there are frescoes from Herod’s elaborate underground palace, pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. Throughout, elaborate animated videos show the king’s audacious construction — atop the desert fortress Masada; at his burial place, Herodium; and his most famous work, the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

The Israel Museum on Tuesday opened its most ambitious archaeological exhibition and the world’s first devoted to Herod, the lionized and demonized Rome-appointed king of Judea, who reigned from 37 to 4 B.C.E. and is among the most seminal and contentious figures in Jewish history. But the exhibition, which the museum director described as a “massive enterprise” that involved sifting through 30 tons of material from Herodium and reconstructing 250 artifacts, has also brought its own bit of controversy.

The Palestinian Authority says the exhibition is a violation of international law because much of its material was taken from near Bethlehem and Jericho, both in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. An Israeli group of archaeologists and activists complains that the museum, however unwittingly, is helping the Jewish settlement movement advance its contention that the West Bank should be part of Israel and not a Palestinian state.

“What the Israel Museum is doing is like coming and saying, ‘Listen, the heritage of the West Bank is part of our heritage first of all,’ ” said Yonathan Mizrachi, an archaeologist who helped found the Israeli group, Emek Shaveh, in 2009. “It’s part of the idea to create the narrative that those sites, no matter what the political solution,” are “part of the Israeli identity.”

James S. Snyder, the director of the museum, dismissed such criticism as propaganda and political opportunism, saying the Oslo Accords signed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s give Israel responsibility for antiquities in the West Bank until a final-status arrangement is in place. The accords call for the two sides to work together to protect archaeological sites and allow for excavation, with a gradual transfer of control to the Palestinians.

Mr. Snyder said all the material taken from Palestinian territory would be returned if the conflict could be resolved and an appropriate place to keep it was created. He noted that the museum had spent a “huge” sum — he would not specify how much — to restore and make available for public consumption artifacts that might otherwise have been lost, like many of the antiquities in Iraq and Egypt.

“We’re not about geopolitics, we’re not about minefields, we’re about trying to do the best and the right thing for the long term for material cultural heritage,” Mr. Snyder said. “Our goal was to invest in the preservation of this material and return it to the sites. We are but custodians, and we are always ready for it to be where it belongs.”

But Hamdan Taha, director of the Palestinian Authority’s department of antiquities and cultural heritage, said that while Oslo provides for Israel’s excavation in the West Bank, exhibiting the material was another story. He complained that the Palestinians were never consulted about the project, which he called “an aggression against Palestinian cultural rights in their own land,” and said it would “not help to reconstruct peace between the Palestinians and Israel.”

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Ehud Netzer, a Hebrew University archaeologist who spent 40 years searching for Herod’s burial place before discovering it in 2007 at Herodium. He died after being injured in a fall at the site in 2010. The tholos, a circular set of columns that topped the tomb, is partly rebuilt in the exhibition, along with the sarcophagus said to be that of Herod and two others.

The many rooms are filled with pottery, coins, busts and frescoes that illustrate the legend of Herod. The king has been admired by historians for his remarkable buildings, but condemned for the murder of his wife and children, among many others. His Judaism was questioned, and he was often denounced as a puppet of Rome, an image the exhibition does little to defy as it explores his relationships with Antony and Cleopatra, Augustus and Marcus Agrippa.

Shmuel Browns, a tour guide and expert on Herodium who helped Netzer excavate the site as a volunteer, said he was awed by the meticulous reconstruction, particularly of a large basin adorned with several heads that was found in pieces in two disparate places at the site, now an Israeli national park.

“They’ve built things from what was found that you could never imagine from what you saw at the site,” Mr. Browns said. “The message is very, very strong about who Herod is and what he did. He wasn’t intimidated by topography, he wasn’t intimidated by material, he wasn’t intimidated by lack of water.

“He’s a fascinating character,” Mr. Browns added. “He just got very, very bad press.”

