This is an Open Thread: Nothing is sealed in plastic
Economists Debate Efficacy of Stimulus Measures
In trying to assemble a bipartisan package to jolt the slumping economy, the White House and Congress have turned to familiar tools that experts say have worked in the past. But there is also a lively debate among economists about which measures will best accomplish the goal.
The favorite template for addressing recession fears is a set of tax measures and spending initiatives passed in 2001 and 2002, including a personal income tax rebate in the summer of 2001 that amounted to $300 to $600 per household and a tax incentive the following year aimed at encouraging businesses to invest in new plants and equipment.President Bush highlighted both those basic approaches on Friday in setting out his principles for a deal with Congress to address the current downturn. Democrats are also likely to seek increased spending for programs like unemployment insurance or to funnel more money to states, an approach that Mr. Bush signaled he would oppose.
USA
Democrats duel to the end in Nevada
Clinton and Obama staked their tents here months ago in anticipation of the state’s earliest-ever caucuses. Besides some nods to Yucca Mountain and other Western issues, it’s been politics as usual.
LAS VEGAS — Putting a Western stamp on the presidential campaign, Nevada voters are expected to flock today in record numbers to the state’s earliest-ever caucuses, delivering a boost to either Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama.The Democrats, with a win apiece, dueled across the state Friday in a final burst of campaigning on the eve of their party’s third nominating test. The race here, like the first two, appeared exceedingly close.
Obama, the winner of Iowa’s caucuses, traveled 1,200 miles: from Las Vegas to Reno, then to Elko, then back again. The Illinois senator intensified his criticism of Clinton, accusing her of distorting his record and changing her positions for political expediency.“It is easy to be for policies that help working families when it’s popular on the campaign trail,” he told more than 1,000 people packed into a gym at the University of Nevada in Reno. “But the American people don’t want a president whose plans change with the politics of the moment.”
Kids killing kids tests justice system
When one child kills another, finding justice is a challenge on all sides, prosecutors, defense lawyers and children’s advocates agree.
He stands 4-feet-11 and weighs 90 pounds. He reads Hardy Boys mystery novels. He watches TV cartoons.Depending on an upcoming decision by Broward prosecutors, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
A 12-year-old Lauderhill boy, who has been charged with killing his 17-month-old cousin Jan. 4 with a wooden baseball bat, is the latest preteen who may face adult time with grown-up prisoners. The state’s juvenile justice system provides few other options.
”This type of case challenges all of us — prosecutors, public defenders and judges,” said Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, whose office is defending the boy.
Said Frank Orlando, a retired Broward juvenile judge who now heads the Center for the Study of Youth Policy at Nova Southeastern University’s law school: “This isn’t the last time this is going to happen. There are a number of states that have so advanced the issue of how you deal with these kids that it makes Florida look silly.”
Middle East
Iraq on alert for Shia festival
The Iraqi authorities have stepped up security as Shia Muslims gather to mark the end of Ashura – one of the holiest events in the Shia calendar.Up to two million pilgrims are expected to gather on Saturday in the city of Karbala for the festival’s climax.
Tensions are high after dozens died in clashes on Friday in two southern cities between police and a group thought to be linked to a Shia cult.
Clashes between Iraqi troops and the cult last Ashura left 263 people dead.
Israel orders closure of Gaza crossings as Palestinian anger and casualties increase
Rory McCarthy in Gaza City
Saturday January 19, 2008
The GuardianMoin al-Wadia lay on his hospital bed beneath a window yesterday, soaking up the last of the day’s winter sunshine. Around him sat his family, with boxes of sweet pastries and bouquets of flowers, as they tried to explain the growing anger and frustration of the people of Gaza.
Wadia had been working at a mechanics’ market on Tuesday morning when the Israeli military launched a major ground incursion, beginning a new round of intense fighting in Gaza. When he heard the sound of gunfire, Wadia began to leave but was knocked to the ground by the force of an Israeli shell. It sliced off his left foot, shattered his right leg and shrapnel lacerated his stomach
Asia
Captain of protest vessel claims spy trawler is shadowing him
The Japanese government is thought to have sent a large ocean-going trawler into the Southern Ocean near Antarctica to track one of the environmental activist ships trying to stop a whale hunt.Captain Paul Watson, on board the Sea Shepherd conservation society’s vessel, the Steve Irwin, said yesterday by satellite phone that the drag trawler Fukoyoshi Maru No 68 was shadowing his ship.
“It has no fishing gear on board and appears to have more electronic gear than normal for a fishing vessel. It is not part of the whaling fleet of seven ships. It is apparently reporting our position to the Japanese fleet.”
The cat and mouse game between the whalers and the conservationists continued with Greenpeace on the heels of the Nisshin Maru factory vessel which is understood to be closing on its four harpoon ships.
But relations between Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace appeared to have deteriorated further with Greenpeace again refusing to relay the position of the Japanese harpoon boats to the Steve Irwin.
Blogger backlash prompts inquiry into officials who ‘murdered’ man
A wave of protest from Chinese bloggers has forced authorities to arrest four people and call an investigation into 100 others after a man was beaten to death for filming a fight between villagers and local officials.More than 50 municipal officers attacked a passerby who paused to film them as they scuffled with rural residents over a garbage dump near Tianmen, in central Hubei province, on January 7.
