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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
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By Jack Shenker in Lampedusa, Guardian.co.uk, May 8, 2011
Exclusive: Boat trying to reach Lampedusa was left to drift in Mediterranean for 16 days, Guardian learns.
This is a huge victory for the Tahrir Square revolution -- and for justice. Former interior minister Habib al-Adly was convicted of corruption for skimming more than $1 million. He still faces a separate trial over the deaths of hundreds of anti-Mubarak demonstrators.
Dozens of other bigshots from the Mubarak regime are also under arrest or investigation, so this conviction and 12-year sentence sends a very welcome signal.
Probably the best analysis of dealing with the debt crisis in the Eurozone I've read:
We think that the EU has a range of good options for structuring enhanced replacement bonds, which would have an implicit seniority, contingent guarantees, value recovery mechanisms and debt swap provisions. This structure would be a much more efficient, less costly and more politically acceptable and sustainable use of EFSF and IMF funds than what we have seen so far.
The special EFSF programs could be redirected to make contingent financing available to sovereigns in the form of stand-by letters of credit for partial guarantees on the issue of replacement bonds. These enhancements could take many forms, such as guarantees on all or portions of principal due at maturity or according to an amortization schedule, or guarantees on portions of coupon interest.
By first focusing on bolstering European bank balance sheets and dealing with their sovereign exposure to the periphery, the fear of systemic contagion of a European sovereign restructuring would be greatly reduced. Furthermore, a bold and comprehensive "Trichet Plan" seems to be the only way to break the vicious feedback loop Europe finds itself in.
Our proposal, unlike other European debt proposals, is predicated on the notion that the borrowers and lenders and not outside parties should take the losses, set terms of the restructuring, and design the instruments in a menu of options which best fits their needs. The consenting adults who created Europe's crisis are the ones who should resolve it - albeit with assistance from EU regulators and officials
There is much at stake, not just for Europe, but the rest of the highly-indebted West. Forbearance by piling debt upon debt to deal with what is ultimately an insolvency issue is no longer an option in the Eurozone and further stumbles could increase global systemic risk. Policymakers should not entirely discount the risk that the crisis in the periphery could spread to the core of Europe and even skip across continents and oceans.
By Bob Woodward, Washington Post, May 6, 2011
...“This is where you start the movie about the hunt for bin Laden,” said one U.S. official briefed on the intelligence-gathering leading up to the raid on the compound early Monday....
This is a major big deal.
The debt crisis in Greece has taken on a dramatic new twist. Sources with information about the government's actions have informed SPIEGEL ONLINE that Athens is considering withdrawing from the euro zone. The common currency area's finance ministers and representatives of the European Commission are holding a secret crisis meeting in Luxembourg on Friday night.
Greece's economic problems are massive, with protests against the government being held almost daily. Now Prime Minister George Papandreou apparently feels he has no other option: SPIEGEL ONLINE has obtained information from German government sources knowledgeable of the situation in Athens indicating that Papandreou's government is considering abandoning the euro and reintroducing its own currency.
Alarmed by Athens' intentions, the European Commission has called a crisis meeting in Luxembourg on Friday night. The meeting is taking place at Château de Senningen, a site used by the Luxembourg government for official meetings. In addition to Greece's possible exit from the currency union, a speedy restructuring of the country's debt also features on the agenda. One year after the Greek crisis broke out, the development represents a potentially existential turning point for the European monetary union -- regardless which variant is ultimately decided upon for dealing with Greece's massive troubles.
By Farhad Manjoo
Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong
And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations profession is similarly ignorant; I've received press releases and correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them happy).
What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers.It's their certainty that they're right.
Rodrigo Rosenberg knew that he was about to die. It wasn’t because he was approaching old age—he was only forty-eight. Nor had he been diagnosed with a fatal illness; an avid bike rider, he was in perfect health. Rather, Rosenberg, a highly respected corporate attorney in Guatemala, was certain that he was going to be assassinated.
Before he began, in the spring of 2009, to prophesy his own murder, there was little to suggest that he might meet a violent end. Rosenberg, who had four children, was an affectionate father. The head of his own flourishing practice, he had a reputation as an indefatigable and charismatic lawyer who had a gift for leading other people where he wanted them to go. He was lithe and handsome, though his shiny black hair had fallen out on top, leaving an immaculate ring on the sides. Words were his way of ordering the jostle of life. He spoke in eloquent bursts, using his voice like an instrument, his hands and eyebrows rising and falling to accentuate each note. (It didn’t matter if he was advocating the virtues of the Guatemalan constitution or of his favorite band, Santana.) Ferociously intelligent, he had earned master’s degrees in law from both Harvard University and Cambridge University.
