Breaking News Alert: Coalition Picks Maliki in Move That May End Iraq Stalemate Topic: Nuri al-Maliki, iraq, biodun igi by Biodun Iginla, BBC News
Fri, October 01, 2010 -- 10:27 AM ET -----
An alliance of Iraq's Shiite political blocs has chosen the incumbent, Nuri al-Maliki, as its nominee for prime minister, alliance officials said on Friday, ending months of wrangling that had stalled formation of a government.
The decision appeared to make it all but certain that Mr. Maliki would form a new government and continue as prime minister.
PISCATAWAY, N.J. – As prosecutors consider filing bias-crime charges against two college freshmen accused of streaming online video of a classmate's sexual encounter with another man, a huge divide has emerged between those who support the suspects and those who want to see them punished.
The saga that unfolded this week at Rutgers University has become a flashpoint for debate after the revelation that 18-year-old Tyler Clementi had jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 22.
Leading up to the suicide, a post appeared on a website catering to gay men seeking advice on what to do after learning that a roommate secretly filmed a liaison. While it's impossible to be certain that that post and subsequent ones were made by Clementi, they mirror the same timeline as the alleged filming and reflect the anguish someone in that situation might have felt.
Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another student, and Molly Wei, of Princeton, N.J., both 18, are charged with invasion of privacy, with the most serious charges carrying a penalty of up to five years in prison.
But Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce J. Kaplan said Thursday that more charges were possible under New Jersey's hate-crimes law.
"We will be making every effort to assess whether bias played a role in the incident, and, if so, we will bring appropriate charges," he said in a statement.
The legal question has to do with the motive.
A person can be found guilty of a bias crime in New Jersey if the jury agrees that he or she committed a crime because of a belief that the victim is a member of a protected group, such as a racial minority or gay.
Ravi's lawyer has not responded to requests for comment. Messages left with an attorney believed to be representing Wei were not returned.
High school friends of the suspects, both 2010 graduates of West Windsor-Plainsboro High, say the suspects have no problem with gay people.
"He had gay friends," Derek Yan, 16, told The Associated Press. Yan said that he chatted online with Ravi, an Ultimate Frisbee player, about college life in recent weeks. "He said he was lucky to have a good roommate," Yan said. "He said his roommate was cool."
Jim McGreevey, the state's former governor who resigned after he announced he was a "gay American," said Friday he was "filled with great sadness" at Clementi's suicide. He talked about the difficulties of coming to terms with being gay, especially at a young age.
"He was trying to find a community online, but at the same time basically being terrorized online, by roommates," he told ABC's "Good Morning America."
Numerous websites popped up in defense of the suspects, with some proclaiming their innocence or calling their alleged actions a prank. Countless other sites, however, were dedicated to bashing the suspects or calling for stiffer charges, including manslaughter.
The comments on the pages are emotional and sometimes vitriolic. Some postings call the suspects "sickos" and "cold-blooded killers" while others display homophobia and racism (both suspects are minorities), even thanking the suspects for their possible role in a gay man's death.
Luanne Peterpaul, who has worked as a prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer and serves as the vice chairwoman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said bias crimes can be hard to prove.
She said prosecutors should look at evidence including the Twitter messages Ravi may have used to alert friends to the alleged video. She said that there might be clues as to his intent.
Peterpaul said she believes that filming a man and a woman engaged in sex in a dorm room would not have had the same results.
"It's quite possible that maybe they would have videotaped an opposite-sex couple," she said. "But would there have been such a following?"
The saga took another twist when the website Gawker reported that someone started a discussion on a graphic gay-oriented website after realizing his roommate was "spying" on him with a webcam.
The author described his conflicted feelings after reading his roommate's tweets about the author kissing a guy in their room while he watched from afar. Should he report his roommate or request a room change? Would either help or just make things worse? The author later wrote that he told a resident assistant about the filming — and that he unplugged his roommate's computer and searched the room for hidden cameras before another liaison.
The last known communication from Clementi was on his Facebook page. It said, "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."
Friends were shocked that Clementi, a talented violinist who was known as quiet but happy, would have been embroiled in scandal — or would have killed himself.
"I would never expect this to happen to him," said John Shen, a student at the New York Institute of Technology and a high school friend of Clementi's who last saw him about a month ago. "He's such a good kid. I've never seen him angry."
Life is better for Brazilians than it was eight years ago. But Lula is leaving unsolved problems for his chosen successor, who lacks his personal magnetism
Sep 30th 2010 | BrasÍlia
Still a lot left for Dilma to do
THE “best president ever” is how Sandro, a flower-seller in São Paulo, describes Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Who will he vote for in the presidential election on October 3rd? “Dilma, for sure.” Why? A shrug and a laugh: “Continuity. And because Lula chose her.” His reasoning is echoed across Brazil, especially among the rural poor and migrants to the big cities. The economy is growing strongly. Jobs are being created, and incomes are rising. The man who presided over this is barred by the constitution from running for a third term. Who better to succeed him, voters ask, than the woman he endorses?
