The Watchmen Stories

SUGARDROP: THE NEW SWEETEST TOMATO EVER

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:04:48 -0800

A NEW tomato which tastes as sweet as a peach hits supermarket shelves today.

The new variety, named Sugardrop, was developed for Tesco to cater for sweet-toothed shoppers and particularly children who find standard tomatoes too sharp.

Tesco describes its gourmet hybrid of two other tomato varieties as the sweetest tomato ever.

The Spanish-grown Sugardrops have around three times the natural sugar content of a standard strain.

Tesco tomato buyer Ashleigh McWilliams said creating the Sugardrop was a long process which involved finding tomato seeds that could be cross- pollinated to produce a new strain.

Growers carried out trials for two years involving 3,000 different tomato types before eventually hitting on the new variety.

“A few years ago we sat down with our suppliers and asked them to find us a high-quality tomato that would appeal to gourmets with a sweet tooth,” said Ashleigh.

“The result is the Sugardrop and now this week UK shoppers will be the first to try it.”

Gerry Hayman, spokesman for the British Tomato Growers’ Association, said the past few years had brought a marked shift in customer demand towards more sugary varieties of the popular salad staple – technically a fruit, not a vegetable.

“There has been a trend towards sweeter tomatoes. It is all about flavour,” he explained.

“This is very much something that consumers are looking for.”

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/142065/Sugardrop-The-new-sweetest-tomato-ever

Gestapo making arrests to expand database (3 articles)

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:57:48 -0800

Police are arresting innocent people in order to get their hands on as many DNA samples as possible, senior Government advisers revealed last night.

The Human Genetics Commission said the Big Brother tactic was creating a 'spiral of suspicion' among the public.

The panel - which contains some of Britain's leading scientists and academics - said officers should no longer routinely take samples at the point of arresting a suspect.

They also called for all police - including support staff - to place their own DNA on the national database in a show of solidarity with a public being routinely placed under suspicion.

By law, officers are only allowed to make an arrest if they have ' reasonable suspicion' that a person has committed a crime.

But the HGC, which has carried out a lengthy review of the merits of the database, said evidence had emerged of police arresting people purely so they could take their DNA.

Its chairman, Professor Jonathan Montgomery, said: 'People are arrested in order to retain DNA information that might not have been arrested in other circumstances.'

The claim, which was backed by evidence from a senior police officer, delivers a significant blow to the Government's defence of the database - which contains more than 5.6million samples.

Campaigners have long feared officers were carrying out mass sweeps of the population to load their samples on the database, and make future crime fighting easier.

The result is one million entirely innocent people having their genetic details logged by the state.

The Commission said one of the consequences of current DNA laws was that young black men are 'very highly over-represented', with more than three quarters of those aged 18-35 on the database.

Professor Montgomery warned this was creating a 'spiral of suspicion' among sections of society.

A retired senior police officer, a superintendent, told the commission: 'It is now the norm to arrest offenders for everything if there is a power to do so.

'It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, for the change in practice is so that the DNA of the offender can be obtained.'

Officers in England and Wales are entitled to take samples from everyone they arrest for a recordable offence.

Proposals within the Crime and Security Bill - published last week - will for the first time put a time limit, in most cases six years, on how long profiles are stored when the alleged offender is either not charged or later cleared.

But there are no plans to reduce police powers to take samples on arrest.

One possibility is to only take DNA when a suspect is charged - making it harder for police to target innocents for their DNA.

In a 110-page report, the commission said more detailed research is required to evaluate how useful the database is in helping to solve crimes, describing current evidence as 'flimsy'.

It accused politicians of using single case studies where the database has secured a conviction instead of carrying out a rigorous evaluation of its scale and function.

Latest Government figures show the costs of running the system - the largest in the world - have risen dramatically, to £4.3million from £2.1million in just a year.

Over the past two years, more than 1.17million new profiles have been added to the database but the number of DNA-related detections fell from a peak of 41,148 in 2006-07 to 31,915 in 2008-09.

LibDem spokesman Chris Huhne said: 'The Government's cavalier attitude to DNA retention has put us in the ridiculous situation where people are being arrested just to have their DNA harvested.

'Ministers make no distinction between innocence and guilt and as a result everyone is treated like a suspect.'

Liberty warned police were being given a 'perverse incentive' to arrest individuals just to get their details on the database.