Farmers have produced less food during the past three decades than they would have done were climate change not happening, according to a study published today1. Global maize (corn) production, for example, is estimated to be about 3.8% lower than it would have been in a non-warmed world — the equivalent of Mexico not contributing to the maize market.
"These things are happening now," emphasizes David Lobell, an Earth system scientist at Stanford University in California and a co-author on the study.
The results come as a surprise to many. "I've been operating under the assumption we wouldn't be able to detect changes until the 20s or 30s of this century," says Gerald Nelson, an agricultural economist with the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC, who was not involved with the work.
By Saeed Kamali Dehghan, Guardian.co.uk, May 5, 2011
Close allies of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being "magicians" and invoking djinns (spirits).
Ayandeh, an Iranian news website, described one of the arrested men, Abbas Ghaffari, as "a man with special skills in metaphysics and connections with the unknown worlds".
The arrests come amid a growing rift between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei which has prompted several MPs to call for the president to be impeached....
By Helene Muholland, Guardian.co.uk, May 5, 2011
• Lib Dems battered in council elections
• SNP makes major gains in Scotland
• Labour wins key councils and advances in Wales
• Conservative vote holds firm
The Liberal Democrats were left reeling after suffering their worst electoral drubbing in almost 30 years after sustaining heavy losses across northern England. The party was ejected from power in Sheffield, Nick Clegg's constituency backyard, as the Lib Dems' national share of votes plummeted to 15%......
Labour was on course for major gains, but suffered heavily at the hands of the SNP in the devolved elections in Scotland. While voters seemed intent on punishing the Liberal Democrats, their coalition partners fared much better, with the Conservatives holding their own in terms of council seats....
By Mark McDonald, New York Times, May 4/5, 2011
SEOUL, South Korea — New satellite images and firsthand accounts from former political prisoners and former jailers in North Korea have confirmed the enormous scale and bleak conditions of the penal system in the secretive North, according to a report released Wednesday by the human rights group Amnesty International.
Former inmates at the political labor camp at Yodok, North Korea, said they were frequently tortured and had been forced to watch the executions of fellow prisoners, the report said, noting that the North’s network of political prisons is estimated to hold 200,000 inmates....
By Christopher Drew, New York Times, May 5/6, 2011
The assault team that killed Osama bin Laden sneaked up on his compound in radar-evading helicopters that had never been discussed publicly by the United States government, aviation analysts said Thursday....
The stealth features, similar to those used on advanced fighter jets and bombers, help explain how two of the helicopters sped undetected through Pakistani air defenses before reaching the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad. The use of the specially equipped helicopters also underscores the extent to which American officials wanted to get to Bin Laden without tipping off Pakistani leaders....
Note accompanying Graphic: A Stealthier Helicopter compared to standard Blackhawk.
Update:
Stories on CIA SPYING FROM ABBOTTABAD SAFEHOUSE and
FIRST HINTS ON DATA SEIZED and
2007 ATTEMPED RAID
added in comments.
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Glenn: The details of Bin Laden’s death matter (04:45)
Would capturing him alive have been a worse outcome? (09:38)
“A nation of laws, not of men” vs. national power (06:23)
David sees a stronger case for withdrawal from Afghanistan (10:39)
The law paradigm vs. the war paradigm for fighting terrorism (07:13)
Glenn: Democrats owe Bush and Cheney an apology (12:55)
Commodity prices fell on Thursday for a fourth day, following weak economic news from Europe and the US.
Oil prices fell, with US light, sweet crude down 5.2% at $103.44 a barrel.
US weekly jobless claims figures hit an eight-month high last week, while German industrial orders fell unexpectedly in March.
There are also concerns about what will happen to the US economy when the latest round of quantitative easing, known as QE2, ends.
"Crude oil is selling off sharply for two primary reasons: QE2 is coming to an end in June and without a QE3 behind it, it will take liquidity out of the market, hurting risky asset classes such as commodities," said Chris Jarvis at Caprock Risk Management in New Hampshire.
"With Osama Bin Laden dead, the market is adjusting the geopolitical risk premium down accordingly."
Precious metals have also been hit, with silver falling another 7% and heading towards its biggest weekly fall since 1983.
