WASHINGTON May 16 - The White House remains confident in the International Monetary Fund and its ability to execute its mission in the wake of the arrest of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a spokesman said on Monday.
"We note that the IMF has said that they have appointed an acting director and the IMF remains fully functional. And we remain confident in the institution of the IMF and its ability to continue to execute its mission effectively," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters traveling to Tennessee on Air Force One with President Barack Obama.
Asked if Washington had any concern that Strauss-Kahn's arrest would have any effect on its handling of some European countries' debt problems, Carney repeated: "We're confident that the IMF will continue to function effectively."
Strauss-Kahn appeared in court in New York on Monday for the first time since he was accused of trying to rape a hotel maid in a case that has sent shockwaves through French politics and left the IMF in turmoil.
His lawyers said he would plead not guilt to charges of a criminal sexual act, attempted rape and unlawful imprisonment.
Twin bomb attacks on a paramilitary force academy in north-west Pakistan have killed 80 people, police say.
At least 120 people were wounded in the blasts at the training centre for the Frontier Constabulary in Shabqadar, Charsadda district.
After early suspicions that one of the bombs was planted, police said both blasts were suicide attacks.
The Pakistani Taliban said they carried out the attack to avenge the death of Osama Bin Laden earlier this month.
The al-Qaeda leader was killed during a US commando raid in the northern Pakistani town of Abbottabad on 2 May.
'Deadliest attack'
The bombings happened as newly trained cadets from the Frontier Constabulary were getting into buses for a short period of leave after completing their course.
The Frontier Constabulary is used to police the regions bordering Pakistan's tribal areas.
The attack on this paramilitary police academy comes days after the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and in the wake of Taliban threats to avenge him. But regular and tribal police forces have been a target of Taliban militants based in the nearby Mohmand tribal region since 2007.
Together with its northern neighbour, Bajaur, Mohmand has been home to local militants claiming allegiance to an anti-Pakistan Taliban group called TTP. At the same time, the area is home to militant groups close to al-Qaeda's thinking, such as the one led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
After 9/11, Bajaur served as the first sanctuary for foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda. In May 2009, security forces in Mohmand captured five Arab fighters and had to fight a three-hour long gun battle with local Taliban to prevent them from freeing the Arabs.
But al-Qaeda does not have any military capability in the area and is dependent on support from local militants. Analysts expect these militants to use Bin Laden's killing as an excuse to launch similar attacks in coming days
"Both attacks were suicide attacks," said the police chief of Charsadda district, Nisar Khan Marwat.
"The first suicide bomber came on a motorcycle and detonated his vest among the Frontier Constabulary men," AFP news agency quoted him as saying.
"When other [Frontier Constabulary] people came to the rescue to help their colleagues, the second bomber came on another motorcycle and blew himself up."
At least 66 of the dead were recruits, but there were also civilian casualties, officials say. A number of vehicles were destroyed in the blast.
"I was sitting in a van waiting for my colleagues. We were in plain clothes and we were happy we were going to see our families," Ahmad Ali, a wounded paramilitary policeman, told AFP.
"I heard someone shouting 'Allahu Akbar' [God is great] and then I heard a huge blast. I was hit by something in my back shoulder.
"In the meantime, I heard another blast and I jumped out of the van. I felt that I was injured and bleeding."
Security forces sealed off the area and the wounded were taken to a hospital in nearby Peshawar.
Lady Reading hospital in Peshawar has been inundated with casualties and doctors said they were fighting to save the lives of 40 critically injured cadets.
"It's the first revenge for the martyrdom of... Bin Laden. There will be more," Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told the Reuters news agency by telephone from an undisclosed location.
Shabqadar lies on the border with Afghanistan, about 35km (22 miles) north-west of Peshawar, not far from the militant stronghold of Mohmand.
The BBC's Aleem Maqbool, in Islamabad, says the security forces have often been the target of such attacks as they fight the Pakistani Taliban across the north-west of the country, but Friday's bombing is the deadliest attack this year.
He adds that the Pakistani army - which has come under intense scrutiny and criticism over the Bin Laden affair - is likely to point out that this attack is an illustration of the sacrifices it has made in the so-called "war on terror".
Army chiefs are appearing before parliament to explain their actions over the death of Bin Laden.
Our correspondent says many politicians and members of the public appear to be less concerned about Bin Laden's presence in Pakistan and more about the way the US was able to carry out its raid without official permission.