Tory home affairs spokesman James Brokenshire said: 'For too long the Government has had a policy of growing the DNA database for the sake of it, regardless of guilt or innocence.'

Tories last night attacked reported Government plans to charge innocent people a £200 fee to apply to have their names removed from the national DNA database.

And they called for England and Wales to follow the Scottish model by not retaining the DNA of such innocents, save in exceptional circumstances. The Government has proposed such DNA should be kept for six years.

Tory security spokesman Baroness Neville-Jones told the Lords: 'If it is the case that making an application for removal is subject to a £200 fee, several individuals will be prevented from making any appeal or indeed getting their names off the database.

'Perhaps the Government is using the right of individuals to appeal to help fill the big public sector deficit.'

The Daily Mail

Police are routinely arresting people simply to record their DNA profiles on the national database, according to a report published today.

It also states that three quarters of young black men are on the database. The finding risks stigmatising a whole section of society, the equality watchdog has warned.

The revelations will fuel the debate about the DNA database, the world’s largest. They are included in a report by the Human Genetics Commission, an independent government advisory body. It criticises the piecemeal development of the database and questions how effective it is in helping the police to investigate and solve crimes.

Jonathan Montgomery, commission chairman, said that “function creep” over the years had transformed a database of offenders into one of suspects. Almost one million innocent people are now on the DNA database.

Professor Montgomery said: “It’s now become pretty much routine to take DNA samples on arrest, so large numbers of people on the DNA database will be there not because they have been convicted, but because they’ve been arrested.”

Recorded crime has fallen every year since 2004-05, but the number of people arrested in England and Wales annually is rising. Latest figures show that arrests rose by 6 per cent to 1.43 million in 2005 and a further 4 per cent to 1.48 million in 2006-07.

Professor Montgomery said there was some evidence that people were arrested to retain the DNA information even though they might not have been arrested in other circumstance.

He said that a retired senior police officer told the commission: “It is now the norm to arrest offenders for everything if there is a power to do so. It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons . . . is so that DNA can be obtained.” He said that the tradition of only arresting someone when dealing with serious offences had collapsed.

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission said the proportion of black men on the database created an impression that one race group represented an “alien wedge” of criminality.

The report’s foreword states that the DNA profiles of 75 per cent of black men aged 18 to 35 are recorded. But the commission admitted that it had “hardened up slightly” earlier estimates quoted in Parliament.

The Crime and Security Bill heralded in last week’s Queen’s Speech proposes cutting to six years the time that innocent people’s profiles are kept. Those arrested but not charged, or those cleared in court, currently remain on the database for ever. There are no plans to reduce police powers to take samples from everyone arrested.

Chris Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary, has said that innocent people should not have their DNA retained by the police once they are acquitted of a crime.

The commission report said that the database should be placed on a clear statutory basis and overseen by an independent authority. Isabella Sankey, of Liberty, said: “Not only are we stockpiling the most sensitive information of innocents who have never been charged, let alone convicted, we are also creating a perverse incentive to arrest people solely to get their details on the database.”

The Home Office suggested that the over-representation of young black men on the database was linked to disproportionality in other areas of the criminal justice system.

The London Times

olice officers are now routinely arresting people in order to add their DNA sample to the national police database, an inquiry will allege tomorrow.

The review of the national DNA database by the government's human genetics commission also raises the possibility that the DNA profiles of three-quarters of young black males, aged 18 to 35, are now on the database.

The human genetics commission report, Nothing to hide, nothing to fear?, says the national DNA database for England and Wales is already the largest in the world, at 5 million profiles and growing, yet has no clear statutory basis or independent oversight.

The highly critical report from the government's advisory body on the development of human genetics is published as the number of innocent people on the database is disclosed to be far higher than previously thought ‑ nearing 1 million.

The commission says the policy of routinely adding the DNA profiles of all those arrested has led to a highly disproportionate impact on different ethnic groups and the stigmatisation of young black men, with the danger of their being seen as "an 'alien wedge' of criminality".

The crime and security bill published last week by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, proposes to keep DNA profiles of people arrested but not convicted of any offence on the database for six years. This follows a landmark European court judgment last December, ruling illegal the current blanket policy of indefinite retention of DNA profiles whether or not the person has been convicted of an offence.

It adds that parliament never formally debated the establishment of the DNA database. Its evolution involved a "function creep" from being used to confirm police suspicions to identifying suspects. This resulted in the addition of more and more profiles without being clearly matched by an improvement in convictions.