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Lady Gaga Cancels Born This Way Ball Tour Due to Severe Injury

02/13/2013 at 08:50 PM EST

It's a somber week for Lady Gaga – and her Little Monsters.

Following Tuesday's Facebook announcement that she was "devastated and sad" because she couldn't walk and had to postpone several Born This Way Ball concerts, the pop star, 26, has officially canceled the remaining dates of her world tour.

"After additional tests this morning to review the severity of the issue, it has been determined that Lady Gaga has a labral tear of the right hip," the singer's rep told PEOPLE Wednesday in a statement. "She will need surgery to repair the problem, followed by strict down time to recover. This unfortunately, will force her to cancel the tour, so she can heal."

Refunds for the cancelled performances will be available at point of purchase starting on Thursday.

"I hope you can forgive me, as it is nearly impossible for me to forgive myself," she wrote the previous day of postponing the dates. "I hate this. I hate this so much. I love you and I'm sorry."

Get well, Gaga!

•Reporting by CHUCK ARNOLD

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Clues to why most survived China melamine scandal

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists wondering why some children and not others survived one of China's worst food safety scandals have uncovered a suspect: germs that live in the gut.

In 2008, at least six babies died and 300,000 became sick after being fed infant formula that had been deliberately and illegally tainted with the industrial chemical melamine. There were some lingering puzzles: How did it cause kidney failure, and why wasn't everyone equally at risk?

A team of researchers from the U.S. and China re-examined those questions in a series of studies in rats. In findings released Wednesday, they reported that certain intestinal bacteria play a crucial role in how the body handles melamine.

The intestines of all mammals teem with different species of bacteria that perform different jobs. To see if one of those activities involves processing melamine, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Shanghai Jiao Tong University gave lab rats antibiotics to kill off some of the germs — and then fed them melamine.

The antibiotic-treated rats excreted twice as much of the melamine as rats that didn't get antibiotics, and they experienced fewer kidney stones and other damage.

A closer look identified why: A particular intestinal germ — named Klebsiella terrigena — was metabolizing melamine to create a more toxic byproduct, the team reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Previous studies have estimated that fewer than 1 percent of healthy people harbor that bacteria species. A similar fraction of melamine-exposed children in China got sick, the researchers wrote. But proving that link would require studying stool samples preserved from affected children, they cautioned.

Still, the research is pretty strong, said microbiologist Jack Gilbert of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, who wasn't involved in the new study.

More importantly, "this paper adds to a growing body of evidence which suggests that microbes in the body play a significant role in our response to toxicity and in our health in general," Gilbert said.

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Christopher Dorner hid in plain sight

To track Christopher Dorner, police from dozens of agencies chased tips across multiple states and into Mexico. But it appears now that he found a hiding place where searchers were thickest.

It is unclear how long Dorner, 33, was hunkered down in the cabin in the 1200 block of Club View Drive, in the snowy mountains near Big Bear. But the cabin was so close to the manhunt command post and to an adjacent press area that countless police and reporters would have fallen in his line of vision.

Questions abounded Wednesday about how Dorner managed to evade capture at the very center of the manhunt, a day after he apparently died in another cabin nearby during a police siege.

Authorities are trying to confirm whether charred remains found in the cabin, which caught fire after police lobbed incendiary tear gas inside, belonged to Dorner.

Authorities declared the manhunt over Wednesday. And the Los Angeles Police Department, which had been on frequent tactical alerts, has resumed normal operations. Most of the protective details have been called off the 50 or so families who were threatened in an online manifesto police say Dorner wrote.

Dorner, an ex-LAPD officer embittered by his firing, killed the daughter of a retired LAPD captain, her fiance and two law officers during a nine-day rampage that began in Irvine, police say.

On Feb. 7, authorities found the smoking wreckage of Dorner's Nissan Titan in the Big Bear area, triggering a massive search. Could Dorner, who reportedly bragged about his military and survivalist skills, survive on the cold mountain? Could he have staged the burning truck as a diversion, and already be hundreds of miles away? Was he dead?

