Greek prime minister George Papandreou won a crucial vote of confidence on Tuesday night but he still needs to push new spending cuts through parliament The head of Pimco, the world’s biggest bond trader, has warned that Greece is still likely to default on its debts, despite prime minister George Papandreou winning a crucial vote of confidence late on Tuesday night. Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of Pimco, ratcheted up the pressure on Europe’s leaders by predicting that other eurozone members could also follow Greece into default territory. “For the next three years, we’re going to see different economies work out different problems. For European economies, especially Greece, it would be through default,” El-Erian told reporters in Taipei on Wednesday via a video conference, according to Reuters. The warning came as shares slid across Europe, as attention shifted to Papandreou’s next challenge – persuading the Greek parliament to approve a new package of asset sales and spending cuts next week. In London, the FTSE 100 fell 20 points in early trading and the euro also sagged, as experts warned that Papandreou’s narrow victory did little to address the wider eurozone crisis. Papandreou won Tuesday’s vote of confidence by 155 votes to 143, with every member of the governing socialist party supporting him. “The result shows that Papandreou has the backing of his party. We now expect that the unity shown last night will be repeated in next week’s austerity vote,” said Joshua Raymond, market strategist at City Index. Raymond added that Wednesday’s lacklustre market reaction was understandable, after traders pushed the FTSE 100 up by 1.5% on Tuesday amid optimism that Papandreou would survive. Greece must approve Papandreou’s austerity plan next week to qualify for an immediate €12bn (£10bn) lifeline, and then a second bailout worth over €100bn. There is doubt, though, over whether the measures can be imposed on an increasingly unhappy population . “Everything depends on Greece implementing the measures,” Lord Brittan, the former vice president of the European Commission, told the BBC’s Today Programme. “Legislating is one thing, implementing is another, and Greece’s history of implementation is not a happy one,” Brittan added. Jane Foley of Rabobank International agreed, saying there was “widespread scepticism” in the bond markets about the ability of the Greek political system to implement the reform. Crowds gathered outside the Greek parliament ahead of the vote of confidence, with some shouting “we give a vote of no confidence” at the lawmakers gathered inside. There were some clashes between protestors and riot police, who reportedly deployed tear gas at one point. European debt crisis Greece Europe Europe Bonds Graeme Wearden guardian.co.uk
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Greek prime minister George Papandreou won a crucial vote of confidence on Tuesday night but he still needs to push new spending cuts through parliament The head of Pimco, the world’s biggest bond trader, has warned that Greece is still likely to default on its debts, despite prime minister George Papandreou winning a crucial vote of confidence late on Tuesday night. Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of Pimco, ratcheted up the pressure on Europe’s leaders by predicting that other eurozone members could also follow Greece into default territory. “For the next three years, we’re going to see different economies work out different problems. For European economies, especially Greece, it would be through default,” El-Erian told reporters in Taipei on Wednesday via a video conference, according to Reuters. The warning came as shares slid across Europe, as attention shifted to Papandreou’s next challenge – persuading the Greek parliament to approve a new package of asset sales and spending cuts next week. In London, the FTSE 100 fell 20 points in early trading and the euro also sagged, as experts warned that Papandreou’s narrow victory did little to address the wider eurozone crisis. Papandreou won Tuesday’s vote of confidence by 155 votes to 143, with every member of the governing socialist party supporting him. “The result shows that Papandreou has the backing of his party. We now expect that the unity shown last night will be repeated in next week’s austerity vote,” said Joshua Raymond, market strategist at City Index. Raymond added that Wednesday’s lacklustre market reaction was understandable, after traders pushed the FTSE 100 up by 1.5% on Tuesday amid optimism that Papandreou would survive. Greece must approve Papandreou’s austerity plan next week to qualify for an immediate €12bn (£10bn) lifeline, and then a second bailout worth over €100bn. There is doubt, though, over whether the measures can be imposed on an increasingly unhappy population . “Everything depends on Greece implementing the measures,” Lord Brittan, the former vice president of the European Commission, told the BBC’s Today Programme. “Legislating is one thing, implementing is another, and Greece’s history of implementation is not a happy one,” Brittan added. Jane Foley of Rabobank International agreed, saying there was “widespread scepticism” in the bond markets about the ability of the Greek political system to implement the reform. Crowds gathered outside the Greek parliament ahead of the vote of confidence, with some shouting “we give a vote of no confidence” at the lawmakers gathered inside. There were some clashes between protestors and riot police, who reportedly deployed tear gas at one point. European debt crisis Greece Europe Europe Bonds Graeme Wearden guardian.co.uk
