• Standard & Poor’s gives country a B rating • Agency blames missed deficit target • Greek finance ministry says move based on ‘rumour’ Standard & Poor’s has again infuriated Greece by cutting the credit rating of the debt-laden country – from BB- to B – and warning that it could be slashed even further. The agency issued the downgrade amid speculation that the €110bn (£97bn) International Monetary Fund and European Union bailout is being renegotiated , only a year after being agreed, and its expectation that investors face losses on their bond holdings. Greece was quick to issue a statement saying that the downgrade “comes at a time when there have been no new negative developments or decisions since the last rating action by the agency just over a month ago and therefore is not justified”. In March, S&P had cut the rating to BB- and warned the country faced another downgrade if the 2010 budget or 2011 fiscal performance fell below expectations. “In fact, Greece missed its 2010 fiscal target (a budget deficit of 10.5% of GDP versus a 9.6% target) and achieving the 2011 target is uncertain,” S&P said. “We believe that many of Greece’s eurozone official creditors have concluded that the ensuing higher projected borrowing requirements have reduced the likelihood that the Greek government will be able to return to commercial markets for medium- and long-term issuance later this year or early next year as originally planned. Accordingly, they may see a restructuring of official and commercial debt as the best way forward,” the agency said. It indicated that half of Greece’s debts could eventually be written off in order “to restore Greece’s debt burden to a sustainable level”. The rating could be downgraded again, the agency warned, but said that it could be maintained at its current level “if Greece’s eurozone partners exempt commercial creditors from comparability of treatment while extending maturities on their official debt”. When the agency cut Greece’s rating to BB- in March, prime minister George Papandreou said the country was being downgraded not because of its policies but because of the EU’s handling of the crisis. He later said that ratings agencies were “seeking to shape our destiny and determine the future of our children”. After the latest downgrade, Greece’s ministry of finance said: “Credit rating decisions should be based on objective data, policymakers’ announcements and realistic assessments of the conditions facing an economy. Not on market rumours and press reports. When such decisions are based simply on rumours, their validity is seriously cast in doubt.” Secret talks were held Luxembourg on Friday between Athens and some of the key EU players and led to the conclusion that Greece will not be able to meet the terms of last year’s rescue by returning to the financial markets to issue more bonds. Its current rate of borrowing is regarded as prohibitively high, at 15.9%. Greece has never had a top-notch AAA rating but has been downgraded or warned of a downgrade eight times since January 2009, when it had an A rating. It was the first eurozone country to have its debt rating cut to junk a year ago. European debt crisis Ratings agencies Greece Europe Financial crisis Jill Treanor guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Detective Inspector Eddie Hall falsely claimed Tomlinson fell down twice before encountering PC Simon Harwood A senior Metropolitan police officer has been found guilty of “reckless” conduct after misleading two pathologists over the possible cause of Ian Tomlinson’s death. Detective Inspector Eddie Hall, the most senior Met officer involved in the Tomlinson inquiry, was investigated after it emerged he told two forensic experts Tomlinson had fallen to the ground in front of a police van before the newspaper seller came into contact with PC Simon Harwood. In his defence, Hall said an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigator had told him Tomlinson had fallen in front of a van. The IPCC investigator, Chris Mahaffey, denied this. Hall’s claim was formally relayed to two pathologists charged with finding a cause of 47-year-old Tomlinson’s death at the G20 protests in London. Video footage showed Tomlinson being struck with a baton and violently pushed from behind on 1 April 2009 on Royal Exchange Buildings. An inquest jury found last week that Tomlinson was “unlawfully killed” by the police officer, and died from internal bleeding as a result of injuries sustained by the push. Jurors heard evidence from four pathologists, including Dr Ken Shorrock, one of the pathologists formally instructed by Hall on behalf of the Met at St Pancras mortuary on 22 April 2009. The police officer told Shorrock that Tomlinson had been seen to fall to the ground on Lombard Street, minutes before the newspaper seller came across Harwood. The same information was supplied to Dr Ben Swift, the pathologist instructed by Harwood, who was also present during the examination. Tomlinson did walk on to Lombard Street as he tried to find a route home through the G20 protests and was forcefully escorted out of the road by police officers. But there was no evidence that even suggested he fell to the ground. Releasing the findings of its inquiry, the IPCC confirmed that “misinformation was supplied by the police to the pathologists”. It said there was never any evidence to suggest Tomlinson fell to the ground in front of a van on Lombard Street. Investigators found that while Hall did not “intentionally mislead” the