San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department officials said the search included more than 600 cabins over eight square miles in the Big Bear area, where many of the structures are empty vacation homes. But Jeanne Kelly, who lives blocks from where Dorner was apparently holed up, said searchers never knocked on her door.

"I think if they searched every house, they probably would've found him," said Kelly, 61. "I hate to knock them."

Jim Rose lives half a mile from the command center, and said searchers never knocked on his door either. "One friend said 'OK, so much for the inspection,' " said Rose, 78.

At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, sheriff's officials defended the search. They said deputies checked the general area extensively and said they did not identify signs of forced entry at that particular cabin.

Officials said the cabin was last rented Feb. 6, a day before Dorner's truck was found burning nearby.

Jack Gaston and his wife, Donna, said they are happy the search is over and hope life will return to normal on the mountain, where roads were closed and residents passed through multiple police checkpoints over the last week.

They said they were shocked that Dorner had still been in the area. "We figured he was five states away from here," Donna Gaston said.

The mayhem began Feb. 3, when Monica Quan, daughter of a retired LAPD captain, and her fiance, Keith Lawrence, were found shot to death in an Irvine parking garage.

Police soon found a Facebook manifesto believed to be Dorner's, which vowed "unconventional and asymmetrical warfare" against police and their families for what he called his unfair firing from the LAPD.

On Feb. 7, hours after apparently trying to steal a boat in Point Loma, Dorner opened fire on two Riverside officers, killing one of them, Michael Crain. In Torrance, police mistakenly shot at two trucks wrongly believed to be Dorner's, hitting a 71-year-old woman in the back.

Then police found Dorner's burning pickup truck and converged en masse on the Big Bear area. On Tuesday morning, two housecleaners entered the condominium on Club View Drive where Dorner was hiding. Police say Dorner tied them up, then stole a purple Nissan.

California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman Andrew Hughan said game wardens spotted Dorner tailgating a school bus on Highway 38, apparently as protection against spike-strips police might deploy.

He said Dorner lost the wardens in the ensuing chase, then crashed into a snow berm.

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Taking Guns to Holy Ground in Mexico City

Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

Mexican soldiers evaluated guns last month in Mexico City. The city has largely been spared the violence of other areas.

MEXICO CITY — A young woman cradling a large crucifix left Mexico’s holiest shrine, the Basilica of St. Mary of Guadalupe, on a recent afternoon and stopped at a tent outside, where soldiers were piling up pistols and rifles on a table, part of a citywide cash-for-guns program.

The woman had brought the crucifix to be blessed, but the sight of the tent reminded her father, who was with her, that he could finally get rid of the .22-caliber pistol and the .38-caliber revolver he kept at home.

“I have had them for 40 years, and I have never used them or will use them,” said the 67-year-old man, who declined to give his name, citing the gun plan’s anonymity. “So I might as well exchange them.”

Mexico City officials have invited residents to drop off their antique pistols, rusted rifles, Saturday night specials, air guns, even their grenades — no names, no questions — hoping to put a dent in the number of weapons they believe are hidden in people’s homes, avoid accidents and maybe even reduce violent crime.

They chose the basilica in the belief that people would feel more confident turning over their weapons on holy ground.

“It’s neutral territory,” said Rosa Icela Rodríguez, the city’s secretary of social development. People may not trust the police or the government, she said, but “who doesn’t know the basilica?”

The capital has largely been spared the gun violence that has ravaged much of the country. The city of nearly nine million had an average of slightly more than two killings a day last year, a rate lower than that of many large cities in the United States.

But in November, a 10-year-old boy at the movies was killed when a stray bullet fired into the air outside pierced the cinema’s roof. The killing struck a nerve here, leading to calls for action.

City officials responded by shifting the desultory and poorly publicized efforts of the past into overdrive.

They are sending social workers door to door to remind residents that it is illegal to have a gun without a permit and that a gun at home does not guarantee protection. The workers have been spreading the word about the exchange and compiling an informal census on attitudes about guns. The buyback program, which began in December, has so far collected almost 3,500 guns, as well as ammunition and grenades.