The chairman of the commission, Prof Jonathan Montgomery, said: "It's now become pretty routine to take DNA samples on arrest. So large numbers of people on the DNA database will be there not because they have been convicted, but because they've been arrested."

He said the commission had received evidence from a former police superintendent that it was now the norm to arrest offenders for everything possible. "It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, for the change in practice is so that the DNA of the offender can be obtained," said Montgomery, adding that it would be a matter of very great concern if this was now a widespread practice.

The report says there is very little concrete evidence on the importance of the DNA match in leading to a conviction and whether the suspect would have been identified by other means anyway.

It argues the database creates "pre-suspects" who are the first to be checked whenever a new crime is entered. This leads to a "no smoke without fire" culture that may be pervasive and hard to overcome.

Professor Montgomery says in his foreword to the report that the DNA profiles of over three-quarters of young black men between 18 to 35 are recorded on the database. But the report itself says that such precise figures are unreliable because the categorisation of ethnicity depends entirely on the perception of the arresting officer: "The extreme preponderance of young black males on the database is [however] undeniable," says the commission and recommends that an equality impact statement be drawn up when legislation is introduced putting the database on a statutory footing.

The latest Home Office estimate for the number of innocent people on the DNA database is 980,000 according to the crime and security bill regulatory impact assessment published last Friday. This is a sharp rise compared with the 850,000 estimate of the DNA profiles of those who have been arrested but not charged or convicted published at the time of the European court of human rights ruling last year.

The Guardian

Gold surges to a fresh record

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:20:29 -0800

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Gold rallied to an all-time high Monday, climbing ever closer to $1,200 an ounce, as the U.S. dollar slid and investors showed nervousness about the economy.

December gold was up $20.90 to $1,167.70 an ounce, after having climbed to a record $1,173.50 earlier in the session.

The rally came as the dollar weakened against its main trading partners, with the euro climbing 0.8% to $1.4979. A softer greenback makes commodities that are priced in dollars cheaper for investors holding other currencies.

"We're seeing significant dollar weakness, and I think that's the main driver today," said Joe Foster, portfolio manager for the Van Eck Global International Investors Gold Fund.

The weak dollar has sent gold surging more than 10% this month as investors flocked to a safe-haven investment. Demand for gold and other so-called tangible assets, which tend to store value better than equity-based investments, often rises in times of economic uncertainty.

Gold is also being supported by a growing expectation in the market that central banks around the world will move to increase their hoards.

India's central bank bought 200 metric tones of gold from the International Monetary Fund earlier this month, and the central bank of Mauritius bought a smaller amount last week.

"We believe the activity of central banks and seasonal weakness in the U.S. dollar in the final four weeks of the year will sustain the strong rally in gold prices," analysts at Deutsche Bank wrote in a recent research report.

Meanwhile, gold is benefiting from a "break-down of confidence" as investors fret about growing fiscal deficits and the ability of governments around the world to oversee the financial system, Foster said.

Given the current momentum in the gold market, and the growing interest from big investment funds, analysts expect prices to continue rising.

"We might have a bit of a pull-back, but the long-term trend is higher," Foster said. Gold will probably top $1,200 some time in December and could climb to $1,300 early next year, he added. To top of page

FBI report: Sharp increase in anti-gay, racial hate crimes

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:56:35 -0800

WASHINGTON — The number of US hate crime victims rose slightly last year to nearly 9,700 from 9,500 in 2007, with most people targeted because of their skin color, the FBI said Monday.

More than half of hate crimes committed in the United States were racially motivated, and three-quarters of the victims were black, the FBI's annual report on hate crimes said.

Of the 6,927 known perpetrators of all hate crimes -- which include attacks driven by not only racial bias but also by the victims' religious affiliation, sexual orientation, ethnic origins or disability -- 61 percent were white. Blacks perpetrated attacks in around 20 percent of cases.

The report was compiled after the issue of race was thrust into the center of US politics with African American Barack Obama's successful bid to be elected the first black president of the United States.

Around 17 percent of hate crime victims were attacked because of their sexual orientation, the overwhelming majority, 96 percent, because they were gay or lesbian.

Nearly 20 percent were attacked for their religious affiliation, with Jews making up around two-thirds of the victims of those attacks.

