(Reuters) – The United States stepped back from the brink of default on Tuesday but congressional approval of a last-gasp deficit-cutting plan failed to dispel fears of a credit downgrade and future tax and spending feuds.
President Barack Obama and lawmakers from across the political divide expressed relief over the hard-won compromise to raise U.S. borrowing authority. Nevertheless, U.S. stocks fell sharply as investors fretted over persistent economic and political uncertainties dogging the world’s largesteconomy.
The possibility of an eventual downgrade of the top-notch American credit rating grew when Moody’s Investors Service, one of the three major ratings agencies, said it was slapping a negative outlook on America’s AAA-rated sovereign debt.
The move, announced after U.S. markets closed, could lead to a downgrade within 12 to 18 months that would probably raise borrowing costs and further hurt the struggling U.S. economy.
Moody’s, affirming the AAA rating, said the deal signed by Obama was a first step toward fixing the budget problems but that the United States was at risk of a downgrade if there was a weakening of fiscal discipline in the coming year, if no further measures were taken in 2013 or if the economy deteriorated.
Another agency, Fitch Ratings, did not rule out slapping a negative outlook on the U.S. AAA rating when it concludes a review of the country later this month, the agency’s top analyst for the United States told Reuters on Tuesday.
Ratings agency Standard and Poor’s said in mid-July there was a 50-50 chance it would cut the U.S. rating in the next three months if lawmakers failed to craft a meaningful deficit-cutting plan.
The $2.1 trillion deficit-reduction plan approved by Congress falls short of S&P’s previous assertion that $4 trillion in deficit-reduction measures would be needed to show that Washington was putting the country’s finances in order.
The Senate’s approval through a 74 to 26 vote of the $2.1 trillion deficit-reduction plan, already passed on Monday by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, warded off the immediate specter of a catastrophic U.S. debt default.
Obama immediately signed the bill into law, lifting the government’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling hours before a Tuesday midnight deadline. But the rancorous debt and deficit battle between his Democrats and their Republican rivals left Obama politically bruised as he heads into a campaign for a second term in 2012.
The agreement drew a line — for the moment — under months of bitter partisan squabbling over debt and deficit strategy that had threatened chaos in global financial markets and dented America’s stature as the world’s economic superpower.
The bill lifts the debt ceiling enough to last beyond the November 2012 elections, calls for $2.1 trillion in spending cuts spread over 10 years and creates a bipartisan joint House and Senate committee to recommend a deficit-reduction package by late November. It does not include any tax increases.
Signaling tough political battles ahead over spending cuts and tax reform as the deficit-cutting plan is implemented, both Obama and Democratic and Republican leaders said their agreement, while a welcome first step, was not enough alone.
Wall Street stocks fell broadly by more than 2 percent, ending down for a seventh consecutive session as the wrangling over the U.S. debt ceiling faded and investors turned their attention to the stalling economy.
Senate vote set for Tuesday after House passes debt ceiling agreement
By Alan Silverleib and Tom Cohen, CNN
Washington (CNN) — The U.S. Senate is scheduled to take up the debt-ceiling deal at noon Tuesday, as lawmakers stare down the deadline for the government to face possible default.
The House on Monday passed the package on a 269-161 vote, overcoming opposition from liberal Democrats and tea party conservatives for ideologically different reasons.
One of those supporting the plan was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona, who cast her first House vote since being shot in the head in an assassination attempt in January. She received an emotional ovation when she entered the chamber.
The agreement reached Sunday by President Barack Obama and congressional leaders from both parties calls for up to $2.4 trillion in savings over the next decade, raises the debt ceiling through the end of 2012 and establishes a special congressional committee to recommend long-term fiscal reforms.
The legislation needs to reach Obama’s desk on Tuesday. If the current $14.3 trillion debt limit is not increased by that point, Americans could face rapidly rising interest rates, a falling dollar and shakier financial markets, among other problems.
All of those factors could influence the government’s credit rating, which is why the Treasury Department has been briefing the agencies that rate U.S. debt about the finer points of the package, a senior administration official told CNN.
If Wall Street doesn’t like what it hears, the United States could face a downgrade in its creditworthiness.
A number of Republicans worried about cuts in defense spending and the lack of a required balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. Progressive Democrats were livid over the extent of the deal’s domestic spending cuts, as well as the absence of any immediate tax hikes on wealthier Americans.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, was able to round up the support of most of his GOP caucus, while the chamber’s two top Democrats — Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland — voted for the plan along with more than 90 of their caucus members.
Still, emotions ran high after months of grueling negotiations that pitted the small-government, anti-tax ideology of conservative Republicans against Obama’s call for balancing spending cuts and entitlement reforms with increased tax revenue to spread the pain of necessary deficit reduction steps.
This “may be the single worst piece of public policy to ever come out of this institution,” declared liberal Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, while Pelosi noted the measure “makes these big cuts and has … not one red cent from the wealthiest people in our country — no revenue.”
Boehner and other House leaders said the deal would start reshaping how Washington spends taxpayer money, which was the goal of conservatives who elected Republicans to a majority in the House last November.
“The bill is not perfect … but changing the way that Washington spends tax payers dollars is often a lot like redirecting or turning an aircraft carrier.” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Virginia. “It’s a monumental task.”
Boehner acknowledged that Republicans on the Armed Services Committee were concerned about cuts to military spending in the agreement, but he told reporters he believed they would support the proposal.
“As I told them, this is the best defense number we’re going to get, and frankly if we don’t pass the bill, it’s pretty clear to me what’ll happen … the defense number will go down,” Boehner said.
The agreement revolves around a two-stage process.
The first stage includes $917 billion in savings, including a roughly $420 billion reduction in the national security budget. The cuts would be accompanied by a $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling.
Because of the pending Tuesday deadline, Obama would have immediate authority to raise the debt ceiling by $400 billion, which will last through September, according to the White House.
The other $500 billion increase in the debt limit would be subject to a congressional vote of disapproval that can be vetoed by Obama.
In the second stage, a special joint committee of Congress would recommend further deficit reduction steps totaling $1.5 trillion or more, with Congress obligated to vote on the panel’s proposals by the end of the year.
The committee would comprise 12 members: Six from each chamber, equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. The panel’s recommendations would be due by November 23 and guaranteed an up-or-down vote without amendments by December 23.
The committee is expected to consider politically sensitive reforms to the tax code and entitlement programs, though Democrats and Republicans disagree on the likelihood of any eventual revenue increases.
If the committee’s recommendations are enacted, Obama would be authorized to increase the debt ceiling by up to $1.5 trillion. If the recommendations are not enacted, Obama can still raise the debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion. At that point, however, a budget “trigger” would kick in, imposing mandatory across-the-board spending cuts matching the size of the debt ceiling increase.
The cuts would be split between defense spending and non-defense programs, an unpopular formula intended to motivate legislators to approve the committee’s recommendations.
“You want to make it hard for (lawmakers) just to walk away and wash their hands,” Gene Sperling, the director of Obama’s National Economic Council, said Sunday. “You want them to say, if nothing happens, there will be a very tough degree of pain that will take place.”
The final debt ceiling increase in the agreement would also be subject to a congressional vote of disapproval that can be vetoed by Obama.
The agreement calls for both houses of Congress to vote on a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, though it does not make a further increase in the debt limit subject to congressional passage of such an amendment — something tea party conservatives were initially demanding.
In a key concession to Democrats, benefits from entitlements including Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare — as well as veteran’s benefits — will be exempt from any immediate cuts.
Leaders on both sides of the aisle have conceded that the deal is far from perfect.
Reid emphasized that “no one got what they want” and “everyone had to give something up.”
But this “is a great stride forward” that shows “we can succeed not in spite of our divided government but because of it,” he said.
A recent CNN/ORC International Poll reveals a growing public exasperation and demand for compromise. Sixty-four percent of respondents to a July 18-20 survey preferred a deal with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. Only 34% preferred a debt reduction plan based solely on spending reductions.
According to the poll, the public is sharply divided along partisan lines; Democrats and independents are open to a number of different approaches because they think a failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause a major crisis for the country. Republicans, however, draw the line at tax increases, and a narrow majority of them oppose raising the debt ceiling under any circumstances.
Majority Leader Harry Reid said no amendments will be allowed, and approval of the deal will require a super-majority of 60 votes in the 100-member Senate.
Senate vote set for Tuesday after House passes debt ceiling agreement
By Alan Silverleib and Tom Cohen, CNN
Washington (CNN) — The U.S. Senate is scheduled to take up the debt-ceiling deal at noon Tuesday, as lawmakers stare down the deadline for the government to face possible default.
The House on Monday passed the package on a 269-161 vote, overcoming opposition from liberal Democrats and tea party conservatives for ideologically different reasons.
One of those supporting the plan was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona, who cast her first House vote since being shot in the head in an assassination attempt in January. She received an emotional ovation when she entered the chamber.
The agreement reached Sunday by President Barack Obama and congressional leaders from both parties calls for up to $2.4 trillion in savings over the next decade, raises the debt ceiling through the end of 2012 and establishes a special congressional committee to recommend long-term fiscal reforms.
The legislation needs to reach Obama’s desk on Tuesday. If the current $14.3 trillion debt limit is not increased by that point, Americans could face rapidly rising interest rates, a falling dollar and shakier financial markets, among other problems.
All of those factors could influence the government’s credit rating, which is why the Treasury Department has been briefing the agencies that rate U.S. debt about the finer points of the package, a senior administration official told CNN.
If Wall Street doesn’t like what it hears, the United States could face a downgrade in its creditworthiness.
A number of Republicans worried about cuts in defense spending and the lack of a required balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. Progressive Democrats were livid over the extent of the deal’s domestic spending cuts, as well as the absence of any immediate tax hikes on wealthier Americans.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, was able to round up the support of most of his GOP caucus, while the chamber’s two top Democrats — Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland — voted for the plan along with more than 90 of their caucus members.
Still, emotions ran high after months of grueling negotiations that pitted the small-government, anti-tax ideology of conservative Republicans against Obama’s call for balancing spending cuts and entitlement reforms with increased tax revenue to spread the pain of necessary deficit reduction steps.
This “may be the single worst piece of public policy to ever come out of this institution,” declared liberal Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, while Pelosi noted the measure “makes these big cuts and has … not one red cent from the wealthiest people in our country — no revenue.”
Boehner and other House leaders said the deal would start reshaping how Washington spends taxpayer money, which was the goal of conservatives who elected Republicans to a majority in the House last November.
“The bill is not perfect … but changing the way that Washington spends tax payers dollars is often a lot like redirecting or turning an aircraft carrier.” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Virginia. “It’s a monumental task.”
Boehner acknowledged that Republicans on the Armed Services Committee were concerned about cuts to military spending in the agreement, but he told reporters he believed they would support the proposal.
“As I told them, this is the best defense number we’re going to get, and frankly if we don’t pass the bill, it’s pretty clear to me what’ll happen … the defense number will go down,” Boehner said.
The agreement revolves around a two-stage process.
The first stage includes $917 billion in savings, including a roughly $420 billion reduction in the national security budget. The cuts would be accompanied by a $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling.
Because of the pending Tuesday deadline, Obama would have immediate authority to raise the debt ceiling by $400 billion, which will last through September, according to the White House.
The other $500 billion increase in the debt limit would be subject to a congressional vote of disapproval that can be vetoed by Obama.
In the second stage, a special joint committee of Congress would recommend further deficit reduction steps totaling $1.5 trillion or more, with Congress obligated to vote on the panel’s proposals by the end of the year.
The committee would comprise 12 members: Six from each chamber, equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. The panel’s recommendations would be due by November 23 and guaranteed an up-or-down vote without amendments by December 23.
The committee is expected to consider politically sensitive reforms to the tax code and entitlement programs, though Democrats and Republicans disagree on the likelihood of any eventual revenue increases.
If the committee’s recommendations are enacted, Obama would be authorized to increase the debt ceiling by up to $1.5 trillion. If the recommendations are not enacted, Obama can still raise the debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion. At that point, however, a budget “trigger” would kick in, imposing mandatory across-the-board spending cuts matching the size of the debt ceiling increase.
The cuts would be split between defense spending and non-defense programs, an unpopular formula intended to motivate legislators to approve the committee’s recommendations.
“You want to make it hard for (lawmakers) just to walk away and wash their hands,” Gene Sperling, the director of Obama’s National Economic Council, said Sunday. “You want them to say, if nothing happens, there will be a very tough degree of pain that will take place.”
The final debt ceiling increase in the agreement would also be subject to a congressional vote of disapproval that can be vetoed by Obama.
The agreement calls for both houses of Congress to vote on a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, though it does not make a further increase in the debt limit subject to congressional passage of such an amendment — something tea party conservatives were initially demanding.
In a key concession to Democrats, benefits from entitlements including Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare — as well as veteran’s benefits — will be exempt from any immediate cuts.
Leaders on both sides of the aisle have conceded that the deal is far from perfect.
Reid emphasized that “no one got what they want” and “everyone had to give something up.”
But this “is a great stride forward” that shows “we can succeed not in spite of our divided government but because of it,” he said.
A recent CNN/ORC International Poll reveals a growing public exasperation and demand for compromise. Sixty-four percent of respondents to a July 18-20 survey preferred a deal with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. Only 34% preferred a debt reduction plan based solely on spending reductions.
According to the poll, the public is sharply divided along partisan lines; Democrats and independents are open to a number of different approaches because they think a failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause a major crisis for the country. Republicans, however, draw the line at tax increases, and a narrow majority of them oppose raising the debt ceiling under any circumstances.
Majority Leader Harry Reid said no amendments will be allowed, and approval of the deal will require a super-majority of 60 votes in the 100-member Senate.
Turns out that the “Friends” had lots of special friends.
After surveying all 236 episodes of the NBC sitcom, humor Web site splitsider.com has found that the six characters had a total of 85 sexual partners — counting only those that appeared on-screen — throughout the series’ 10-season run.
The most promiscuous one was Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc), who racked up 17 partners, 23.5 percent of whom accounted for relatively long lasting relationships.
Tied for second place in the sleeping-around category were Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) and Ross Gellar (David Schwimmer), who each had 16 partners, although 37.5 percent of Phoebe’s relationships were serious, while half of Ross’ relationships wound up being long-term.
Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston) had 14 partners — including baby daddy Ross — with 71.4 percent being serious relationships. BFF Monica Gellar (Courteney Cox) had 13 partners, two famously played by Tom Selleck and Jon Favreau, and went steady with 38.5 percent of them.
The prude of the bunch was, unsurprisingly, Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry). He had a paltry nine partners, 33.3 percent of whom were serious relationships, before he married Monica.
NEW ORLEANS — Colorful former Gov. Edwin Edwards, who turns 84 next month, on Friday married a 32-year-old woman who befriended him during his federal prison sentence for bribery and extortion.
Edwards, a Democrat who served four terms as governor in the 1970s, `80s and `90s, did most of the talking after he and bride Trina Grimes Scott emerged from an elevator at the Monteleone Hotel in the French Quarter.
“People who don’t know me don’t know what a wonderful, pleasant, modest fellow I am,” Edwards said when asked how a man his age managed to land a much-younger wife.
He also told reporters how Grimes, who started writing him letters while he was in prison, visited him there regularly on weekends and holidays in recent years.
“The prison was in love with her — they used to watch her walk across the parking lot,” Edwards said, laughing. “They made me the camp hero.”
The two have not talked about what prompted her to choose him as a pen pal.
Edwards spent eight years in federal prison for his role in a bribery and extortion scheme to rig riverboat casino licenses during his fourth term in the early 1990s. In July, he completed six months of home detention and regular reporting to a Baton Rouge halfway house.
Grimes became Edwards’ third wife in what the governor said was a small, private ceremony earlier Friday at the hotel, with a few friends and family in attendance.
“It’s great, I’m very happy,” the bride told reporters. She has posted wedding updates on herFacebook page, which does not list an occupation.
Edwards wore a blue suit, while his new wife wore a cream-colored, knee-length, strapless dress.
A reporter asked what the dress was made of and she said she didn’t know. Edwards, born and raised in Louisiana’s Cajun country, quipped: “It’s Italian silk, with a Cajun twist.”
After posing for pictures, the couple walked around the block to Galatoire’s Restaurant on Bourbon Street, to smatterings of applause from tourists and workers in taxi cabs and delivery trucks.
They were followed by a small parade of reporters, photographers, and an entourage that included state Supreme Court Justice Catherine Kimball, who performed the wedding ceremony, and her husband, former state Rep. Clyde Kimball.
Edwards, who also served in Congress, brought charisma and power to state politics that rivaled that of Louisiana’s other favorite populist sons, Huey and Earl Long.
Though frequently criticized in the press for his link to a Korean rice scandal early in his congressional career, his strong hand in deal-making with legislators as governor and his leadership in the push to legalize gambling in the `90s, Edwards built a reputation for being able to broker coalitions of urban and rural constituencies.
He was last elected governor in 1991, when he faced former Ku Klux Klan wizard David Duke, who ran as a Republican. Business leaders feared Duke’s election would be devastating for the state’s convention business because of his extremist views.
Around New Orleans, bumper stickers began popping up on vehicles, stop signs and park benches that forever immortalized Louisiana’s often stormy romance with Edwards. The stickers read, “Vote for the Crook: It’s Important.”
The Democrat-controlled US Senate has blocked a Republican debt-ceiling bill, just two hours after it was narrowly passed in the House of Representatives.
Congress was earlier warned that it was “playing with fire” and President Barack Obama appealed for a compromise as the Tuesday deadline for a resolution of the debt crisis talks loomed ever closer.
The Senate is now instead debating a Democrat plan to avoid a US government default, a spectre that has created fears of a fresh world recession. The Treasury department says that the US will default on its financial obligations on Tuesday if agreement is not reached on raising the debt ceiling.
Late on Friday night the Republican-controlled House had passed a bill, which would have lifted the borrowing ceiling only temporarily, by just eight votes. Democrats had opposed it as unacceptable and “extremist” – while conservatives influenced by the Tea party argued that it did not go far enough.
John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, gave an impassioned appeal to his colleagues in the House to approve his plan, slamming his fist on the podium several times.
“I stuck my neck out a mile to get an agreement with the president of the United States,” he said, referring to failed negotiations with Mr Obama earlier this month
(Reuters) – An Iranian military commander has accused German engineering company Siemens of helping the United States and Israel launch a cyber attack on its nuclear facilities, Kayhan daily reported on Sunday.
Gholamreza Jalali, head of Iran’s civilian defense, said the Stuxnet virus aimed at Iran’s atomic program was the work of its two biggest foes and that the German company must take some of the blame.
Siemens declined to comment.
“The investigations show the source of the Stuxnet virus originated in America and the Zionist regime,” Jalali was quoted as saying.
Jalali said Iran should hold Siemens responsible for the fact that its control systems used to operate complicated factory machinery — known as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) — had been hit by the worm.
“Our executive officials should legally follow up the case of Siemens SCADA software which prepared the ground for the Stuxnet virus,” he said.
“The Siemens company must be held accountable and explain how and why it provided the enemies with the information about the codes of SCADA software and paved the way for a cyber attack against us,” he said.
Some foreign experts have described Stuxnet as a “guided cyber missile” aimed at Iran’s atomic program.
Unlike other Iranian officials who have played down the impact of Stuxnet, Jalali said it could have posed a major risk had it not been discovered and dealt with before any major damage was done.
“This was a hostile act against us which could have brought major human and material damages had it not been encountered promptly.”