The US gives billions of dollars in military and humanitarian aid to Pakistan, but has questioned its reliability as an ally in combating the militants.
In recent years, Taliban militants have killed hundreds of people in bombings and other attacks across Pakistan.
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The US Supreme Court has been hearing evidence on whether the largest sex discrimination lawsuit in American history should go ahead.
A group of women is suing the world's biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, claiming they were held back because of their gender.
They want to bring a class action suit on behalf of more than a million women.
Wal-Mart denies the allegations and says it promotes women employees and pays them well.
The group bringing the lawsuit says Wal-Mart systematically discriminated against women in stores across America.
But lawyer Theodore Boutrous Jr, for Wal-Mart, said on Tuesday the class action nature of the legal action deprived the company of legal rights as it was forced to defend the treatment of women regardless of the jobs they held or their place in the Wal-Mart chain.
This is the first step in what those bringing the case hope could become a landmark legal moment. What started out as a grievance over pay and promotion among a handful of women could turn into the largest sex discrimination lawsuit in America.
The first claims of women being passed up for promotion at Walmart stores surfaced 11 years ago, but the six women pursuing this case do not want their grievances to be heard separately.
Instead, they are pushing for the case to be heard as a class action - to include all female store employees since 1998 - because they claim there is a wider culture of sex discrimination in the company. It is up to America's highest court to decide whether this is how the case should proceed.
Walmart denies the charges, but if a class action goes ahead, the company faces the prospect of a billion-dollar payout, as well as a dent to its reputation.
"There is absolutely no way there can be a fair process here," Mr Boutrous said.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the issue at stake at this early stage in the process was not proving discrimination, but showing enough evidence to go forward.
"We're talking about getting a foot in the door," Justice Ginsburg said
Meanwhile, Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked that he was unsure "what the unlawful policy is" that Wal-Mart engaged in.
A decision on whether the class action suit should go forward is expected by summer.
'Lost pay'
Christine Kwapnowski, one of six women named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, says she was passed over for pay and promotion in favour of male colleagues.
"I asked what I needed to do to get promoted and my manager said I should 'doll up and blow the cobwebs off my make-up,'" she told the BBC.
The six plaintiffs bringing the lawsuit are making their claim under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, arguing "the policies and practices underlying this discriminatory treatment are consistent throughout Wal-Mart".
The women, who are seeking lost pay and damages, want the US Supreme Court to allow the case to proceed as a class action lawsuit against the company.
A class action suit would cover any woman who has worked for, or works for, one of more than 3,400 Wal-Mart stores in the US since December 1998.
A group of women demonstrated outside the court on Tuesday, chanting for "fair pay now"
Two lower courts have allowed the suit to proceed as a class action; Wal-Mart appealed to the Supreme Court. A decision is not expected until June.
Wal-Mart denies the claims, and notes the company has won awards for its women-friendly working practices.
"Wal-Mart has had - for many years - strong policies against discrimination and these policies are there to ensure women are promoted and paid well," company spokesman Greg Rossiter said.
After the hearing Ms Kwapnoski said she was confident about the outcome.
"Ten years has been how long this has been going on," she said. "And it's a fight worth fighting and we'll keep fighting it until the end."
LATAKIA, Syria — Gangs of young men, some armed with swords and hunting rifles, roamed Sunday through the streets of a Syrian seaside city, closing alleys with barricades and roughly questioning passersby in streets scarred by days of anti-government unrest.
The scenes in Latakia, a Mediterranean port once known as a summmer tourist draw, were a remarkable display of anarchy in what had been one of the Mideast's most tightly controlled countries.
Syria has been rocked by more than a week of demonstrations that began in the drought-parched southern agricultural city of Daraa and exploded nationwide on Friday, with security forces opening fire on demonstrators in at least six places and killing dozens.
The government has also tried to calm the situation with concessions, and President Bashar Assad is expected to announce Tuesday that he is lifting a nearly 50-year state of emergency and moving to annul other harsh restrictions on civil liberties and political freedoms.
Member of Parliament Mohammed Habash told The Associated Press that lawmakers discussed the state of emergency during a Sunday night session and Assad would make an announcement about the issue on Tuesday. He offered no further details.
Ammar Qurabi, an exile in Egypt who heads Syria's National Organization for Human Rights, said there appeared to be divergent views within the Syrian leadership, with one branch that believes in a crackdown and another that believes in dialogue.