A year ago pundits agreed that Lula’s vast popularity was strictly personal, and could not be passed on at will. He had tried without success to get allies elected as state governors or mayors of big cities. That may be why José Serra of the opposition Party of Brazilian Social Democracy, a seasoned politician who long led the opinion polls, barely started campaigning until it was too late. He seemed to think that Lula’s choice, Dilma Rousseff, a colourless technocrat who was Lula’s chief of staff but has never held elected office, would be easy to beat.
He was wrong. Lula’s popularity, it turned out, could be transferred—but only on his going and only to his chosen successor. If the polls are right (see chart), Ms Rousseff will be Brazil’s next president. That is despite several brewing scandals. The most serious concerns Erenice Guerra, a longtime associate of Ms Rousseff who took over from her as chief of staff when she stepped down to start campaigning. Last month allegations surfaced that people linked to Ms Guerra, including her sons, had extracted bribes in the form of retainers and success fees from businesses hoping to win government contracts. Ms Guerra was quickly defenestrated. No evidence implicating either the president or his candidate has come out.
The opposition has tried to get voters to worry about this (Ms Rousseff is either incompetent or complicit, Mr Serra claimed). But few seem to be listening. The affair has knocked only a few points off Ms Rousseff’s commanding lead.
Instead, Brazilians are revelling in a golden moment. A country that used to fall over whenever the world economy wobbled was one of the last to go into recession in 2008 and one of the first out in 2009. Median earnings are rising and, despite a minimum wage at its highest in real terms since 1979, so is employment.
Since 2003 some 20m Brazilians have emerged from poverty and joined the market economy. These new consumers buy everything from cars to cookers and fridges to flights. To this burgeoning domestic market, add China’s appetite for Brazilian iron ore, meat, soya and more, and in economic terms this is probably “the best moment in the entire history of Brazil,” says Marcelo Neri of the Fundação Getulio Vargas, a university.
Brazil according to Lula
Lula’s remarkable life story—the child of dirt-poor migrants who became a metalworker and trade-union leader—and personal magnetism have helped him to sell “brand Brazil” around the world: a coming power, a profitable place to invest and a tolerant democracy where a man like him could become president. These qualities also mean that most Brazilians give him most of the credit for the improvement in their lot. Are they right?
In a recent interview with The Economist at the presidential palace in Brasília, Lula set out some ways in which Brazil has become a better place during his terms in office. “We are starting to lay steps so that the poorest begin to rise up to the lower-middle class and then to the middle-middle class,” he says. With national self-esteem rising and inequality falling, Brazil is poised under the next president to fulfil his dream of becoming “a country in which the great majority are middle-class” with high purchasing power and access to better education and health. Lula understands from personal experience what matters in helping poorer Brazilians get ahead. He is proud that, although he is the first president of Brazil without a university degree, he is the one who created the most universities and technical schools.
“Wherever you go in Brazil you will see work financed by the federal government,” he says, highlighting railways, power stations and basic sanitation. After 25 years in which the country failed to maintain its infrastructure, let alone build any more, it is “reacquiring the capacity to carry out the grand infrastructure works that Brazil needs.”
For many of the poor and working-class Brazilians who are his most ardent supporters, Lula’s crowning achievements have been big rises in the minimum wage and pensions, and the Bolsa Família programme, which gives 12m families small but life-changing amounts of cash in return for having their children vaccinated and keeping them in school. By boosting domestic demand, these policies have also contributed to economic growth.
Many better-off city dwellers agree that Lula deserves praise for bringing into the Brazilian mainstream the once-novel idea that reducing poverty is a proper aim of government (though others sneer snobbishly). But when asked what Lula has done for his country, such people also point to the policies he inherited from his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
As finance minister under Itamar Franco in 1993-94, Mr Cardoso tamed Brazil’s persistent hyperinflation with the Real Plan. As president between 1995 and 2002, he put in place policies that have given the country stability and growth. “Lula inherited sensible macroeconomic policies and was clever enough to realise it,” says André Villela of the Fundação Getulio Vargas. That involved ignoring the socialist economic ideas of his Workers’ Party (PT). Early in Lula’s presidency, his finance minister, António Palocci, saw off fears of default by tightening fiscal policy and repaying foreign-currency debt. Henrique Meirelles, a former international banker who has run the Central Bank for all of Lula’s presidency, has guaranteed monetary orthodoxy. Because of Lula, says Luiz Felipe Lampreia, who was Mr Cardoso’s foreign minister, “there is now a national consensus against macroeconomic foolishness.”
A mightier state
But the consensus breaks down on two issues. His critics argue that, given his popularity, Lula could have done more to fix some of Brazil’s deep-rooted problems. They also say that in his second term he allowed the state to become over-mighty.
