Barack Obama and John Boehner in budget talks to secure last-minute deal amid threat of widespread disruption to services America is preparing for a federal government shutdown from Saturday that could see 800,000 staff suspended and hundreds of agencies, from the national parks to the tax office, disrupted or closed. The fate of the federal government rests on a meeting at the White House between Barack Obama and the Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, aimed at securing a last-minute deal. The initial impact of a shutdown would be felt by Americans on spring breaks and international tourists, who would find attractions closed on Saturday, such as Washington’s Smithsonian museums, the Statue of Liberty and the former Alcatraz prison, as well as scores of national parks. Essential services such as air traffic control, border authorities and security services would be maintained as would postal services, but many others would either cease or be severely reduced. Congress, the Pentagon and many other government agencies would also be affected. In anticipation of widespread disruption Congress has divided staff into two camps: “essential” workers, who would be expected to turn up for work as normal on Monday, and “non-essential” staff, who would be told to stay at home. To be deemed non-essential would be a blow to the morale of many in status-conscious Washington. In a further indignity, staff face having their BlackBerries and laptops shut down. There are more than a million federally owned BlackBerries. Jeffrey Zients, deputy director of the White House’s office of management and budget, said the impact of the shutdown would be uneven. “National parks, national forests and the Smithsonian Institution would all be closed. The National Institutes of Health Clinical Centre will not take new patients, and no new clinical trials will start,” he said. Troops stationed overseas, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, would not receive their wages, but welfare recipients would continue to be paid. American holidaymakers who have left it late to apply for passports could be in trouble as would foreigners hoping for visas for the US. There is confusion over whether non-essential staff would be paid after the shutdown for the days they are absent. The government said they would not be, though after previous shutdowns staff were able to recover lost pay. Obama, after a late-night meeting at the White House with Boehner and the Senate leader, Harry Reid, sounded optimistic that a deal could be reached. He said staff from both sides would work through the night to bridge the remaining differences. “I am not prepared to express wild optimism,” the president said. “But I think we are further along today than we were yesterday.” He is expecting an early answer from the Republicans to prevent the steps necessary to impose a shutdown being put into action. The Democrats said agreement had been reached on about 70% of the issues. A senior Democrat in the House, Steny Hoyer, told NBC “there’s no deal yet, unfortunately”. He said he was embarrassed about the country being on the brink of a shutdown, but “you can’t negotiate on the basis that one side gives 100% and the other gives zero”. The Republicans want a cut in the federal deficit of $40bn (£24bn). The Democrats made a compromise offer of $34.5bn on Wednesday. The new sticking points are mainly the areas where the Republicans want cuts – abortion programmes and environmental protection – on which the Democrats refuse to give way. Obama has postponed a trip to Indiana, where he planned to make a speech, because of the budget crisis. He said he wanted to be on hand for any further negotiations. US politics Barack Obama John Boehner Republicans Democrats US economy United States Economics Ewen MacAskill guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …A battle over Planned Parenthood funding has emerged as one of the major sticking points in stalled federal budget talks that could shut down the government, reports the Huffington Post . Specifically, Republicans are refusing to approve money to subsidize Pap smears, which help detect cervical cancer, according to sources. Ironically,…
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Ali Mohsen was inside military headquarters that Saleh regime claimed was a rebel base, WikiLeaks cable reveals The Yemeni government apparently targeted a leading army general and rival of President Ali Abdullah Saleh by telling Saudi military commanders that his headquarters was a rebel base to be bombed. The extraordinary plot – foiled when suspicious Saudi pilots aborted the air strike – has emerged in one of the classified US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks. Dated February 2010, the cable illustrates the extent to which relations between Saleh and Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar had deteriorated more than a year before the general declared his support for anti-regime protesters. The US cable recounts a meeting between James B Smith, the American ambassador in