He said Assad must address the people and show some transparency as quickly as possible.
"People are asking themselves, where is he? why doesn't he make an appearance?" Qurabi said. "Assad must choose whether he wants to go the way of the Moroccan king, who has pledged to sponsor broad constitutional reforms, or the Gadhafi way. Which is it going to be?"
A top adviser to Assad offered the first hint of reforms in an announcement Thursday, saying the government had begun studying change to the emergency law and other measures. That pledge did not stop protests from erupting in cities across Syria the following day.
Some of the worst violence appears to have taken place in Latakia, a coastal city that is a mix of Sunnis living in its urban core and members of Assad's minority Alawite branch of Shiite Islam in villages on its outskirts, along with small minorities of Christians, ethnic Turks and other groups.
Witnesses told The Associated Press that large, religiously mixed crowds took to the steets of Latakia on Friday to express sympathy with protesters in the southern city of Daraa and demand greater civil liberties and political freedoms and an end to official corruption.
According to the witnesses and footage posted on social networking sites, shooting erupted after nightfall Tuesday that protesters blamed on security forces, and unrest erupted that continued until Saturday. Syrian officials said the government moved the army into Latakia in heavy numbers by early Sunday.
Syrian officials said 12 people had died in the city, and blamed the deaths on unidentified gunmen firing from rooftops.
An Associated Press photographer saw traces of what appeared to have been a serious battle in Latakia's main Sheik Daher square. Two police cars had been smashed and rocks and telephone cables torn from overhead poles were strewn across the streets and sidewalks.
The offices housing SyriaTel, the mobile phone company owned in large part by a cousin of President Bashar Assad, had been burned.
At one of the city's two hospitals, officials said they had treated 90 wounded people on Friday. The photographer saw many suffering from gunshot wounds to the hands or feet. Others were in critical condition.
Few cars or people were on the streets and shops were closed. Soldiers patrolled in heavy numbers, stopping virtually anyone seen carrying a bag. They pulled drivers to the side of the road to ask for identification papers and search their vehicles.
Just before sundown, gangs of 10 to 15 young men began roaming the streets, many armed with sticks and a few carrying guns or swords. Some of the gangs could be seen closing streets and alleys with metal barricades and large rocks.
Their allegiances could not be immediately determined, but pro-government groups of men in civilian clothes and armed with hunting rifles and other firearms also could be seen pulling over drivers, asking them for identification and the reason for their presence in Latakia.
The Baath party's office in Latakia did not appear to be burnt, despite reports from activists Saturday that it had been set ablaze, which the government had denied.
The Reuters news agency reported that two of its staffers had been missing in Syria since Saturday night, saying Beirut-based producer Ayat Basma and cameraman Ezzat Baltaji had been expected to cross into Lebanon by road and be picked up by a taxi.
Reuters said it had asked for Syrian officials' help in securing the journalists' safe return.
Syria's state of emergency has been in force since Assad's Baath party took power on March 8, 1963. It lets the government detain suspects without trial and exercise strict control over the media.
It also allows civilians to be tried in military courts.
Assad's decisions are effectively law but the state of emergency would have to be formally canceled by a presidential decree requiring approval of the cabinet. The decree would then be referred to a parliamentary committee for approval before actually going into effect.
The next scheduled cabinet meeting is Tuesday.
Habash, the lawmaker, told the AP before the parliament session Sunday that it might vote on a section of the constitution that mandates Baath party leadership of the nation. The amendment of the constitution's section 8 would open the way for the formation of parties besides the Baath and 11 other closely associated parties known as the National Progressive Front.
There was no word of such a vote after the session.
(This version corrects that activists, not the Syrian government, said Latakia Baath offices were burnt.)
PARIS — Conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy's party has taken a drubbing and the rival Socialists have gained groun in local elections that have been seen as a test ahead of the presidential vote next year.
The far-right National Front also claimed victory but it is unclear from Interior Ministry partial results whether the party will get its first official footprint in France's smallest administrative districts.
Results showed Sarkozy's UMP party taking 18.9 percent of the vote in Sunday's second-round balloting in the nation's cantons. It is the last national vote before next year's presidential elections.
The Socialist Party has 35 percent of the vote so far and the National Front more than 10 percent, down from 15 percent in last week's first-round vote.