The last time The Economist talked to Lula, in early 2006, he was emerging from a scandal that engulfed his first administration and almost ended his political career. In a scheme known as the mensalão (roughly, “big monthly stipend”) the PT had bought votes of congressmen from allied parties. Lula said then that in a second term his priority would be tax, political, labour and pension reforms. These are sorely needed: the tax system is multilayered and burdensome, politics prone to corruption and gridlock, labour laws rigid and anachronistic and pensions for public employees absurdly generous. Yet none of these reforms happened, despite (or perhaps because of) Lula’s soaring popularity.
Not for want of trying, is Lula’s response. He talks up his efforts to reach consensus on most of these issues, and blames “hidden enemies” in Congress who refused to match verbal support with votes. Indeed, when asked what he has learned about his country during eight years as president, Lula speaks of the difficulties of getting things done, especially public-investment projects. A president can find that by the time he has cut through red tape and persuaded state and local governments to co-operate, his four-year term is over. A big infrastructure project—and Brazil needs many, from roads, ports and airports to sewage works and power plants—could easily take “five years to solve all the problems, and two years to get the job done”. In Brazil, he concludes, “the president cannot always do what he wants, he does what he can”.
Not good enough, retort critics, who see Lula as having surfed the commodity boom on Mr Cardoso’s unpopular, but necessary, liberalising reforms. They accuse Lula of using the recession as an excuse to expand the state’s grip on the economy, either directly (with oil) or indirectly (through loans by state banks). They worry that he has strayed from the path of fiscal rectitude. The government has lost control over day-to-day spending on pay and pensions, says Marcelo de Paiva Abreu, an economist at the Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro, losing its chance to boost investment in infrastructure.
The increase in public spending in 2008 shortened the recession, but much of it has not been reversed even as the economy roared back to life. Some of it involves printing money, disguised by accounting tricks: while the government’s net debt is falling its gross debt is rising, and its deficit helps to keep Brazil’s interest rates high (though they are lower than a decade ago). “Such pro-cyclical spending makes no sense,” says Mauro Leos of Moody’s, a ratings agency. “When times are bad—and bad times always come—Brazil will be sorry it hasn’t been putting money aside.”
Lula agrees that the expanded role of the state should be temporary. “I don’t want the proprietorial state,” he insists, adding that “I respect the workings of the market.” But the lesson of the financial crisis is that the state should regulate better and be prepared to intervene when the market fails, as well as “inducing” private investment and acting “for the sake of the people who need it the most”.
Rather than reforms, opponents say that Lula has given priority to cementing his party’s grip on government. The past eight years have seen an “unprecedented” increase in the award of government jobs to political clients, according to Maria Celina D’Araújo, a political scientist at Rio’s Catholic University. Almost a quarter of senior managers in the federal administration are PT members, her research shows, and 45% are trade unionists. Under Mr Cardoso 40% of managers of state pension funds were trade unionists; under Lula, more than half are.
Although Brazil is far from one-party hegemony, there are other signs that Lula and the PT increasingly conflate what is good for the country with what is good for them. One party leader responded to revelations of corruption by warning of the perils of “too much” press freedom, while Lula complained that some publications “act as if they were a political party”.
Asked about fears that Brazil’s democracy could be threatened by an extension of these trends, Lula says this is “unthinkable”. But if such fears are among the most commonly mentioned reservations about his legacy, that is because they are amplified by the huge deep-sea oil reserves (known as pré-sal, since they lie beneath a volatile layer of salt) discovered a few years ago. If these can be brought to the surface and to shore they will turn Brazil into an oil power. But oil has a nasty habit of bringing corruption with it. The fund Lula wants to set up with oil revenues could, as he says, help Brazil to overcome poverty, low standards in education and limited investment in science and technology. Or it could provide a lucrative way to reward loyalty to party and president.
Lula makes light of the risks in lifting the oil. The recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico was caused by the “irresponsibility” of a private company which tried to extract oil in the “cheapest and quickest way possible”. Standards in Brazil, he insists, are higher. He dismisses the idea that the state is counting its barrels before they are pumped. His government decided to grant sole operating rights in unallocated fields to Petrobras, the national oil company, rather than grant concessions, as before, because “you offer risk-sharing contracts when there is risk. In the case of the pré-sal oil, we are sure.” It is a strange way to talk of the most technically demanding oil-extraction project on the planet.
The government has used a huge ($67 billion) new share issue by Petrobras, launched on September 23rd, to raise its stake in the company from 40% to 48%. It is paying for this partly by selling oil deposits to the firm and partly by more accounting sleight of hand involving the National Development Bank (BNDES). In all, state bodies bought 60% of the offered shares.
But it must also raise finance, either private or public, for its grand infrastructure plans, made more urgent by hosting the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. Since Brazil’s savings rate remains low, foreigners will have to pay for most of the projects. At the moment they seem keen to. The current-account deficit has reached 2.4% of GDP so far this year. But capital inflows help to make the real stronger, which is hard on exporters.
What next?