Iran has given few details of the impact of the virus. It said in September that staff computers at the Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power station had been hit but that the plant itself was unharmed.
Bushehr — Iran’s first nuclear power station — is still not operational, having missed several start-up deadlines, prompting speculation that it too had been hit by Stuxnet, something Iran denies.
Russia’s ambassador to NATO said in January the virus had hit the computer system at Bushehr, posing the risk of a nuclear disaster on the scale of the 1986 Chernobyl incident in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
Some defense analysts say the main target was more likely to be Iran’s uranium enrichment — the process which creates fuel for nuclear power plants or provide material for bombs if processed much further. Western powers accuse Iran, a major oil producer, of seeking to develop nuclear weapons capability, something Tehran denies.
U.S.-based think-tank, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), said that in late 2009 or early 2010 about 1,000 centrifuges — machines used to refine uranium — out of the 9,000 used at Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant, had been knocked out by the virus — not enough to seriously harm its operations.
(Additional reporting by Jens Hack in Munich; Writing by Ramin Mostafavi; Editing by Robin Pomeroy and Janet Lawrence)
Fashion designer Bijan Pakzad is hospitalized after suffering a stroke at his Beverly Hills home.
According to sources Bijan was transported to Cedars-Sinai Medial Center Thursday evening. On a Facebook post Friday night, Bijan’s son Nicolas said his father had “a stroke.”
The 67-year old remains hospitalized, and according to Nicolas … Bijan is “in critical condition.”
Bijan — a legend in the fashion and perfume biz — famously suits up movie stars and world leaders. His Rodeo Drive boutique is known as the most expensive store in the world.
Manchester, England (CNN) – Shanna Bukhari gets some pretty nasty messages through Facebook, she says. They call her a “dirty Muslim.” They say England is a “white nationality country” and she shouldn’t be allowed to represent it.
But that’s just what she hopes to do at the Miss Universe beauty contest this year. If the Manchester, England-based fashion model wins the British contest next month, Bukhari will become the first Muslim to represent Britain at the international contest.
The idea isn’t going down well with everyone – Bukhari says she has gotten hate mail from across the board.
“I’ve had racists, I’ve had a minority from Muslim community, I’ve had it from all religions and all communities that dislike what I’m doing,” she said.
The most upsetting messages, she said, are video links suggesting she should be murdered.
Since she started getting threats, she has made a point of never being alone, and a private security firm guards her when she appears at charity events, she said.
Some of the abuse she gets is based on a misunderstanding, she said.
“I am not representing Islam and I am not the one that brought my religion into this,” Bukhari said. “The minority out there should not use my religion to attack me.”
She’s not planning to wear a bikini, she said, explaining that her swimsuit will be a one-piece topped with a sarong.
“I don’t think I would be comfortable wearing a bikini,” she said.
Bukhari says she’s a good Muslim.
“This competition does not define me as a person. It doesn’t make me any less of a Muslim being in a pageant like this,” she said. “Pageants like this are happening in Muslim countries as well.”
And a British woman shouldn’t have to defend herself from the sort of criticism she’s getting from a few Muslims, she argued.
“We live in a Western society and there is a minority out there who is trying to dictate and control others… they need to start accepting England as a whole and treat it as their country.”
One of her critics agrees with her on that point.
“As much as I may oppose the way a certain person dresses, I think it’s important that people should have the right to dress the way they want to dress,” said Mohammed Shafiq, the chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, a Manchester-based Muslim youth organization working to build cross-community understanding.
But, although he says Shanna Bukhari may have a right to enter a beauty contest he says she should not.
“Islam is very clear that women should dress in a modest way and guard their modesty, and certainly as a liberal Muslim myself, I do believe that she should do just that.”
He objects to pageants “where women have to be paraded and idolized as sexual objects,” and dismisses the argument that pageant winners do a lot of charity work.
“You can promote peace without having the title Mrs Universe or Mrs UK for that matter,” he said.
Despite his objections to beauty contests, Shafiq says he bears Bukhari no ill will.
“I totally condemn the death threats she may have received and the hate mail she may have received,” he said. “I’ve opposed her but it doesn’t mean I’m full of hatred and I wish her well.”
More people back Shanna Bukhari’s quest to be Miss Universe than oppose it, she said.
“I’ve had so much support from all over, not just the United Kingdom … Hong Kong, China, Pakistan, India, many Muslim countries – it’s way more than the hate that I’ve received,” she said.
On the streets of Manchester, where she lives, not a single person who spoke to CNN objected to what Bukhari was doing.
“Whether you’re Muslim or whatever your religion is, you should be entitled to do what you like. You should be allowed to do it regardless of your religion,” said David Yates.
“Why not?” asked Priya Baghani, who is not Muslim. “In Manchester there are a lot of Muslims, so that might be representative of this community, so why not?”
Several women wearing headscarves declined to answer CNN’s questions about Bukhari.
But one of the world’s best-known Muslim beauty queens is backing her.
Miss USA 2010 Rima Fakih is both the first Arab-American and the first Muslim to win that title. She sought out Bukhari after hearing her story to offer advice and a gift.
“Be fearless, be proud of who you are and no matter what anyone tells you by using religion as a tool against you, don’t let that affect you,” she said.
“I sent Shanna a bracelet just like mine,” Fakih said, jangling a wrist covered with good luck charms, “and I hope it’s going to keep her safe.”
Washington (CNN) — The U.S. State Department accuses Iran of helping the Syrian government’s efforts to suppress protests that have taken place there in recent weeks.
“We believe that there is credible information that Iran is assisting Syria” in quelling the protesters, department spokesman Mark Toner said Thursday.
U.S. officials said the Iranian assistance includes gear used to suppress crowds, as well as equipment and technical advice for monitoring and blocking e-mail, cell phones, text messaging, and internet postings by and among activists.
Syria’s Foreign Ministry told the nation’s official news agency, SANA, that the claim is “absolutely untrue.”
An official at Iran’s mission to the United Nations said Iran “categorically rejects” the accusation as “totally baseless and unfounded.”
He added, “This and similar allegations are in line with the mainstream anti-Iranian propaganda masterminded and propagated by known circles in the United States to tarnish the image of Iran and Syria.”
But Toner said of the Iranians, “They continue to play a meddling role in the region.”
American officials said Iran’s government is also sharing with Syria the best practices it developed during Tehran’s crackdown on the “green movement” protesters in 2009.
One security tactic Iran has developed, according to former Pentagon intelligence analyst Michael Rubin, is arresting protesters days later, rather than in the middle of heated street protests.
“What Iran does is, they take photos” of anti-government protesters, Rubin said. “Then they come, over the next two or three weeks, and they will round up people in the middle of the night, where you won’t create a spark, where you won’t create a backlash.
“That may be what they’re trying to teach Syria right now.”
The U.S. allegation was first reported in the Wall Street Journal.
From a email which I got and special thanks to www.savepasargad.com
and Mr. Farzad
پرتاب گل به سوی آرامگاه کورش بزرگ در لحظه سال تحويل
پرتاب گل به سوی آرامگاه کورش بزرگ در لحظه سال تحويل
در تخت جمشيد و پاسارگاد هيچ امکانات رفاهی نيست. سازمان ميراث فرهنگی و سازمان های مسئول ديگر در ايام نوروز هيچ نوع امکانات رفاهی در تخت جمشيد و پاسارگاد تهيه نمی بينند. هيچ تبليغی برای رفتن به آن جا نمی شود، به ندرت وسيله ی نقليه عمومی برای رفتن به آنجا هست
چندين سال است که در آستانه ی نوروزجوان ها با رنج راهی طولانی و با پای پياده خودشان را به آنجا می رسانند تا تحويل سال نو را در کنار آرامگاه کورش سر کنند. روز زمين سفره هفت سين شان را روی زمين پهن کنند، و در لحظه تحويل سال نو به سوی آرامگاه گل پرتاب کنند
E-book business should take a page from music industry and go DRM-free
Rob Pegoraro
Fast Forward
I’ve done my part to prop up the consumer-electronics industry in recent years: a flat-panel TV downstairs and one upstairs, his and hers smartphones, not-too-obsolete digital cameras, a desktop computer upstairs and an iPad 2 downstairs (well, once it gets off back order).
But one thing is missing from this electronic inventory: a Kindle, a Nook or any sort of e-book reader.
That’s not an accident. The e-book business seems determined to repeat the early mistakes of the music industry with “digital rights management” restrictions. But this time around, I don’t feel compelled to back their early investments with my own money.
Think back to how the first good, mass-market music-download store worked. Apple’s iTunes Store seemed like a revelation compared with earlier, listener-hostile efforts, simply because it let you listen to your purchases in most cases.
All you had to do was consent to listen to songs bought off iTunes only on the five computers you’d authorized with your account, plus any iPods or iPhones you owned.
Somehow, the recorded-music business did not perish. Digital sales should finally pass CD sales next year.
E-books haven’t come as far along. If you buy a title from Amazon’s Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook bookstore or Apple’s iBookstore, among others, the DRM attached to it will prevent you from reading that book on another company’s software or hardware.
That might not seem like a problem today. Amazon makes a pretty good e-book reader today in the Kindle and has since shipped software for a growing variety of computers and smartphones. But do you trust it to lead that category of hardware and software for as long as you’d want to reread that book?
E-book DRM also disables many functions common to paper books or other electronic documents. Most stores don’t let you copy text from a book to quote elsewhere, although Barnes & Noble is a welcome exception. Printing? Forget it, unless you go to the trouble of placing an e-reader face down in a copier, one page at a time.
Lending is limited to those titles for which a publisher has authorized it and comes with condescendingly strict limits that most librarians would not recognize. For example, Amazon permits only one 14-day loan per authorized title, ever.
Reselling an e-book? Forget it.
All those limits and lock-ins make an e-book with DRM a dubious deal. Why would I want to pay almost as much as for a paper book — in some cases more — and then have my purchase constrain its usefulness and therefore cut its value?
Some smaller publishers haven’t bought into DRM, just as independent record labels never saw the point of it. Tech publisher O’Reilly and Associates of Sebastopol, Calif., sells titles on its own site and through such outlets as the Kindle Store without any “protection.”
Has the company lost any sales? In a nutshell, no. E-book sales had grown to more than 10 times print sales on O’Reilly’s site by the end of 2010, wrote Vice President Andrew Savikas.
The mainstream sites are showing some signs of being open to removing DRM. Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble now all allow publishers to opt out of DRM. Apple even defaults to omitting DRM, although it takes only one click for a publisher to restore that.
But good luck finding out whether a potential purchase comes with the usual digital locks. Apple and Barnes & Noble provide zero indication of an e-book’s DRM status in their stores. On the Kindle Store, you might get lucky and find that a book’s title notes that virtue, or that a publisher has thought to tag that page with a “drmfree” label.
But most publishers don’t give their own authors that option. My colleague Joel Achenbach’s new book “A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea” sailed into the Kindle Store with DRM intact because he never had a choice — he was never asked. His agent, Michael Congdon, said major publishers don’t negotiate that.
Maybe most authors would choose DRM anyway. Dan Pacheco, chief executive of Boulder, Colo.-based BookBrewer, wrote that his Internet-publishing startup will provide an author’s work without DRM, “but no author has done that to date.”
There is one way to settle this discussion. Give customers a clear choice, let the market work, and the book business might discover that it can read the recording industry’s sheet music.
White House says Obama will lay out deficit-reduction plan later this week
By Associated Press, Monday, April 11, 3:29 AM
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama and Congress are shifting from short-term budget concerns to debates over the nation’s long-term economic future, and everything — from Medicare and Medicaid cuts to tax hikes for the wealthy — is on the table.
Much will be revealed at midweek, when the House and Senate are expected to vote on a budget for the remainder of this fiscal year and Obama unveils his plan to reduce the deficit, in part by scaling back the government’s chief health programs for seniors and the poor. The House, too, may vote on Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s spending plan for next year as Democrats readied arguments that it proposed “Draconian” cuts to Americans who need help the most.
Meanwhile, congressional officials were putting to paper a deal struck Friday night that would fund the government through September and cut $38.5 billion in spending. They were operating under a one-week extension of the budget, which passed the House and Senate in the last hour before the government was to begin shutting down.
The House’s 348-70 vote to extend funding a few days provided no guarantees for the measure being written Monday that would fund the government through the next six months, but leadership aides said they expected it to pass as early as Wednesday.
Whatever its fate, official Washington raced ahead to frame the upcoming fight over raising the nation’s debt limit and the election-year budget as a pair of interconnected battles that would make Friday’s nail-biter seem minor.
To be sure, the GOP had succeeded in turning what’s usually a fight over spending into a series of battles over spending cuts — a thematic victory for House Republicans swept to power by a populist mandate for smaller, more austere government.
“We’ve had to bring this president kicking and screaming to the table to cut spending,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., on “Fox News Sunday.”
Presidential adviser David Plouffe said Obama has long been committed to finding ways for the nation to spend within its means. He confirmed that the president would unveil more specifics for deficit reduction with a speech Wednesday that would reveal plans to reduce the government’s chief health programs for seniors and the poor.
“You’re going to have to look at Medicare and Medicaid and see what kind of savings you can get,” Obama adviser David Plouffe said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
But he contrasted Obama’s approach to the Republicans in familiar terms.
“We can’t take a machete,” Plouffe said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We have to take a scalpel, and we’re going to have to cut, we’re going to have to look carefully.”
Away from the talk shows, congressional officials still were analyzing Friday’s vote to fund the government through the week.
The late hour of Friday’s handshake left lawmakers little time to react. House members of both parties who voted for a few days’ funding could not say on Sunday that they’d vote for the plan to fund the government through September.
Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who voted “yes” Friday to extend funding this week while the final compromise was written, said he was nonetheless undecided on whether he’d vote for the final deal. On ABC’s “This Week,” he said he didn’t think the six-month compromise would pass.
On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., also a “yes” vote on Friday, would not commit to voting for the six-month deal either.
Pence praised House Speaker John Boehner for fighting “the good fight.”
“It sounds like John Boehner got a good deal, probably not good enough for me to support it, but a good deal nonetheless,” Pence said on ABC.
Friday’s tally also offered a look at Republicans likely to be the staunchest opponents of any compromises on spending and policy.
Twenty-eight of the “no” votes were cast by Republicans. Sixteen of those are members of the 87-member freshman class. Also voting no: tea party star and possible presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.
“This short-term was just ‘same ol’, same ol” for Washington,” one newcomer who voted “no,” Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, wrote on his Facebook page.
The $38.5 billion in cuts, Huelskamp wrote, “barely make a dent” in years of trillion-dollar deficits and the nation’s $14 trillion debt. Additionally, the measure lacked the policy riders he sought, such as one to strip Planned Parenthood of federal funding, though by law no federal money goes to its abortion services.
All told, Huelskamp wrote, the measure “ignores the fundamental reasons I and my fellow freshmen members of Congress were sent to Washington in November of last year.”
Plouffe said the president understands the mandate to dramatically cut spending. On talk show after talk show, he pointed to December’s bipartisan deal on tax cuts with Friday night’s agreement on this year’s budget as evidence that both parties can govern together when they want to.
“Compromise is not a dirty word,” Plouffe said on ABC.
The president, Plouffe said, would address ways to reduce the deficit and the long-term, $14 trillion debt. He gave few specifics, but he said the president believes taxes should go up on higher-income Americans and cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will be necessary.
Obama’s speech will come as the debate shifts to the far more delicate ground of the government budget for next year — when the president and most of Congress are up for re-election.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
By Jennifer Liberto, senior writer, and David Goldman, staff writerFirst Published: April 8, 2011: 5:06 AM ET
WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) — What happens when you apply an 1884 law to BlackBerries? Mass confusion.
The Antideficiency Act, passed by Congress during Chester Arthur’s administration, prevents non-essential federal employees from working when the government has no budget with which to pay them. If the government were to shut down Friday, the 800,000 furloughed federal employees would actually be violating the law if they were to check their work e-mail.
But in the age of ubiquitous communication, how do you even enforce that? The truth is, no one really knows yet. The last shutdown was in 1995, when the Palm Pilot was about as advanced as handheld devices got.
The Capitol was bustling on Thursday with staffers wondering if they’d have to work all weekend, turn off their BlackBerries or turn in their devices on Monday. Most said they didn’t know for sure.
“For the first time, government agencies are trying to figure out how the Antideficiency Act applies to computers and BlackBerry devices,” said John Cooney, partner at Venable LLP and former deputy general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget. “It’s a difficult problem to solve.”
Agencies are taking different steps to address the problem, but none of them are foolproof.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development, for instance, is allowing all 9,700 non-essential employees to keep their government-issued BlackBerries and laptops, but they are prohibited from using them. However, some “excepted” employees may be allowed to carry out “essential functions.”
The agency is determining who qualifies as an “excepted” employee. Those staffers may continue to work on a BlackBerry only for essential reasons, according to Melanie Roussell, spokeswoman for HUD. For example, public affairs officers at HUD might be allowed to use their BlackBerries — but only to answer media questions about furloughs.
0:00 /02:27
Checking and responding to other e-mails would be against the agency’s rules. Of course, knowing what e-mails are essential requires reading them.
Other parts of government are dealing with the problem by taking away the devices. The House sent a memo to staffers saying furloughed employees may be required to turn in their BlackBerries, laptops, and even cell phones, instructing them to turn on “out of office” messages.
Employees would have to come back on Monday to return their devices — even though they’re not allowed to work.
In that case, the agencies might invoke a 1981 ruling by Benjamin Civiletti, President Ronald Reagan’s attorney general. Civiletti ruled that as long as budget negotiations are ongoing, agencies may allow staff to come back to work on the morning after a shutdown to engage in shutdown-related activities like securing their desks, and, presumably, turning in their BlackBerries.
So what about checking e-mail from home?
HUD told its employees that they are prohibited from checking e-mail on their home computers. The House issued similar guidance — but it also said offices “may contact employees to notify them to return to work.” Getting that message out without e-mail could be tricky. Time for a return of the telephone tree?
In a more extreme measure, government agencies could shut down their e-mail servers, but that would kill e-mail and communications for essential workers as well.
“Agencies are not required to take heroic efforts when the government shuts down for a short period of time,” Cooney said. For example, a trade delegation does not need to be flown home, only to fly back abroad if the government were to resume operations a few days later.
“But if it’s a long shut down, the agencies might have to block certain users’ e-mails at the router or system level,” he added.
Many agencies don’t have a BlackBerry plan yet. The OMB said it was still trying to determine which employees were “non-essential,” and that it will then send a memo around about its BlackBerry strategy. Treasury had yet to decide what to do.
The White House Travel Office said that its employees would not be allowed to use their BlackBerries, but it didn’t say whether they could keep them.
The First BlackBerry won’t be taken away, however. The E-mailer-in-chief is an essential government employee.
– CNN’s Washington Bureau contributed to this report
Editor’s note: This is another in a series of Business Insider commentaries debunking common tech myths.
(Business Insider) — Apple and CEO Steve Jobs have celebrated a string of huge hits over the past several years, including the iPhone, the iPad and the MacBook Air.
Reviews have been mostly glowing, sales have been strong and investors have cheered, sending the stock up 40% over the past 12 months. Apple, which was struggling a decade ago, is now the world’s most admired and highly valued tech company.
But Apple is not perfect. In fact, the company has several weaknesses to address:
1) The cloud. Apple has been bragging about how the iPad 2 is a “post-PC” device, but you still need to plug it into a computer to activate and sync it. The easiest way to get photos off your iPhone is to email them to yourself. You still can’t sync your iTunes music over Wi-Fi or 3G. This is a shame.