The turnout in the areas counted so far was 44 percent.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
PARIS (AP) — Conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy's popularity is up for a test in local elections that could give the far-right National Front party its first official footprint in France's smallest administrative districts.
Sunday's second-round vote in the nation's cantons is the last national ballot before presidential balloting next year.
In last week's first-round balloting, the rival Socialist Party led with 25 percent of the vote, way ahead of Sarkozy's UMP party with 17 percent and just ahead of the National Front's 15 percent.
The far right, resurgent under Marine Le Pen's leadership, threw Sarkozy's party into disarray. Of the 1,566 cantons still up for grabs, the National Front is vying in 394 of them.
The big unknown is the abstention rate — 55.6 percent last week.
Germans are voting in a state election in Baden-Wuerttemberg, which analysts say will test Chancellor Angela Merkel's hold on power.
Mrs Merkel's Christian Democrats could be ousted in the state for the first time since 1953, opinion polls suggest.
They say that the Social Democrats and the Greens have enough support to form a governing coalition.
The opposition to Mrs Merkel's party has also been energised by anti-nuclear sentiment.
On Saturday, tens of thousands of Germans took part in what are thought to be the country's biggest-ever protests against nuclear power, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan.
Japan is still struggling to stabilise the Fukushima plant, crippled by the earthquake and tsunami of 11 March.
Voter discontent
Polling stations across Baden-Wuerttemberg opened at 0600 GMT and will close at 1600 GMT. About eight million people are eligible to cast their votes in one of Germany's industrial powerhouses.
Angela Merkel changed policy on nuclear power a week ago
Recent polls have suggested that the Social Democrats and Greens could secure 48% of the vote.
Mrs Merkel's party and the Free Democrats, a coalition partner, are forecast to win about 43%.
The BBC's Germany correspondent Stephen Evans says that two specific issues have driven discontent against the Christian Democrats: nuclear power, particularly after the disaster in Japan, and a plan for a big railway project which could transform the centre of Stuttgart.
Mrs Merkel changed policy on nuclear power a week ago, suspending for three months an earlier decision to extend the lifetime of Germany's nuclear reactors. Four of them are based in Baden-Wuerttemberg.
The chancellor also temporarily shut off the seven oldest reactors pending a safety review.
But one of Mrs Merkel's ministers said in a leaked memo that such decisions made on the eve of elections "were not always rational".
Germany - which was hit by fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster - has long had a large body of public opposition to nuclear power.
Our correspondent also says that some voters in the state say they feel their views have been ignored in favour of those of bigger corporate interests.
Preliminary results are expected soon after the voting ends.
Geraldine A. Ferraro, the former Queens congresswoman who strode onto a podium in 1984 to accept the Democratic nomination for vice president and to take her place in American history as the first woman nominated for national office by a major party, died Saturday in Boston.
The cause was complications from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that she had battled for 12 years, her family said in a statement. She died at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she had been undergoing treatment since Monday.
“If we can do this, we can do anything,” Ms. Ferraro declared on a July evening to a cheering Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. And for a moment, for the Democratic Party and for an untold number of American women, anything seemed possible: a woman occupying the second-highest office in the land, a derailing of the Republican juggernaut led by President Ronald Reagan, a President Walter F. Mondale.
It did not turn out that way — not by a long shot. After the roars in the Moscone Center had subsided and a fitful general election campaign had run its course, hopes for Mr. Mondale and his plain-speaking, barrier-breaking running mate were buried in a Reagan landslide.
But Ms. Ferraro’s supporters proclaimed a victory of sorts nonetheless: 64 years after women won the right to vote, a woman had removed the “men only” sign from the White House door.
It would be another 24 years before another woman from a major party was nominated for vice president — Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican running mate of Senator John McCain, in 2008. And though Hillary Rodham Clinton came close to being nominated that year as the Democratic presidential candidate, a woman has yet to occupy the Oval Office. But Ms. Ferraro’s ascendance gave many women heart.
Ann Richards, who was the Texas state treasurer at the time and went on to become governor, recalled that after the Ferraro nomination, “the first thing I thought of was not winning in the political sense, but of my two daughters.”
“To think,” Ms. Richards added, “of the numbers of young women who can now aspire to anything.”
In a statement, President Obama said Saturday, “Geraldine will forever be remembered as a trailblazer who broke down barriers for women, and Americans of all backgrounds and walks of life.”