Unlike the United States, where proposals for stricter gun laws are driving a heated political debate, Mexico has strict gun laws and little formal opposition to them. Mexico’s Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, but that right has been severely restricted.

It is virtually impossible to buy a gun legally; there is only one gun shop in the country, and it is run by the army. The kinds of guns people can buy are sharply limited and require a permit first. Private gun sales also require a permit, and carrying a gun outside one’s home requires a separate document.

The Small Arms Survey, a research project at the Graduate Institute of Research and Development in Geneva, estimates that Mexico has 15.5 million civilian-owned guns, about 15 guns for every 100 residents, compared with 99 per 100 in the United States.

But the number of legal guns in Mexico is even lower: only 2.8 million are registered, according to the Organization of American States.

The vast majority of guns here come from the United States, either smuggled in by criminal gangs or diverted from legal purchases by corrupt officials, according to Magda Coss, who has written about Mexico’s gun trade. Mexican leaders have blamed lax gun laws north of the border for the gun violence here, which the government says has taken about 50,000 lives in the past six years.

Long before the drug wars, Mexicans had an ambivalent relationship with guns. The history of insurrection and revolution created a popular mythology studded with armed folk heroes like Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary depicted in a famous photograph with a rifle and bandoleers across his chest.

Village festivals to celebrate the patron saint often end with drunken men lumbering down starlit country roads shooting their weapons into the air. Mexico’s fast-forward urbanization has simply moved the festivals and their shooting into densely populated working-class streets.

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Lady Gaga: I Can't Walk Due to Injury

02/12/2013 at 06:45 PM EST

Lady Gaga is feeling like a little monster for postponing concerts because of an injury.

"I barely know what to say," she writes on her Facebook page, Tuesday. "I've been hiding a show injury and chronic pain for some time now, [and] over the past month it has worsened. I've been praying it would heal. I hid it from my staff. I didn't want to disappoint my amazing fans. However, after last night's performance I could not walk and still can't."

The pop star, 26 – whose Twitter page explains that she has a case of synovitis, which is severe inflammation of the joints – was forced to postpone two concerts in Chicago, one in Detroit and one in Hamilton, Ontario.

"I hope you can forgive me, as it is nearly impossible for me to forgive myself," the rest of her Facebook post says. "I'm devastated & sad. It will hopefully heal as soon as possible. I hate this. I hate this so much. I love you and I'm sorry."

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Study questions kidney cancer treatment in elderly

In a stunning example of when treatment might be worse than the disease, a large review of Medicare records finds that older people with small kidney tumors were much less likely to die over the next five years if doctors monitored them instead of operating right away.

Even though nearly all of these tumors turned out to be cancer, they rarely proved fatal. And surgery roughly doubled patients' risk of developing heart problems or dying of other causes, doctors found.

After five years, 24 percent of those who had surgery had died, compared to only 13 percent of those who chose monitoring. Just 3 percent of people in each group died of kidney cancer.

The study only involved people 66 and older, but half of all kidney cancers occur in this age group. Younger people with longer life expectancies should still be offered surgery, doctors stressed.

The study also was observational — not an experiment where some people were given surgery and others were monitored, so it cannot prove which approach is best. Yet it offers a real-world look at how more than 7,000 Medicare patients with kidney tumors fared. Surgery is the standard treatment now.

"I think it should change care" and that older patients should be told "that they don't necessarily need to have the kidney tumor removed," said Dr. William Huang of New York University Langone Medical Center. "If the treatment doesn't improve cancer outcomes, then we should consider leaving them alone."

He led the study and will give results at a medical meeting in Orlando, Fla., later this week. The research was discussed Tuesday in a telephone news conference sponsored by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and two other cancer groups.

In the United States, about 65,000 new cases of kidney cancer and 13,700 deaths from the disease are expected this year. Two-thirds of cases are diagnosed at the local stage, when five-year survival is more than 90 percent.