“Dilma is going to surprise the world,” says Lula. That is a near certainty, given how little is known about her. In the 1960s she was a Marxist revolutionary; in the 1970s she was jailed and tortured by Brazil’s military regime. More recently, as Lula’s energy minister and then chief of staff, she has been a competent manager, though with a notoriously short fuse. She was not an obvious successor to Lula. He chose her partly for lack of alternatives: the PT’s more prominent leaders were caught up in the mensalão or other scandals.
Asked whether he will remain the power behind the throne, Lula starts with flat denial. “You can be sure of one thing: I’m leaving,” he says, adding that he has no plans to run for election in 2014. “If I get Dilma elected and she is good, she’ll have to be a candidate for re-election.” But then ambivalence creeps in. “I’m a politician, and I’ll continue to be politically active,” he says, musing that when he steps down he may find it easier to talk about tricky political matters. “I will start by convincing my own party to accept political reform as a priority.” In practice, Ms Rousseff may have to govern in Lula’s long shadow.
Since she has spent much of her political life behind the scenes, little can be said about her ability to cope with the limelight. She lacks Lula’s faith, rooted in his trade-union background, in his ability to negotiate a deal, whatever the circumstances. At home that helped him to dominate his party and coalition. Abroad, it led him to assert Brazil’s right to join the best talking shops, such as the United Nations Security Council. He believes passionately in the power of personal diplomacy. “If I could give one piece of advice to the world’s presidents, it would be: ‘don’t outsource politics’.” But many would say he overestimates its possibilities. His most serious misstep came in Iran, when his attempt (with Turkey) to persuade Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to play by the world’s nuclear rules was spurned by the UN.
Ms Rousseff may feel the lack of such dealmaking abilities, as she tries to run a party and government no longer dwarfed by their leader, and perhaps in less favourable economic circumstances. She is likely to do less of Lula’s globetrotting while she feels her way at home.
What kind of government would she run? Plans for tightening fiscal policy have appeared in the press, attributed to sources close to her. So have predictions that Mr Palocci, who ran such a tight ship in Lula’s first term, might become her chief of staff. But also in that fight are people like José Dirceu, the architect of the mensalão, who plays an important role in her campaign. In September he told a group of PT members that the party would be more powerful under Ms Rousseff, since she represented the party project, whereas Lula was “twice as big as the party”. Luciano Coutinho, president of the BNDES and architect of the government’s industrial policy, might get the job of finance minister.
Then there is the PT’s main electoral ally, the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), a coalition of regional bigwigs with a voracious appetite for patronage. In August the PMDB’s leader, Michel Temer, who will be vice-president if Ms Rousseff is elected, told party members to campaign hard for her, saying that in return they would partake in what he described as the “sharing out of the bread”.
Where Ms Rousseff herself stands nobody bar her closest associates knows. Her early appointments and announcements will be scrutinised with unusual eagerness. Will she surround herself with austere economists, or party hacks, or believers in the state’s power to boost growth? Or a mix of all three? Does she plan to trim the budget deficit—or does she, like many on the left of her party, believe that growth makes such tedious rectitude unnecessary? Will she take some steps that Lula shirked, because of a desire to smooth her path to the throne, such as inviting private companies to run Brazil’s overstretched state-owned airports?
Ms Rousseff may have cause to wish that her predecessor had been bolder. But she is inheriting a better Brazil than he did, and that is in good part because of him. If one of Lula’s finest moments came right at the start of his presidency, another will come at the end, when he stands down after two terms, rather than changing the constitution to allow himself a third. “A popular left-winger but not a populist,” concludes Carlos Melo of Insper, a São Paulo business school. “This is something completely new and an example to the rest of Latin America.”
AP – Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, sitting in a wheelchair and wearing a gas mask, is rescued from a …
38 mins ago
QUITO, Ecuador – Ecuador was under a state of siege Friday, the streets quiet with the military in charge of public order, after soldiers rescued President Rafael Correa from a hospital where he'd been surrounded by police who roughed him up and tear-gassed him earlier.
Correa and his ministers called Thursday's revolt — in which insurgents also paralyzed the nation with airport shutdowns and highway blockades — an attempt to overthrow him and not just a simple insurrection by angry security force members over a new law that would cut benefits for public servants.
The region's presidents quickly showed their support for Correa, rushing to a meeting in Buenos Aires early Friday and condemning what many called a coup attempt and kidnapping of Correa. The U.S. also warned those who threaten Ecuador's democracy that the leftist Correa has Washington's full support.
There was no sign on the capital's streets Friday morning of the rebellious police who had thrown the country into chaos the previous day.
Quito's Mariscal Sucre airport and the airfields in Guayaquil and Manta, which were shut to international traffic Thursday by soldiers, reopened overnight.
At least two police officers and a soldier were killed and dozens injured in Thursday's mayhem, said Irina Cabezas, the vice president of congress. Dozens were injured.
At least five soldiers were wounded in the firefight at the hospital before Correa was removed at top speed in an SUV, according to the military and Red Cross.
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BATON ROUGE -- For some people, a giant underwater oil leak isn't solely an environmental disaster. It's also a delicious, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for research.