Muslims were the targets of less than eight percent of religious hate crimes, putting them in third place behind Jews and followers of unspecified "other religions" attacked in 13 percent of religion-fueled hate crimes.

In 2007, Muslims represented about eight percent of victims attacked because of their religion, and in 2006 they made up 12 percent of victims of religion-motivated hate crimes.

Members of the large US Hispanic community were victims of 64 percent, or nearly two-thirds, of the 1,148 hate crimes driven by a bias against a person's ethnicity or national origin.

Most hate crimes targeting individuals were intimidation or simple assault, but seven murders and 11 rapes were counted among the hate crime statistics.

The FBI compiled the report using data submitted by 13,690 law enforcement agencies in most of the 50 states. More than 80 percent of the participating agencies reported no hate crimes in their jurisdictions in 2008.

http://rawstory.com/2009/11/fbi-report-sharp-increase-antigay-racial-hate-crimes/

NYPD tell conductor to seal passengers in with murderer

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:53:00 -0800

In the remade-twice film "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3," armed men take passengers on a New York City subway train hostage.

On Saturday, the NYPD effectively informed a train conductor to seal passengers in a subway car with a murderer.

Apparently, creating potential hostage situations is a new crime stopping tactic.

"Nearly 30 petrified passengers were trapped on a Midtown hell train yesterday with a knife-wielding madman and the blood-soaked body of a straphanger he just stabbed to death in a senseless argument over a seat," The New York Post reported Sunday. "The Bronx-bound D train came to a screeching halt at around 2 a.m. in the tunnel between the Rockefeller Center and Seventh Avenue stations when a rider yanked the emergency cord after watching the carnage unfold."

The paper adds, "The group of riders were stuck in the car behind locked doors as a pool of blood began to form around the dying man and the suspect, Gerardo Sanchez, 37, of The Bronx, coldly stood over him. Eventually, Sanchez strolled to one end of the car, and the rest of the passengers fled to the opposite end."

The Post reports, "Cops relayed word to the operator to keep the car sealed until they arrived — leaving horrified straphangers trapped in with the killer and the body for about five minutes until the doors opened at the station, the sources said."

Monday, the Post seems to be blaming the situation on passengers, warning readers to "think before you pull chord."

Chuck Bennett advises, "If a passenger witnesses a crime or a passenger becomes ill, the cord can be pulled if the train is still at the station but not when it's already departing."

"You can't get help to anyone if the train is between the stations," NYC Transit spokesman Charles Seaton tells the NYC tabloid.

Angry commuters unloaded on the NYPD in Monday's Daily News.

"[They] gambled with a lot of lives," said Richard Kaye, 45, of Morrisania, when asked whether keeping passengers locked inside was the right call.

"God forbid he had stabbed four more people."

"If you lock us in the train, he could go crazy and start killing us, start slashing us," said Gloria Whyte, 34, of Long Island City.

"I wouldn't want to be one of those people stuck in the train with someone who commits murder," said Anne-Marie Christensen, a 28-year-old social worker from the upper East Side. "He's already in a heightened state, so it's dangerous to leave people alone with him."

"What if he'd had a gun?" asked Jonathan Gack, 19. "That would have made everything 10 times worse."
The Daily News notes that only one of the passengers sealed in with the murderer thanked the police for doing "the right thing."

http://rawstory.com/2009/11/nypd-conductor-seal-passengers-murderer/

Bank crisis shows need to expect the very worst: study

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:44:45 -0800

LONDON (Reuters) - Two years of economic and market turmoil mean that investors cannot ignore the chances of even the most extreme events like global depression or a killer pandemic, a leading investment consultancy said on Monday.

Watson Wyatt said in its study, "Extreme Risks," that investors should prepare for everything from currency and banking crises to trade protectionism and even the end of capitalism.

The firm said it had drawn up the list to underline that risk management in investing cannot afford to ignore threats even in the bottom 5 percent of possible events and recommended ways of hedging -- a form of insurance -- against them.

"The events of the last two years have demonstrated that risk management cannot afford to stop at the 95th percentile. We need to find a way to include very unlikely, but potentially high impact, events," Watson Wyatt said in the report.

Its 15 extreme risks were ranked in order as of mid-year.

They were economic depression, hyperinflation, excessive leverage, a currency crisis, a banking crisis, sovereign default, climate change, political crisis, insurance crisis, protectionism, disunity in Europe, the end of capitalism, the end of fiat money, war and a killer pandemic.