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Swoop on José de Jesús Méndez Vargas is big blow to organised crime, says President Felipe Calderón Mexican authorities say they have dealt a debilitating blow to major organised crime in the west of the country after apprehending the leader of the cult-like, pseudo-Christian La Familia cartel. José de Jesús Méndez Vargas, known as El Chango, or The Monkey, was arrested in the central state of Aguascalientes without confrontation or casualties, according to federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire. President Felipe Calderón lauded the arrest on Twitter, calling it a “big blow” to organised crime. After the death of La Familia founder and leader Nazario Moreno González in December, Poire said Méndez Vargas was the last remaining head of a criminal group responsible for homicides, kidnappings, extortion and corruption. The Mexican attorney general’s office said Méndez Vargas was “responsible for the transfer and sale of cocaine, marijuana, crystal methamphetamine in various states of Mexico and the US”. He is also accused of having masterminded the kidnappings and killings of rival gang members. The government had offered a $2.5m reward for information leading to his capture. La Familia first appeared four years ago when it rolled five severed heads into a Michoacán nightclub, vowing to protect local citizens from rival cartels. La Familia was part of the Gulf Cartel but later became an independent drug-trafficking organisation, which ignited a rivalry between the two gangs. Moreno, the leader, set a code of conduct for its members that prohibited the use of hard drugs or dealing them within Mexican territory, even as they gruesomely decapitated foes and sold huge amounts of cocaine and methamphetamine. “They believe they are doing God’s work, and pass out Bibles and money to the poor,” according to a US drug enforcement administration profile. “La Familia Michoacána also gives money to school and local officials.” Moreno was killed in December during two days of shootouts between La Familia and federal police. After his death, La Familia split into warring factions, causing increased bloodshed in western Mexico. Poire told reporters that with Méndez Vargas’s arrest, 21 of the country’s 37 top drug traffickers have been apprehended or killed since 2009. More than 35,000 people have died in drug violence since, according to government figures. Local media say the number is closer to 40,000. Meanwhile, officials in the northern Mexican city of Durango say they have found 14 more bodies in a mass grave, adding to the 250 corpses discovered since April. Police have revealed no motives for the killings, but officials say the mass murders are the result of an internal power struggle within the Sinaloa drug cartel, Mexico’s most powerful gang. Mexico Drugs trade US foreign policy guardian.co.uk
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Jurors to consider verdict on accused killer Levi Bellfield after hearing four weeks of evidence at Old Bailey The Old Bailey jury trying Levi Bellfield for the abduction and murder of schoolgirl Milly Dowler is expected to retire on Wednesday. The panel of 11, which has heard four weeks of evidence, was told by judge Justice Wilkie to consider its verdicts coolly and dispassionately. Bellfield, 43, denies the murder and kidnap of Milly and the attempted kidnap of 11-year-old Rachel Cowles. In 2008, he was convicted of murdering two students and the attempted murder of a third. Milly, 13, disappeared on 21 March 2002 in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, while she walked home from school. Her remains were found six months later in a wood at Yateley Heath, Hampshire, some 25 miles away, but the cause of death could not be determined. Milly Dowler Crime guardian.co.uk
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More than any other Republican presidential prospect, Sarah Palin draws white-hot journalistic loathing. She’s too red-state, too gun-toting, too religious, and too unwilling to abort a disabled “fetus.” Even so, filmmaker Steve Bannon remains deeply optimistic his forthcoming Palin documentary “The Undefeated” will sway the media to see Palin in a different light. Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs banker turned filmmaker, told National Review’s Kathryn Lopez that once he and his producing partner delved into Palin’s life story, “we decided that not just the American people but even the mainstream media were both fair and decent — that when presented with something that represented a completely different point of view they would be at least open to considering it.” The movie is not an attempt at objectivity. It’s a campaign film, a longer version of the kind Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason produced for Bill Clinton. You know, “I believe…in a place called Hope.”