The price of silver has fallen by more than 20% from its record high near $50 an ounce last Thursday.
Some of the sell-off is due to an unprecedented raising of trading costs by CME Group, which oversees much speculative trading in silver.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business/market_data/commodities/143910/defaul...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business/market_data/commodities/40380/default...
In energy matters, what goes around, comes around—but perhaps should go away
... All of this has prompted incessant calls for the world to innovate its way into a brighter energy future, a quest that has engendered serial infatuations with new, supposedly perfect solutions: Driving was to be transformed first by biofuels, then by fuel cells and hydrogen, then by hybrid cars, and now it is the electrics (Volt, Tesla, Nissan) and their promoters (Shai Agassi, Elon Musk, Carlos Ghosn) that command media attention; electricity generation was to be decarbonized either by a nuclear renaissance or by ubiquitous wind turbines (even Boone Pickens, a veteran Texas oilman, succumbed to that call of the wind), while others foresaw a comfortable future for fossil fuels once their visions of mass carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) were put in practice. And if everything fails, then geoengineering—manipulating the Earth’s climate with shades in space, mist-spewing ships or high-altitude flights disgorging sulfur compounds—will save us by cooling the warming planet.
This all brings to mind Lemuel Gulliver’s visit to the grand academy of Lagado: No fewer than 500 projects were going on there at once, always with anticipation of an imminent success, much as the inventor who “has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers” believed that “in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate”—but also always with complaints about stock being low and entreaties to “give … something as an encouragement to ingenuity.” Admittedly, ideas for new energy salvations do not currently top 500, but their spatial extent puts Lagado’s inventors to shame: Passionately advocated solutions range from extracting work from that meager 20-Kelvin difference between the surface and deep waters in tropical seas (OTEC: ocean thermal energy conversion) to Moon-based solar photovoltaics with electricity beamed to the Earth by microwaves and received by giant antennas.
And continuous hopes for success (at a low price) in eight more years are as fervent now as they were in the fictional 18th century Lagado. There has been an endless procession of such claims on behalf of inexpensive, market-conquering solutions, be they fuel cells or cellulosic ethanol, fast breeder reactors or tethered wind turbines. And energy research can never get enough money to satisfy its promoters: In 2010 the U.S. President’s council of advisors recommended raising the total for U.S. energy research to $16 billion a year; that is actually too little considering the magnitude of the challenge—but too much when taking into account the astonishing unwillingness to adopt many readily available and highly effective existing fixes in the first place.
World food prices rose to near a record in April as grain costs advanced, adding pressure to inflation that is accelerating from Beijing to Brasilia and spurring central banks to raise interest rates. ...
The cost of living in the U.S. rose at its fastest pace since December 2009 in the 12 months ended in March, the same month in which Chinese consumer prices rose by the most since 2008. The European Central Bank raised interest rates on April 7, joining China, India, Poland and Sweden in a bid to control inflation partly blamed on food costs. Costlier food also contributed to riots across northern Africa and the Middle East that toppled leaders in Egypt and Tunisia this year.
Some good news:
The Obama administration is seeking to use the killing of Osama bin Laden to accelerate a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and hasten the end of the Afghanistan war, according to U.S. officials involved in war policy.
Administration officials think it could now be easier for the reclusive leader of the largest Taliban faction, Mohammad Omar, to break his group’s alliance with al-Qaeda, a key U.S. requirement for any peace deal. They also think that bin Laden’s death could make peace talks a more palatable outcome for Americans and insulate President Obama from criticism that his administration would be negotiating with terrorists.
“Bin Laden’s death is the beginning of the endgame in Afghanistan,” said a senior administration official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations. “It changes everything.”
One of my alma maters. The seven students murdered at Jackson State soon afterward are often forgotten.
| Budget, Deficit, Unemployment | |
| Voters favor cutting unemployment over reducing the deficit 54 - 35 percent, but in another question, 47 percent say reduce unemployment while 46 percent say reduce spending. | |
| Half of the 1,408 voters surveyed were told Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid and defense comprise 60 percent of the federal budget; the other half was not told. Yet responses were similar. Voters who were told of the 60 percent figure oppose limits to entitlement growth: | |
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| Voters informed of the 60 percent figure support cuts in defense spending 54 - 43 percent, while voters not told split with 47 percent for defense cuts and 49 percent opposed. | |
| "So much for the idea that if the public only understood the budget numbers they would be much more amenable to reductions," said Brown. "Except for defense spending." | |
Voters back 69 - 28 percent raising taxes on households earning $250,000 or more. They say 60 - 34 percent that Medicare should remain as is, rather than giving seniors money to buy private health insurance beginning in 2022. Gradually raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67 by 2033 is a good idea voters say 51 - 46 percent. But moving responsibility for Medicaid to the states is a bad idea, voters say 54 - 38 percent.