Of its top risk, economic depression, the firm said that while the immediate threat appeared to have been reduced by government action, there was now little governments could do if demand dropped again.

The risk from climate change, meanwhile, was anything from flooding to reduced agricultural output and countries in conflict over diminishing resources.

As for disunity in Europe, that the potential for the break up of the euro zone, a major threat to foreign lenders.

WHERE TO INVEST

But all would not be totally lost for investors if some of these extreme risks did come to pass, according to the study, with Watson Wyatt offering potential hedge positions.

Economic depression, for example, could be offset to some extent with globally-diversified long-dated sovereign nominal bonds.

Gold, which is currently at nominal record highs, was a hedge for a range of threats, including hyperinflation and a currency crisis, while going long pharmaceuticals/short airlines was seen as combating investment losses from a pandemic.

Not everything was hedgeable, however, including climate change and political crises that led to the rise of extremism.

As for the end of capitalism, Watson Wyatt said gold was the best holding, but admitted that in such circumstance "investors should probably worry more about the return "of' their investments than the return 'on' their investments."

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IMF chief says global economy in holding pattern

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:42:35 -0800

LONDON (Reuters) - The global economy is in a holding pattern and vulnerable to more upheaval, and a lasting recovery will depend on policymakers taking the proper steps in coming months, the head of the IMF said on Monday.

Rich countries' top priority should be planning to clean up the fiscal mess left by emergency support measures although it was still too early to remove them, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said.

"Exiting too soon would be terrible. It may mean the double-dip -- which is not our central scenario -- may happen. So we have to wait until we have a real recovery in private demand," he said in remarks to the Confederation of British Industry's annual conference.

Governments have committed trillions of dollars in stimulus and guarantees and central banks have cut interest rates to record lows since the financial crisis intensified after the collapse of Lehman Brothers (LEHMQ.PK: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) in September 2008.

Those efforts helped to stem the crisis, Strauss-Kahn said.

He cautioned that the sense of global policy unity forged during the darkest days of the financial crisis might dissolve, and urged close cooperation even though exit strategies differ from country to country.

For advanced economies, where debt burdens have grown sharply over the past year, the IMF wants governments to plan to get their respective finances back in order.

That means ensuring stimulus measures are temporary and putting entitlement programs on a sustainable path. Eventually, more drastic measures will be necessary, Strauss-Kahn said, including spending cuts and -- in some cases -- tax hikes.

"I see fewer problems with monetary policy," he said, adding that central banks had the proper tools to unwind the trillions of dollars worth of emergency lending programs they cobbled together in the midst of the financial panic.

"Especially in many advanced economies, monetary policy can afford to stay accommodative for some time, given little sign of inflation on the horizon," he said.

EMERGING MARKET RISKS

Some emerging economies might need to move sooner, he said.

Since emerging economies recovered more quickly from the recession than industrialized economies did, capital flows have swelled, posing a threat to stability in some markets.

In separate remarks to French newspaper Le Monde, the IMF's chief economist Olivier Blanchard said some emerging markets were at risk of "capital movements, accumulation of reserves and bubbles which would be difficult to control."

Strauss-Kahn said capital controls could be part of a package of measures that countries used to limit inflows, but cautioned that "all tools have their limitations."

He said China and other emerging Asian surplus countries were leading candidates to replace U.S. consumers as the main engine of world growth.

Still, he said they had "some way to go," and urged China to allow its yuan currency to appreciate more rapidly.

"By reducing global imbalances, the world will be a safer place, less prone to crises," he said. "It will also be in China's long-term interest."

On financial reform, he said it was essential to put tougher rules in place to avoid a repeat of the crisis, but policymakers must take care not to clamp down too hard or too quickly because that could derail the recovery.

He suggested laying out future requirements and the timetable for implementation to reduce regulatory uncertainty, which might be inadvertently encouraging more risk-taking.

(Reporting by Emily Kaiser in Washington, Fiona Shaikh in London and Anna Willard in Paris, Editing by )

Falling Chicago Fed index bodes ill for U.S. recovery

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:41:04 -0800

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago said on Monday its gauge of the national economy fell further into negative territory in October, in a report that suggested the economic recovery could be in trouble.

The Chicago Fed said its National Activity Index slid to -1.08 from a revised -1.01 in September. September's reading was originally reported at -0.81.