As Mr. Mondale’s surprise choice, Ms. Ferraro rocketed to national prominence, propelled by fervid feminist support, a spirited and sometimes saucy personality, canny political skills and the calculation by Democratic strategists that Reagan might be vulnerable on issues thought to be more important to women.
But it proved to be a difficult campaign. The incumbent Reagan-Bush ticket presented a formidable enough challenge in and of itself, but Ms. Ferraro found herself on the defensive almost from the start, answering critics who questioned her qualifications for high office. Then there were damaging revelations about the finances of her husband, John Zaccaro, forcing Ms. Ferraro to release his tax returns and hold a marathon news conference in the middle of the general election race. Some said she had become a liability to Mr. Mondale and only hurt his chances more.
Quick Study as Candidate
A former Queens criminal prosecutor, she was a vigorous but relatively inexperienced candidate with a better feel for urban ward politics than for international diplomacy. But she proved to be a quick study and came across as a new breed of feminist politician — comfortable with the boys, particularly powerful Democrats like the House speaker, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., and less combative than predecessors like Representative Bella Abzug of New York.
She was also ideal for television: a down-to-earth, streaked-blond, peanut-butter-sandwich-making mother whose personal story resonated powerfully. Brought up by a single mother who had crocheted beads on wedding dresses to send her daughter to good schools, Ms. Ferraro had waited until her own children were school age before going to work in a Queens district attorney’s office headed by a cousin.
In the 1984 race, many Americans found her breezy style refreshing. “What are you — crazy?” was a familiar expression. She might break into a little dance behind the speaker’s platform when she liked the introductory music. Feeling patronized by her Republican opponent, Vice President George Bush, she publicly scolded him.
With Ms. Ferraro on the ticket, Democrats hoped to exploit a so-called gender gap between the parties. A Newsweek poll taken after she was nominated showed men favoring Reagan-Bush 58 percent to 36 percent but women supporting Mondale-Ferraro 49 percent to 41 percent.
For the first time a major candidate for national office talked about abortion with the phrase “If I were pregnant,” or about foreign policy with the personal observation “As the mother of a draft-age son....” She wore pearls and silk dresses and publicly worried that her slip was showing.
She also traveled a 55,000-mile campaign trail, spoke in 85 cities and raised $6 million. But in November the Democratic ticket won only one state — Mr. Mondale’s Minnesota — and the District of Columbia.
And to the Democrats’ chagrin, Reagan captured even the women’s vote, drawing some 55 percent; women, it appeared, had opposed, almost as much as men, the tax increase that Mr. Mondale, a former senator and vice president under Jimmy Carter, had said in his acceptance speech would be inevitable, an attempt at straight talking that cost him dearly at the polls.
Most election analysts believed that from the start the Democratic ticket had little chance against a popular incumbent who was basking in an economic recovery and proclaiming that it was “morning again in America.” Some said the choice of the little-known Ms. Ferraro had been a desperate move to attract the female vote in a daunting election year. Compounding the campaign’s woes was a barrage of questions about the Ferraro family finances — often carrying insinuations about ties to organized crime — that not only blemished Ms. Ferraro’s stature as the first Italian-American national candidate but also diverted attention from other issues.
Ms. Ferraro’s politics teetered from liberal positions, like her support for the Equal Rights Amendment for women and a nuclear freeze, to conservative ones, like her opposition to school busing and her support of tax credits for private and parochial school parents. In her first race for the House of Representatives, in 1978, from New York’s Ninth Congressional District in Queens, a Republican stronghold, her slogan was “Finally, a tough Democrat.”
The abortion issue, magnified because she was Roman Catholic and a woman, plagued her campaign. Though she opposed the procedure personally, she said, others had the right to choose for themselves. Abortion opponents hounded her at almost every stop with an intensity seldom experienced by male politicians.
Writing in The Washington Post in September 1984, the columnist Mary McGrory quoted an unnamed Roman Catholic priest as saying, “When the nuns in the fifth grade told Geraldine she would have to die for her faith, she didn’t know it would be this way.”
Named for a Brother
Geraldine Anne Ferraro was born on Aug. 26, 1935, in the Hudson River city of Newburgh, N.Y., where she was the fourth child and only daughter of Dominick Ferraro, an Italian immigrant who owned a restaurant and a five-and-dime store, and the former Antonetta L. Corrieri. One brother died shortly after birth, and another, Gerard, died in an automobile accident two years before Geraldine was born.