Riyadh, and Prince Khaled bin Sultan, the junior Saudi defence minister. The talks were arranged for Smith to pass on US concerns about Saudi air strikes on the Houthis, a Shia insurgent group in the north of Yemen. Khaled told the ambassador that targets were selected by a joint committee of senior Saudi and Yemeni officers. Smith’s note continues: “Prince Khaled also reported that the Saudis had problems with some of the targeting recommendations received from the Yemeni side . For instance, there was one occasion when Saudi pilots aborted a strike, when they sensed something was wrong about the information they received from the Yemenis. It turned out that the site recommended to be hit was the headquarters of General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, the Yemeni northern area military commander, who is regarded as a political opponent to President Saleh. This incident prompted the Saudis to be more cautious about targeting recommendations from the Yemeni government.” Ali Mohsen was inside the headquarters at the time of the aborted attack, one of his senior aides told the Washington Post. “This was not the first attempt by the president and regime to kill him,” the aide said. Ali Mohsen, a long-time confidant of the president as well as the head of the Yemeni army in the country’s north-west, was one of 11 military commanders to publicly defect last month , saying he would back “the peaceful revolution” . For many years Ali Mohsen was Saleh’s key military strongman, playing a major role in the 1994 civil war. Generally seen as the country’s second most powerful man, he is usually referred to as the cousin of Saleh’s two half-brothers, although some reports claim he is himself a half-brother to Saleh. According to the cable Smith also asked Prince Khaled about evidence that some of the air strikes were hitting civilian targets, particularly a building the US believed to be a medical clinic. The Saudi minister agreed there were problems – complaining in passing that if the US sold his country the Predator drone aircraft then targeting would be more accurate – but said the air campaign was deliberately hitting the Houthis hard to “bring them to their knees”. He added: “However, we tried very hard not to hit civilian targets,” an assurance accepted by Smith. Saudi Arabia began military operations against the Houthis in 2009 following a cross-border Houthi raid that killed two Saudi guards. Yemen The US embassy cables Middle East Arab and Middle East unrest US foreign policy WikiLeaks Peter Walker guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …American and European space agencies trying to reconcile their Mars ambitions with their budgets are stepping up cooperation. NASA and ESA had planned to send two rovers to Mars for a tandem mission in 2018, but they’re now considering combining functions and sending a single rover. America’s Max-C rover is…
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Ollanta Humala, a nationalist linked to Hugo Chávez, and Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a disgraced ex-leader, are frontrunners He is “El Comandante”, the former army officer with a whiff of Hugo Chávez about him, a champion of the disenfranchised who wants to do more for Peru’s poor. She is the daughter of the disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori, a child of privilege who knows all about power and wants to use it to crack down on violent crime. Ollanta Humala, the 48-year-old nationalist and former lieutenant colonel in the army, will take on Keiko Fujimori, a rightwing congresswoman and former first lady (her father elevated her when he divorced her mother) in Peru’s first round of presidential elections on Sunday. A former president and a one-time prime minister are also among the candidates. Humala is the most compelling, if opinion polls are anything to go by. In recent weeks he has leapt into first place, sending shudders through financial markets and worrying Peru’s conservative power brokers. Polls predict that he will win but probably not by a big enough margin to avoid a runoff vote in June. In 2006, Humala, who was then closely linked with Chávez, Venezuela’s radical leftist president, narrowly lost a second-round runoff. This time, Humala has distanced himself from the Venezuelan leader while Brazilian news reports indicate he may be taking advice from the camp of the country’s popular former leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Recast as centre-left rather than radical left, he has stressed he respects press freedom and would adhere to the market economy. But he has said he would renegotiate mining and energy contracts and rewrite Peru’s constitution. Even so, he has taken to wearing suits and has swapped his red T-shirt for a white one. His rise, while not meteoric, shows that a large portion of Peruvians feel disenfranchised and shut out of the country’s China-like growth. Driven by high commodity prices for its mineral resources, but also agricultural exports and manufacturing, Peru’s economy has grown an average of 