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Iranian president under increasing pressure from MPs after supporting foreign minister’s controversial appointment of deputy Ministers in Iran moved a step closer towards impeaching the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after a series of clashes with supporters of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Impeachment proceedings were launched against foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi for appointing a man close to Ahmadinejad’s chief-of-staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, as his deputy. MPs warned that impeachment proceedings against Ahmadinejad would begin soon. The power struggle between Ahmadinejad and the establishment emerged after the controversies surrounding Mashaei became public. Khamenei’s supporters, who include the overwhelming majority of the parliament, say Mashaei has too much influence over Ahmadinejad. They accuse him of attempting to undermine clerical power and increasing his own power base. Deputy foreign minister Mohammad Sharif Malekzadeh was appointed last week but resigned on Tuesday. However, despite the resignation Iranian MPs went ahead with the impeachment motion.The parliament also rejected Ahmadinejad’s nominee for the new post of minister of sport and youth. Ali Motahari, an influential MP, told news website Khabaronline that the motion to impeach Ahmadinejad would be delivered within 10 days. “In a meeting with the parliamentary clerics, we decided to launch the motion [to impeach the president] in 10 days and avoid any delays.” Iran Middle East Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Saeed Kamali Dehghan guardian.co.uk
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Kenneth Clarke’s prison plans dashed by PM’s call for tougher sentencing for violent and sexual offences and knife crime David Cameron has announced plans to impose a surprise tough “two strikes and you’re out” mandatory life sentence in a move that looks set to dash justice secretary Kenneth Clarke’s hopes of stabilising the record 85,000 prison population in England and Wales. Cameron announced hardline plans for serious violent and sex offenders to spend longer in jail and an automatic six-month jail term for “aggravated knife possession”. Prison reformers warned that the plans risked fuelling a fresh rise in what are already record jail numbers. Whitehall sources conceded that Cameron’s fresh “tough on crime” rhetoric was now likely to derail the justice secretary’s liberal “rehabilitation revolution”, as well as force Clarke to look elsewhere for £130m further savings in his department. The publication of Clarke’s legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders bill showed that the justice secretary had been forced by Downing Street to ditch more than 60% of his original proposals. These included the wholesale abandonment of his original plan for a maximum 50% discount for early guilty pleas – described by the prime minister as “too lenient” – which would have provided 3,400 of the estimated 6,450 prison places to be saved. Cameron said this proposal would have “sent the wrong message” if it had gone ahead, adding that restoring public confidence in the criminal justice system was the public’s only test. At a rare No 10 press conference, he fended off suggestions that his government was looking weak due to repeated policy U-turns. He argued that a willingness to listen and change policy was a sign of strength, an assertion backed by Downing Street’s own polling. Cameron went out of his way to praise Clarke’s stewardship of the Ministry of Justice and Clarke brushed aside questions about his future, saying: “I have been on probation for the last few decades, and I am just about getting the hang of it.” The justice secretary has also quietly dropped his original plan to restore the discretion of judges on sentencing by scrapping David Blunkett’s 2003 minimum mandatory sentences of 15 years, 30 years and “whole life” for the most serious murders. A Ministry of Justice (MoJ) impact assessment estimates the redrawn sentencing package will save just 2,650 prison places each year – or £80m – compared with the original 6,450 and £210m saving. MoJ officials said that proposals in the bill would have a “broadly neutral” impact on the prison population by 2014/15 as it is already projected to rise by a further 3,000 by then. But that fails to take account of the tougher punishments unveiled by Cameron, most of which are not contained in the new bill. The MoJ said that it had no estimate as yet for the tougher extra measures to be added to the bill this autumn but penal reformers said they were bound to boost prison numbers. They include the resurrection of Michael Howard’s 1996 “two strikes and you’re out” mandatory life sentence for the most serious repeat offenders, and a proposal to delay the earliest release date for 6,500 serious sexual and violent offenders from halfway until two-thirds of the way through their sentence. The government has also postponed its immediate plans to revise the release test for 6,000 prisoners on the indeterminate sentence for public protection (IPP). Instead an “urgent review” will now be undertaken to replace the current IPP regime with “a much tougher determinate sentencing framework with a greater number of life sentences”. This will report in the autumn and include the new mandatory life sentence for repeat serious offenders. The plan to introduce a mandatory six-month sentence for threatening someone with a knife is already in the legislation. The impact assessment says the move will need 100 extra prison places, at a cost of £5m a year. The prime minister failed to honour a deal that Clarke has struck with the Treasury that it would make up most of the difference if savings were not realised as result of a change of government policy. Instead the justice secretary will have to find the “missing” £130m from his own budget over the next four