However, most kidney tumors these days are found not because they cause symptoms, but are spotted by accident when people are having an X-ray or other imaging test for something else, like back trouble or chest pain.

Cancer experts increasingly question the need to treat certain slow-growing cancers that are not causing symptoms — prostate cancer in particular. Researchers wanted to know how life-threatening small kidney tumors were, especially in older people most likely to suffer complications from surgery.

They used federal cancer registries and Medicare records from 2000 to 2007 to find 8,317 people 66 and older with kidney tumors less than 1.5 inches wide.

Cancer was confirmed in 7,148 of them. About three-quarters of them had surgery and the rest chose to be monitored with periodic imaging tests.

After five years, 1,536 had died, including 191 of kidney cancer. For every 100 patients who chose monitoring, 11 more were alive at the five-year mark compared to the surgery group. Only 6 percent of those who chose monitoring eventually had surgery.

Furthermore, 27 percent of the surgery group but only 13 percent of the monitoring group developed a cardiovascular problem such as a heart attack, heart disease or stroke. These problems were more likely if doctors removed the entire kidney instead of just a part of it.

The results may help doctors persuade more patients to give monitoring a chance, said a cancer specialist with no role in the research, Dr. Bruce Roth of Washington University in St. Louis.

Some patients with any abnormality "can't sleep at night until something's done about it," he said. Doctors need to say, "We're not sticking our head in the sand, we're going to follow this" and can operate if it gets worse.

One of Huang's patients — 81-year-old Rhona Landorf, who lives in New York City — needed little persuasion.

"I was very happy not to have to be operated on," she said. "He said it's very slow growing and that having an operation would be worse for me than the cancer."

Landorf said her father had been a doctor, and she trusts her doctors' advice. Does she think about her tumor? "Not at all," she said.

___

Online:

Kidney cancer info: http://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/kidney-cancer

and http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/kidney

Study: http://gucasym.org

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Deaths of endangered fish curtail water exports

In a step that has become more routine over the last decade, water exports to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California have been reduced to avoid killing endangered delta smelt.

State and federal water managers said Tuesday that early winter pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta has been curtailed because too many of the native fish were dying at the delta's export pumps.

At this point it is difficult to say what effect the pumping cutbacks could have on water deliveries. December storms have left crucial Northern California reservoirs with slightly more water than usual for this time of year, although after a dry January, statewide snowpack is below normal for the date.

Proponents of a controversial proposal to change the way water supplies are conveyed through the delta immediately cited the export reductions, arguing that the cuts could have been avoided with the new system.

"This is all too familiar a story," said Mark Cowin, director of the state Department of Water Resources. "This conflict will continue to play out year after year until we make fundamental changes in the way we manage the delta."

State and federal water officials — along with the biggest urban water and irrigation districts in California — are advocating the construction of two massive tunnels that would carry supplies beneath the delta to southbound aqueducts from a new diversion point on the Sacramento River. That would mean less water is pumped directly from the south delta, avoiding harm to the smelt and, backers hope, the accompanying pumping restrictions.

Cowin said computer modeling shows an additional 700,000 acre-feet of water could have been sent south and to the Bay Area since Nov. 1 if the new diversion had been in place, enough to irrigate more than 200,000 acres or supply 1.4 million homes.

Opponents of that plan warn that taking large volumes of water from the Sacramento River could create problems for another fish, the endangered salmon that migrate up the river to their spawning grounds. Delta farmers also worry that with less fresh water flowing through the delta, their irrigation supplies could grow saltier, hurting crops.

State and federal officials also acknowledge that even with the tunnel system, they will not be able to guarantee a certain level of water deliveries to farms and cities south of the delta.

It was probably the big December storms that drew smelt in the direction of the pumps. The finger-sized fish likes muddy water. When winter rains flush runoff into the delta, the increased turbidity acts as a signal to the smelt to swim to the interior — closer to the pumps — as they prepare to spawn.