Apple needs to think about the cloud the way Google does — as the future of mobile services. You shouldn’t be tied to a USB cord to access files. You shouldn’t need a PC to use a “post-PC” iPad. You shouldn’t have to email a map link from your computer to your iPhone.
The company has a huge new data center in North Carolina and can’t be blind to the fact that other companies — Dropbox, Amazon, Google, etc. — are doing very cool things with the cloud.
But for now, Apple is still weak here — MobileMe and Apple’s iOS push notifications not withstanding.
2) Social. Apple has tried to do “social” a bit with Ping, its social network based around iTunes music, and GameCenter, its social gaming service. They aren’t huge hits. Apple has not been able to go as deep integrating Facebook or other social networks into its products as some Android devices or Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 have.
Some of this could be to reduce Apple’s dependence on other companies, so the iPhone is more reliable. But it seems that Apple and Steve Jobs don’t really get social, and don’t see its value. That could burn them in the long run.
Or perhaps, again, this could be addressed in the next version of iOS. For instance, Apple could go a long way by making the iPhone’s built-in Photos app more social, like the popular Instagram app. And Apple’s marketing boss Phil Schiller is all over Instagram. So it’s not like the company isn’t highly aware of what’s out there.
This isn’t to say that Apple should replicate Facebook, or even try to build its own general-purpose social network. But integrating your existing online social connections could be useful for many of Apple’s products, ranging from the iPhone’s address book to the App Store to photo sharing. So it’s time for Apple to do more here.
3) The living room. The new Apple TV just got a small upgrade, in the form of live video streaming for MLB and NBA games. But it’s still the weakest of Apple’s products, with a relatively limited selection of video. And it’s definitely not something TV companies like Comcast or DirecTV are worried about.
Apple could improve Apple TV with an app store within the next year or so — gaming could be big! — and more video content sooner. But it’s a challenge, because this is a situation where Apple has to decide between being a good platform — and allowing rival companies like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon to thrive — and being a dominant content seller by keeping an iTunes monopoly.
The good news for Apple is that no one else is really putting up a fight here yet. Google TV isn’t a big success, while Boxee, Roku and TiVo Premiere haven’t caught on with mainstream consumers. So Apple can take its time. Heck, Apple may even come out with an actual television someday.
Also, these are all areas where Apple is relatively in control of its destiny, and can make improvements.
There are some other areas where Apple is vulnerable, such as the threat posed by Google’s Android system, and possible production problems because of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. But that’s a different list.
(CNN) — For Mike Smith, Facebook is a fort for communicating freely with friends online.
Within the confines of that giant yet access-restricted network, the music-software engineer from San Francisco believes he can control what’s posted about him through the simple courtesy of asking friends to remove unflattering photos.
But on the wide-open Web exists a harsher environment.
Images that make their way outside the walls of Facebook or similarly closed networks can get indexed by search engines and become almost impossible to scrub.
“I don’t want to advertise my life,” Smith said. “But my last name is Smith, so there’s built-in anonymity. No one can find me.”
For those less fortunate, a rogue picture can become an unwanted tattoo. As software matures, more data can be extracted from those images with ease.
A digital photograph is like an onion, and advancements in machine reading and software scanning can help peel back layers to extract information from images.
Each layer of a digital picture often contains data about where and when a shot was taken. Rapidly maturing computer algorithms can interpret what or who is in the frame.
More than half of people online have uploaded photos to be shared with others, according to a study from the Pew Research Center for a report that hasn’t yet been published. It was 55% in November, up from 46% in July 2008, Pew’s studies found.
Previously, the Pew Internet Project hadn’t studied photo sharing as closely as status updates and blogs, said Lee Rainie, the project’s director.
“The photo piece of this is now rising in importance and volume, we think, so we’re going to pay more attention to this in the future,” Rainie said. “It’s become such a central feature for social networking.”
Pew is also considering the privacy implications. “As location awareness now comes in your pocket with that smartphone, it’s very likely that there’s more of that (GPS data) inadvertently passed along,” Rainie said.
Coye Cheshire, a University of California, Berkeley professor who studies social interaction online, is also planning to research this subject more deeply. He’s working on a study about people’s perceptions of the pictures they post to Facebook and Twitter.
So far in his research, Cheshire has observed that people tend to perceive a loss in their ability to control and contain info about themselves after something bad happens with it.
“What we don’t see, however, is any increase in their online discretionary behaviors,” he said.
Several factors could account for this phenomenon, which seems to run counter to the experiments where an animal learns to avoid electrodes after getting zapped a few times. “Thankfully, we don’t have any data showing people aren’t able to learn,” Cheshire said with a chuckle.
But perhaps new technologies, with their increasingly slick and simplified interfaces, are outpacing humans’ ability to adjust.
How long did it take us to determine the manners and appropriate response times associated with e-mail and text messages? Have we even figured them out yet?
“People are kind of slow, actually, to evolve to large-scale normative shifts,” Cheshire said. “It takes a very long time for that to happen.”
While we’re trying to figure out whether it’s appropriate to tag a tipsy friend in a Facebook photo, software engineers are barreling ahead.
Google has already deployed apps capable of identifying objects, goods, text, artwork and buildings by taking a picture from a phone and running some algorithms over it.
That architecture is also used for privacy-related endeavors, such as the blurring of faces and license plates captured by Google’s Street View vehicles.
The search giant is also tuning the ability to identify the faces of people who agree to be included in its database, a director for the project said in an interview last week.
Face.com released an app called Photo Finder, which looks for familiar faces in images on Facebook in an attempt to find a person’s photos that haven’t already been tagged manually. The company’s computers have scanned 23 billion photos from people who have installed the app and authorized it to look at their pictures and ones from friends.
“When it comes to normal people’s photos, the truth is that most of the photos are within the closed doors of a social network,” said Face.com CEO Gil Hirsch. “Not that many people have a lot of photos of themselves out there on the open Web.”
Let’s say you take a picture at your office that has a business card or envelope with your home address or some kind of sensitive information visible in the background.
Evernote, ZoomReader and many other companies have proprietary image-processing capabilities that can recognize words in images and then make that text searchable. About one-fifth of all notes stored in Evernote’s database contain images, Evernote CEO Phil Libin said in a recent interview.
Generally, text transcribed by image services, such as Evernote’s, isn’t offered up to public search engines such as Google. However, “today, every image that Google touches is analyzed by one or several of our algorithms,” said Hartmut Neven, Google’s engineering director for image-recognition development.
Flickr, a Yahoo property that’s among the largest photo-sharing sites, declined to comment on development plans, but a spokeswoman said, “No idea is out of the question.”
Beyond the stacks of info contained within standard picture files, a new breed of applications can pile on even more detailed signals about where a photo was taken.
For example, a new photo-sharing app called Color leverages a smartphone’s various sensors to determine more accurately the setting where a picture is taken.
In addition to the phone’s GPS location, Color can record gyroscope and compass orientation, as well as ambient sound from the microphone and lighting from the phone’s proximity sensor — tracking 20 to 40 data points in all, Color Labs CEO Bill Nguyen has said.
Some of that info is sent over the internet to Color’s servers moments after the app is opened, not just when pictures are taken. Using those signals, the app figures out who is nearby and then displays their photos. On the iPhone, users must tap a button to grant Color permission to access the device’s GPS after the app is first loaded, and it won’t work at all without that.
Though Color collects all of this info, someone’s exact location isn’t shown publicly, and the goal isn’t to sell any of this data to other companies, Nguyen said. The actual business model involves partnering with restaurateurs and store owners to provide services that make environments more hospitable, he said.
“I think the problem that happens to me a lot online is I never remember: Is this public or private?” Nguyen said of competing social-networking services. “One of the great things about Color is we’re telling you, ‘Hey, it’s public; it’s public.’ ”
However, some people have complained that Color has not been totally upfront about the extent of data that’s collected, some of which is instantly made available to nearby strangers. Nguyen acknowledges these concerns and said an upcoming version could make the terms “more clear.”
“We think there are, without a doubt, moments where you share things privately and where you share things publicly,” Nguyen said. “This is a way that you share openly.”
Even popular smartphone systems, such as the iPhone and Android, aren’t always explicit about the info they store in photos. Evidence of that can be found in the stream of pictures that are shared online from people unwittingly publishing data that can pinpoint their whereabouts.
Photos shared through e-mall or using Flickr, Photobucket and others can include precise location info, easily surfaced by free software, according to a CNN report in October. Facebook, the most popular photo-sharing site, wipes that info from each image uploaded for security reasons, a spokeswoman said then.
A computer program, aptly named Creepy, demonstrates how easily the location data in photos can be surfaced and plotted on maps. Various apps have popped up that let users selectively strike sensitive data from pictures. Alternatively, smartphone owners can disable location tagging in their phone’s settings panel.
AnchorFree, a security-software firm, is planning to offer a feature in the next six months that can automatically remove GPS data from photos before they’re sent over the Web.
“IPhone doesn’t protect itself,” said Eugene Lapidous, AnchorFree’s chief architect. “So we have to provide some intermediary service in the cloud.”
Any existing privacy concerns we have may be perpetually aggravated by the constant strides made in technical laboratories.
“As we think of new ways to use the content, there’s no way to go back,” Berkeley’s Cheshire said. “It’s an added problem to think about how this could be indexed, searchable on a completely separate system that hasn’t been invented yet.”
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Subject; Spark of Love By ABC 7
Producer & Director Amir Lahijy
Host: Elham Rahbar
Director of Photographer: AJ
Editor: Amir Lahijy
Executive Producer: Javedan Productions & Hello Hollywood
WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. (KABC) — Southern Californians are helping make the holidays special for less-fortunate children by donating to our annual Spark of Love Toy Drive.
Residents arrived early Friday to help ABC7′s Garth Kemp (dressed as a giant elf) Stuff-A-Bus full of toys in Woodland Hills, bringing new, unwrapped toys or sports equipment to the Gateway Plaza Center.
The world famous Rockettes also stopped by for a visit in the morning and showed off their high kicks.
Those who would like to help can also drop off new toys at any CVS/pharmacy or fire station, or For 18 years, ABC7 and firefighters from Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties, along with the Los Angeles City Fire Department, have joined forces to run the “Spark of Love Toy Drive”. This campaign collects new, unwrapped toys and sports equipment for the under served children in our communities.
Toys collected in the respective counties are distributed locally. Last year alone, “Spark of Love” collected over 500,000 toys within all five counties and we want to top that total this year, so please help the firefighter’s ignite a spark of love in a child’s heart.
WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. (KABC) — Southern Californians are helping make the holidays special for less-fortunate children by donating to our annual Spark of Love Toy Drive.
Residents arrived early Friday to help ABC7′s Garth Kemp (dressed as a giant elf) Stuff-A-Bus full of toys in Woodland Hills, bringing new, unwrapped toys or sports equipment to the Gateway Plaza Center.
The world famous Rockettes also stopped by for a visit in the morning and showed off their high kicks.
Those who would like to help can also drop off new toys at any CVS/pharmacy or fire station, or For 18 years, ABC7 and firefighters from Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties, along with the Los Angeles City Fire Department, have joined forces to run the “Spark of Love Toy Drive”. This campaign collects new, unwrapped toys and sports equipment for the under served children in our communities.
Toys collected in the respective counties are distributed locally. Last year alone, “Spark of Love” collected over 500,000 toys within all five counties and we want to top that total this year, so please help the firefighter’s ignite a spark of love in a child’s heart.
Obama Weighs Multi-Year Effort to Overhaul Tax Code
Published December 10, 2010
| The Wall Street Journal
President Obama has instructed his economic team to draft options to close loopholes and lower income-tax rates ahead of what would be a multi-year effort to overhaul and simplify the U.S. tax code, administration officials said Thursday.
Lowering corporate tax rates could give the administration the opportunity to build an alliance with business leaders, though it would likely depend on which tax breaks officials propose to eliminate.
White House aides cautioned that the effort was in its infancy. But in the wake of last week’s report from his presidential deficit commission, a broad tax overhaul has been pushed toward the front of the discussion as members of both parties try to find a way to bring down the $1.3 trillion budget deficit with minimal pain.
“The president has long said that reforming the tax system is a priority, and the bipartisan fiscal commission recently made recommendations that he will consider as part of the budget process,” said White House Deputy Communications Director Jen Psaki. “But he is not considering specific policy proposals, and no decisions have been made about whether this is a priority he will push for in the near future.”
The debt commission proposed ending certain tax breaks, known as tax expenditures, that allow many corporations and individuals to minimize their tax burdens. By attacking such loopholes, the commission concluded tax rates could be lowered while still bringing in more revenue to the Treasury.
A White House official said Mr. Obama had asked members of his economic team to comb through the commission’s report, as well as an earlier paper on tax-simplification options drafted by a presidential economic-recovery
board. No deadline has been set, and no decision has been made on whether to put any proposals into the fiscal 2012 budget, which will be released in February.
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Iranian TV to air interview with
woman sentenced to death by stoning
(CNN) — A program on Iran’s government-backed Press TV recently took a woman convicted of adultery and murder back to her home in Osku “to produce a visual account” of the death of her husband “at the crime scene.”
Press TV posted a story on its website early Friday morning explaining that the program “Iran Today,” which will air Friday night, would include interviews with — among others — Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who was sentenced to be stoned to death.
Press TV’s release of still photographs of Ashtiani and her son from the interview, which took place on Sunday, fueled some speculation that they had been released, but there was no evidence or confirmation to support that conjecture.
In a clip from the program that aired late Thursday, Ashtiani confesses to plotting to kill her husband. Her family, however, has denied she was involved in her husband’s death.
Ashtiani was convicted of adultery in 2006 and sentenced to death by stoning.
She became the subject of enormous international outcry over the summer when her sentence became public knowledge.
Officials ranging from Pope Benedict XVI to the European Union’s top foreign policy official, Catherine Ashton, urged Iran not to carry out the sentence.
Two German journalists who interviewed Ashtiani were arrested in October and charged with espionage. He son and lawyer also were arrested, but it was not clear on what charges.
CNN’s Azadeh Ansari and Mitra Mobasherat contributed to this report.
The GOP leads House and Senate opposition to the checks, proposed in lieu of a cost-of-living adjustment for seniors.
By Jordan Steffen, Tribune Washington Bureau
December 8, 2010, 5:04 p.m.
latimes.com
Reporting from Washington —
A proposal to provide Social Security recipients with a lump-sum payment of $250 as a modest income boost in difficult economic times was blocked Wednesday by Republican-led opposition in the House and Senate.
The measure would have provided the one-time payment to 54 million Social Security recipients in lieu of an annual cost-of-living adjustment.
This is the second consecutive year that the cost-of-living adjustment has not been awarded, a result of the country’s low inflation rate. Last year, Congress authorized a $250 payment to each recipient as part of the economic stimulus measure.
President Obama and congressional Democrats urged Congress to send another round of payments, but Senate Republicans had vowed to block Democratic-backed legislation that does not concern tax cuts and government spending.
The bill, which required 60 votes to pass in the Senate, failed on a 53-45 vote late Wednesday afternoon. Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Democratic Sens. Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Udall of Colorado and Mark R. Warner of Virginia joined Republicans in voting against the bill.
Warner’s office said he voted against it on the basis of its cost, estimated at $13 billion. Other Democrats did not respond to requests for comment.
Most Democrats said the rejection of the proposal stood in contrast to a pending deal in which the wealthiest earners would continue receiving a tax break.
“People are wondering how it could be that we could provide a million dollars in tax breaks to the richest people in this country but we couldn’t come up with $250 for struggling seniors and disabled vets,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said before the vote.
The proposal also failed in the House, where it would have required 290 for passage under special rules. There, the measure failed on a 254-153 vote, with 141 Republicans voting against the bill.
“While Democrats maintain a strong record protecting, upholding, and strengthening Social Security, Republicans continue to advocate risky schemes to privatize it and cut benefits,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D- San Francisco) said after the vote. “America’s seniors deserve better.”
Congressional Republicans united against the stipend even though senior citizens represented one of the GOP’s most potent support bases in the 2010 midterm elections. Exit polls estimate seniors favored Republicans by 18 to 20 points, a level far higher than in the last midterm, in 2006, when the senior vote split nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
On average, retired workers receive nearly $1,200 a month in federal benefits.
Every year, the government automatically adjusts Social Security payments based on the nation’s inflation rate. But for an increase in payments to occur, consumer prices must be higher than when the last increase was awarded. Consumer prices this year were up 1.1% compared with last year, but remained below what they were in 2008.
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Fire Set Off by Rioting Inmates Kills 83 at Chilean Prison
Published December 08, 2010
| Associated Press
FOXNEWS.COM
SANTIAGO, Chile — A fire set off during a riot in a severely overcrowded prison killed at least 83 inmates Wednesday and seriously injured at least 14 others, firefighters said. Chileans nationwide could hear inmates screaming after a prisoner used an illegal cell phone to call state television for help.
“The conditions that existed inside this prison are absolutely inhumane,” said Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, who visited an emergency center where inmates were being treated for severe burns and smoke inhalation.
National prison police director Luis Masferrer said the blaze broke out at about 5:30 a.m. at the San Miguel prison south of the capital, and it was brought under control three hours later.
Chile’s health minister, Jaime Manalich, called it an “enormous calamity,” “probably the worst in the history of our penitentiary system.”
Hundreds of anxious and angry relatives of inmates gathered in a chaotic scene outside the prison gates. Some told state television that prison police initially closed the gates to firefighters, impeding efforts by 10 responding units to control the blaze.
Police operations director Jaime Concha insisted police acted quickly despite coping with 1,900 inmates at the prison built for 700.
Pedro Hernandez, who directs Chile’s prison guards union, said there were only five guards to watch over the prisoners. Pinera, however, said there were six guards in the prison towers where the inmates are held, and 26 others stationed at the perimeter.
Chile’s firefighters said in an official statement that they were alerted to the fire by a call from a cell phone inside the prison. The release didn’t say whether it was a prisoner or guard who called.
Authorities have not said why so many inmates died or how long it took firefighters to enter the part of the prison where the blaze began, on the third floor of Tower 5. Firefighters had to work with police to avoid more problems with prisoners all around them.
“They wouldn’t let the firefighters come in. The riot police came in first and began to beat us, and later the firefighters came in,” an unidentified prisoner said in a call that was played on state television.
While more than 200 inmates were moved to other areas of the prison, there were 147 others in the immediate area of the blaze, and many died of asphyxiation, the firefighters’ statement said.
It was supposed to be visitors’ day at the prison, so many family members were already lining up outside when the fire broke out. Their anxiety spilled over when they learned that prisoners were killed. Some broke down in tears and screams, while others threw rocks at Masferrer, the prison police director, as he read the survivors’ names over a megaphone.
Manalich said 14 prisoners were badly burned, with uncertain fates. Two firefighters and three guards were less seriously hurt, authorities said.
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Will reading WikiLeaks cost students jobs with the federal government?
By Emanuella Grinberg, CNN
December 8, 2010 6:30 p.m. ESTDecember 8, 2010 6:30 p.m. EST
(CNN) — U.S. agencies have warned some employees that reading the classified State Department documents released by WikiLeaks puts them at risk of losing their jobs. But what about students considering jobs with the federal government? Do they jeopardize their chances by reading WikiLeaks?
It’s a gray area, said law professors and national security experts who spoke with CNN. The topic has been debated intensely in the past week in legal and academic circles, ever since several U.S. universities sent e-mails to students with warnings about reading leaked documents.