pathologist, his erroneous briefing jeopardised the investigation, inquest and possible prosecution. “He did so based on what he believed to be the case at the time but he should have ensured he relayed factual information rather than his interpretation of the facts,” the report said. The inquest jury was told to ignore part of Shorrock’s report in which he said he could not rule out that the fall in Lombard Street had resulted in the fatal internal bleeding. The Met said in a statement: “The report concerning information supplied to the pathologists by an MPS [Metropolitan police service] officer found that although incorrect information was given, this was an honestly held belief and there was no evidence of intent to mislead and no lasting damage to the investigation.” Tomlinson’s family responded by the report by releasing extracts from a letter the IPCC sent to a top-ranking Met officer in March this year. In the letter, the IPCC said there was a “total lack of evidence” for the fall reported by Hall. “There is no evidence of any kind to suggest that Ian Tomlinson fell in front of a van,” the letter said. “No media footage portrays a fall; it was not said in any Gold Group [a forum designed to 'add value to the response to an internal or external critical incident'] meeting; no investigator workbook documents that there was a fall, there is no email traffic revealing such a view and there is no witness evidence that he fell in front of a van.” In a separate development, the Guardian revealed on Monday that senior police were told within 48 hours of Tomlinson’s death that police witnesses had seen him being pushed to the ground by Harwood. The three constables who witnessed the assault did not recognise Harwood, but the significance of their information was instantly realised and passed on to City of London police investigators. The IPCC is now investigating why City of London failed to pass the information on to its own officials, the coroner, the pathologist, the family or the media. Ian Tomlinson Metropolitan police Police Protest G20 Paul Lewis guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson told reporters after his team was swept out of the playoffs by the Dallas Mavericks that he hopes he has coached his final game. Already a Hall of Famer, Jackson would retire with a record 11 NBA titles. (May 9)
Continue reading …
At the Kinetic Sculpture Race in Baltimore, humans provide the power for creations made out of anything. But the AP’s Lee Powell found the spectacle is as much about personality as physics. (May 9)
Continue reading …
Click here to view this media Judith Miller thinks that whole debate over torture is so yesterday. I wonder what other crimes Judith Miller thinks should be excused because someone promised not to do them again? Given her history of playing stenographer for the Bush administration with their push to invade Iraq, I would imagine that list is quite long. MILLER: Yes, this is a replay of the old arguments we were having earlier on, before the election of Obama about what we did, why we did it. I think a couple of commentators pointed out that the techniques that were used under Bush, President Bush were not the techniques that were in place by the time he left office. And so you do have, we’ve had an evolution of thought about how you handle terrorism, what’s appropriate, what’s not. It was kind of a shame to see this whole thing come up again because pretty much the issue’s been solved. Sorry Judy, but it’s not been solved when no one’s been held accountable for it. And the people making an issue of it today are the endless supplies of Bushies running to the airways to try to justify their tactics that failed to catch bin Laden. Miller also goes on to say that talking about whether torture worked or not is “not the only standard by which we judge something like this.” Well that’s right Judy, but the standard should be whether we’re following the law or not. Alan Colmes spoke up and asked a good question which is why are we bragging about torturing anybody in the first place? What’s pitiful is after the last ten years of continually being propagandized by our media, the politicians and the movie and television industry, so much of the public does think it’s perfectly acceptable to torture someone and that it actually yields reliable information. Jim Pinkerton throws out the treatment of Bradley Manning as proof that the Obama administration is continuing Bush’s practices and I’m with Alan Colmes, torture is not acceptable no matter who’s running the country and I’m not about to defend the way Manning has been treated in custody just as Colmes wasn’t. I’m also not going to play this all sides are equal game either when you look at the long list of atrocities that were committed under the Bush administration and hold up Manning’s case as somehow equal to that as Pinkerton did here. It’s just not. And there’s nothing Pinkerton could say that would make me believe he’s actually got one iota of concern for Bradley Manning. He deserves a speedy trial and we need to find out the truth about how he’s been treated in custody. If Pinkerton is concerned for his well being, he sure as hell has not been advocating for it on Fox. What’s disgusting is that the fact that no one was held accountable for what happened during the Bush years, so now we’ve got these guys back on television instead of on trial and our media still defending their actions and calling waterboarding “enhanced interrogation” instead of what it is, torture.