The index's three-month moving average, CFNAI-MA3, decreased to -0.91 in October from -0.67 in September, declining for the first time in 2009, the Chicago Fed said.

"October's CFNAI-MA3 suggests that growth in national economic activity remained below its historical trend," the report said.

The Chicago Fed said that a move below -0.70 in the index's three-month moving average following a period of economic expansion indicates an increasing likelihood that a recession has begun.

The report appears to highlight the fragile state of the economy, which only started growing again in the third quarter this year following the worst slump in decades.

The Chicago Fed's report also said the amount of economic slack reflected in the three-month moving average "indicates low inflationary pressure from economic activity over the coming year."

The 85 economic indicators that comprise the Chicago Fed's index are drawn from four categories: production and income; employment, unemployment and hours; personal consumption and housing; and sales, orders and inventories.

Thirty-two of the 85 individual indicators made positive contributions to the index in October, and 53 made negative contributions. Forty-three indicators improved from September to October, while 42 indicators deteriorated.

Values of zero in the National Activity Index indicate a national economy expanding at historical trends, negative values indicate below-trend growth and positive values signal growth above trend, the Chicago Fed said.

Financial markets showed little reaction to the report.

(Reporting by Burton Frierson; Editing by Padraic Cassidy)

Gold hits record high past $1,160 per ounce

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:32:53 -0800

(AFP) – 9 hours ago

HONG KONG — The price of gold soared to a record close of 1,166.00-1,167.00 US dollars an ounce in Hong Kong on Monday as dealers moved into the safe haven commodity due to the weak greenback, analysts said.

It opened at 1,158.00-1,159.00 US dollars.

The precious metal was up from Friday's close of 1,145.00-1,146.00 dollars as stocks on Wall Street suffered a third straight loss and as the US unit continues to struggle due to super-low interest rates.

"We closed on the day's high Friday, so that prompted more buying this morning," Anderson Cheung, director of precious metals at Mitsui Bussan in Hong Kong, told Dow Jones Newswires.

"People are talking about buying gold long-term exposure, as a safe haven," Cheung said.

The price of gold has soared 11.5 percent since India's central bank at the start of November bought 200 tonnes from the International Monetary Fund.

"We might see some early profit taking on the London opening, but a real bull trend has formed. It's very easy to push the price higher right now. The sentiment in the gold market really changed since the IMF gold sale to India's central bank," said Wallace Ng, chief gold dealer at Fortis in Hong Kong.

Dollar Slump Persisting as Top Analysts See No Bottom

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:29:37 -0800

Nov. 23 (Bloomberg) -- The most accurate dollar forecasters predict the world’s reserve currency will continue sliding even when the Federal Reserve begins to raise interest rates, which policy makers say is an “extended period” away.

Standard Chartered Plc, Aletti Gestielle SGR, HSBC Holdings Plc and Scotia Capital Inc. say the dollar will depreciate as much as 6.4 percent versus the euro. About $12 trillion of fiscal and monetary stimulus, the world’s lowest borrowing costs and a record $4 trillion of government bond sales between 2009 and 2010 will weigh on the currency, they said. So will the nation’s 10.2 percent unemployment rate and signs that the economic recovery may falter, they said.

“History tells us the dollar shouldn’t start rising on a sustained basis until 12 months after the Fed starts to lift rates,” said Callum Henderson, the Singapore-based global head of foreign-exchange strategy for Standard Chartered.

The best forecaster of the dollar against the euro in the six quarters ended June 30 in Bloomberg’s ranking of 46 firms last month predicts the greenback will weaken 5.3 percent to $1.58 per euro in 2010, from $1.4970 today.

“It’ll take time to drain the oversupply of dollars from the market,” Henderson said. “The dollar will remain weak until the Fed’s rates rise above the competitors’.”

Group of 10

The U.S. will be one of five economies represented in the Group of 10 to wait until after mid-2010 to raise benchmark rates, according to median predictions in Bloomberg surveys of as many as 60 economists. The Fed, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Swiss National Bank will increase borrowing costs in the third quarter and the Bank of Japan will remain at 0.10 percent at least through March 2011, the surveys show.

By the end of 2010, only Japan will have lower borrowing costs, and those will be higher when adjusted for inflation, the forecasts show. The Fed’s target for overnight loans between banks will be 1 percent, compared with the ECB’s 1.5 percent benchmark.