They say students ought to be mindful of their future careers when commenting on or distributing the documents online — especially those planning to seek jobs in national security or the intelligence community, which require a security clearance.
“The security clearance asks whether or not you’re a risk when it comes to sensitive material. This could be one indicator that, when taken together with others, creates a broader pattern that might suggest you’re not a person to be hired,” said Pepperdine University law professor Gregory McNeal, who specializes in national security law.
“They may very well take into account your opinion, as a job candidate, whether or not you think WikiLeaks is a good thing or bad thing for the country,” he said. “It’s a small issue, but one to approach with caution if I were a student seeking a job in the national security field.”
E-mails went out last week to students at several schools, including Boston University’s School of Law, Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, cautioning students against commenting on or posting links to the documents on social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter.
Each message came from the schools’ offices of career services, claiming to be sent at the recommendation of an alumnus.
In the eyes of the federal government, the documents remain classified, “thus, reading them, passing them on, commenting on them may be seen as a violation of Executive Order 13526, Classified National Security Information,” said Maura Kelly, Boston University law assistant dean for career development and public services, in an e-mail to students.
“Two big factors in hiring for many federal government positions are determining if the applicants have good judgment and if they know how to deal with confidential/classified information,” Kelly said in the memo, which was posted on the law blog “Above The Law” last week.
A Boston University spokeswoman confirmed that the e-mail had been sent, adding that students are “free to make their own choices.”
“Our Dean of Career Development and Public Service thought it prudent to alert our students to the possible ramifications of dealing with classified information, especially in light of the fact that law graduates often apply for jobs that require security clearances,” Mary K. Gallagher said in an e-mail.
So, can just reading about the leaked documents in the media jeopardize your chances of getting a job with the federal government?
Probably not, said McNeal. But commenting on them online or distributing them might create a pattern of behavior that raises red flags during screening for the highest levels of security clearance, which often require polygraph tests.
“I don’t think looking at them alone could hurt anyone. The problem is when you’re looking and then supporting and endorsing, then you start running into trouble. That’s where you run the risk of jeopardizing the security clearance on character grounds,” he said.
It also serves as a reminder to be mindful of your “online and personal profile,” your virtual footprint of statements, comments and shared materials stored in the web’s collective consciousness, the professor said.
“When you’re up against so many others for the same competitive job, you don’t want to stand out for this. Prudence would dictate, don’t add another possible reason for them to ding you.”
Nor should the school’s warnings necessarily be construed as policy endorsement, said Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the school’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
“I imagine the distribution of these warnings is less to endorse the policy and more just to say, ‘Hey this is what we’re hearing.’ This is not like advising students to not smoke pot. It’s not weighing in on a matter of policy. It’s just telling them that it might affect them down the road,” he said.
But to the government agency hiring you, there could be a big difference between just reading about the documents in the news and actively disseminating them or seeking them out in their full form on WikiLeaks’ site.
“It’s a new situation, and the documents are so ubiquitous right now that it seems weird to worry who on the margin has ever posted a link to them. But at the same time, the initial release was against the law, so I can’t begrudge the government, when figuring out who to employ or trust with secrets, to ask if you helped to further spread documents that belonged to the government.”
After the issue went viral last week on “Above The Law” and “the Arabist,” which posted an e-mail to students at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, the blogosphere lit up with comments from readers calling the practice unconstitutional and a violation of free speech rights.
Many suggested the warning was over the top and added another layer of anxiety for job-seekers in a weak job market. An unscientific survey on “Above The Law” asked readers what they thought: 55% said the warnings were needlessly scaring law students, 38% said a little over the top but a prudent thing to consider in a difficult job market and 9% said spot on, even reading the stuff could get you in trouble.
But would it be illegal for the State Department to deny anyone a job based on statements about WikiLeaks? The answer is unclear, but in the private sector, inquiries from prospective employers about your ability to handle confidential material would be considered “legitimate business concerns,” labor lawyer Camille Olson said.
“The framework of the issue goes back to whether the employer has a legitimate concern about your fitness for the position,” said Olson, a Chicago-based attorney who has represented large employers, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and The Society for Human Resource Management.
“I can understand how an employer in the federal government would believe that someone who once engaged in that kind of conduct, with the understanding that the information was confidential, how that reflects upon their potential for handling confidential info in the future.”
The e-mail from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs told students that posting links or making comments about the documents online would “call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.”
On Monday, the school issued a follow-up, saying that said it supported students’ right to “discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens” without fear of consequences.
“OCS e-mailed this cautionary suggestion to students, as it has done many times with other information that could be helpful in seeking employment after graduation. We know that many students share a great deal about their lives online and that employers may use that information when evaluating their candidacy,” Dean John H. Coatsworth said in a statement.
“Should the U.S. Department of State issue any guidelines relating to the WikiLeaks documents for prospective employees, SIPA will make them available immediately.”
The U.S. government’s position on WikiLeaks has been clear since November 28, when the site began posting anonymously leaked U.S. State Department documents. The Obama administration has condemned the disclosures, arguing that they harm U.S. diplomacy by exposing confidential communications. The site has been kicked off servers in the United States and France and lost a major revenue source on Friday when the U.S.-based PayPal cut off its account.
The White House Office of Management and Budget also sent a memo forbidding unauthorized federal government employees and contractors from accessing the classified documents on the WikiLeaks site or other websites on government or personal computers.
The memo, sent to federal workers and contractors without official federal government authorization to read the documents, said that just because the documents have been published on the internet does not change their “classified status” or “automatically result in declassification.”
“Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority,” the memo said.
What’s less clear is the government’s official position on whether potential recruits should avoid WikiLeaks. A spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget would not comment on the issue. But a look at the Standard Form 86 — the questionnaire all applicants for national security positions must fill out — sheds light on the risks the government wants to avoid.
Questions related to past associations, such as have you ever “knowingly engaged in activities designed to overthrow the U.S. Government by force” or “engaged in acts of terrorism” are intended to evaluate whether you could pose a security risk, said McNeal, the Pepperdine law professor.
The big concern for universities, which are supposed to be incubators for lively debate and the exchange of ideas, is the chilling effect the warnings may have, said Zittrain, the Harvard professor.
“I would hate to see the policy extended so broadly that you have students scared to read newspapers,” Zittrain said. “What I hope no one would want to do is ask if you read an article about the documents and hold that against you. They’re out there so it might be quite natural to read something about them.”
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WikiLeaks: Sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll — Saudi style
By Tim Lister, CNN
December 8, 2010 1:54 p.m. ESTDecember 8, 2010 1:54 p.m. EST
(CNN) — “The full range of worldly temptations and vices are available — alcohol, drugs, sex — but strictly behind closed doors.”
If you want to get your readers’ attention, it’s not a bad way to start. The language comes from a short but tantalizing U.S. diplomatic cable sent last year from the consulate in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia — where alcohol is banned and carnal relations strictly regulated.
“Behind the facade of Wahabi conservatism in the streets, the underground nightlife for Jeddah’s elite youth is thriving and throbbing,” the cable begins.
In evidence, then Consul General Martin Quinn refers to a Halloween party last year. The redacted cable reads: “Along with over 150 young Saudis (men and women mostly in their 20s and early 30s), ConGenOffs accepted invitations to an underground Halloween party at Prince XXXX residence in Jeddah on XXXX.”
“The scene resembled a nightclub anywhere outside the Kingdom: plentiful alcohol, young couples dancing, a DJ at the turntables, and everyone in costume,” it said.
The notorious Vice Police were nowhere to be seen “because the religious police keep their distance when parties include the presence or patronage of a Saudi royal and his circle of loyal attendants.” There are literally thousands of princes in Saudi Arabia, but the host of this event was able to trace his lineage back to a direct ancestor of King Abdullah.
As for the details of the party, the cable continues: “The hired Filipino bartenders served a cocktail punch using sadiqi, a locally-made moonshine…. It was also learned through word-of-mouth that a number of the guests were in fact ‘working girls,’ not uncommon for such parties.”
The cable goes on to make the point that black-market liquor is prohibitively expensive — even for princes. A bottle of Smirnoff vodka might cost the equivalent of $400. “Additionally, though not witnessed directly at this event, cocaine and hashish use is common in these social circles and has been seen on other occasions,” it adds.
The Consul General draws an interesting conclusion at the end of his dispatch. “Parties of this nature and scale are believed to be a relatively recent phenomenon in Jeddah. …It is not uncommon in Jeddah for the more lavish private residences to include elaborate basement bars, discos, entertainment centers and clubs.”
“As one high society Saudi remarked, “The increased conservatism of our society over these past years has only moved social interaction to the inside of people’s homes.”
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Breaking Down START II Treaty Amid Raging Debate
By James Rosen
President Obama has called it a top priority for action in the waning days of the lame-duck session in Congress – riling some liberal Democrats, who are more focused on tax relief and jobless benefits – while Republicans offer a steady drumbeat of criticism, and demand it be held over for the next Congress to consider.
But the actual contents of the START II nuclear arms accord with Russia, signed by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Prague last April and awaiting Senate ratification, remain far less publicized than the politicking surrounding it.
As such accords go, this one is fairly modest in its slashing of the two countries’ nuclear arsenals. The U.S. and Russia would each be limited to 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads, down from the 2,200 permitted under the Treaty of Moscow that was finalized by Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, in June 2003.
“In reality, neither side was going to be at 2,200,” Eric S. Edelman, an under secretary of defense for policy from 2005 to 2009, told Fox News.
In addition, each country would be limited to having 800 nuclear missile launchers, with only 700 permitted for deployment. To abide by this, Russia would have to do nothing, as Moscow is only known to possess 608 strategic delivery vehicles. The U.S., by contrast, would have to pare back from 880 such vehicles.
Most controversial are the provisions related to missile defense and to the procedures and systems to be established to verify that each side is abiding by the treaty. No previous treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, or between the U.S. and the Russian Federation, has asserted a link between nuclear arms reductions and missile defense – but this one does.
START II forbids each country from converting the hardware that was once used to launch nuclear missiles, either from land or submarine, into an interceptor that can be used in a missile defense system.
Opponents of ratification have made this tenet a central point in their arguments. “[President] Reagan was adamant that no arms control agreement be allowed to encumber the pursuit of advanced ballistic missile defense technology,” wrote two Reagan aides, former Attorney General Ed Meese and former assistant DefenseSecretary Richard Perle, in an opinion article for the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
“One of us (Mr. Perle) was present in Iceland when [Reagan] turned down an otherwise desirable treaty with the Soviet Union precisely because it would have impeded work on his Strategic Defense Initiative.”
A day earlier, five Republican former secretaries of state who support swift ratification – Henry A. Kissinger, George P. Shultz, James A. Baker III, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, and Colin L. Powell – dismissed the suggestion that START II hinders American progress toward an effective missile defense system.
The former secretaries cited testimony from current military commanders to that effect, and added: “Although the treaty prohibits the conversion of existing launchers for intercontinental and submarine-based ballistic missiles, our military leaders say they do not want to do that because it is more expensive and less effective than building new ones for defense purposes.”
Finally, even supporters of START II acknowledge the verification regime that it provides is less robust than the one that existed under the terms of the first START treaty, which disappeared when it expired in December 2009. For example, on-site inspection would not be permitted at mobile missile production facilities; and would be permitted only at declared, not undeclared, sites.
Where proponents of START II like to cite the precedent of previous arms control accords signed by previous presidents dating back to Richard Nixon, opponents of the new treaty, like Meese and Perle, have cited the absence of undeclared sites from the inspection regime as “a precedent that could be invoked by others — Iran, for example.”
“Having a sufficient verification regime in place is much better than having no verification regime in place at all,” countered Heather Conley, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a supporter of the new treaty. “Could it be more and do more? Of course. But I think most considered experts believe that what was negotiated in the treaty is certainly sufficient for verification purposes.”
Edelman, who also served as a top national security aide to Vice President Cheney, offered another potential problem with START II.
“There’s a limitation on what we call Conventional Prompt Global Strike weapons,” he said. “That is the idea that we might use either a submarine-launched ballistic, or a Minuteman, missile, and put a conventional warhead on it, so that the United States could strike any target in the world within 30 minutes or so…Those will be counted as strategic delivery vehicles under this 700-launcher limit, even though there is not a nuclear warhead on it.”
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FBI:
New Barbie ‘Video Girl’ doll could be used for child porn
By Michael Martinez, CNN
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(CNN) -- The FBI is warning law agencies that the new Barbie "Video Girl" doll could be used as a tool by pedophiles to make child pornography.
In an alert entitled "Barbie 'Video Girl' a Possible Child Pornography Production Method," the FBI said the doll has a built-in hidden camera in the chest and a small LCD screen for video display in her back.
The FBI "cyber crime alert" doesn't cite any misuse of the doll, which has been on the market since July, but talks about the possibility.
"FBI investigation has revealed instances where an individual convicted of distributing child pornography had given a Barbie doll to a 6 year old girl," the alert said.
The document went on to cite the findings of another investigation that found "examples where a concealed video camera had recorded child pornography." That camera didn't involve a doll, FBI special agent Frederick Gutt in Seattle, Washington, said Friday.
][
"The possibility of the combination of these two in a single device presents a concern for investigators," said the alert, dated November 30.
"Law enforcement is encouraged to be aware of unconventional avenues for possible production and possession of child pornography, such as the Barbie Video Girl," the document said.
The FBI regularly distributes such alerts to help investigators improve policing. No incidents involving the new doll have been reported, according to Gutt and another FBI special agent, Steve Dupre.
The doll's camera can capture 30 minutes of footage, and the video can be downloaded and streamed live to a computer, but there is no indication it can be streamed directly to the Internet, the FBI alert said.
The notice is written for law agencies only, but someone at the FBI mistakenly sent it to media outlets in Seattle, said Dupre of the FBI's Sacramento, California, office, which distributed the notice.
"It was an inadvertent dissemination of the document," Dupre said. "There have been no reported incidents of this doll being used as anything other than as intended."
Seattle media accounts of the FBI alert prompted some parents to express concerns about the doll.
"That plays into these people who prey upon our children's ideals. It frightens me," William Porres, a Tacoma, Washington, grandfather, told CNN affiliate KING. He said he will not buy the doll for his 6-year-old granddaughter.
"Oh, she would love it, but she's more important to me than a giggle on Christmas morning," Porres said.
A Mattel Inc. spokesman could not be reached for comment, but the toymaker issued a statement to KING:
"The FBI is not reporting that anything has happened. Steve Dupre from the FBI Sacramento field office has confirmed there have been no incidents of this doll being used as anything other than its intent. Mattel products are designed with children and their best interests in mind. Many of Mattel's employees are parents themselves and we understand the importance of child safety -- it is our number one priority," the statement said.
FBI special agent Gutt said the alert apprised other agencies about how the new doll's videotaping capabilities could contain evidence.
"The cyber alert was meant for law enforcement only and was taken out of context," Gutt said. "The intent was to aid law enforcement in evidence gathering."
The Mattel website says the $49.99 doll, for kids ages 6 and up, has been nominated for the 2011 Toy of the Year Award.
"Budding filmmakers, take note: Barbie doll now doubles as a video camera!" the website says. "Girls can record and play back clips with this multi-tasking doll, which has a video camera built right in. Capture everything from a doll's-eye-view, then watch it instantly or upload to your computer. There's an LCD screen on Barbie doll's back, and a camera lens hidden discreetly in her necklace. Talk about making movies in style!"
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Clinton: Iran faces choices in nuclear talks
By Andrew Quinn
(Reuters) – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Friday urged Iran to enter into next week’s nuclear talks in good faith and warned of more pressure and isolation if Tehran kept to its current course.
Clinton, in a speech at a security conference in Bahrain, addressed herself to the Iranian delegation headed by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and said Iran faced the choice of living up to its obligations and fully addressing the world’s fears about its nuclear program.
“We urge you to make that choice — for your people, your interests, and our shared security,” Clinton said. “We urge you to restore the confidence of the international community and live up to your obligations.”
Mottaki did not react visibly to Clinton’s address and instead concentrated on his dinner.
Clinton’s speech came just days before Iranian negotiators sit down in Geneva with representatives of six big powers — the United States, France, Russia, Britain, China and Germany. Monday’s meeting will be the first in more than a year.
Clinton said the world community and Iran both had a lot riding on the Geneva talks.
“We hope that you will come to it, as we will, in good faith and prepared to engage constructively on your nuclear program,” Clinton said.
Repeating that the Obama administration remained committed to trying to resolve the Iranian nuclear question through dialogue, Clinton said no one quibbled with Tehran’s right to a peaceful nuclear program.
But she said Iran’s behavior in recent months had sown more doubts about its true nuclear intentions — which the big powers fear are aimed at producing atomic weapons despite Tehran’s pledge that it has purely peaceful aims.
Rather than address the world community’s concerns, Iran has “so far chosen a different path, one that leads to greater international isolation and pressure.”
SANCTIONS WEIGH
Officials say there is still time for a diplomatic solution with Iran but the increasingly defiant state must take “tangible steps” to address concerns about its nuclear program.
Officials also say economic sanctions imposed on Iran over its nuclear program are biting increasingly deeply, possibly cutting investment in its crucial energy sector by as much as $60 billion and spurring Tehran’s renewed interest in engagement.
“I think we’re going to have to take stock of where we are after Geneva … The pressure’s not lifting because they’re coming to the table in Geneva. And then we’ll take it step by step,” Clinton said in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine made public on Friday.
Clinton, who elsewhere in her speech vowed to boost security cooperation with Gulf states like Bahrain that feel most directly under potential Iranian threat, said Tehran could be making its own calculations in agreeing to re-engage.
“It is for me, if you are thinking strategically, very much in Iran‘s interest to come to these talks in Geneva committed to working out a way to restore the confidence of the international community,” she said during a question-and-answer session after the speech.
But she said it was imperative that Tehran “conclusively reject the pursuit of nuclear weapons,” saying that any Iranian hope of making their country more secure through such arms was unfounded.
“That is an absolutely wrong calculation because it will trigger an arms race that will make the region less stable, more uncertain and will cause serious repercussions far beyond the Gulf,” Clinton said.
Clinton, calling Iran “the home of one of humankinds great civilizations,” said the region would benefit immensely if Iran could be integrated socially, politically and economically with its neighbors
(Reporting by Andrew Quinn; Editing by Jon Hemming)
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House Democrats: no tax cut extension over $250,000
By the CNN Wire Staff
Washington (CNN) — Congressional Democrats rammed a bill through the House of Representatives Thursday permanently extending the Bush-era tax cuts only for families making $250,000 a year or less.
It would maintain the current Alternative Minimum Tax limit for two years.
The measure, which passed on a sharply polarized 234-188 vote, would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire after December 31 for the wealthiest Americans. Most Democrats backed the bill, while most Republicans opposed it.
GOP leaders are insisting on an extension of the tax cuts for all Americans. All 42 Senate Republicans publicly vowed Monday to prevent a final vote on any other legislative business in the lame duck session until Congress has “prevented the tax increase that is currently awaiting all American taxpayers.”
President Barack Obama and top congressional Democrats insist the roughly $700 billion price tag attached to an extension of the tax cuts would be fiscally irresponsible. Republicans contend that a failure to extend all of the cuts would hamper an already sluggish economy.
Negotiators from the White House and both parties on Capitol Hill are meeting behind closed doors this week to try to hammer out a compromise. Multiple congressional Democratic sources told CNN Thursday that, despite what was happening on the floor of the House, a deal to extend all of the cuts temporarily was getting close.