The killing has provoked widespread anger in Chinese cyberspace, where bloggers have expressed outrage over the so-called urban management officers – quasi-police who are often deployed to disperse small protests or to shut down unlicensed hawkers.
The villagers had been angry about the smell and pollution from rubbish being dumped near their homes and had tried to halt a loaded truck that arrived.
Latin America
Kidnap victims found dead after Mexico gunfight
o Tuckman in Mexico City
Saturday January 19, 2008
The GuardianThe bodies of six kidnap victims were found inside a house in Mexico yesterday following a three-hour shootout between gunmen and soldiers and police.
The victims, all male, were blindfolded and gagged and had been shot in the head. The authorities in the city of Tijuana, near the US border, said the men had probably been abducted for ransom, or picked up for association with a rival gang.
The three-hour battle between a handful of gunmen in a house and about 100 soldiers and police outside has highlighted fears that a military-led offensive aimed at quelling a gruesome turf war between drug cartels is turning into a more general conflict.
Soldiers and state and local police were sent in to help control the gunfight, which began when federal agents prepared to raid a house police now say was a shelter for a cell of the Arellano Félix drug cartel.
Loss of news talk show dismays Mexicans
Supporters of journalist Carmen Aristegui say the cancellation of her radio program poses a threat to the country’s move toward greater democracy.
MEXICO CITY — For some Mexicans, it was as if a combination of Diane Sawyer and Christiane Amanpour had been summarily bounced from the airwaves.That’s been the widespread reaction to the Jan. 4 decision by journalist Carmen Aristegui to end her prominent 5-year-old morning talk show on the capital’s W Radio, due to what she described as growing editorial differences with the station’s co-owners, Mexico’s multimedia giant Grupo Televisa and Grupo Prisa, Spain’s largest media conglomerate.
Aristegui has said little publicly about the matter, granting only one interview to the liberal magazine Proceso, in which the veteran journalist gave few specifics behind the reasons for her departure.
Europe
Exile: the price for defying Putin
She is a slight, beautiful, 24-year-old who graduated from university just last year and doesn’t look like she could pose much of a threat to anyone. But in yet another sign that anyone who doesn’t toe the Kremlin line is at risk, Natalya Morar has been exiled from Russia.The young reporter’s investigative reporting for the Russian magazine The New Times has angered Russian authorities, who have kicked her out and branded her a threat to national security. She is the latest in a long line of journalists to be pressured, persecuted or killed for their work in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Morar, a national of the former Soviet republic of Moldova, was returning to Moscow from a reporting trip to Israel in December when border guards told her that the Federal Security Service (FSB) had barred her re-entry. She was put on a plane to Moldova. This week, the Russian embassy in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, finally told her why she was expelled.
Mystery of high-flying cocaine users that has whole of Ireland hooked
The airline pilot, the nun, and the government minister. Everybody in Ireland wants to know who they are. Then there’s the teacher, the nurse, the lawyer and the top doctors. All are said to admit, candidly but anonymously, that they snort cocaine. The pilot, in fact, says he takes it in the cockpit.Cocaine use in the Irish Republic is widespread and expanding. The monied new Ireland, in other words, has a habit. Drug seizures shot up by a factor of 17 last year in the Irish Republic. One consignment intercepted in Co Cork containing 60 bales of cocaine worth a total of £80m.
But who exactly were these high-powered individuals who admitted so frankly to taking the drug? Which government minister could be so audacious as to confess to a journalist in Buswell’s, a hotel right across from the Dail – the Irish Parliament – that he’s a regular user? And he was quite willing to be recorded. He airily admitted: “Yes I do take drugs – just coke though – regularly enough. I’m certainly not the only one around here that does.
Africa
Freedom of expression must stay, as much as the quality
Coaches looking to take African-ness out of the continent’s players do so at their peril, as Ajax have found despite their reputation
When it comes to Africa, it is generally considered appallingly un-PC to draw conclusions, so here is a list of facts. When you visit the Ghanaian Embassy website, you will find it easier to organise a “boob job” in Accra, the capital, than a visa. And when you do click on “visa”, you will find them trying to sell you a credit card.On arriving here this week, the four teams travelling to Kumasi, Ghana’s second city, found the main intended hotel unbuilt. In Accra, two of the training pitches have been declared unplayable. And when Nigeria arrived on Thursday, they discovered that the plane for their internal connecting flight was too small for the squad and spent two hours waiting for another. They were offered a four-hour coach trip instead and elected to stay overnight.
Kenya opposition vows more pressure
NAIROBI, Kenya – Clashes between rival tribes armed with machetes and bows and arrows on Friday marked the third, the bloodiest and what the government hopes is the last day of opposition protests over Kenya’s disputed presidential election.With more than 20 people killed since Wednesday, the opposition announced a new strategy of economic boycotts and strikes to ratchet up pressure.
The U.S. ambassador, citing “many factors and underlying grievances,” compared Kenya’s violence to the 1968 race riots in the United States.
At a town hall meeting for Americans in Nairobi, Ambassador Michael Ranneberger said there was “a lot of cheating on both sides” in the Dec. 27 elections that pitted President Mwai Kibaki against opposition leader Raila Odinga.
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