7% a year for the past five years, one of the world’s fastest growth rates. “Peru’s progress has been admirable,” says Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue. “But it hasn’t been accompanied by a fairer distribution of resources and honesty in government.” A third of Peruvians still live in poverty, a fifth of children are malnourished and one in five lack access to running water. Rife corruption and weak institutions are partly to blame, while the current president, Alan García, has focused on infrastructure rather than social spending. On the campaign trail in the vast northern shantytowns on the fringe of Lima, Humala found fertile ground for his electoral promises. “This economic growth isn’t reaching the poorest families. The more growth there is the more conflict it generates. We have to change this,” he told the Guardian. Humala competes directly with Keiko Fujimori for the poor vote. If she were elected she would be Peru’s first female president and its youngest. At 35, Fujimori has been in the public eye for most of her life. In 1994, she accepted her father’s offer to become first lady aged only 19. She was elected as a congresswoman on a wave of public support and her Fuerza 2011 party enjoys the solid backing of one in five voters. Many credit her father with defeating the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas and restoring the economy and he remains highly popular for his public works in rural Peru and poor urban areas. Capitalising on his law and order legacy, she has promised to crack down on violent crime, build more jails and introduce the death penalty for certain offences. But she is a polarising figure who has failed to dispel allegations that her private university education in the United States was paid for out of public coffers. She has not ruled out pardoning her father if elected. Many suspect Fujimori, 72, is directing her campaign from his cell, where he is serving a 25-year sentence for authorising death squad killings and corruption. “If she becomes elected as president … in no time Fujimori would be freed and he would play a major if not determinant role in that government,” says Gustavo Gorriti, an investigative journalist who was briefly kidnapped during Fujimori’s auto-golpe , or self-coup, in which he dissolved Congress and assumed special powers on 5 April 1992. He added that Fujimori’s ideal electoral scenario would be facing Humala in a runoff so she could “play with the fears of having a second Venezuela or Bolivia here in Peru”. Both candidates have a strong negative vote of around 50%, according to polls. The other candidates vying for a spot in the second round are Alejandro Toledo, Peru’s president from 2001 to 2006, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former investment banker who served as his finance minister and prime minister. Peru guardian.co.uk
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UN says killings it is investigating in the west of Ivory Coast appear to have been at least partly ethnically motivated UN investigators have found more than 100 bodies in Ivory Coast in the last 24 hours, victims of what seem to have been ethnically motivated massacres. Some appear to have been burned alive and others were thrown into a well, said a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The killings occurred in three locations in western Ivory Coast, and may have been carried out by Liberian mercenaries, according to the UN. The discovery came as Alassane Ouattara, the internationally recognised president of Ivory Coast, said he would not try to capture Laurent Gbagbo, who has refused to leave power and is hiding in a bunker under his personal residence. In his first televised address since the siege in Abidjan began this week, Ouattara said he would focus on returning the country to normal to ease the plight of civilians. The UN team’s discovery underlines the need for an urgent resolution to the crisis, which was brought about by Gbagbo’s rejection of the official election results last November. About 40 bodies were found in Blolequin, west of Duékoué, where another 229 corpses were discovered last week. A further 15 bodies have been discovered in Duékoué, and another 60 were found in the nearby town of Guiglo. Some of the victims were from other countries in west Africa. Forces loyal to Ouattara were partly blamed for the massacre in Duékoué discovered last week. It is not yet clear who carried out the massacres uncovered on Thursday. “All the incidents appear to have been at least partly ethnically motivated,” said Rupert Colville, the UNHCHR spokesman, in Geneva. “I think one has to be a little bit cautious of assigning responsibilities.” He said ethnic tensions were rising as the conflict continued. Ivory Coast has a Muslim north and Christian south, and more 60 different ethnic groups. Under Gbagbo’s decade-long rule, particularly in the early days, he tolerated and encouraged an increase in xenophobia, mainly aimed at Ivorians whose parents came from neighbouring countries, as well as the French. Muslims