“Giving $700 billion to the wealthiest people in America … does not create jobs,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California. There must be a “tax cut for middle-income people in this country. … That is what we send to the (negotiating) table.”
Pelosi ripped Republicans for pushing what she characterized as unfunded tax breaks for the wealthy while insisting that any further extension of unemployment benefits for lower-income Americans be paid for.
“This is so grossly unfair,” she said. “Something is very wrong with this picture.”
“It’s time that this country began to tax fairly and invest wisely,” said Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-California. “It’s time that this country acted sanely.”
House Minority Leader John Boehner — in line to become speaker when Republicans take over the House in January — called the Democrats’ vote political “chicken crap” that undermines the spirit of bipartisan tax negotiations now under way between the White House and congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle.
“This is nonsense,” he said. “The election was one month ago. There are 23 months [until] the next election and the political games have already started.”
“This bill is as misguided as it is futile,” said Michigan Rep. Dave Camp, the top Republican on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. It is “the wrong policy at the wrong time.”
“You cannot help the job seeker by punishing the job creator,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas. “No taxes on nobody. It may be bad grammar but it’s great economics.”
Indications that a deal to extend all of the Bush tax cuts for two or three years fueled concern among some Democratic lawmakers that the White House will not fight hard enough to get Democratic priorities in return.
“The goose is cooked,” said one senior Democratic source. “The question is what the larger deal is going to look like.”
Democrats are hoping to squeeze out of Republicans a wish list of concessions, according to Democratic sources. They say that list generally includes: a lengthy extension of unemployment benefits without having to find offsets to pay for them; extending college tuition tax credits set to expire at the end of the year; extending so-called “make work pay” tax credits expiring December 31; and tax credits for businesses that hire unemployed workers.
“This is the first fight of 2012,” said one Democratic source.
Another Democratic source said that by agreeing to a temporary extension of all of the cuts, Democrats are simply facing reality.
“No one wants to leave here without extending the tax cuts,” the source said. “The question is what are we getting in return for doing that. I don’t know how much of an appetite there is for a long and drawn out fight. The calendar is not our friend.”
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Iran blames Israel after nuclear scientist killed
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press
TEHRAN, Iran – Assailants on motorcycles attached magnetized bombs to the cars of two nuclear scientists in Tehran on Monday, killing one and wounding another who is on a U.N. sanctions list for suspect activity. The president accused Israel and the West of being behind the attacks.
The wounded scientist, Fereidoun Abbasi, is specified by a 2007 U.N. resolution for sanctions because of suspected links to secret nuclearactivities, describing him as a Defense Ministry scientist. Iranian media said he was a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the country’s strongest military force.
The other scientist, who died in the attack and does not appear in anyU.N. resolutions, was involved in a major project with Iran’s nuclear agency, said the agency’s chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, though he did not give specifics.
Iranian officials said they suspected the assassination was part of a covert campaign aimed at damaging the country’s nuclear program, which the United States and its allies says is intended to build a weapon — a claim Tehran denies. At least two other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in recent years, one of them in an attack similar to Monday’s.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a press conference that “undoubtedly, the hand of the Zionist regime and Western governments is involved in the assassination.”
But he said the attack would not hamper the nuclear program and vowed that one day Iran would take retribution. “The day in the near future when time will come for taking them into account, their file will be very thick,” he said.
Asked about the Iranian accusations, Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said Israel did not comment on such matters. Washington has strongly denied any link to previous attacks.
The attacks, as described by Iranian officials, appeared sophisticated.
In each case, assailants on motorcycles approached the cars as they were moving through Tehran and attached magnetized bombs to the vehicles, Tehran police chief Hossein Sajednia said. The bombs exploded seconds later, he said, according to the state news agency IRNA.
He said no one has been arrested in connection with the attack nor no one has so far claimed responsibility.
The bombings both took place in the morning, but there were conflicting reports on what time each took place. The bombs went off in two separate locations, in north and northeast Tehran, that lie about a 15-minute drive apart without traffic.
The slain scientist, Majid Shahriari, was a member of the nuclear engineering faculty at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. His wife, who was in the car with him, was wounded.
Shahriari cooperated with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said Salehi, a vice president who heads the organization. “He was involved in one of the big AEOI projects, which is a source of pride for the Iranian nation,” Salehi said, according to IRNA, without giving any details on the project. Salehi also said the killed scientist was one of his own students.
The AEOI is in charge of Iran’s nuclear activities — including its uranium enrichment program, which the United Nations has demanded be halted.
The other attack targeted Abbasi, who was wounded along with his wife.
Abbasi is on a sanctions list under U.N. Security Council resolution 1747, passed in 2007, which described him as a Defense Ministry scientist with links to the Institute of Applied Physics,working closely with Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, another nuclear scientist on the sanctions list. Under the resolution, those on the list are under a travel ban and international assets freeze.
A pro-government website, mashreghnews.ir, said Abbasi held a Ph.D. in nuclear physics and has long been a member of the Revolutionary Guard, the country’s most powerful military force. It said he was also a lecturer at Imam Hossein University, affiliated to the Guard. The United States accuses the Guard of having a role in Iran’s nuclear program.
The site said Abbasi was a laser expert at Iran’s Defense Ministry and one of few top Iranian specialists in nuclear isotope separation.
Isotope separation — meaning the isolating of a specific isotope of an element — is a process needed for a range of purposes, from producing enriched uranium fuel for a reactor, to manufacturing medical isotopes to producing a bomb.
Iran says its nuclear program is intended entirely for peaceful purposes, including producing electricity. The U.N. has demanded a halt to uranium enrichment because it can be used to produce reactor fuel or a bomb, but Tehran insists it has a right to pursue the technology.
Iran has continued to portray its nuclear program as being under constant pressure from the West and its allies. These include alleged abductions of nuclear officials and, more recently, a computer worm known as Stuxnet that experts say was calibrated to destroy uranium-enrichment centrifuges by sending them spinning out of control. Iran says its experts stopped Stuxnet from affecting systems at its nuclear facilities.
Monday’s attacks bore close similarities to another in January that killed Tehran University professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi, a senior physics professor. He was killed when a bomb-rigged motorcycle exploded near his car as he was about to leave for work.
In 2007, state TV reported that nuclear scientist, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, died from gas poisoning. A one-week delay in the reporting of his death prompted speculation about the cause, including that Israel’s Mossad spy agency was to blame.
The latest attacks come a day after the release of internal State Department cables by the whistle-blower website Wikileaks, including several that vividly detail Arab fears over Iran’s nuclear program and its growing political ambitions in the region.
Arab worries over Iran often have been expressed in public in careful, diplomatic language by officials in the Gulf and elsewhere. The messages obtained by Wikileaks, however, appear to reflect the urgency of the concerns and the impression that a U.S.-led attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would be welcomed by some leaders of Arab nations in the Middle East, especially the oil-rich states that neighbor Iran in the Persian Gulf.
Lawmaker Javad Jahangirzadeh said Israel was behind the attacks and was trying to “create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation to stop the progress of our scientists.”
There are several active armed groups that oppose Iran’s ruling clerics, but it’s unclear whether they could have carried out the apparently coordinated bombings in the capital. Most anti-government violence in recent years has been isolated to Iran’s provinces such the border with Pakistan where Sunni rebels are active and the western mountains near Iraq where Kurdish separatists operate
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Iran blasts kill one nuclear scientist, wounds other
By Parisa Hafezi
TEHRAN
(Reuters) – Two car bomb blasts killed one Iranian nuclear scientist and wounded another in Tehran on Monday, Iran’s al Alam Arabic language television reported.
The bombings, rare attacks in the Iranian capital, occurred ahead of a possible meeting between Iran and major powers next month to discuss the country’s nuclear program.
Analysts say information about Iran’s nuclear activities is very valuable for the United States and its allies, particularly ahead of the meeting.
In the past months, Iran has arrested a number of “nuclear spies,” warning citizens over leaking information to foreign secret services.
“Majid Shahriyari was martyred and his wife was injured … Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani and his wife were both wounded,” state radio said. “The attackers planted a bomb on each of the teachers’ vehicles.”
Iran’s atomic chief Ali Akbar Salehi warned “enemies” not to play with fire by carrying out such attacks.
“Our nation’s patience has a limit … when it is over our enemies will face a tedious fate,” Salehi said, the official IRNA news agency reported. “Dr. Shahriyari was my student for many years and he had good cooperation with the Atomic Energy Organization.”
Iran’s English language Press TV showed police and plain clothes security agents examining a silver-colored Peugeot 206 car with what looked like shrapnel holes in its bonnet.
No group has claimed the responsibility but Iranian officials and media both blamed Israel, which Tehran calls “the Zionist regime,” and the United States for the killing of the nuclear scientist.
Another nuclear scientist, Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, was killed by a remote controlled bomb in Tehran in January. Some opposition websites said he backed moderate candidate Mirhossein Mousavi in the 2009 disputed presidential vote that secured President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election.
Western sources said in January that Mohammadi worked closely with Fereydoun Abbassi-Davani, who was subjected to U.N. sanctions because of his work on suspected nuclear weapons development.
“Abbasi-Davani has not been seriously injured in the blast,” the semi-official Mehr news agency said.
Salehi said one of the country’s biggest nuclear projects was on the killed scientist’s agenda, without giving further details, IRNA reported.
Iran says its atomic program is purely peaceful, but suspicions that it is seeking nuclear weapons have led to the imposition of several rounds of international sanctions by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States.
(Reporting by Hossein Jaseb and Ramin Mostafavi; Writing by Parisa Hafezi; Editing by Jon Hemming)
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Saudi king urged U.S. to attack Iran: WikiLeaks
By Arshad Mohammed and Ross Colvin
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) – Saudi King Abdullah has repeatedly urged the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear program and China directed cyberattacks on the United States, according to a vast cache of diplomatic cables released on Sunday in an embarrassing leak that undermines U.S. diplomacy.
The more than 250,000 documents, given to five media groups by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, provide candid and at times critical views of foreign leaders as well as sensitive information on terrorism and nuclear proliferation filed by U.S. diplomats, according to The New York Times.
The White House condemned the release by WikiLeaks and said the disclosures may endanger U.S. informants abroad. WikiLeaks said its website was under attack and none of the underlying cables was visible there Sunday night, though some were posted by news organizations.
Among the revelations in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which also received an advance look at the documents along with France’s Le Monde, Germany’s Der Spiegel and Spain’s El Pais, King Abdullah is reported to have “frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program.”
“Cut off the head of the snake,” the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, quotes the king as saying during a meeting with General David Petraeus in April 2008.
The leaked documents, the majority of which are from 2007 or later, also disclose U.S. allegations that China’s Politburo directed an intrusion into Google’s computer systems, part of a broader coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by Chinese government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws, the Times reported.
MEDVEDEV “PLAYS ROBIN TO PUTIN’S BATMAN”
As described by German news weekly Der Spiegel, the cables contain tart comments such as a U.S. diplomat’s description of German Chancellor Angela Merkel as someone who “avoids risk and is seldom creative.”
Another document described by The New York Times cites a U.S. embassy cable raising the possibility that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi may have had a romantic relationship with his Ukranian nurse, who is described as a “voluptuous blonde.”
The newspaper said many of the cables name diplomats’ confidential sources, from foreign lawmakers and military officers to human rights activists and journalists, often with a warning: “Please protect” or “Strictly protect.”
Comments such a description of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s head of state, as playing “Robin to (Prime Minister Vladimir) Putin’s Batman,” are sure to embarrass the Obama administration and to complicate its diplomacy.
The White House said the release of the documents could endanger the lives of people who live under “oppressive regimes” and “deeply impact” the foreign policy interests of the United States, its allies and partners around the world.
“To be clear — such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
“By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals,” he said.
“DEVASTATING”
Security analysts tended to agree that the release of the documents was a severe blow to U.S. diplomacy, undermining the confidentiality that is vital for foreign leaders and activists to talk candidly to U.S. officials.
“This is pretty devastating,” Roger Cressey, a partner at Goodharbor Consulting and a former U.S. cyber security and counter-terrorism official, said in an e-mailed comment.
The U.S. government, which was informed in advance of the leaked cables’ contents, contacted governments including Russia, and in Europe and the Middle East, to try to limit damage.
The White House also warned readers that the field reporting in the documents is often incomplete and does not necessarily reflect, or even shape, U.S. policy decisions.
Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the dramatic revelation that Saudi King Abdullah counseled a U.S. strike on Iran may have been exaggerated for diplomatic effect.
“It’s very possible that the Gulf states have in private adopted very aggressive rhetoric just to stress the urgency of the issue,” Hokayem said. “But I personally doubt that there is an appetite for war as such.”
Among the disclosures reported by The New York Times were:
– suspicions Iran has obtained sophisticated missiles from North Korea capable of hitting western Europe, and the United States is concerned Iran is using those rockets as “building blocks” to build longer-range missiles;
– allegations that Chinese operatives have broken into American government computers and those of Western allies, the Dalai Lama and American businesses since 2002;
– talks between U.S. and South Korean officials about the prospects for a unified Korea should the North’s economic troubles and a political transition lead the state to implode;
– the South Koreans considered commercial inducements to China to “help salve” Chinese concerns about living with a reunified Korea that is in a “benign alliance” with Washington, according to the American ambassador to Seoul;
– reporting that Saudi donors remain chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like al Qaeda, and the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American military for years, was the “worst in the region” in counterterrorism efforts, according to a State Department cable last December;
– Since 2007, the United States has mounted a secret and so far unsuccessful effort to remove highly enriched uranium from a Pakistani research reactor out of fear it could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device.
دستگیری یک متهم به ربودن هواپیمای ایرباس ایران در مسیر تهران دمشق
خبرگزاری دولتی ايرنا گزارش کرد: گارد امنیت پرواز 517 مسیر تهران دمشق متعلق به شرکت هواپیمایی ایران ایر موفق به دستگیری یکی از سرنشیان هواپیما شده اند که قصد ربودن این هواپیما را داشت.
خبرگزاریهای ایران در این باره گزارش کردند پس از آن که هواپیما نیمه شب جمعه قصد فرود در فرودگاه دمشق را داشت یکی از سرنشیان مدعی شد حامل بمب است و قصد انفجار هواپیما را دارد. که بی درنگ توسط گارد امنیت پرواز هواپیما دستگیر شد.
در این گزارش ها افزوده شده: فرد متهم دچار اختلال روانی ست. اما سپاه پاسداران در اطلاعیه ای که در این باره منتشر کرده، فرد مذکور را وابسته به گروههای ضدانقلاب خوانده که قصد ربودن هواپیما به مقصد مورد نظر را داشته است.
هنوز در باره چگونگی این رویداد گزارش مستقلی منتشر نشده و سرنشینان هواپیما نیز تاکنون در این باره سخنی نگفته اند.
عدم انتشار گزارش مستقل از این رویداد و سکوت سرنشینان هواپیما صحت اطلاعیه سپاه پاسداران که در آن سخن از کشف یک توطئه هواپیماربایی به میان آورده مورد تردید قرار داده است.
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Black Friday: It’s busy out there!
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Larger-than-expected crowds jammed the nation’s malls and discounters on Black Friday, elbowing each other in the race for the biggest deals on the biggest sales day of the year.
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, typically marks the start of the annual holiday gift-buying marathon. This year, retailers are eager to rev up their holiday sales as soon as possible to make up for the past two lackluster holiday seasons.
So for bargain hunters who kick off their gift shopping Friday, merchants have made the deals especially sweet, particularly on key holiday favorites such as toys and electronics — and it seems to be working.
“We had the best turnout yet. We had an estimated 1,800 people waiting to get in at midnight,” said Nick Nicolosi, general manager of the North Point Mall in Alpharetta, Ga.
Nicolosi said midnight shoppers made a beeline for deals on gaming consoles such as the Sony (SNE) PS3 and Nintendo Wii bundle, and Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) iPad and iPod accessories.
Clothing was another hot category. Shoppers filled up their bags at trendy specialty chains such as H&M, Forever 21 and Victoria’s Secret with party dresses and lounge wear. Ugg boots also emerged as another hot holiday purchase.
Toys R Us didn’t even wait until Friday to launch its Black Friday bargain bonanza. For the first time in the chain’s history, all of Toys R Us’ stores opened at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving instead of the usual midnight opening.
Early start pays off. The two-hour head start paid off, according to Toys R Us CEO Gerald Storch.
“I’ve been getting reports from all over the country and the lines have anywhere from between 500 to 1,000 people at every Toys R Us store nationwide,” he said.
Gaming consoles, electronic toys, dolls and and boys action figures were hot sellers at Toys R Us, he said.
Brian Dunn, CEO of No. 1 electronics chain Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500) which opened at 5 a.m., said lines outside stores were larger than last year and registers “have been going non-stop.”
“Our doorbusters have been selling out and there’s lots of interest in laptop deals,” Dunn said.
Gabriella Serrado of Sunrise, Fla., was a happy Best Buy customer.
“This year I was able to plan my shopping a lot better. I started at Kohls which opened at 3 a.m. and then I headed over to Best Buy,” Serrado said.
“Best Buy [has] learned from the past. Instead of having the cashiers at the front of the store, they placed credit card only registers all around the store, so our wait in line was less than 30 minutes,” she added.
Serrado said she bought a 46-inch LED TV set that came with a Blu-Ray DVD player. She also purchased a Mac computer — something she was waiting to buy, but a $125 gift card thrown into the deal made it impossible to resist.
Macy’s stores, which opened at 4 a.m., also attracted large crowds. At its flagship store in New York City, 7,000 waited for the doors to open, said CEO Terry Lundgren. “That’s versus the 5,000 people who waited last year,” he said.
But is the customer traffic translating into robust sales?
“I have been walking through the store to see that. I’ve seen lots of red bags, plenty inside the store and outside of it,” he said.
Lundgren’s hoping that Macy’s sales success this holiday comes from its recent strategy of matching merchandise and prices to consumers’ tastes and preferences in local markets.
Wal-Mart (WMT, Fortune 500), the nation’s largest retailer, opened all of its more than 4,000 U.S. stores at midnight Friday with deep deals on HDTVs, GPS devices, laptops, toys and clothing.
The retailer promised consumers that it would offer the most aggressive Black Friday deals, and even match a competitor’s lower price on any identical product.
The scene at a Wal-Mart supercenter on New York’s Long Island was pretty busy — but minus the chaos that has been seen in recent years.
Compared to last year, consumers seems to have better thought out their Black Friday shopping strategy, said Marshal Cohen, lead retail analyst with NPD Group.
“Because of stores staggering their Black Friday openings from midnight to 5:00 a.m., this has really helped shoppers plan their moves,” he said.
“Shoppers are being more strategic and less impulsive,” he said. “They have done their homework on who has the best deals, they have a little bigger budget this year but they’re sticking to it, and they’re not rushing into a big-ticket purchase.”
Despite expectations of a blowout sales day for HDTVs, Cohen said once the doorbuster TV deals are sold out, other TV deals don’t appear to be faring as well.
“But cameras are doing well,” Cohen said. The biggest surprise to him is the popularity of kitchen appliances.
At Sears, many customers grabbed doorbuster deals but many others also aggressively used Sears’ Layaway for big-ticket items, said Sears’ spokesman Tom Aiello .
Wal-Mart and Target (TGT, Fortune 500) both set deep Black Friday deals on toasters, coffeemakers and other appliances, with prices at $3 and less.
“Personally, I wouldn’t gift anyone anything that comes with a plug, but appliances are selling out,” he said.
All of Disney’s retail stores, which opened at midnight, experienced a robust start on Black Friday, said Disney Store president Jim Fielding.