U.S. borrowing costs will make dollar-based assets less attractive, said Camilla Sutton, the foreign-exchange strategy director at Scotia Capital in Toronto. The Bank of Nova Scotia unit, the most-accurate forecaster of the dollar versus the Swiss franc in Bloomberg’s rankings, predicts 2010 will end with the greenback weaker at $1.60 per euro.

“The dollar will lose the near-term race for interest rate increases and then lose the long-term race,” Sutton said.

History Lesson

Once the Fed raises its target, the dollar’s performance likely will mimic the pattern that followed the central bank’s past three rounds of increases, Sutton and Henderson said.

After policy makers started boosting borrowing costs in July 2004, the Dollar Index tumbled 10 percent and didn’t get back to where it had been before the first increase and stay there for more than a month until November 2005.

Intercontinental Exchange Inc.’s dollar gauge fell 6 percent and took seven months to recover after the Fed began lifting borrowing costs in July 1999. It dropped 16 percent following the Fed’s 1994 move without regaining lost ground until 1997.

The top forecasters are in the minority, with median predictions in Bloomberg surveys of as many as 43 strategists showing the dollar gaining against the euro, pound, yen, Swiss franc and Swedish krona by Sept. 30. The other currency measured by the Dollar Index, Canada’s dollar, will outperform the greenback by 0.7 percent by the end of the third quarter, the projections show.

Limiting Liquidity

Twenty-four of 37 predictions for the end of next year have the U.S. dollar strengthening against the euro. The median is $1.46, up 2.5 percent. Twenty-seven of 31 strategists see the yen also getting beaten. The U.S. currency will gain 15 percent to 102 yen, from 88.85 today, the median shows.

“The dollar will gain support as soon as the Fed starts to rein in liquidity,” said Lee Hardman, an analyst in London at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd., Japan’s biggest lender by market value. The dollar will strengthen 9.8 percent to $1.35 per euro by the end of 2010, the bank predicts.

The stock rally that pushed the MSCI World Index up almost 70 percent since March 9 will grind to a halt as the global recovery slows, spurring demand for the perceived safety of the dollar, according to Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg, which scored highest overall in Bloomberg’s rankings with a 5.6 margin of error for all currencies.

Global Growth

“Financial markets and equity markets have been too optimistic concerning economic growth next year,” said Gernot Griebling, the Stuttgart bank’s head of bond and economic research. “Risk aversion should rise again,” strengthening the U.S. currency to $1.37 per euro by Sept. 30, he said.

For now, the global recovery is on track, with the Paris- based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development doubling its 2010 growth forecast for leading developed economies to 1.9 percent and predicting a 2.5 percent expansion for 2011. The recovery is fueling investments in higher-yielding currencies funded by selling dollars.

The Dollar Index has fallen 16 percent since March 5, a steeper drop than in any eight calendar months in 23 years. The decline began four days before the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index of stocks started its strongest rally since the 1930s, gaining 60 percent.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said on Nov. 16 that “significant economic challenges remain” in the U.S. and reiterated the Federal Open Market Committee will keep borrowing costs low for an “extended period.”

Waiting

Policy makers may not change course until 2012, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said Nov 18.

“If you look at the last two recessions, in each case the FOMC waited 2 1/2 to three years” after they ended to raise rates, Bullard said.

What happened after those moves convinces Standard Chartered’s Henderson and Scotia Capital’s Sutton that the dollar will keep sliding. HSBC, the top pound-dollar forecaster, and Aletti Gestielle, the best on the dollar versus the yen, also say the greenback will depreciate, to $1.50 and $1.60 per euro by mid-year, respectively.

The dollar will weaken “as investors worry about its status as a reserve currency and the public deficits,” said Sutton, a former Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System money manager.

Budget Deficit

The U.S. budget deficit reached a record $1.4 trillion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Its debt amounted to 9.9 percent of the economy, up from 2004’s average of 3.5 percent.

Central banks that disclose which currencies they hold put 63 percent of their new cash into euros and yen in April, May and June, the highest percentage for any quarter when global reserves grew more than $80 billion, Barclays Capital data show.

Henderson sees similarities to 2004, when the Fed had lowered its overnight target below the ECB’s.

The 2001 recession, induced by the crash of technology stocks, prompted the U.S. to cut rates by 5.5 percentage points to 1 percent in June 2003, a point below the euro region. The Fed stayed there until June 2004, more than two years after the recession ended. The dollar started rallying after the rate surpassed the ECB’s 2 percent that December.