"I was praying for a small oil spill and I ended up with this," said Sonia Gallegos, an oceanographer at the Naval Research Lab at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Last year Gallegos received funding from NASA to study spills. This year she received a terrible, awesome gift from BP, and -- like 100 other scientists gathered at Louisiana State University on Thursday -- is now playing mediator between the brain and the heart.
"I'm very happy to have something to work with, but at the same time I live here," said Gallegos, who's working on automated detection of oil spills. "It breaks my heart. It's my home, and I understand the impact on people."
"I live two blocks from the beach in Bay St. Louis -- we smell the benzine," said her lab colleague Allen Reed, a geologist. "It's an opportunity, but it's very unwelcome in many ways."
Early Thursday morning the scientists and federal officials wolfed down danishes, mini doughnuts and coffee before engaging in a day-long mind meld. Curiously, the summit took place in a campus building named after LSU alumnus Lodwrick M. Cook, former chairman and chief executive of ARCO, an oil company that was acquired by BP in 2000.
"We're here to find out what we know, what we don't know and what we need to know," said Robert Gagosian, president of the District-based nonprofit Consortium for Ocean Leadership, which organized the event.
What they know: The oil will be a matter of concern and study for generations.
What they don't know: Where exactly the oil is going, how much there is, and what exactly it will do to wildlife and industry.
What they need to know: How to choreograph dozens of state, local and federal players, and how to harmonize streams of data into an accessible, coherent set that guides future action.
From a dais in front of round, white-clothed tables, Jane Lubchenco, administrator of NOAA, updated the crowd on the federal response, which in the next two months will remain focused on both the movement and immediate impact of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak. Within six months, the government hopes to calculate the impact of dispersants, conduct seafood surveys and quantify the injury to natural resources. In the longer term, it plans to study the impact on and the possible restoration of ecosystems, as well as the socioeconomic fallout in coastal states.
Lubchenco skipped through a PowerPoint presentation of charts with tiny numbers and swaths of color that depicted, by turns, the location of pre-impact assessment sites, the coordinates of data-gathering stations at sea and the forecast of surface oil movement over the next 72 hours. She also referenced the Interior Department's pre-impact assessment along the coast, and a "flow rate technical group" that had been assembled to determine the volume of oil.
The brisk rundown irked at least one scientist.
"The big problem is so far there's no central database where we can actually get hold of" this data, said Piers Chapman, head of the department of oceanography at Texas A&M University, during the question-and-answer session that followed. "The public feels there is a conspiracy to hide data."
"It's probably going to be a challenge to have all that available in one place," Lubchenco replied. "We are working on a collaborative effort to put all data together -- a product most likely to emerge is a spatially explicit Google-driven map so you can find what's where. . . . No one's hiding anything. It's a data management issue."
But the passion to share research and knowledge -- one of the prime reasons everyone gathered in the Lod Cook Alumni Center -- should take a back seat to cleanup efforts, said Edward B. Overton, an LSU chemist and professor emeritus.
"There's massive amounts of oil on the surface that is eminently skimmable," Overton said from the dais before attendees broke into smaller group discussions that were closed to the media. "If there's a skimmer in the world, it ought to be in the gulf today. . . . I'm happy we're studying it but we have to make sure we keep as much oil as possible off the shore. BP needs to stop the bloody well and the rest of the community needs to make sure that oil does not get to the shoreline."
An American of Turkish origin was one of the nine activists killed during Israel's raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, a U.S. official said Thursday.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the victim was Furkan Dogan, 19 years old, and that U.S. authorities in Turkey had met with Mr. Dogan's father to express condolences and to offer U.S. consular services, the Associated Press reported. She added that two other American citizens had been injured in raid and in a subsequent protest and the U.S. was seeking information about all three from Israel, AP reported.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Injured activist Almahti Alharati is taken to a hospital in Turkey after arriving from Israel. Hundreds of activists were flown back to Turkey early Thursday morning.
"Protecting the welfare of American citizens is a fundamental responsibility of our government and one that we take very seriously,'' she told reporters. "We are in constant contact with the Israeli government attempting to obtain more information about our citizens.''
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Mr. Dogan, who was born in Troy, N.Y., and held dual U.S-Turkish citizenship, had died of "gunshot wounds" but he declined to confirm reports that he had been shot multiple times in the head, AP reported. Mr. Crowley said U.S. consular officials had seen Mr. Dogan's body in a morgue in Israel before it was taken to Turkey but had not known he was a dual citizen at the time.
Mr. Dogan's father told Turkey's state-run Anatolia News Agency that he had identified his son's body and that he had been shot through the forehead. Still, he said, the family was not sad because they believed Mr. Dogan had died with honor.
"I feel my son has been blessed with heaven," he said. "I am hoping to be a father worthy of my son.''
Senior U.S. officials said Thursday that the Obama administration would "redouble" its efforts to get Israel to ease the siege on the Gaza strip. But these officials indicated the White House wasn't going to ask Prime Minister Netanyahu to formally end the blockade.