“Historically, the Black Friday weekend is a barometer for retailers’ holiday sales season,” said Fielding. “We’ve seen lines around the block at our stores.”
Still, Fielding said consumers are very conscious of value and are “strategically driven.”
The holiday season is critical to retailers since combined November-December sales can account for as much as 50% of stores’ sales and profits for the full year.
Holiday sales are forecast to increase 2.3% this year, according to the National Retail Federation. That will be an improvement from last year’s anemic 0.4% holiday sales gain and a dismal 3.9% sales decline in 2008.
—Are you a Black Friday shopping fanatic? Tell us about your experience this year. Email your response to parija.bhatnagar@turner.com and you could be part of an upcoming article. For the CNNMoney.com Comment Policy, click here.
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Black Friday: Determined shoppers swarm Southern California stores
As early as Thursday night, bargain-hunters line up outside stores for one of the year’s biggest shopping days. A fight at Los Cerritos Center leads to a brief lockdown of some stores, and freeway traffic is jammed near the Citadel Outlets.
By Andrea Chang and Tiffany Hsu, Los Angeles Times
The night was young, the Thanksgiving turkey not even cold yet, when thousands of determined shoppers hit the malls for one of the biggest shopping days of the year.
Some stores at Los Cerritos Center was placed on lockdown briefly Friday morning after a fight broke out in the food court; gunshots were reportedly heard, but Sheriff’s Department officials later said they believed the sounds were metal chairs being knocked over. Traffic was backed up for miles on Interstate 5 near the Citadel Outlets as shoppers rushed to the mall for its 10 p.m. Thanksgiving opening. At a Best Buy in Burbank, 1,000 shoppers were already lined up ahead of the store’s 5 a.m. opening, with a few fights breaking out.
Ilene Agan, who has shopped on Black Friday for the last five years, arrived at the Toys R Us in Torrance at 8 p.m. to find a line of 50 shoppers already waiting. By the time the store opened two hours later, the line had grown to several hundreds of people.
“We are in it to win it,” said the 27-year-old from Long Beach who was hoping to score Barbies for her daughters. “Go hard or go home.”
To pass the time, fellow shopper Victoria Jones, 43, was highlighting deals in line while huddled with a group of people she had just met who were helping each other plan their shopping strategies.
“It’s not worth it, it’s extremely ridiculous and unnecessary, but I’m here,” the teacher from Torrance said with a laugh.
Black Friday, the traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping season, is always marked by promises of huge discounts, early hours and massive crowds of shoppers.
“This is professional shopping for a lot of these customers, and they know exactly what they want,” said Mike Boylson, chief marketing officer at JCPenney. “They plan these things, they have their routes and they make a beeline.”
This year, as consumers have indicated they’re more willing to spend, the nation’s retailers have rolled out even more deals and spread them over several days instead of packing them all into the day after Thanksgiving.
“We make sure that we’re very competitive and aggressive on Black Friday, trying to make sure that each year is bigger than the year before,” said Jerry Storch, chief executive of Toys R Us. “I don’t think this year the customer is a little more willing to open up their wallet.”
At a Wal-Mart in Duarte, Vivian Hampton said she was feeling more confident about her financial situation this year.
“I’ve been blessed enough and [I'm shopping] mostly for me this year,” the 52-year-old Fullerton resident said.
Not everyone lucked out at the stores.
Burbank resident and high school student Januar Ponce, 18, arrived at the Best Buy store at 4:30 a.m., hoping to buy a $189 Toshiba laptop. But it was already sold out by the time he arrived at the store’s computer section.
“I would have run for it and pushed people out of the way for a great deal like that,” he said. “But I got here too late.”
Even though she had a 6 a.m. flight to catch at LAX on Friday, 20-year-old Vanessa Barrera stopped by Sears at South Coast Plaza with her family in the middle of the night to snag a 55-inch Samsung television.
“We don’t know if they even have it or if we’re going to get it,” the student from Santa Ana said. “Maybe I’m sacrificing too much for this TV. It’s definitely a ‘want’ and not a ‘need.’ ”
Black Friday becoming a week of discounts and extended hours
As hopes for a rebound in consumer spending rise, retailers push more holiday deals and spread the usual 24-hour Black Friday discounts over several days.
By Andrea Chang, Los Angeles Times
Call it Gray Friday.
Black Friday, the traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping season, has lost a bit of its luster as hungry retailers try to stretch the one-day shopping bacchanal on the day after Thanksgiving into a weeklong bonanza.
Big chains including Sears and Toys R Us have joined Wal-Mart and Kmart in offering Thanksgiving Day hours. Others have already begun hawking massive discounts and pushing online deals. And to keep the party going past Friday, many retailers will offer fresh discounts Saturday and Sunday.
There’s a lot riding on the outcome. Retailers hope an improving economy will bring the biggest holiday receipts in four years — and if they succeed, it could help set off a chain of events that could accelerate the country’s slow recovery, said economist Esmael Adibi of Chapman University.
“If the retail sector is healthy, that will eventually lead down the road to expansions, and expansions lead to hiring,” he said. “Additional hiring generates more income, and then that income in turn will be spent. It’s a multiplier effect.”
Wall Street was feeling optimistic about the retail industry as it headed into the all-important Thanksgiving weekend. Continuing a recent run-up, investors pushed an index of 90 retail stocks to the highest level in more than three years Wednesday, with Guess shares gaining 11% and shares ofAmazon.com, Tiffany & Co. and Big 5 each rising more than 5%.
Consumer spending at the nation’s retailers, although not robust, has been generally healthy all year. So economists are predicting the best holiday season since 2006 (before the recession) and are estimating a year-over-year retail sales increase of 2.3% to 3.5%.
Despite the earlier-than-ever holiday deals this year, habitual Black Friday shoppers say they’ll still be out in force for the annual shopping extravaganza.
Many have been gearing up for days, drafting store layout maps and lists of things to buy, and plan to wake up in the middle of the night — or not sleep at all — so they can be the first to hit the malls. Last year 79 million Americans shopped on Black Friday, which is said to be so named because it was historically the day when huge revenue would push retailers into the black.
“People cutting in line, people trying to start fights, people pushing in line as they start going inside — I don’t know, I like it,” said Sam Sanders, 33, of Ontario, who has shopped on Black Friday for the last eight years. “Rushing in to get the product before it sells out — that’s like the best part.”
With shoppers indicating that they’re willing to spend again, albeit cautiously, retailers have added more holiday deals and spread the usual 24-hour Black Friday discounts over several days, hoping to one-up rivals and seize market share.
“It’s our most intense promotional calendar yet. We’ve really gone on the offensive this year,” said Mike Boylson, chief marketing officer at JCPenney, which will have more than 300 Black Friday “door-buster” specials and will offer online-only deals Thanksgiving Day. “We know there’s a lot of very hungry competitors that are going to do just about anything to get business.”
For the first time, Toys R Us stores will open at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving, with 25% more door-busters than last year, and Sears will be open Thanksgiving Day.
To kick off Black Friday, most Wal-Mart stores will host midnight events, handing out treats such as breakfast bars and chocolate to help keep overnight shoppers energized; the discounter will have a fresh batch of deals Saturday. Target will open at 4 a.m., an hour earlier than last year, and is offering more door-buster deals than ever before; Kohl’s is touting its earliest-ever opening, at 3 a.m.
Locally, Citadel Outlets will again be open at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving. Two hours later, shopping centers including the Shops at Montebello and Lakewood Center will open for midnight-madness events, their earliest-ever openings.At Ontario Mills, which also opens at midnight, the mall will use social networking for the first time on Black Friday to hype last-minute deals.
Retailers said the motivation for throwing their doors open earlier and rolling out more deals was the notion that although many Americans are no longer pinching pennies, they’re still price-conscious and looking for bargains. Lower-income Americans, especially, are still struggling.
“Yes we’re being aggressive this year, much more so than last year,” said Steve Nave, senior vice president and general manager of Walmart.com. “I think everyone is cautiously optimistic that things are turning around in the economy, but the Wal-Mart customer is still especially strapped right now.”
Every year Delene Mitchell, 42, and her friends hit the stores on Black Friday right after finishing the last of their pumpkin pie.
“We just sit up, drink some wine and go shopping,” she said of her Thanksgiving ritual. “We don’t go to bed.”
She’ll continue the tradition this week, but after being unemployed for most of the year, the Burbank resident is looking for more than just a good time.
“Years ago, I loved Black Friday because it gets me into the holiday spirit,” she said. “But now I need the deals. I need to save money.”
The nation’s high unemployment rate will still put a damper on consumer spending, but with the worst of the economic troubles probably over, many people could give in to pent-up demand and frugal fatigue, economist Adibi said.
“Those who are employed say, ‘The recession ended, I survived, I have my job and things are not going to get worse,’” he said. “All of this positive news is giving relief to consumers and they’re coming out and shopping.”
Retail and mall executives said they’ve seen signs that consumers are feeling more confident, including better sales of aspirational items such as luxury goods and jewelry and an increased number of shoppers buying for themselves — trends that are expected to continue this Christmas.
“People are moving a little more from those ‘need’ items to things that are a little more discretionary,” said Traci Weber, senior vice president of marketing at mall operator Macerich, which owns centers including Santa Monica Place and Westside Pavilion. “We want to see this continued momentum.”
More holiday specials will also be moving online this year to meet demand as consumers increasingly turn to their laptops and smart phones to shop.
Wal-Mart said it would triple its number of online-only deals on Thanksgiving Day compared with last year and announced that it would offer free shipping on about 60,000 holiday items through Dec. 20. Amazon.com rolled out its electronics Black Friday deals in October, weeks earlier than usual, and has been featuring a deal of the day and limited-time “Lightning Deals” all week.
The earlier opening times have put pressure on retailers to follow suit, even if it means staffing stores on Thanksgiving Day — once considered off-limits so employees could spend the holiday with their families.
JCPenney opted to keep its official Black Friday opening time at 4 a.m. despite moves by many of its competitors to open earlier.
“Once you open early, you might get some business, but the next year you’re up against that, so you have to open at least as early,” Boylson said. “At some point, you’ve got to draw the line.”
But he acknowledged that the Black Friday start time was something executives at the department store chain were always revisiting. He said the retailer wouldn’t give in “unless our hand is forced … and it might be after this year.”
U.S. Sends Aircraft Carrier for Joint Exercises With South Korea After Deadly Attack
A U.S. aircraft carrier strike group set off for Korean waters Wednesday after President Obama pledged America would stand “shoulder to shoulder” with South Korea and stage joint military exercises in response to what the White House branded a provocative, outrageous attack by North Korea on its neighbor.
Obama called South Korean President Lee Myung-bak Tuesday night, saying the U.S. would work with the international community to strongly condemn the attack that killed the two South Koreans and injured many more.
The White House said the two presidents agreed to hold combined military exercises and enhanced training in the days ahead to continue the close security cooperation between the two countries.
The nuclear-powered USS George Washington carrier strike group, which carries 75 warplanes and has a crew of over 6,000, left a naval base south of Tokyo and will join exercises with South Korea from Sunday to the following Wednesday, U.S. officials in Seoul told Reuters.
“This exercise is defensive in nature,” U.S. Forces Korea said in a statement. “While planned well before yesterday’s unprovoked artillery attack, it demonstrates the strength of the ROK (South Korea)-U.S. alliance and our commitment to regional stability through deterrence.”
An administration official said Tuesday evening that U.S. officials in Washington and in Beijing were appealing strongly to China to condemn the attack by arguing that it was an act that threatened the stability of the entire region, not just the Korean peninsula. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
“President Obama said that North Korea must stop its provocative actions, which will only lead to further isolation, and fully abide by the terms of the armistice agreement and its obligations under international law,” the statement said.
Working to head off any escalation, the U.S. did not reposition any of its 29,000 troops in the South or make other military moves after North Korea fired salvos of shells into the island, setting off an artillery duel between the two sides.
The president, speaking to ABC News, would not speculate when asked about military options.
“South Korea is our ally. It has been since the Korean war,” Obama said in his first comments about the North Korean shelling of a South Korean island early Tuesday. “And we strongly affirm our commitment to defend South Korea as part of that alliance.”
The U.S. has relatively few options when dealing with the Pyongyang government. Military action is particularly unappealing, since the unpredictable North possesses crude nuclear weapons as well as a huge standing army. North Korea exists largely outside the system of international financial and diplomatic institutions that the U.S. has used as leverage in dealing with other hostile countries, including Iran.
North Korea has also resisted pressure from its major ally, China, which appears to be nervous about the signs of instability in its neighbor.
“We strongly condemn the attack and we are rallying the international community to put pressure on North Korea,” Obama said in the ABC interview, specifically citing the need for China’s help. Obama said every nation in the region must know “this is a serious and ongoing threat.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates phoned South Korea’s defense minister to express sympathy for the deaths of two of the South’s marines in the artillery shelling of a small South Korean island and to express appreciation “for the restraint shown to date” by the South’s government, a Pentagon spokesman said.
Obama called North Korea’s action “just one more provocative incident” and said he would consult with Lee on an appropriate response.
In his phone call to South Korea’s defense minister, Gates said the U.S. viewed recent attacks as a violation of the armistice agreement that ended the Korea War in 1953, and he reiterated the U.S. commitment to South Korea’s defense, said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell.
Obama was awakened at 4 a.m. Tuesday with the news. He went ahead with an Indiana trip focused on the economy before returning to the White House after dark.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the U.S. would take a “deliberate approach” in response to what he also called provocative North Korean behavior. At the same time, other administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe the emerging strategy, said the White House was determined to end a diplomatic cycle that officials said rewards North Korean brinksmanship.
In the past, the U.S. and other nations have sweetened offers to North Korea as it has developed new missiles and prototype nuclear weapons. North Korea is now demanding new one-on-one talks with the United States, which rejects that model in favor of group diplomacy that includes North Korea’s protector, China.
“We’re not going to respond willy-nilly,” Toner said. “We believe that it’s important that we keep a unified and measured approach going forward.”
Both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill accused North Korea of starting the skirmish.
The violence comes as the North prepares for a dynastic change in leadership and faces a winter of food and electricity shortages. It is the latest of a series of confrontations that have aggravated tensions on the divided peninsula.
The incident also follows the North’s decision last week to give visiting Western scientists a tour of a secret uranium enrichment facility, which may signal an expansion of the North’s nuclear weapons program. Six weeks ago, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il anointed his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, as his heir apparent.
The administration official said the U.S. did not interpret North Korea’s aggression as a desire to go to war, but as yet another effort to extract concessions from the international community.
Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said no new equipment or personnel have been relocated to South Korea, while Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz seemed to shrug off the latest incident as something that Seoul can handle on its own.
“The North Koreans have undertaken over time a number of provocations that have manifested themselves in different ways,” Schwartz said.
The artillery exchange was only the latest serious incident between the two nations. In March, a South Korean naval ship, the Cheonan, exploded and sank in the Yellow Sea, killing 46 sailors. South Korea accused the North of torpedoing the vessel; the North denied the allegation.
In August, the South Korean military reported that the North had fired 110 artillery rounds into the Yellow Sea near the disputed sea border but said the shells fell harmlessly into North Korean waters.
South Korean officials said Tuesday’s clash came after Pyongyang warned the South to halt military drills near the small South Korean island of Yeonpyeong.
When Seoul refused and began firing artillery into the water near the disputed sea border, the North bombarded Yeonpyeong, which houses South Korean military installations and a small civilian population.
Recent joint U.S.-Korean naval exercises and strenuous denunciations of the North may only have provoked the regime in Pyongyang. Some experts say the secretive regime may be trying to promote Kim Jong Un as a worthy successor who, like his father, is capable of standing up to the U.S.
“I think it may be all wrapped in this succession planning, in the way the North is looking at it,” said Robert RisCassi, a retired Army general who commanded U.S. forces in Korea from 1990-93.
The U.S.-South Korea exercises also angered China. Beijing is regarded as the key to any long-term diplomatic bargain to end North Korea’s nuclear program and reduce tensions on the peninsula.
But U.S. officials say the North’s motives and internal politics are opaque and sometimes appear inconsistent.
“I don’t know the answer to any question about North Korea that begins with the word ‘why,”‘ Gates told reporters Monday.
Consumer Reports: Thanksgiving dinner can be deadly if you overdo it
A few years ago on Thanksgiving day, Marvin M. Lipman, Consumers Union’s chief medical adviser, was called to the emergency room to see a 52-year-old high school football coach in the throes of a heart attack. In the whirlwind of activity to stabilize him before a transfer to a nearby medical center for angioplasty and stenting, Lipman didn’t have time to sit down with his wife to take a decent history until later that evening.
“You couldn’t possibly believe what he ate today,” she said, and then went on to describe a meal that could have fed his entire offensive backfield. He also had a high blood cholesterol level and a family history of early coronary disease.
In years gone by, skeptics wondered whether a single meal could trigger a heart attack. But in the past decade or two, researchers have learned a lot more about the physiological events that take place after eating a meal packed with carbohydrates, fat and salt. Some research has found that it can set the stage for a heart attack. For example, a study of 1,986 heart attack patients presented at a meeting of the American Heart Association in 2000 suggested that an unusually large meal quadrupled the chance of having a heart attack within the next two hours.
The price of a pigout
After a large meal (a Thanksgiving feast can easily exceed 4,000 calories), cardiac output of blood is increased and diverted to the intestinal circulation to aid digestion, which can take as long as six hours, leaving other organs, including the heart and brain, relatively deprived. The work involved in all this shunting around of blood might be the equivalent of vigorous sex or moderate exercise.
But that’s not all. An increase in insulin, triggered by the carbohydrate content of the meal, can compound the situation by preventing normal relaxation of the coronary arteries. Triglyceride elevation, from the fats and carbs, can impair the function of the inner lining of the coronary arteries and cause those vessels to become less elastic and acutely inflamed. Increases in inflammatory markers such as C-reactive protein have been noted following a large, high-fat meal. And the rise in blood pressure that usually occurs after eating such a meal can cause those inflamed patches to rupture, which in turn can lead to blockages and heart attacks.
Gobbling down a huge dinner can have other health consequences, too. The prodigious amounts of gastric acid produced during the body’s effort to digest the food can cause acid reflux that often goes on for many hours. The high fat content of a typical holiday feast can precipitate a gallbladder attack in people with gallstones. The high salt content might trigger acute heart failure in someone with a history of that condition.
Add to those possibilities the sleepiness generated not only by the meal but also by the wine one might imbibe (making the drive home an accident waiting to happen), plus the embarrassing flatulence and waking up the next morning with acute gout, and you have many good reasons to revamp your eating habits at Aunt Fannie’s fabulous feast this year.
The only thing you probably don’t have to worry about is rupturing your stomach. That rarely happens, because the stomach can expand to accommodate nearly four times the normal volume of food.
Be a gourmand, not a glutton
So what’s a formerly fearless foodie to do on a holiday that features a dinner table groaning with potentially deadly goodies?
l Don’t arrive famished. Have a snack an hour or two before.
l Stay away from the finger food at the hors d’oeuvres table.
l Eat the salad first.
l Use a salad plate instead of a dinner plate.
l Taste everything to your liking, but take small portions and resist seconds.
l Eat slowly, and participate in conversation.
l Skip the dessert, or at least go easy on it. Fruit is preferable.
l Limit alcohol intake to one glass of wine, and drink at least one full glass of water.
(c) Copyright 2010. Consumers Union of United States Inc.