years. He denied that the probation service budget, which has been protected so far from 23% cuts, would be a particular target, but said it was not yet making the same level of savings as was being required of the police. Frances Crook, director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, described the new mandatory sentences on knives and repeat offenders as “worrying” saying they would compromise judicial discretion. “Given around 5,000 people are convicted of carrying knives each quarter, what constitutes using a knife to threaten will have to be very tightly defined to avoid prison numbers spiralling out of control,” she said. The shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, said the government’s policies on law and order were “in complete shambles”. But the former Tory home secretary Lord Howard said the government had taken a “perfectly sensible” approach. Prisons and probation UK criminal justice Sentencing David Cameron Kenneth Clarke Conservatives Alan Travis Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
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Less than 24 hours after two men were left with gunshot wounds following sectarian violence, fresh conflict breaks out Fresh skirmishes have erupted in east Belfast less than 24 hours after two men were left with gunshot wounds following sectarian violence that police believe was orchestrated by loyalist paramilitaries. Police brought in water cannon and used baton rounds after missiles hit their lines and bricks and bottles were thrown between nationalists and unionists. Several hundred people gathered near interfaces close to the Newtownards Road, and masked youths pelted each other with stones and fireworks. Police say 11 shots were fired during the riot on Monday, six by nationalists and five by loyalists. Two shots fired at police vehicles were being treated as attempted murder. Petrol and smoke bombs, fireworks, bricks and stones were thrown by an estimated 500 men in masks and crash helmets as violence broke out at about 9pm on Monday in the Lower Newtownards Road and Short Strand area of the city, a mainly nationalist area. For four hours, missiles were hurled at homes on both sides of the sectarian divide along the main routes into Belfast’s city centre. The shooting happened just before 1am. Two Protestant men, both shot in a leg, were taken to hospital. One officer suffered a serious eye injury when rioters targeted police with lasers . The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) confirmed that officers had fired a number of stun grenade rounds and said the service was investigating a report of an attempted hijacking of a bus. Police said the violence had been planned by members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Assistant Chief Constable Alistair Finlay said: “There certainly were people masked up and there were certainly people wearing surgical gloves … There was some planning around this event, it just didn’t spirit itself out of the ether.” One nationalist resident who asked not to be named said he had seen a gang gathering at about 3pm. “I saw all these men, not young lads, massing outside a local loyalist drinking den, all wearing crash helmets. I thought they were going on an outing, just messing around. But it was the same gang who came down later on … It’s the worst I’ve seen in years and years.” Belfast’s mayor, Niall Ó Donnghaile, a councillor based in the Short Strand area, said a number of Catholic residents had been injured, including one man who was knocked unconscious when he was hit with a brick. “There is no doubt that this was unprovoked and was a carefully orchestrated and planned attack on the area,” he said. “Homes have been attacked with petrol bombs and paint bombs, bricks, golf balls. I saw what happened.” A member of Northern Ireland’s legislative assembly, Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey, said: “The UVF launched an attack on the Catholic community in this area. I
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The morning after Judge Belvin Perry, Jr. abruptly halted the Casey Anthony murder trial, the defense continued challenging forensic evidence in an effort to cast doubt on the prosecution’s theory of how Caylee Anthony died. But like many days in this trial, the testimony inside is technical and complex, while the speculation in the media
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Click here to view this media Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Monday finally got to tell a television audience why he had been banned from MSNBC for the past year. “Well, it seems your old boss had a little problem with me,” Moulitsas told Keith Olbermann on Current’s premiere episode of Countdown . “I was under the impression that you were in charge of your own guests, that you could decide who could speak on your show… Turns out Joe Scarborough has veto power over who can speak on everybody else’s shows.” “I got in a little Twitter war with him,” he explained. “Apparently I made him cry. He went crying to Phil Griffin, your old boss.” The “Twitter war” had begun after Scarborough criticized the media for not covering a story about the White House allegedly offering a job to Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA). “Like story of a certain dead intern,” Moulitsas tweeted , referring to the death of Lori Klausutis, a staffer working for Scarborough when he was a congressman in 2001. “So, I found it kind of bizarre that the lowest rated morning show host in all of cable news at the only show on cable news that could crack Fox News’ stranglehold on the top ten,” Moulitsas told Olbermann Monday. “Yours was the most successful show, not just on MSNBC but one of the most successful shows on cable. Yet, Joe Scarborough, such a loser host, was dictating who you could talk to.” “Well, that’s kind of sad story you just told us there, Markos,” Olbermann admitted.
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