from the north – Ouattara’s main constituency – were also discriminated against, causing much resentment, and a brief civil war. Following the rapid advance of Ouattara’s forces through the country last week, Gbagbo has been confined to his bunker with his influential wife, Simone . UN and French peacekeeping forces have attacked his military depots to reduce his firepower. But he refuses to surrender, insisting he won the election and blaming France for his predicament. Many of Gbagbo’s top generals and troops have deserted him, but about 200 soldiers and militiamen equipped with heavy weapons are guarding his home in the upmarket Cocody suburb, according to the French military. They repelled an assault by Ouattara’s fighters on Wednesday. In his television speech Ouattara said his forces were going to set up a security perimeter around Gbagbo’s compound. They would then wait for him to run out of water and food, while at the same time securing the streets of Abidjan, where most people have stayed inside their homes this week due to the heavy fighting. Ouattara said he would soon end the ban on cocoa exports, which he announced in January. He also asked the EU to lift sanctions on Ivory Coast’s main ports, designed to pressurise Gbagbo into stepping down. In addition, Ouattara requested the Central Bank of West African States to reopen its branches in the country to allow salaries to be paid. He also pledged to hold a public inquiry into any human rights abuses committed during the conflict. Ivory Coast United Nations Alassane Ouattara Laurent Gbagbo Xan Rice guardian.co.uk
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Man arrested after two people wounded in shooting on board HMS Astute in Southampton A man has been arrested today after a shooting on board a nuclear submarine, police said. Two people are believed to have been injured in the incident on HMS Astute, which is docked in Southampton. Hampshire police said the incident was not terrorist-related and there was no risk to the public. Several police vehicles were sent to the Eastern Docks and officers could be seen on the gangway of the submarine. A police spokesman said: “Hampshire police were called by their Ministry of Defence colleagues at 12.12pm today and are currently liaising with them to establish the exact circumstances of the incident. “It is believed two people have sustained injuries as a result of gun shots being discharged on the vessel. People should be reassured there is no risk to public safety. “Hampshire constabulary and the MoD are keen to stress this incident is not terrorist-related. More information will be circulated as it becomes available.” Television news pictures showed police vehicles, fire engines and a helicopter, believed to be the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance, on the dockside by the submarine. The MoD referred all calls to Hampshire police. HMS Astute was last in the headlines when it ran aground on a shingle bank between the Scottish mainland and the Isle of Skye and remained stuck for several hours. The incident in October last year cost Andy Coles his command of the submarine . HMS Astute was named and launched by the Duchess of Cornwall in June 2007 before becoming part of the Royal Navy in August last year at a commissioning ceremony at Faslane naval base on the Clyde. The submarine weighs 7,800 tonnes, equivalent to nearly 1,000 double-decker buses, and is almost 100 metres (328ft) long. Its Spearfish torpedoes and Tomahawk cruise missiles are capable of delivering pinpoint strikes from 1,240 miles (2,000km) with conventional weapons. The submarine’s nuclear reactor means it does not need refuelling and it makes its own air and water, enabling it to circumnavigate the globe without needing to surface. Built by defence giant BAE Systems at Barrow in Furness, Cumbria, it was the first in a fleet of six which will replace the Royal Navy’s Trafalgar class submarines. Crime Military guardian.co.uk
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• Portugal expected to need up to €85bn in aid • Ministers talk down prospect of Spanish rescue package • Spain says bailout ‘completely out of the question’ • Portuguese to vote in new government on 5 June Eurozone finance ministers have told Portugal that it would have to implement new economic reforms that go beyond those proposed by its outgoing government if it hoped to secure aid from the EU and IMF. Portugal bowed to intense pressure from financial markets and its European partners this week and became the third eurozone country after Greece and Ireland to request financial help from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund . Finance ministers from the 17-nation eurozone met in Budapest on Friday to discuss the sovereign debt crisis that has haunted the single currency area for over a year, with Portugal the main focus of their talks. “The package must be really strict because otherwise it does not make any sense to guarantee anybody’s loan,” Finland’s finance minister Jyrki Katainen told reporters. “The package must