مشاورامنیت ملی رییس جمهوری آمریکا استعفا می دهد
مقامات آمریکایی می گویند مشاورامنیت ملی باراک اوباما رییس جمهوراستعفا می دهد.
انتظارمی رود آقای اوباما امروز، جمعه، استعفای جیمزجونز را اعلام کند. مقامات می گویند تام دونیلون، معاون مشاور امنیت ملی، جایگزین او خواهد شد.
پرزیدنت اوباما جیمز جونز را در اوائل ٢٠٠٩ به عنوان مشاور امنیت ملی خود منصوب کرد.
پیش از احراز این مقام، او نزدیک به ٤٠ سال در ارتش آمریکا خدمت کرده بود
Economy likely creating some jobs, but not enough
By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER, AP Economics Writer – Fri Oct 8, 12:06 am ET
WASHINGTON – Companies likely added a small number of jobs last month, but hardly enough to bring much relief to the nation’s 15 million unemployed.
On Friday, the Labor Department will issue the final monthly jobs report before the midterm congressional elections. The report is likely to leave President Barack Obama in a precarious position: Democratic members of Congress will face voters with unemployment likely above 9.5 percent.
Economists estimate private employers added a net total of 75,000 jobs in September. But they expect that number to be offset by the loss of an equal number of temporary Census jobs. Overall, economists expect no change in the nation’s total payrolls.
The unemployment rate is projected to rise to 9.7 percent from 9.6 percent, according to a survey of economists by Thomson Reuters, as more people look for work. People who are out of work aren’t counted as unemployed until they actively look for a job.
Economists see few signs that the jobs situation will improve anytime soon.
“There’s not much growth going on in the economy right now, so that doesn’t give employers much reason for hiring,” said Nigel Gault, an economist at IHS Global Insight.
Gault said he expects the pace of job creation to remain similarly weak for the rest of this year. Some economists say theunemployment rate could top 10 percent by next year.
The economy expanded at a scant 1.7 percent annual rate in the April-June quarter. Most analysts think growth was similarly weak in the July-September quarter.
Since the recession ended in June 2009, the economy has grown 3 percent, according to economists at Deutsche Bank. That’s less than half the average 6.5 percent pace in postwar recoveries.
Some encouraging signs did emerge in government reports Thursday. For the fourth time in five weeks, fewer people applied forunemployment benefits. The number who did so fell to the lowest level since July.
And job openings rose in August for the second-straight month, to 3.2 million.
But neither figure is strong enough to signal broad gains in job creation. Employers advertised 4.4 million job openings in December 2007, when the recession began.
“The data that we’re seeing is still consistent with a very slow jobs recovery,” said Michelle Meyer, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
Weak job growth will likely force the Federal Reserve to take further steps to boost the economy. Most economists expect the Fed to act next month to buy government debt to try to lower interest rates and spur more borrowing.
The unemployment rate can rise even when the economy is adding jobs — if the jobs aren’t enough to keep up with the growing population. Private-sector job creation in September will likely to fall below the 125,000 net new jobs needed just to keep up with population growth. That growth stems from young people seeking their first jobs and new immigrants looking for work.
Even more jobs will be needed to absorb many of the 1.1 million Americans who have stopped looking for work and won’t resume their search until hiring picks up.
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco estimates that employers would have to create as many as 300,000 net jobs each month to reduce the unemployment rate to 8 percent within two years. That figure takes into account both population growth and the return of some discouraged job seekers.
Iran says computer virus not to blame for delay in launching nuclear power plant
The problem at the Bushehr reactor — the nation’s first nuclear power plant — was caused by a leak in the pool holding the fuel rods, Iran’s atomic energy chief says.
By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times
Gay suicides and media hype
The story of Tyler Clementi brings tears to the eyes. The Rutgers University freshman jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after a video of him having sex with a man was posted on the Internet, probably by a classmate. Not only did a promising young life end — it’s 2010, and even college students still exhibit malicious anti-gay bias.
Yet does his awful death mean there’s a “trend” of suicides by young gays and lesbians. That has been a television theme in the last week. It’s clear there have been suicides in which young homosexuals kill themselves at least in part owing to harassment. Each instance is heartbreaking. But people who aren’t gay, or don’t belong to any group that has been subjected to prejudice, take their own lives. Does the occurrence of a gay person’s suicide show any larger trend?
In 2007, there were about 42 million Americans aged 15-24. The self-inflicted death rate for this group was about one in 10,300. That comes to roughly 4,000 suicides a year by those of teens-to-college age — a horrible figure. That suicide is a leading cause of death for young people is, itself, horrible.
The exact figure is disputed, but a good estimate is that three to four percent of the human family is homosexual. Based on the suicide rate for those 15 to 24, we’d expect somewhere around 150 gay or lesbian young people to kill themselves in a year. That’s terrible – but also shows a few instances of gay suicide do not constitute a trend. This ABC News report laments “five suicides by gay teenagers in the last three weeks,” implying a sudden new development. Other things being equal, statistics would suggest nine suicides by gay young adults in a three-week period.
Are homosexuals as a group at greater risk of suicide than others of similar backgrounds? This studyfound that gay young people who are rejected by their families are much more likely than their age group as a whole to attempt to kill themselves. But do heterosexual youth who are rejected by their families also have elevated suicide-attempt rates? Being rejected by your family would be traumatic regardless of the reason.
This Centers for Disease Control backgrounder on suicide does not cite sexual orientation as a leading factor, nor does this briefing paper from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The AFSP views “psychiatric disorders” as the leading cause of suicide. Mistreatment by society might cause severe depression, the disorder most associated with suicide.
It’s tempting for editors and talk-show bookers to imply that an instance shows a larger trend. Often it doesn’t. In a country of 300 million people, you can find an instance of practically anything. Surely one could find instances of happy, well-adjusted gays and lesbians who are perfectly content with their lives. That would not prove a trend of treating homosexuals fairly, any more than a gay person’s suicide proves a trend of treating them unfairly. The flip side of this coin is that another kind of suicide — military suicides — are rising at a rate that does show a clear trend.
The Houston Chronicle reported on Monday, “Last year suicides made up nearly 25 percent of the deaths of Texans younger than 35 who served in the military. That percentage is more than twice the rate of suicide in the comparable civilian population.”
In 2008 and 2009, suicide rates among active-duty military exceeded the rates for the general population of the same age and gender. The Army says the 2010 suicide rate is down, roughly to the rate of comparable civilian population.
Military suicide rates are troubling because of what they suggest about the stress and suffering imposed by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — wars which most Americans have not been so much as inconvenienced. Military suicides are further troubling because soldiers tend to enjoy better health than the population as a whole, meaning health problems are less likely to be suicide factors, and have ready access to no-charge psychological counseling, which should tend to reduce suicide rates.
Any suicide by anyone is a devastating tragedy — but news reports must weigh which tragedies are personal, and which may represent some larger trend.
And bear in mind:
Suicide is not a private choice — it causes lasting emotional pain and psychological harm to family and loved ones. When death comes from old age or late-stage disease, ending your own life may be ethical. Except in that circumstance, suicide is both morally wrong and cruel to others.
Studies of those who have attempted suicide and failed show that in almost all cases, they are glad they failed. Whatever awful thing is causing you to consider suicide — it may change, and you’ll later be glad to be alive to know it changed.
If your leg was broken you’d ask for help. If you are thinking about suicide, ask for help. Suicidal thoughts do not mean you are a bad person — they mean you have a problem and need help. Most people who receive suicide counseling get better.
Green Beret who died saving comrades awarded Medal of Honor
From John Couwels, CNN
Oviedo, Florida (CNN) — President Barack Obama on Wednesday awarded the Medal of Honor — the nation’s highest military decoration — to Staff Sgt. Robert J. Miller, a Green Beret who died after willingly taking fire to protect U.S. and Afghan soldiers.
The citation read at a solemn White House ceremony in Washington, D.C., honored Miller for “conspicuous gallantry … at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty” and “extraordinary acts of heroism” on January 25, 2008, when a patrol he led was ambushed in Afghanistan.
Miller killed at least 10 insurgents and wounded dozens more in repeatedly exposing himself to enemy fire “in keeping with the highest traditions of military service,” the citation said.
Miller is the seventh service member to receive the Medal of Honor for actions during operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama gave a detailed account of the combat in which Miller was killed, describing how the small group of U.S. and Afghan soldiers came under fire in a narrow valley from protected enemy positions above.
Realizing the peril of the situation, Miller ordered his team to fall back, but then “did something extraordinary,” Obama said.
“Rob moved the other way, toward the insurgents,” to draw their fire so his team could back off safely, the president said.
The others could hear Miller firing and calling out enemy positions amid overwhelming enemy fire, Obama said.
“Then over the radio, they heard his voice,” Obama continued. “He had been hit. But still he kept calling out enemy positions, still he kept firing, still he kept hurling grenades. Then they heard it. Rob’s weapon fell silent.”
Five members of his team were wounded, Obama said, but all survived. He quoted one of the survivors as saying, “I would not be alive today if not for his ultimate sacrifice.”
Some of the dozen team members at the ceremony were red-eyed when Obama asked them to stand, and the president cited them and all U.S. fighting forces in Afghanistan for their commitment to the mission of preventing the country from again becoming a haven for terrorists to launch attacks on the United States.
“Every American is safer because of their service, and every American has a duty to remember and honor their sacrifice,” Obama said.
Miller’s parents, Maureen and Philip Miller, stood onstage with Obama as the citation was read. They earlier told how they take consolation that their son gave his life so others could live.
“If it wasn’t for Robert’s actions, they could have easily been killed,” Maureen Miller said.
Miller’s father added: “We have a sense of awe and amazement of what he did and a feeling of pride.”
Sgt. James Lodyga, Miller’s commander in Afghanistan, described the battle in the village of Barikowt, near the Pakistani border, as being like “fish in a barrel.”
“Enemy on right, on the left. Robby immediately started firing,” Lodyga said.
An Army commendation noted the young man’s character.
“Only 24 years old, Miller impressed everyone on his team. Although the youngest member of A Company, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group [Airborne], Fort Bragg, N.C., he quickly earned a reputation for taking on difficult challenges,” the Army said.
His mother relayed a perspective only a parent could have.
“I’m feeling humbled by it,” Maureen Miller said. “He was just our kid, not too long out of the annoying teenager stage, and he was doing all this.”
She had a notion, though, of her son’s outlook on life.
“Robert wore his favorite shirt which said, ‘Cowards die many time before their death. The valiant never taste of death but once,’ ” she said.
The fallen soldier’s sister, Nancy, pointed out that “he was always concerned about looking out for others.”
Lodyga said Miller did just that.
“Robby was shot in the side and he shot those who shot him,” the sergeant said. “He kept firing until he succumbed to a shot under the armpit. I don’t know how to put it into words. I know Robby saved our lives, Absolutely he’s a hero. I thank him a lot.”
The Medal of Honor is given for exceptional acts of gallantry, “bravery or self-sacrifice” and must involve risk of life, the White House said.
At Miller’s home in Oviedo, Florida, his parents fly the U.S. flag — and display two stars in a window.
“The blue star flag is anyone in active service. Gold star is designation that they are fallen in battle,” Philip Miller said. “They are in memory of our son and a proud memorial for him.”
For Miller’s parents, Wednesday’s ceremony at the White House was an important step on the long road to healing.
The parents were told at his funeral more than two years ago that the decorated Green Beret would be receiving another commendation.
“There was a sense that it wasn’t finished and that there was something left to be done,” Maureen Miller said. “Now this part of the chapter will be closed.”
The slain warrior’s mother said she was looking forward to “finally getting it over with and a sense of closure. We will always miss Rob and there will always be a hole in our heart.”
CNN’s Tom Cohen contributed to this story.
Democrats conflicted about
election spending gap
With Obama and allies denouncing the Supreme Court’s easing of campaign finance rules, Democrats haven’t created a major operation to channel soft money, as Republicans have done. Some operatives hope the party will extend its reach soon.
“It’s a very challenging fundraising environment,” said Monica Dixon, executive director of the Democratic political action committee, called Commonsense Ten. “We’re going to go as far as the Democratic donor base will take us.”
The vast gap speaks not only to the dispirited state of Democratic donors, but also to the party’s conflicted reaction to the Supreme Court’s loosening of campaign finance rules, which was strongly denounced by President Obama.
Aside from organized labor and Patriot Majority — a PAC backing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reidin Nevada — Commonsense Ten is the only significant independent operation running ads for Senate Democrats. Nervous Democratic operatives are hoping it will soon extend its reach.
Though the Democratic Party has outraised the Republican Party this cycle, the advantage tilts heavily the other way when money raised by outside groups is included.
Independent groups backing Republican candidates have run $34.5 million worth of television and radio ads on Senate races, while pro-Democratic groups have run only $4.2 million in such spots, according to Democratic ad tracking. Who is behind all the money is murky, as some groups operating as nonprofits do not have to disclose their donors.
The disparity marks a reversal from past elections. Even though campaign finance reform is a core issue for many Democrats, the party in recent years has had the advantage over Republicans in “soft,” or unregulated, contributions through groups known as 527 committees, named for the section of federal law allowing them. In 2004, such Democratic committees America Coming Together and the Media Fund raised nearly $200 million total, far outstripping their GOP rivals. Jordan was a communications strategist for the groups.
The Federal Election Commission later fined both committees, along with pro-Republican groups, for campaign finance violations. Committee officials blamed ambiguous opinions from the FEC.
This year, it was the Republicans who were faster off the mark when the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission that laws banning corporations from direct political activity violated the 1st Amendment. GOP strategist Karl Rove and other party leaders helped launch American Crossroads a few months later.
But there have been no similar efforts by Democrats to create a major operation to channel soft money.
That’s in part because Obama has assailed the Citizens United decision.
“I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities,” he said in his State of the Union address.
“It doesn’t help a Democratic fundraiser when the president is telling people these independent groups are a bad idea,” said political consultant Tom Matzzie, former Washington director of MoveOn.org.
The White House declined to comment. A senior Democratic official said Obama’s concern was that many outside groups offer no transparency about their donors.
Obama’s message is now being echoed by other Democratic officials. This week, a group of state and local officials announced a new project, the Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending, to pressure corporations not to put money into campaigns.
“I don’t think we should do the equivalent of the donors arms race, because it’s bad for democracy,” said Ilyse Hogue, director of political advocacy for MoveOn.org, which last month ran ads critical of the independent expenditures by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
MoveOn.org had its own soft-money committee in 2004, but has returned to running campaigns through its PAC, which cannot accept donations of more than $5,000. “We found it was truer to our principles,” Hogue said.
Commonsense Ten has approached the new landscape with caution. Dixon said the group was aiming to “have a completely transparent relationship with people who want to know who we’re raising money from and how we’re spending it.”
One of the first acts by the committee was to request an advisory opinion from the FEC about the Citizens United decision. That meant that the group didn’t start fundraising until August, when it got the all-clear from the FEC to accept unlimited donations. Unlike some nonprofit groups running political ads this cycle, Commonsense Ten, as a PAC, must disclose its donors.
Jordan said Commonsense Ten was not envisioned as a bulwark against the Crossroads affiliates or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which together plan to spend at least $125 million.
“We never for a second fantasized about numbers like that,” he said. “It could have been $15 million or $15, and we had no idea which, but it seemed worth taking a shot at.”
Jordan, former executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and onetime presidential campaign manager for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), directs the PAC’s ad strategy out of his 200-year-old farmhouse in Vermont, while Dixon, a longtime Capitol Hill staffer, runs daily operations from her home office in Bethesda, Md. Forbes, a lobbyist and veteran of the Clinton White House, focuses on strategy and fundraising.
In the coming weeks, Commonsense Ten plans to finance field operations and to go on the air in more states. It has amassed several million dollars’ worth of commitments, much of that money from traditional Democratic allies such as environmentalists, women’s groups and labor.
Although rallying donors has not been easy, Jordan said the vast sums being spent for the GOP had begun to alarm Democrats. “People are calling us and they want to know where we’re playing,” he said. “If we can help at the margins in the few places, I think we’ll be satisfied.”
U.S. walks out of UNGA
during Ahmadinejad speech
][
United Nations (CNN) – Delegates from the United States and other nations walked out of the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a fiery speech that criticized Washington, capitalism and the world body itself.
Though incendiary statements from Ahmadinejad are nothing new, tension in the hall grew as the Iranian leader recounted various conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
“Some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack,” Ahmadinejad told the General Assembly. He followed with the claim that the attacks were aimed at reversing “the declining American economy and its scripts on the Middle East in order to save the Zionist regime. The majority of the American people, as well as most nations and politicians around the world, agree with this view.”
UNITED NATIONS —
The U.S. delegation walked out of the U.N. speech of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday after he said some in the world have speculated that Americans were actually behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks, staged in an attempt to assure Israel’s survival.
He did not explain the logic of that statement that was made as he attacked the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ahmadinejad said there were three theories about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks:
– That a “powerful and complex terrorist group” penetrated U.S. intelligence and defenses.
– “That some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime. The majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians agree with this view.”
The Americans stood and walked out without listening to the third theory that the attack was the work of “a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”
Mark Kornblau, spokesman of the U.S. Mission to the world body, issued a statement within moments of Ahmadinejad’s attack.
“Rather than representing the aspirations and goodwill of the Iranian people,” he said, “Mr. Ahmadinejad has yet again chosen to spout vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable.”
The Iranian leader spoke of threats to burn the Quran by a small American church in Florida to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Although that church backed down, several copycat burnings were posted on the Internet and broadcast in the Muslim world.
“Very recently the world witnessed the ugly and inhumane act of burning the holy Quran,” Ahmadinejad said.
He briefly touch on the four sets of sanctions imposed on his country by the United Nations overTehran’s refusal stop enriching uranium and to prove Iran is not trying to build an atomic bomb.
Some members of the Security Council have “equated nuclear energy with nuclear bombs,” Ahmadinejad said.
He accused the United States of building up its nuclear arsenal instead of dismantling it and reiterated his call for a nuclear-free world.
“The nuclear bomb is the worst inhumane weap9on and which must totally be eliminated. The NPT (Nonproliferation Treaty) prohibits its development and stockpiling and calls for nuclear disarmament,” the Iranian president said.
Ahmadinejad tells U.N. most blame U.S. government for 9/11
By Louis Charbonneau
(Reuters) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the United Nations Thursday most people believe the U.S. government was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001, prompting the U.S. delegation to leave the hall in protest.
Addressing the General Assembly, he said it was mostly U.S. government officials and statesmen who believed al Qaeda Islamist militants carried out the suicide hijacking attacks that brought down New York’s World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon.
Another theory, he said, was “that some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy, and its grips on the Middle East, in order to save the Zionist regime.” Ahmadinejad usually refers to Israel as the “Zionist regime.”
“The majority of the American people as well as most nations and politicians around the world agree with this view,” Ahmadinejad told the 192-nation assembly, calling on the United Nations to establish “an independent fact-finding group” to look into the events of September 11.
As in past years, the U.S. delegation walked out during Ahmadinejad’s speech. It was joined by all 27 European Union delegations and several others, one Western diplomat said.
Mark Kornblau, spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, reacted before Ahmadinejad finished speaking.
“Rather than representing the aspirations and goodwill of the Iranian people, Mr. Ahmadinejad has yet again chosen to spout vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable,” he said.
“COVERED UP”
Ahmadinejad raised a third theory about the attacks, saying: “It was carried out by a terrorist group, but that the American government supported and took advantage of the situation. Apparently this viewpoint has fewer proponents.”