Geraldine was born at home; her mother, who had been holding Gerard at the time of the crash and who had washed and pressed his clothes for months after his death, would not go to the hospital for the delivery and leave the third brother, Carl, at home.
Geraldine was named for Gerard, but in her book “Framing a Life: A Family Memoir,” written with Catherine Whitney, Ms. Ferraro said her mother had emphasized that she was not taking his place.
“Gerry is special,” she quoted her mother as saying, “because she is a girl.”
Unknown to Ms. Ferraro at the time, her father had repeated trouble with the state liquor authorities and ultimately lost his restaurant license. During the vice-presidential campaign, she learned by reading The New York Post that her father had been arrested on charges of running a numbers racket but had died of a heart attack the morning he was to appear in court. Her mother was arrested as an accomplice, but the charges were dropped after her husband’s death, Ms. Ferraro wrote.
She called her father’s death, which happened when she was 8, “a dividing line that runs through my life.” In her grief, she said, she developed anemia.
Her mother soon sold the store and the family’s house and moved to the South Bronx. With the proceeds from the sale of property in Italy that her husband had left her, she sent Geraldine to the Marymount School, a Catholic boarding school in Tarrytown, N.Y. She sent Carl to military school.
Ms. Ferraro’s outstanding grades earned her a scholarship to Marymount College in Tarrytown, from which she transferred to the school’s Manhattan branch. She commuted there from Queens, where her mother had moved by then. An English major, Ms. Ferraro was editor of the school newspaper and an athlete and won numerous honors before graduating in 1956. “Delights in the unexpected,” the yearbook said.
After graduating, Ms. Ferraro got a job teaching in a public grade school in Queens. She later applied to Fordham Law School, where an admissions officer warned her that she might be taking a man’s place. Admitted to its night school, she was one of two women in a class of 179 and received her law degree in 1960.
Ms. Ferraro and John Zaccaro, whose family was in the real estate business, were married on July 16, 1960, two days after she passed her bar exam. She was admitted to the New York State bar in 1961, and decided to keep her maiden name professionally to honor her mother. (She was admitted to the United States Supreme Court bar in 1978.)
For the first 13 years of her marriage, Ms. Ferraro devoted herself mainly to her growing family. Donna was born in 1961, John in 1964, and Laura in 1966. Ms. Ferraro did some legal work for her husband’s business, worked pro bono for women in Family Court and dabbled in local politics. In 1970 she was elected president of the Queens County Women’s Bar Association.
In 1973, after her cousin Nicholas Ferraro was elected Queens district attorney, she applied for and got a job as an assistant district attorney in charge of a special victims bureau, investigating rape, crimes against the elderly, and child and wife abuse.
The cases were so harrowing, she later wrote, that they caused her to develop an ulcer. And the crime-breeding societal conditions she saw, she said, planted the seeds of her liberalism.
Sights Set on Congress
One night Mario M. Cuomo, who was lieutenant governor of New York at the time, gave Ms. Ferraro and her husband a ride home from a bar mitzvah. She told him she was thinking of running for public office. “What about Congress?” Mr. Cuomo asked.
Ms. Ferraro found her opportunity in 1978, when James J. Delaney, a Democratic congressman from a predominantly working-class district in Queens, announced his retirement. In a three-way Democratic primary for the seat, Ms. Ferraro won with 53 percent of the vote. In the general election campaign, a slugfest against a Republican assemblyman, Alfred A. DelliBovi, she won by 10 percentage points, helped by her law-and-order background.
In the House, Ms. Ferraro was assigned to unglamorous committees but used them to her advantage. On the Public Works and Transportation Committee, she successfully pushed for improved mass transit around La Guardia Airport.
Mr. O’Neill, the speaker, took an immediate liking to her, and in her three terms she mostly voted with her party’s leadership. Liberal and labor groups gave her high ratings, though she was less adamant than many liberal Democrats about cutting military spending.
Ms. Ferraro was a co-sponsor of the Economic Equity Act, which was intended to accomplish many of the aims of the never-ratified Equal Rights Amendment. She also supported federal financing for abortions.
“She manages to be threatening on issues without being threatening personally,” Barney Frank, the Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, told The Chicago Tribune in 1984.
Others were less laudatory. “Some see her as too compromising, too ambitious, too close to the leadership,” The Washington Post wrote that same year.