Rather, these officials said they believed there were ways to accelerate the introduction of important goods into Gaza, such as construction materials and food, while still allowing Israel to guard against the smuggling of weapons.
"We don't think it's in Israel's interest to maintain the status quo," Mr. Crowley said. But he added: "Given the history and reality, Israel has a very legitimate interest to inspect and control the flow of materials into Gaza."
Mrs. Clinton said no decision had yet been made about how to handle Mr. Dogan's death but renewed calls for Israel to "conduct a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation that conforms to international standards and gets to all the facts surrounding this tragic event."
"We are open to different ways to assuring that it is a credible investigation, including urging appropriate international participation," she told AP.
In Istanbul, about 10,000 mourners buried eight of the activists, with a further service due for a Turkish journalist who also was killed on the Mavi Marmara.
The crowd prayed before eight Turkish and Palestinian flag-draped coffins lined up in a row outside Istanbul's Fatih mosque in a traditional service for the dead, AP reported.
"Our friends have been massacred,'' Bulent Yildirim, the head of the Islamic charity group IHH that organized the flotilla, told the crowd.
Earlier in the day, hundreds of humanitarian-aid activists detained by Israeli commandos on their Gaza-bound flotilla returned to Istanbul, with crowds waving Palestinian flags and chanting anti-Israeli slogans. Some of those returning Thursday said more had died but were missing. They were unable, however, to name any of the missing.
By 3 a.m., as the activists boarded buses on the airport tarmac, a jubilant crowd of several thousand Turks had gathered to meet them, pushing through police cordons to reach the airport perimeter fence.
"Turkey is proud of you," "God is great" and "Zionist dogs will pay for this," the crowd chanted.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said nine bodies were on the planes, Israel's first indication, since the raid to halt the flotilla turned violent early Monday morning, that the dead were from Turkey. According to several news reports, one of those killed was a Turkish-American carrying a U.S. passport. U.S. officials had not confirmed the reports.
Activists on board a Gaza-bound flotilla return home to cheering crowds. Video courtesy of Reuters.
Turkey's energy minister, Taner Yildiz told reporters in Istanbul that Turkey was suspending all consideration of state to state energy and water projects with Israel, according to the Turkish IHA news agency. Mr. Yildiz said projects would be suspended until after relations with with Israel were normalized, the agency said. He named one project to deliver 50 million cubic meters of water per year, and another to extend the projected Blue Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Turkey to Israel.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned Israel for the incident, and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, had said early Wednesday that Turkey would review its ties with Israel if all Turks weren't released by the end of the day.
"If the Israelis do not lift the embargo on Gaza, we will form much larger flotillas in cooperation with NGOs from Europe and all over the world and we will send them both by sea and through Egypt, said Bulent Yildirim, leader of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, or IHH, which owns the Mavi Marmara, in a speech from an open-topped bus. Mr. Yildirim was on the Mavi Marmara when the Israeli commandos boarded.
Most of the activists were whisked away upon arrival in their buses without stopping. IHH organizers said they were being taken for medical checks.
The group of IHH leaders and foreign-language speakers that stopped to soak up the crowd's adulation and speak to the media appeared tired but victorious. They had conflicting accounts of what happened. Abdi Mahdi, a 30-year-old freelance photographer from Walthamstow London, said he was praying on the Mavi Marmara's deck with about 100 others when the Israelis attacked.
Mr. Mahdi first said they had all scattered "to look after each other" when the Israeli commandos pulled along side in dinghies and fired tear gas canisters on board without warning. He then acknowledged that the activists fought "with whatever we could find," adding that it was in self-defense. Mr. Mahdi spoke alongside several other Britons who held flowers they were given and punched the air before the jubilant crowd.
Gene St. Onge, a 63-year-old structural engineer from Oakland, Calif., was on the ship Sfendoni, behind the Mavi Marmara. Nobody fought on his boat, he said, but they tried to resist by blocking the wheelhouse with their bodies and holding onto the wheel. Israeli commandos pushed him down several times, Mr. Onge said, sporting a cut in his forehead. He said one person was hit in the head with a rifle butt while the ship's Greek captain suffered a burst ear drum and other injuries.
Mr. Onge said he saw the start of the fight on the Mavi Marmara. Eight to ten commandos standing in each small boat sought to scale the sides of the ship, but were driven away with fire hoses and objects tossed at them from above, he said. He said he wasn't able to see the rest.
Asked why people fought only on the Mavi Marmara, he said: "Well, they are Turkish."
"Feelings are stronger here," he explained, nodding at the roaring crowd. "Some might say they went too far, but they were protecting their boat in international waters. The point is, who attacked first? We were not spies, we had no weapons."
He said the detainees were treated roughly, given little food and allowed little sleep. They were questioned repeatedly by Israeli officers, he said. "Initially I think they were trying to flush out if we were Al Qaeda or something, but when it became obvious we weren't it was just a form of collective punishment I think.