Continue reading …Naomi Klein in 2000, talking about attempts to organize McDonald’s workers. I know a lot of media people read our site, so I wonder why they seem so oblivious to the ongoing economic pain suffered by so many through this recession. Do they know how clueless they sound? The middle class is being systematically hollowed out of our country, pushing people to the margins and leaving nothing but the economic extremes. From Andy Kroll at TomDispatch: Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald’s launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that’s more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald’s franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald’s was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices. It shouldn’t be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald’s hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million more are too discouraged even to look for a job. At this point, it apparently made no difference to them that the fast-food industry pays some of the lowest wages around: on average, $8.89 an hour, or barely half the $15.95 hourly average across all American industries. On an annual basis, the average fast-food worker takes home $20,800, less than half the national average of $43,400. McDonald’s appears to pay even worse, at least with its newest hires. In the press release for its national hiring day, the multi-billion-dollar company said it would spend $518 million on the newest round of hires, or $8,354 a head. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “McJob” as “a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement.” Of course, if you read only the headlines, you might think that the jobs picture was improving. The economy added 1.3 million private-sector jobs between February 2010 and January 2011, and the headline unemployment rate edged downward , from 9.8% to 8.8%, between November of last year and March. It inched upward in April, to 9%, but tempering that increase was the news that the economy added 244,000 jobs last month ( not including those 62,000 McJobs ), beating economists’ expectations. Under this somewhat sunnier news, however, runs a far darker undercurrent. Yes, jobs are being created, but what kinds of jobs paying what kinds of wages? Can those jobs sustain a modest lifestyle and pay the bills? Or are we living through a McJobs recovery? The evidence points to the latter. According to a recent analysis by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the biggest growth in private-sector job creation in the past year occurred in positions in the low-wage retail, administrative, and food service sectors of the economy. While 23% of the jobs lost in the Great Recession that followed the economic meltdown of 2008 were “low-wage” (those paying $9-$13 an hour), 49% of new jobs added in the sluggish “recovery” are in those same low-wage industries. On the other end of the spectrum, 40% of the jobs lost paid high wages ($19-$31 an hour), while a mere 14% of new jobs pay similarly high wages.As a point of comparison, that’s much worse than in the recession of 2001 after the high-tech bubble burst. Then, higher wage jobs made up almost a third of all new jobs in the first year after the crisis . The hardest hit industries in terms of employment now are finance, manufacturing, and especially construction, which was decimated when the housing bubble burst in 2007 and has yet to recover. Meanwhile, NELP found that hiring for temporary administrative and waste-management jobs, health-care jobs, and of course those fast-food restaurants has surged. Indeed in 2010, one in four jobs added by private employers was a temporary job, which usually provides workers with few benefits and even less job security. It’s not surprising that employers would first rely on temporary hires as they regained their footing after a colossal financial crisis. But this time around, companies have taken on temp workers in far greater numbers than after previous downturns . Where 26% of hires in 2010 were temporary, the figure was 11% after the early-1990s recession and only 7% after the downturn of 2001.As many labor economists have begun to point out, we’re witnessing an increasing polarization of the U.S. economy over the past three decades. More and more, we’re seeing labor growth largely at opposite ends of the skills-and-wages spectrum — among, that is, the best and the worst kinds of jobs.
Continue reading …Rita Chretien, Missing Canadian Woman, Found Alive In Nevada After 49 Days In Wilderness, Search For Husband Resumes
May 9, 2011 No Comment
RENO, Nev. — Search teams continued to scour canyons and mountainsides Sunday for the missing husband of a rescued Canadian woman who survived for seven weeks on just snacks and water after they became stranded in remote northeastern Nevada. Rita Chretien, 56, was discovered on Friday in the couple’s van which was mired in mud on a national forest logging road in Elko County, authorities said. The woman, who lost considerable weight but was hospitalized in fair condition, told investigators the last she saw 59-year-old Albert Chretien on March 22, when he set off for help on foot with a GPS unit just a few days after they got stuck, Elko County Sheriff Jim Pitts said. More than a dozen deputies from Nevada and Idaho’s Owyhee County returned for a second day of searching, sheriff’s Detective James Carpenter said. The teams were scouring rugged terrain along the northern border of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. Bad weather prevented them from using aircraft Saturday and would probably prevent it again Sunday, Carpenter said. Because rain and high winds are forecast for next couple of days, it could be midweek before aircraft may help with the effort. Carpenter told The Associated Press on Sunday the search could be take time because of the various directions that Chretien may have taken once he set out for help. Though weather in recent weeks has been harsh and there’s been no sign of the man, Carpenter said crews weren’t ready to turn the rescue mission into a recovery operation. But searchers were hampered in their efforts by the