Her friendship with Mr. O’Neill helped her career. Thanks in part to him, she was elected secretary of the Democratic caucus, giving her influence on committee assignments, and in 1983 she was awarded a seat on the powerful budget committee, where she received a crash course in economics. To enhance her foreign policy credentials, she took trips to Central America and the Middle East.
It was Ms. Ferraro’s appointment as chairwoman of the 1984 Democratic Platform Committee that gave her the most prominence. In her book “Ferraro: My Story,” written with Linda Bird Francke, she said that in becoming the first woman to hold that post she owed much to a group of Democratic women — Congressional staffers, abortion rights activists, labor leaders and others — who called themselves Team A and who lobbied for her appointment.
Even before then, however, Ms. Ferraro’s name had been mentioned on lists of potential candidates for vice president, along with Representative Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, the former congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Dianne Feinstein, the mayor of San Francisco. By May 1984, Mr. O’Neill had endorsed her for the No. 2 spot on the ticket. It was “the Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” as Ms. Ferraro later put it.
On July 1, the National Organization for Women threatened a convention floor fight if the Democrats did not choose a woman, and three days later a delegation of Democratic women went to Minnesota to urge Mr. Mondale to do so.
Mr. Mondale made his historic call, asking Ms. Ferraro to be his running mate, on July 11. His campaign believed that she would do well not only among women but also among blue-collar workers. Eight days later, wearing a white dress she had purchased on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, she accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president.
Trouble Over Finances
Her campaign was soon stalled by accusations about her personal finances. The storm reached its height in a two-hour press conference on Aug. 21, after Ms. Ferraro had released the tax returns of her husband, Mr. Zaccaro. She responded to question after question in a confident, relaxed manner. Mr. Cuomo called it “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen by a politician under pressure.”
Ms. Ferraro later faced down hecklers in Texas and pro-Reagan auto workers in Illinois. After Vice President Bush was overheard bragging that “we tried to kick a little ass last night,” referring to a debate with Ms. Ferraro, she declined to comment directly, though her aides called the remark insulting and demeaning. There were signs at campaign rallies saying, “Give ’em hell, Gerry!”
Everywhere people were adjusting — or manifestly not adjusting — to a woman on a national ticket. Mississippi’s agriculture secretary called Ms. Ferraro “young lady” and asked if she could bake blueberry muffins. When a Roman Catholic bishop gave a news conference in Pennsylvania, he repeatedly referred to the Republican vice-presidential nominee as “Mr. Bush” and to the Democratic one as “Geraldine.”
Ms. Ferraro’s words raised hackles as well. She was criticized for suggesting that Reagan was not a “good Christian” because, she said, his policies hurt the disadvantaged.
Her inability to escape questions about her finances was partly brought on by her husband’s initial refusal to release his tax returns. She riled Italian-Americans when she explained, “If you’re married to an Italian man, you know what it’s like.”
When her financial situation was finally disclosed, it turned out that the candidate with the rags-to-riches story had a net worth exceeding that of Mr. Bush, a boat, a full-time uniformed maid and vacation homes on Fire Island in New York and in the Virgin Islands.
Mr. Bush’s wife, Barbara, complained that Ms. Ferraro was masquerading as a working-class wife and mother, calling her a “four-million-dollar — I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich.”
Her associations and finances revealed one questionable thing after another. The Federal Election Commission fined her 1978 campaign committee for accepting $134,000 in contributions from her husband and children when they were legally allowed to contribute only $4,000.
Evidence also emerged that organized-crime figures had contributed to her campaigns. When a House ethics panel investigated her financial disclosures, it came out that one of Mr. Zaccaro’s companies had rented two floors of a building to a pornography distributor.
The disclosures damaged a campaign that was already fighting an uphill battle; Mr. Mondale later said he thought they cost the campaign 15 percentage points in the polls. He also suggested that a male running mate might not have been dissected so severely. After the election, the House ethics committee determined that Ms. Ferraro’s financial disclosures had been inadequate. In 1986, the elections commission said that one of her campaign committees had improperly allocated funds.
Ms. Ferraro’s family experienced legal problems of its own. In 1985, Mr. Zaccaro pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge that he had schemed to defraud a mortgage broker. Two years later he was acquitted of attempted extortion in a cable television company’s bid to get a Queens franchise. And in 1988 the couple’s son, John, was convicted of a felony for selling cocaine in Vermont while a student at Middlebury College.