Mr. Netanyahu, in a statement broadcast from his office, defended the operation Wednesday, saying terrorists affiliated with Hamas were to blame for the violence on board the Turkish-owned passenger ship, the Mavi Marmara. "This was not the Love Boat, it was the Hate Boat," he said.
The Free Gaza Movement, the Cyprus-based lead organizer of the flotilla, which was primarily manned and funded by the Turkish IHH charity, rejected the statement, saying Turkey had vetted all passengers to make sure none had ties to extremist groups and an independent security firm had searched the ships for weapons.
Israel's cabinet on Tuesday debated pressing charges against activists for allegedly attacking Israeli commandos after they descended from a helicopter onto the ship, but decided instead to send them home, according to Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor.
Israel's High Court of Justice considered a petition Wednesday to reverse the decision to forgo criminal procedures, but the petition failed to halt the deportation of activists.
In a statement to the High Court, Israel Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein defended the expulsion, arguing "public, security and diplomatic interests prevail'' over the need for a criminal investigation.
Meanwhile, Israel continued to transfer aid from the detained boats into the Gaza Strip, but alleged that Hamas, the Palestinian faction that controls the territory, was impeding shipments.
The United Nations Security Council called early Tuesday for an "impartial investigation" into the deadly events. While Israel's top ally, the U.S., hasn't backed an international investigation into the incident, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said the U.S. was open to "international participation" in the probe of what happened in the Mediterranean Sea.
The aid flotilla and the outcome of the raid have put Israel under heightened pressure at home and abroad to review its three-year blockade of the Gaza Strip. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday repeated a call for an end to the blockade.
Israel and Egypt began restricting the flow of goods into and out of Gaza in 2007, after Hamas seized control. Critics of the blockade say it has failed to weaken the Hamas government and has kept out crucial aid and basic materials, a claim Israel denies.
Mr. Netanyahu defended the blockade of Gaza Wednesday, saying it is needed to prevent missile attacks against Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. He said the aim of the flotilla was to break the blockade, not to bring aid to Gaza. "If the blockade had been broken, it would have been followed by dozens, hundreds of boats," he said. "Each boat could carry hundreds of missiles."
Egypt, which criticized the Israeli raid, opened its border with Gaza to humanitarian aid Tuesday and Wednesday.
Activists on an Irish ship are planning to test the blockade again in the coming days. Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen appealed to Israel to let the ship deliver its aid cargo to Gaza—but he conceded on Wednesday that supplies of concrete on board would pose a particular stumbling block because Israel considers it of military use.
The ship was supposed to join the flotilla that Israeli commandos intercepted Monday, but was delayed by mechanical problems.
Breaking from https://biginla.tripod.com/bbcnews : Buffett: Municipal Debt Meltdown Will Hit US Topic: warren buffett, us economic down
Add investment legend Warren Buffett to the list of those who warn of a municipal debt meltdown.
Many municipalities have promised overly generous retirement and health benefits to public workers without any viable plans to bring in the money necessary to pay for those benefits.
Add investment legend Warren Buffett to the list of those who warn of a municipal debt meltdown.
Many municipalities have promised overly generous retirement and health benefits to public workers without any viable plans to bring in the money necessary to pay for those benefits.
They have assumed unrealistic returns in their pension fund investments and unrealistic revenue from taxes.
The Pew Center on the States recently estimated that as of the end of 2008 budget years, states had $1 trillion less than needed to pay for future pensions and medical benefits. And that number doesn’t even reflect much of the losses suffered by pension fund investments in the second half of 2008.
“There will be a terrible problem, and then the question becomes will the federal government help,” Buffett said at a hearing of the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in New York, Bloomberg reports.
“I don’t know how I would rate them myself. It’s a bet on how the federal government will act over time.”
In May, Buffett said the feds may end up having to bail out some states from their extreme financial woes.
“It would be hard in the end for the federal government to turn away a state having extreme financial difficulty when they’ve gone to General Motors and other entities and saved them,” Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual meeting, Bloomberg reports.
“I don’t know how you would tell a state you’re going to stiff-arm them with all the bailouts of corporations.”
The Oracle of Omaha has been cutting municipal bond holdings in his company Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire’s portfolio of munis has dropped 17 percent since the end of 2008, to $3.9 billion as of March 31 from $4.7 billion.
The company’s 2009 annual report showed $16 billion at risk in derivatives tied to municipal debt, Bloomberg reports.
Buffett has made clear his bearishness toward municipal bonds by warning of the dangers of insuring those bonds.
In his 2009 letter to shareholders, the world’s second most wealthy man said local governments may be tempted to default on bonds whose payments are guaranteed by insurance companies rather than implement politically difficult tax hikes.
Insuring muni bonds “has the look today of a dangerous business,” Buffett wrote.
About $14.5 billion of municipal bonds defaulted in 2008 and 2009, according to Income Securities Advisor Inc., which studies distressed debt.