be harder and more comprehensive than the one which parliament voted against.” French economy minister Christine Lagarde said she expected Portugal to propose specific steps that would restore confidence in an economy that is among the least competitive in the eurozone. Portuguese prime minister José Sócrates resigned late last month after parliament rejected a new round of austerity measures meant to help the country meet its deficit reduction targets for 2011. He is continuing to serve in a caretaker capacity until new elections are held on 5 June. The main opposition party has backed the request for aid, but negotiations on an economic adjustment programme – a precondition for assistance – are likely to be tough as cross-party consensus will be needed. “We need a commitment of the country, not only a commitment of the government,” Portuguese finance minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos said. “I think we have to be committed to reaching an agreement as soon as possible,” he added. Lisbon is expected to require €80bn-€85bn (£70bn-£75bn) in aid, roughly the same amount as Ireland but less than the €110bn package offered to Greece nearly one year ago. Not Spain Ministers tried to drive home the message in Budapest that the contagion that has spread like a virus across the eurozone’s southern periphery would not hit Portugal’s larger neighbour Spain, which has scrambled to reform its labour market, pension system and savings banks this year to avoid a similar fate. Spanish economy minister Elena Salgado said a bailout for her country was “completely out of the question”, and the European economic and monetary affairs commissioner Olli Rehn told reporters he was sure Spain would not require assistance. For now at least, markets seem to agree. The euro rose to a 15-month high against the dollar on Friday, following a rise in official eurozone interest rates a day earlier. The spreads between Spanish bond yields and those of the Germany’s benchmark bonds – a key measure of investor confidence in Spain’s finances – have changed little since Portugal announced on Wednesday it would seek aid. The spreads on 10-year bonds hovered at around 1.8 percentage points on Friday morning. But the rise in the euro undermines the competitiveness of the eurozone’s weaker economies and investors continue to look closely at Spain’s weaknesses – a banking sector weakened by the property crash and its struggle to generate growth. “Fortunately, despite the Portuguese woes, Spain is perceived to be more solid by the markets,” analysts from Dutch bank ING said in a research report. Bailout costs Rehn said he expected ministers to mandate the European commission, European Central Bank and the IMF to negotiate a package with Portugal . Under EU rules, this “troika” must send a mission to a country requesting financial aid to establish the parameters of the support programme. That would then be put into a memorandum of understanding. The ministers may also discuss the interest rate that the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the eurozone’s temporary rescue fund, will charge for its loans. Interest on EFSF loans is likely to fall by 100 basis points in June once eurozone leaders give their final approval to a new package of anti-crisis measures. Ministers will also examine the economic situation in Ireland after the latest round of stress tests of the country’s stricken financial sector. Greece will also be a focus amid reports that the country will report a bigger-than-expected budget deficit for 2010. Speculation has grown in recent weeks that Athens may have to restructure a debt load that is expected to peak at over 150% of GDP, with senior government officials in the eurozone conceding in private such a step may be inevitable. But the Greek government and leaders of other euro members have rejected such suggestions. European debt crisis Euro Portugal European monetary union Europe Europe guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Los Angeles authorities have vowed to dramatically increase security at Dodger Stadium following the near-fatal beating of a Giants fan. At “an absolute minimum,” the police force will double the number of uniformed officers patrolling the stadium and boost the number of plainclothes cops in the area, announced LAPD chief…
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The first wheatears have returned to the islands, and chiffchaffs and willow warblers are beginning to pass through on their spring journeys. A bright and sunny morning seems the perfect time to look for the newly arrived travellers. A short car tour and a lengthy walk turn up not even a fleeting glimpse of a wheatear’s white rump, and so we set off for Airidh nam Ban in the hope of at least hearing a chiffchaff among the trees there even if we don’t see one. In the wood there is plenty of bird activity. Two robins are engaged in a musical duel, chaffinches flit from branch to branch plinking and chinking constantly. A wren adds its ringing
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