After her defeat in 1984, Ms. Ferraro was criticized for appearing in a Diet Pepsi commercial. Feminists in particular called it undignified.
She is survived by her husband, her three children and eight grandchildren.
Later Bids for Office
Weary of the spotlight on her family, Ms. Ferraro passed up a chance to challenge Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York in his bid for a second term in 1986. But she decided to seek the seat in 1992 and entered the Democratic primary. She finished 10,000 votes (1 percent of the total) behind Robert Abrams, the state attorney general, who lost to Mr. D’Amato in the general election. She again ran for the Senate in 1998 but lost to Charles E. Schumer in the Democratic primary by a lopsided margin.
Ms. Ferraro was later ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission during the Clinton administration and co-host of the CNN program “Crossfire” from 1996 to 1998. She also wrote books and articles and did business consulting.
Near the end of 1998 she learned she had multiple myeloma, a bone-marrow cancer that suppresses the immune system. She was one of the first cancer patients to be treated with thalidomide, a drug used in the 1960s to treat morning sickness that caused severe defects in unborn children.
“Such a strange thing,” Ms. Ferraro said in an interview with The New York Times in 2001. “What was terrible for a healthy fetus has been wonderful at defeating the cancer cells.”
She addressed her place in history in a long letter to The Times in 1988, noting that women wrote to her about how she had inspired them to take on challenges, “always adding a version of ‘I decided if you could do it, I can too.’ ” Schoolgirls, she said, told her they hoped to be president someday and needed advice.
“I am the first to admit that were I not a woman, I would not have been the vice-presidential nominee,” she wrote. But she insisted that her presence on the ticket had translated into votes that the ticket might otherwise have not received.
In any event, she said, the political realities of 1984 had made it all but impossible for the Democrats to win, no matter the candidates or their gender. “Throwing Ronald Reagan out of office at the height of his popularity, with inflation and interest rates down, the economy moving and the country at peace, would have required God on the ticket,” Ms. Ferraro wrote, “and She was not available!”
Groundbreaking US Democratic politician Geraldine Ferraro has died at the age of 75.
She had been been suffering from cancer for many years, and died in hospital in Massachusetts, a family friend said.
Ms Ferraro was the first female vice-presidential candidate to represent a major political party, when she became Walter Mondale's running mate in 1984.
Their presidential bid was heavily defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan and his running mate, George Bush snr.
A statement released by Ms Ferraro's family said she was widely known as a "leader, a fighter for justice, and a tireless advocate for those without a voice".
It continued: "Her courage and generosity of spirit throughout her life, waging battles big and small, public and personal, will never be forgotten and will be sorely missed."
Born into a humble working-class Italian family in New York, Geraldine Ferraro rose to the highest echelons of US politics, blazing a path for Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin.
Her candidacy alongside Walter Mondale drew enormous attention. Women rallied around her - many wept openly at the convention where she was nominated. She faced a barrage of questions about her experience and was also plagued with questions about her husband's finances.
But Ferraro was undeterred. During a debate, she told her rival, then Vice President George H W Bush, that she resented his patronising attitude toward her.
Mondale and Ferraro lost in one of the biggest landslides in American political history. In the end, her candidacy didn't win the day, but it was, and still is, a win for women in American politics.
Ms Ferraro made a name for herself as district attorney prosecuting cases of rape, child abuse and domestic violence before running for Congress.
She had been an elected representative for almost six years when the Democratic nominee for president, Walter Mondale, selected her as his running mate.
Despite their overwhelming defeat, she paid tribute to his decision to choose her.
"Campaigns, even if you lose them, do serve a purpose," she said at the time.
"My candidacy has said the days of discrimination are numbered. American women will never be second-class citizens again."
Reacting to news of Ms Ferraro's death, Mr Mondale called her "a remarkable woman and a dear human being".
"She was a pioneer in our country for justice for women and a more open society," he told the Associated Press.
"She broke a lot of moulds and it's a better country for what she did."
In 2008, Sarah Palin became the second woman - and the first Republican - to become a mainstream running mate, when she was chosen by Senator John McCain.
Ms Palin was also a political unknown at the time, serving as governor of Alaska.
She paid tribute to Ms Ferraro on her Facebook page. "May her example of hard work and dedication to America continue to inspire all women," Ms Palin wrote.
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