Los Angeles is one of the cities whose finances are in desperate straits.
“Los Angeles is facing a terminal fiscal crisis: between now and 2014 the city will likely declare bankruptcy,” former mayor Richard Riordan wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
“Yet Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council have been either unable or unwilling to face this fact.”
METAIRIE, La. – BP sliced off a pipe with giant shears Thursday in the latest bid to curtail the worst oil spill in U.S. history, but the cut was jagged and placing a cap over the gusher will now be more challenging.
BP turned to the shears after a diamond-tipped saw became stuck in the pipe halfway through the job, yet another frustrating delay in the six-week-old Gulf of Mexico spill.
The cap will be lowered and sealed over the leak, said Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man for the disaster. It won't be known how much oil BP can siphon to a tanker on the surface until the cap is fitted, but the irregular cut means it won't fit as snugly as officials hoped.
"We'll have to see when we get the containment cap on it just how effective it is," Allen said. "It will be a test and adapt phase as we move ahead, but it's a significant step forward."
Even if it works, BP engineers expect oil to continue leaking into the ocean.
The next chance to stop the flow won't come until two relief wells meant to plug the reservoir for good are finished in August.
BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward promised the company would clean up every drop of oil, and "restore the shoreline to its original state."
"We will be here for a very long time. We realize this is just the beginning," Hayward said Thursday.
This latest attempt to control the spill, the so-called cut-and-cap method, is considered risky because slicing away a section of the 20-inch-wide riser removed a kink in the pipe, and could temporarily increase the flow of oil by as much as 20 percent.
Hayward conceded the attempt was risky, but said the risk was reduced when the pipe was cut away.
Live video footage showed oil spewing uninterrupted out of the top of the blowout preventer, but Allen said it was unclear whether the flow had increased.
"I don't think we'll know until the containment cap is seated on there," he said. "We'll have to wait and see."
President Barack Obama will return to the Louisiana coast Friday to assess the latest efforts, his third trip to the region since the April 20 disaster. It's also his second visit in a week.
The White House said the federal government was sending BP a $69 million bill for costs so far in the spill. Spokesman Robert Gibbs said the bill was the first to be sent to the oil company, which leased the rig that exploded April 20 and sank two days later. Eleven people were killed.
So far, anywhere between 21 million and 46 million gallons of oil has spewed into the Gulf, according to government estimates.
Computer models show oil could wind up on the East Coast by early July, and even get carried on currents across the Atlantic Ocean, by Bermuda and toward Europe. The models showed oil entering the Gulf's loop current, the going around the tip of Florida and as far north as Cape Hatteras, N.C. Researchers with the National Center for Atmospheric Research cautioned that the models were not a forecast, and it's unlikely any oil reaching Europe would be harmful.
Oil drifted six miles from the Florida Panhandle's popular sugar-white beaches, and crews on the mainland were doing everything possible to limit the catastrophe.
Forecasters said the oil would probably wash up by Friday, threatening a delicate network of islands, bays and beaches that are a haven for wildlife and a major tourist destination dubbed the Redneck Riviera.
Officials said the slick sighted offshore consisted in part of "tar mats" about 500 feet by 2,000 feet in size.
Mark Johnecheck, a 68-year-old retired Navy captain from Pensacola, sat on a black folding chair as rough surf crashed ashore at Pensacola Beach and children splashed in the water. Johnecheck has lived in the Pensacola area since the 1960s, but doesn't come to the beach very often.
"The reason I'm here now is because I'm afraid it's going to be gone," he said. "I'm really afraid that the next time I come out here it's not going to look like this."
He said the arrival of the oil seems foregone: "I don't know what else they can do," he said. "It just makes you feel helpless."
His wife walks up and becomes emotional thinking about the oil. "It's like grieving somebody on their dying bed," said Marjorie Johnecheck, 62.
Next to her chair is a small white pail full of sugary Panhandle sand. She will take it home and put it in a decorative jar.
"I'm taking it home before it gets black," she said.
County officials set up the booms to block oil from reaching inland waterways but planned to leave beaches unprotected because they are too difficult to defend against the action of the waves and because they are easier to clean up.
Anne Wilson, a 62-year-old retired teachers aide who has lived in Pensacola Beach for the last year and a half, felt helpless.
"There's nothing more you can do," said Wilson, who lived in Valdez, Alaska, near the Exxon spill in 1989. "It's up to Mother Nature to take care of things. Humans can only do so much."
Florida's beaches play a crucial role in the state's tourism industry. At least 60 percent of vacation spending in the state during 2008 was in beachfront cities. Worried that reports of oil would scare tourists away, state officials are promoting interactive Web maps and Twitter feeds to show travelers — particularly those from overseas — how large the state is and how distant their destinations may be from the spill.
The effect on wildlife has grown, too.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported 522 dead birds — at least 38 of them oiled — along the Gulf coast states, and more than 80 oiled birds have been rescued. It's not clear exactly how many of the deaths can be attributed to the spill.
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