[Gee...Imamgeing my (total lack of) surprise.] |
Already the story is starting to unravel, mutate, transmogrify. Government statements that were presented as gospel truths in every media outlet in the world, and which served as the basis for ten thousand earnest, serious commentaries, turn out, one day later, to have been false.
By Issandr El Amrani, Arabist.net, May 4, 2011
From a recent RAND poll of Iranians.....
"WASHINGTON -- Senate Democrats are furious at their lead budget negotiator for crafting a blueprint that they think moves the party too far to the right, a senior Democratic aide said.
Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has been bargaining for months in secret with Republicans in the so-called Gang of Six to craft a budget that might win bipartisan acceptance. On Tuesday, Conrad abruptly dropped the veil and rolled out his own offering for party colleagues -- to brutal reviews.
"He's going to be a man without a country," the Democratic aide said, describing a contentious Tuesday briefing.
The problem for Democrats is that, rather than put down a firm Democratic marker from which the party can negotiate, Conrad has adopted a plan that resembles the work he's done with legislators across the aisle.
In bringing it forward himself, Conrad sets the starting point for the Democratic position in a more conservative spot than President Barack Obama's budget -- and that was already a compromise. Obama's plan includes a spending freeze for federal workers, among many other concessions to the GOP. [snip]
“It borrows some of the ideas of the fiscal commission on revenue,” Conrad added, saying that tax rates would be lowered. But his plan would “broaden the base” of taxpayers, he said. It would do that by eliminating certain corporate tax loopholes and special treatment for particular industries and targeting offshore tax havens.
“You would not need to raise rates. You could actually lower rates along the lines of what the commission does,” Conrad said.
Conrad’s plan pulls “some savings” from Medicare, he said, but does not include a specific spending target, as Republicans have called for.
A significant difference between Conrad’s plan and the fiscal commission plan is that Conrad does not address Social Security, which, he noted, is on a separate budgetary track. Social Security is paid for by payroll taxes rather than general revenue, so it does not contribute to the deficit."
Dave Dayan says:
"The Gang of Six simply didn’t finish the job, and indeed, it was built to not finish the job, with Republicans desirous to drag out talks so Senate Democrats looked like they didn’t have a plan. In this sense it was no different than the Max Baucus-led Gang of Six on the health care law. So Conrad is becoming the Gang of One. He’s basically carrying Bowles-Simpson. The lack of changes to Social Security is a relief, but the plan overall is right of center. It has a 3:1 spread on spending cuts to revenue hikes. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that Republicans will come aboard, leaving Conrad truly as a Gang of One, without a unified Democratic Party or key Republicans behind him."
Bipartisan, bicameral meetings with Joe Biden begin tomorrow.
Reminds me of this:
[...]A Wyoming couple is now accusing national rent-to-own chain Aaron's Inc. of spying on them at home using their rented computer's webcam without their knowledge. Aaron's also allegedly used a keylogger and took regular screenshots of the couple's activities on the machine, leading the couple to file a class-action lawsuit in the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
According to the complaint filed on Tuesday, Aaron's has been using a product called "PC Rental Agent" on its rent-to-own machines since at least 2007 in order to "surreptitiously access, monitor, intercept, and/or transmit electronic communications" made by Aaron's customers. Created by a company called DesignerWare, PC Rental Agent is advertised as a way to keep track of rent-to-own computers and lock out customers who fail to pay. According to the lawsuit, the product was sold to Aaron's under the guise that it was undetectable by users, and Aaron's apparently conceals the fact that it has the ability to monitor customers' activity when marketing its services.
Crystal and Brian Byrd found this out the hard way in 2010 when they rented a Dell Inspiron laptop from Aaron's, which they paid off in full in October of 2010—one month ahead of schedule. Aaron's didn't record the last payment correctly, however, leading an Aaron's store manager to show up at the Byrd home in December in order to repossess the computer. The store manager then produced a photo of Brian Byrd using the machine, taken with the Inspiron's webcam, as apparent "proof" that the Byrds were still using the computer.