location, where cell phone service is nonexistent and terrain is rough. “That area is pretty remote,” said Tom Montoya, U.S. Forest Service district ranger for the area. He described it as “miles from anything. It’s kind of canyon lands, a lot of gorges out there” that would make it easy to get lost. Rita Chretien was taken to St. Lukes Magic Valley Medical Center in Twin Falls, Idaho, which listed her condition as fair. Officer Dan Moskaluk, spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia, said she reportedly was up and walking around. Moskaluk told the AP that her family reported she lost 20-30 pounds, living off “water and small amounts of trail mix.” The Chretiens disappeared in late March during a trip to Las Vegas and were last seen in Baker City, Ore. “This is a miracle,” Raymond Chretien, the couple’s son, told The (Portland) Oregonian in a telephone interview. Detectives in Idaho intended to meet with Rita Chretien and her doctors again over the weekend, Carpenter said. During brief questioning Friday, she told investigators her husband was walking to State Highway 225 in an attempt to find help. That highway is more than 10 miles away from the area where hunters found the van on Friday. It forced search crews to consider the possibility Albert Chretien was confused and did not walk in that direction. “I’m trying to figure out how the van ended up where it did,” Montoya told AP. “It doesn’t make sense.” The van was found along the border of the national forest and Bureau of Land Management land about 5 miles south of the state line, where Idaho’s high desert collides with Nevada’s snow-capped Independence Mountains. Rivers and streams with headwaters mostly in the wilderness area drain off 10,000-foot peaks to the north on their way to the Snake River. “I don’t know how much snow is up there, but it’s really wet and heavy,” Carpenter said. Because of the snow and mud, the only way currently to access the site is from Idaho, he added. “We can’t get in from the Elko side.” The couple left their Penticton, British Columbia, home on March 19, and reached Baker City in eastern Oregon that afternoon, where they were captured on a store’s surveillance camera. Raymond Chretien told The Oregonian they made it to Nevada later that day, sightseeing on back roads when their van got stuck in mud. Three days later, Albert Chretien set out on foot. Weather over the past month in that area has included snow, rain and chilly temperatures and family members said the couple weren’t avid campers. The Chretiens were reported missing when they didn’t return home March 30. The RCMP, Baker City police and other agencies mounted a search in April but failed to turn up any sign. Moskaluk described it as an extensive search covering 3,000 square miles “from March 31 onward.” He said the family is well regarded in Penticton and operates a heavy equipment excavation business. ______ Associated Press reporter Josh Loftin contributed to this story from Salt Lake City.
Continue reading …
LOLITA C. BALDOR and KIMBERLY DOZIER, Associated Press WASHINGTON — Newly released videos show Osama bin Laden watching himself on television and rehearsing for terrorist videos, revealing that even from the walled confines of his Pakistani hideout, he remained a media maestro who was eager to craft his own image for the cameras. The videos, released by U.S. intelligence officials Saturday, were offered as further proof that Navy SEALs killed the world’s most wanted terrorist this week. But they also served to show bin Laden as vain, someone obsessed with his portrayal by the world’s media. One of the movies shows bin Laden, his unkempt beard streaked in gray, sitting on the floor, wrapped in a brown blanket and holding a remote control. He flipped back and forth between what appears to be live news coverage of himself. The old, small television was perched on top of a desk with a large tangle of electrical wires running to a nearby control box. In another, he has apparently dyed and neatly trimmed his beard for the filming of a propaganda video. The video, which the U.S. released without sound, was titled “”Message to the American People” and was believed to be filed sometime last fall, a senior intelligence official said during a briefing for reporters, on condition that his name not be used. The videos were seized from bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Officials said the clips shown to reporters were just part of the largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever collected. The evidence seized during the raid also includes phone numbers and documents that officials hope will help break the back of the organization behind the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Intelligence officials have known that bin Laden and al-Qaida monitored the news. But for years, when it was assumed that he was living in Pakistan’s rugged, mountainous tribal region, some believed he might not be able to get real-time news. After the CIA discovered bin Laden’s suburban compound, they realized that a satellite dish provided a television feed to bin Laden’s compound. The video also reveals that bin Laden had a computer in his home, though officials say there were no Internet or phone lines running from the house. Bin Laden and four others were killed in a daring pre-dawn raid Monday after U.S. helicopters lowered a team of SEALs behind the compound’s high walls. The terrorist leader’s death leaves al-Qaida with an uncertain future and represents America’s most successful counterterrorism mission.
Continue reading …An apparently deranged passenger tried to open a door mid-flight on a Continental plane en route from Houston to Chicago. An air marshal tacked the flyer when a flight attendant screamed, and the plane was immediately diverted to St. Louis. There were no other details about the passenger, but officials…
Continue reading …Conde Nast brings The New Yorker to iPad, seven other magazines by month’s end
May 9, 2011 No Comment
Yet another print powerhouse is bringing its wares to the iPad , all lining up neatly ahead of Apple’s upcoming WWDC. First it was Time , then it was Hearst , and now Cond
Continue reading …