At the same time state officials were discussing the water cutbacks, Southern California environmentalists who oppose the $14-billion tunnel project announced an advertising campaign in which they portray the proposal as a costly boondoggle that would drive up water rates.

bettina.boxall@latimes.com

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Militant Threats Test Pentagon’s Role in Africa

Pool photo by

Gen. William E. Ward, left, departed as Africa Command leader under a cloud, succeeded by Gen. Carter F. Ham in 2011.

NIAMEY, Niger — Created five years ago to focus on training the armed forces of dozens of African nations and strengthening social, political and economic programs, the Pentagon’s Africa Command now finds itself on a more urgent mission: confronting a new generation of Islamist militants who are testing the United States’ resolve to fight terrorism without being drawn into a major conflict.

Some military and Congressional critics question whether the command is up to dealing with its dual mission, and some influential lawmakers warn that Africom, with its headquarters in Germany, is understaffed and poorly financed for challenges that include countering Al Qaeda’s fighters in Mali, Islamic extremists in Libya, drug traffickers in West Africa and armed rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The leader of the command, Gen. Carter F. Ham, must straddle the new and the old missions, as he demonstrated one day last month when he flew to the northern reaches of this largely desert nation to watch United States troops train Niger’s fledgling border corps in basic skills to help combat Al Qaeda’s branch in North and West Africa. Then, within hours, he was back here in the capital for an urgent secure phone call from Washington to weigh what kind of advanced military support or surveillance the Pentagon could provide a French-led operation to blunt an Islamist offensive in neighboring Mali.

“The command is searching to find the right balance between the press of current military operations and the vision of longer-term engagement, helping Africans develop greater capacity for themselves,” said Christopher W. Dell, a former United States ambassador to Angola and Zimbabwe, who is General Ham’s deputy for civil-military activities.

Africom has an annual budget of about $300 million and 2,000 employees worldwide — an operation that Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, calls “an ‘economy of force’ effort.” By comparison, the military’s Central Command, which oversees Afghanistan and the Middle East, has a yearly budget of about $800 million and 5,000 employees.

With no assigned forces in the region except for those at a base in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, the command was caught napping last Sept. 11, critics contend, when it had no military forces poised to respond to the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. An independent review of the attack concluded that events had unfolded too quickly for any American forces to make a difference.

Still, controversy has dogged the command since its creation in 2008. Initial statements about its mission and scope of activity alarmed some African leaders and State Department officials, who feared that the Pentagon was trying to militarize diplomacy and development on the continent. These concerns led the command to set up its headquarters in Stuttgart.

The command’s first boss, Gen. William E. Ward, left two years ago under a cloud. Pentagon investigators later found that General Ward had lavishly overspent on official trips. He was ordered to repay the government $82,000 and was forced to retire as a lieutenant general, a one-rank demotion.

Enter General Ham, who turns 61 this week and is the rare Army officer to have risen from private to four-star commander in a 40-year career. He has led troops in northern Iraq, overseen military operations at the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and helped lead reviews into the Defense Department’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the fatal shootings at Fort Hood, Tex.

His combat mettle was tested almost immediately. Within days of assuming command in March 2011, General Ham was leading the initial phase of the Libya air campaign, for which he earned high marks from his civilian bosses at the Pentagon and the White House.

But the general, who will retire this spring, acknowledged in one of three interviews during his recent trip to Niger that the command’s ability to address the terrorist threat in Africa had been “mixed.”

His grades? “Pretty good” in Somalia, where the Shabab, Islamist militants, have been dealt several setbacks in the past year. “Less good” in Libya, Mali and other parts of North and West Africa, where the United States is hunting Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a militant leader who claimed responsibility for the attack on a gas field in Algeria last month. And lacking in Nigeria, where an Islamist extremist group, Boko Haram, poses a major threat.

“Frankly, the intelligence community has not focused a lot on this part of the world,” General Ham said. “But we are starting to, out of necessity.”

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