He said the main evidence for that theory was “a few passports found in the huge volume of rubble and a video of an individual whose place of domicile was unknown but it was announced that he had been involved in oil deals with some American officials.”
“It was also covered up and said that due to the explosion and fire no trace of suicide attackers was found,” he added.
Similar to past years, the Iranian president used the General Assembly podium to attack Iran’s other arch foe, Israel, and to defend the right of his country to a nuclear program that Western powers fear is aimed at developing arms.
“This regime (Israel), which enjoys the absolute support of some western countries, regularly threatens the countries in the region and continues publicly announced assassination of Palestinian figures and others, while Palestinian defenders … are labeled as terrorists and anti-Semites,” he said.
“All values, even the freedom of expression, in Europe and the United States are being sacrificed at the altar of Zionism,” Ahmadinejad said.
The Iranian president has previously raised doubts about the Holocaust of the Jews in World War Two and said Israel had no right to exist.
Obama and Ahmadinejad to Face Off at U.N.
President Barack Obama and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are set to take their political rivalry to the U.N. General Assembly Thursday amid efforts to renew negotiations over Iran’s suspect nuclear program.
Ahmadinejad, who regularly challenges American presidents to debate him in front of the world’s media, has a history of using the annual summit to make provocative statements.
In 2008, the Iranian leader called Israel a “Zionist regime” of murderers, igniting outrage. Last year, his comments were so outrageous they prompted a walkout by other nations.
Obama was scheduled to speak Thursday morning and Ahmadinejad in the afternoon. Others scheduled to address the general assembly included leaders from China, Turkey and Iraq.
On Wednesday night, a combative Ahmadinejad took to the airwaves to lash out at Israel’s prime minister, telling CNN’s Larry King that Benjamin Netanyahu is a “skilled killer” who “should be put on trial for killing women and children.”
Ahmadinejad deflected questions about his country’s nuclear program, saying “we have no interest” in atomic weapons. “We are not seeking the bomb.”
On the sidelines of the summit, European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the foreign ministers of Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia met Wednesday to try to find a solution to the long-running dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. They urged Iran to come to the table for a new round of talks, and said it remained essential for Iran to prove its nuclear program is peaceful.
The U.S. and key Western allies fear Iran could try to process its low enriched uranium into highly enriched uranium, which could be used to make an atomic weapon. Iran insists its nuclear program is purely peaceful, aimed solely at producing nuclear energy.
Iran has defied four rounds of increasingly restrictive economic sanctions aimed at compelling Tehran to prove it is not building a nuclear weapons program. Iran adamantly denies accusations from the U.S. and its allies that it seeks atomic arms.
Talks with Tehran reached a stalemate last October, after Iranian officials tried to renegotiate an agreement to ship most of its low enriched uranium out of the country, to be turned into fuel for a research reactor.
In their meeting on Wednesday, Clinton and the other ministers said they still want to engage with Iran on a fuel swap for its research reactor. They backed the readiness of U.N. nuclear agency chief, Yukio Amano, to convene a meeting.
“We look forward to Iran’s positive and constructive participation in this dialogue,” they said.
The meeting comes on the heels of a three-day summit to promote the achievement of U.N. anti-poverty goals by the 2015 target that wrapped up late Wednesday night. Presidents, prime ministers and kings from many of the U.N.’s 192 member states who attended the summit are remaining in New York and will shift gears to other world issues from the continuing impact of the global financial crisis to terrorism and nuclear proliferation at the ministerial meeting.
On the summit’s last day, nations pledged more than $40 billion to battle needless deaths among poor mothers and their children. But the struggling world economy, particularly in the United States, raises deep concerns that the cash won’t be forthcoming. Leaders exhorted financial donors to fulfill their aid commitments.
“The crisis is no excuse for letting up our efforts, but underscores the need for actions,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said as he wrapped up the three-day Millennium Development Goals summit.
With many countries still hurting from the global economic crisis, the secretary-general has repeatedly urged governments not to abandon the world’s 1 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. The United States and Britain said they will continue to do their part to help the global poor.
“We will keep our promises and honor our commitments,” Obama told world leaders.
“I suspect that wealthier countries may ask — with our economies struggling, so many people out of work, and so many families barely getting by, why a summit on development?” he said. “The answer is simple. In our global economy, progress in even the poorest countries can advance the prosperity and security of people far beyond their borders, including my fellow Americans.”
Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg urged other countries to join Britain in meeting aid commitments.
The goals, “are not simply charity, nor are they pure altruism,” Clegg said. “They are also the key to lasting safety and future prosperity.”
International aid group Oxfam called the summit “a mirage.”
“The promises look good from a distance, but the details are hard to see, and when the world’s poorest people most need help, pledges could still vanish into thin air,” Oxfam spokeswoman Emma Seery said in a statement.
“While leaders celebrated a big package of money for global health, they failed to acknowledge their collective disastrous failure to meet their aid targets, which is putting the lives of women and children at risk daily,” she said.
The issues of maternal and child mortality have been a particular focus of the summit, which reviewed efforts to implement anti-poverty goals adopted in 2000 — and found them lacking. Worldwide every year, an estimated 8 million children still die before reaching their 5th birthday, and about 350,000 women die during pregnancy or childbirth.
Along with easing maternal and child mortality, the goals included cutting extreme poverty by half, ensuring universal primary education and halting and reversing the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
The leaders approved a final document saying the U.N. goals can be achieved and spelling out specific actions to accelerate their implementation over the next five years.
One of the last speakers Wednesday night was Melinda French Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who said she’s impatient but optimistic because of the progress she’s seen in the last 10 years to meet the goals.
“I’m optimistic that our sense of urgency will inspire us to work together, not to isolate ourselves, for if we are motivated, if we are inspired, if we work together, then we can meet again in five years to celebrate achievements that few of us might have dared to imagine,” Gates said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
جلسه سالانه احمدی نژاد با ژورناليست های آمريکائی امسال صحنه هشدار و جوابگوئی بود
نيويورک تايمز زير عنوان “هشدار رهبر ايران به آمريکا ضمن جوابگوئی به انتقادها” می نويسد محمود احمدی نژاد رئيس جمهوری ايران با استفاده از شيوه خاص خود درمطرح ساختن نظراتش، روز سه شنبه در گردهم آئی سالانه اش با ژورناليست های آمريکائی درد و رنج ناراضيان درزندان يا گزيدگی ناشی از تحريم های اقتصادی را تکذيب کرد و کارنامه تهران را در مورد بازرسی های اتمی سزاوار ستاره ای طلائی دانست. او اين بار صحبت هايش را با کمی قلدری هم در آميخته بود. رئيس جمهوری ايران نشسته درسر ميز کنفرانسی در احاطه سردبيران اخبار و تهيه کنندگان برنامه های تلويزيونی به اين ميهمانان جلسه صبحانه اش گفت اگر آمريکا به ايران بر سر برنامه اتمی اش حمله کند درگير جنگی می شود که جنگ های ديگر آمريکا را در مقام مقايسه کم رنگ جلوه می دهد. آقای احمدی نژاد در جريان اين جلسه در هتلی در ميانه منهتن، در چارچوب آنچه که به بخشی از مراسم و تشريفات او هنگام شرکت در مجمع عمومی سازمان ملل متحد به تهاجمی مسحور کننده مبدل شده است گفت آمريکا هيچوقت وارد جنگی واقعی نشده است. نه در ويتنام، نه در افغانستان، و نه حتی در جنگ جهانی دوم. جنگ فقط بمباران کردن بعضی جاها نيست. وقتی شروع شد حد ومرزی نخواهد داشت. او در عين حال اين ايده را که اختلافات زمانی ممکن است به آن حد برسد رد کرد و تهديد حمله ای به ايران را فقط در يک جنگ روانی و کم اهميت دانست. آقای احمدی نژاد گفت ما هميشه برای مذاکره آماده بوده ايم. مناسبات تهران و واشينگتن از هنگام تصويب چهارمين دور تحريم ها در شورای امنيت سازمان ملل متحد در ماه ژوئن، و جريمه هائی مکمل، با مصوباتی جداگانه توسط آمريکا، و کشورهای آسيائی و اروپائی، حتی فاصله ای بيشتر هم پيدا کرده است. آژانس نظارتی اتمی سازمان ملل متحد در اين ماه گفت که ايران از آن پس از دادن اجازه دسترسی به بازرسان و اطلاعات راجع به برنامه اتمی خود امتناع ورزيده است. ايران تاکيد می کند که برنامه اتمی اش صلح آميز است اما مقامات آمريکائی می گويند ايران به توانائی های تسليحات اتمی نزديک تر می شود. آقای احمدی نژاد روز سه شنبه سياست را برای فشار و انتقادهای بازرسان بين المللی مقصر دانست و گفت آنها به جايگاههای اتمی ايران دسترسی داشته اند و کشورش مطابق با معاهده های بين المللی اتمی عمل می کند. آقای احمدی نژاد گفت پرونده اتمی ايران سياسی است. در غير اينصورت چرا ضرورت پيدا کرده است که جزئيات برنامه اتمی ما در اختيار وسائل ارتباط جمعی گذاشته شود. او افزود آنچه ما انجام می دهيم قانونی است. ما هميشه پشت سر قانون هستيم. آقای احمدی نژاد از قوه قضائيه ايران که با رگباری از انتقاد بر سر توقيف قريب ۵۰۰ روزنامه نگار، فعال سياسی و مقامات دولتی در پی تجديد گزينش مورد اختلاف خود در ژوئن ۲۰۰۹ روبروست، دفاع کرد. تابستان امسال حکم مجازات مرگ از طريق سنگسار برای يک زن ايرانی به اتهام زنا، که بنا به گزارشها معلق شده است، تقبيح های بين المللی بيشتری را در پی داشت. اما آقای احمدی نژاد روز سه شنبه به خبرنگاران گفت شما سيستم قضائی ما را درک نمی کنيد. وی کفت ايران هيچکس را به دلائل سياسی زندانی نکرده است – نظری که با ارزيابی گروههای مدافع حقوق بشر منافات دارد. وی گفت هرچه اتفاق افتاده است زير نظارت قاضی، نيروهای انتظامی و اطلاعاتی بوده است. درواقع مردم از دولت بشدت انتقاد می کنند و ما هيچگونه محدوديتی برای آن بوجود نمی آوريم. در حاليکه آقای احمدی نژاد در پی استفاده از سفر به سازمان ملل متحد برای نشان دادن خود به عنوان رهبر مقتدر يک کشور متحد بود بنظر می رسد رقبای سياسی او در سلسله مراتب محافظه کاران در غياب او برای شرمنده ساختن اش در داخل استفاده می کنند. بعضی ها حتی گفته اند که وی می تواند بر سر آنچه که رفتار استبدادی و بی اعتانی اش به ديگر شاخه های حکومت، بخصوص مجلس توصيف می کنند استيضاح شود
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Paul Volcker, special adviser to President Barack Obama, said on Wednesday that reforming the U.S. mortgage market is the biggest single element missing from financial regulatory reform.
(Reuters) – Paul Volcker, special adviser to President Barack Obama, said on Wednesday that reforming the U.S. mortgage market is the biggest single element missing from financial regulatory reform.
The former Federal Reserve chairman said the mortgage industry is dysfunctional and a “creature of the government” that needs reform.
Volcker told a forum sponsored by the International Economic Alliance in New York that he would want to avoid a “hybrid” institution that is “private when things are going well and public when things are going badly.”
At the height of the financial crisis in late 2008, the U.S. government seized mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Since then, the two entities have taken about $150 billion in direct aid from the government.
The debate over the future of the U.S. mortgage finance system will intensify in January as the Obama administration is set to offer its plans to overhaul Fannie and Freddie.
The deeply political issue will be marked in part by the fight over continued government support for the $10.7 trillion market.
Money market regulation should also be revisited, he said, adding he was “not satisfied” with how credit agencies had been addressed in the financial regulatory reform process.
New rules governing Wall Street, signed into law earlier this summer to toughen the oversight of financial firms, are meant to prevent a repeat of practices that contributed to a devastating global financial crisis in 2007-2009.
Volcker said the U.S. economy’s long slog to recovery was due to the fact that the economy had gotten “way out of balance” and could no longer be pumped up through consumption.
In the second quarter of 2010, the U.S. economy grew at an annual pace of 1.6 percent, slowing from a growth rate of 3.7 percent in the first three months of the year.
Volcker said that companies were sitting on a “pile” of cash mainly due to the drop-off in demand that gave them little confidence in making investments to expand their businesses.
TAX POLICY NEEDS REVAMP
Corporate income tax policy “is a mess,” he said. Tax policy in general could do more to create incentives for investment in areas of growth for the economy.
“Some kind of energy tax probably makes sense,” he said after describing how European gasoline prices are significantly higher than those in the United States and have resulted in more efficiently built transportation systems.
The former Federal Reserve chairman, answering a question about taxes for high earners, said the biggest redistribution of wealth he had seen in his lifetime was from average American families to the rich.
(Reporting by Daniel Bases and Kristina Cooke; Editing by Jan Paschal)
By the CNN Wire Staff
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican raised the possibility Sunday of using behind-the-scenes diplomacy to try to save the life of an Iranian widow sentenced to be stoned for adultery.
In its first public statement on the case, which has attracted worldwide attention, the Vatican decried stoning as a particularly brutal form of capital punishment.
Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the Catholic church opposes the death penalty in general.
It is unclear what chances any Vatican bid would have to persuade the Muslim nation to spare the woman’s life. Brazil, which has friendly relations with Iran, was rebuffed when it offered her asylum.
Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani was convicted in 2006 of adultery. In July, Iranian authorities said they would not carry out the stoning sentence for the time being, but the mother of two could still face execution by hanging for adultery and other offenses.
Her son, Sajad, told the Italian news agency Adnkronos that he was appealing to Pope Benedict XVI and to Italy to work to stop the execution.
Lombardi told The Associated Press that no formal appeal had reached the Vatican. But he hinted that Vatican diplomacy might be employed to try to save Ashtiani.
Lombardi said in a statement that the Holy See “is following the case with attention and interest.”
“When the Holy See is asked, in an appropriate way, to intervene in humanitarian issues with the authorities of other countries, as it has happened many times in the past, it does so not in a public way, but through its own diplomatic channels,” Lombardi said in the statement.
In one of the late Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals in 1995, the pontiff laid out the Catholic Church’s stance against capital punishment.
John Paul went to bat in several high-profile cases of death-row inmates in the United States. One of the first was the case of Paula Cooper, who was convicted of murdering her elderly Bible teacher when she was 15 but spared the electric chair by Indiana in 1989. Other appeals for clemency have been made by the Vatican, including one for a group of Cuban officers convicted of drug trafficking.
Meanwhile, Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini, told the ANSA news agency that while Italy respects Iranian sovereignty and isn’t in any way interfering, “a gesture of clemency from Iran is the only thing that can save her.”
Italy has strong economic ties, primarily energy interests, in Iran.
ran orders 99 lashes for woman facing execution, rights group says
By the CNN Wire Staff
(CNN) — An Iranian woman who’d already been condemned to death faces another sentence of 99 lashes because of a case of mistaken identity in a photograph, according to foes of the execution.
Iranian authorities imposed the sentence after they saw the photo of a woman without a head scarf in a newspaper, the International Committee Against Stoning, a human rights group, said Friday.
In an apology, The Times of London, which ran the photo on its front page on August 28, said the woman was wrongly identified as Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who had previously been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery.
The Times said the photo actually is of Susan Hejrat, a political activist living in Sweden.
Iranian law requies all women, regardless of their faith, to wear garments that cover their hair and bodies.
According to the Times, one of Ashtiani’s former lawyers, Mohammed Mostafaei, gave the paper the photo.
Mostafaei told CNN Saturday that he still thinks the photo may be of his former client.
The Times said Mostafei told it that Ashtiani’s son, Sajjad, 22, had e-mailed him two photographs three months ago and told him both were of his mother.
“One was the widely used picture of Ms. Ashtiani with her face obscured by a chador [cloak], and the other was the one used by The Times… That showed the full face of a woman,” The Times said in a statement Friday.
Sajjad Ghaderzadeh wrote in an open letter that another lawyer sent the paper an authentic photo of his mother, but that it did not appear in the Times article. The letter was circulated by the International Committee Against Stoning on Friday.
“We do not know how that picture was originally obtained, nor to whom the picture belongs,” Ghaderzadeh said in the letter.
“My mother has been called in to see the judge in charge of prison misdemeanors and he has sentenced our helpless mother to 99 lashes on false charges of spreading corruption and indecency by disseminating this picture of a woman presumed to be her [Sakineh] without hijab,” he wrote.
A phone call to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tehran early Sunday morning was not answered.
The Committee Against Stoning said Friday that “it is Mr. Mostafaei’s responsibility to provide an explanation as to why he has disseminated [a] counterfeit photo and information regarding Sakineh’s case; his action has only led to increased pressure on Sakineh and her family.”
“We strongly condemn this barbaric new sentence of 99 lashes imposed by the Islamic Republic against Sakineh and we demand that this sentence be abandoned immediately,” said the committee.
Mostafei told CNN that Ghaderzadeh three months ago gave him two photos — one of Ashtiani wearing a hijab (covering) and one without it, Mostafei said.
The lawyer said he immediately released the photo of Ashtiani wearing the chador and sent the Times the photo of her without the hijab more recently.
Asked about whether the photo printed by the Times is of Ashtiani, Mostafei said, “In my opinion it is Ms. Ashtiani. It was given to me by her own son. If it is not indeed her, it looked just like her. She was wearing religious clothes in the photo, she had the same face, same everything.”
Ashtiani was sentenced to death by stoning after she was convicted of adultery. Iranian judicial authorities say a final verdict in her case has not yet been made, ISNA news agency reported recently. In July, Iran’s judiciary said the case was under review.
Ashtiani, who is being held in Tabriz, Iran, no longer has visitation rights, the family told CNN.
The Committee Against Stoning has said that Iran announced she will not be executed during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ends around September 9. Iran’s judiciary could reinstate her sentence of death by stoning, execute her by other means, or possibly grant her a reprieve, according to human rights groups.
Iran’s Judiciary High Council of Human Rights indicated that evidence shows the allegations against Ashtiani “have been proved right” and that Iran’s judiciary operates independently as other justice systems do, the semi-official Iranian Student’s News Agency reported.
(Reuters) – God did not create the universe and the “Big Bang” was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book.
In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts Thursday.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.
“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
Hawking, 68, who won global recognition with his 1988 book “A Brief History of Time,” an account of the origins of the universe, is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity.
Since 1974, the scientist has worked on marrying the two cornerstones of modern physics — Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which concerns gravity and large-scale phenomena, and quantum theory, which covers subatomic particles.
His latest comments suggest he has broken away from previous views he has expressed on religion. Previously, he wrote that the laws of physics meant it was simply not necessary to believe that God had intervened in the Big Bang.
He wrote in A Brief History … “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”
In his latest book, he said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun helped deconstruct the view of the father of physics Isaac Newton that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos but was created by God.
“That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions — the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass, far less remarkable, and far less compelling evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings,” he writes.
Hawking, who is only able to speak through a computer-generated voice synthesizer, has a neuro muscular dystrophy that has progressed over the years and left him almost completely paralyzed.
He began suffering the disease in his early 20s but went on to establish himself as one of the world’s leading scientific authorities, and has also made guest appearances in “Star Trek” and the cartoons “Futurama” and “The Simpsons.”
Last year he announced he was stepping down as Cambridge University’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position once held by Newton a
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