“If the apex of the crises were in 2001 and 2008, then dollar weakness will last into 2011,” said Henderson.

‘Being Dovish’

The dollar didn’t start rallying after the Fed’s June 1999 increase until the ECB began raising its rates that November.

“When the Fed shifts from being dovish to the early stages of the tightening, the dollar continues to trade weak,” said Ray Farris, global head of foreign exchange research at Credit Suisse Group AG in London, the third-best euro-dollar forecaster. “It’s really only in the late stages of a Fed tightening when U.S. interest rates are high relative to everybody else that the dollar stabilizes and then recovers.”

The dollar plunged to a record low $1.6038 in July 2008 as seven Fed cuts opened up a 2.25 percentage gap to the ECB, making Europe’s securities more attractive. It rallied later in the year as the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September froze credit markets and sent investors to the safety of U.S. assets and the greenback.

“There’s nothing in the cards from a monetary policy angle that could persuade me from being a dollar bear in 2010,” said Jens Nordvig, a managing director and head of G-10 currency strategy at Nomura International Plc in New York, Japan’s largest brokerage firm, which bought Lehman Brothers’ European, Asian and Middle Eastern assets in 2008.

To contact the reporter on this story: Bo Nielsen in Copenhagen at bnielsen4@bloomberg.net.

Call For Independent Inquiry Into Climategate as Global Warming Fraud Implodes

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:15:48 -0800

Calls for an independent inquiry into what is being dubbed “Climategate” are growing as the foundation for man-made global warming implodes following the release of emails which prove researchers colluded to manipulate data in order to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.

Former British chancellor Lord Lawson was the latest to demand an impartial investigation be launched into the scandal, which arrives just weeks before the UN climate conference in Copenhagen. “They should set up a public inquiry under someone who is totally respected and get to the truth,” he told the BBC Radio Four Today programme.

The emails were leaked at the end of last week after hackers penetrated the servers of the Climatic Research Unit, which is based at the University of East Anglia, in eastern England. The CRU is described as one of the leading climate research bodies in the world.

The hacked documents and communications reveal how top scientists conspired to falsify data in the face of declining global temperatures in order to prop up the premise that man-made factors are driving climate change. Others illustrate how they embarked on a venomous and coordinated campaign to ostracize climate skeptics and use their influence to keep dissenting reports from appearing in peer-reviewed journals, as well as using cronyism to avoid compliance with Freedom of Information Act requests.

As expected, the establishment media has gone into whitewash overdrive, characterizing the emails as evidence of “rancor” amongst the climate community and focusing on some of the lesser emails while ignoring the true significance of what has been revealed.

Organizations with close ties to the CRU have engaged in psychological terrorism by fearmongering about the planet with doomsday scenarios, illustrating their argument with outlandish propaganda animation videos which show pets drowning and others that show computer-generated polar bears crashing to earth in a throwback to 9/11 victims jumping from the towers, when in reality polar bear population figures are thriving.

“One of the emails under scrutiny, written by Phil Jones, the centre’s director, in 1999, reads: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” reports the London Telegraph.

The author admitted to the Associated Press that the e mail was genuine.

In another example, researchers discuss data that is “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”. Apparently, the “real temperatures” are whatever global warming cheerleaders want them to be.

As Anthony Watts writes, attempts to claim e mails are “out of context,” as the defense has been from CRU, cannot apply in this instance.

You can claim an email you wrote years ago isn’t accurate saying it was “taken out of context”, but a programmer making notes in the code does so that he/she can document what the code is actually doing at that stage, so that anyone who looks at it later can figure out why this function doesn’t plot past 1960. In this case, it is not allowing all of the temperature data to be plotted. Growing season data (summer months when the new tree rings are formed) past 1960 is thrown out because “these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures”, which implies some post processing routine.

Spin that, spin it to the moon if you want. I’ll believe programmer notes over the word of somebody who stands to gain from suggesting there’s nothing “untowards” about it.

Either the data tells the story of nature or it does not. Data that has been “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” is false data, yielding a false result.

Another email discusses changing temperature data to fix “blips” in studies so as to make them conform with expectations, which of course is the cardinal sin of scientific research.

“Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more” was revealed in the 61 megabites of confidential files released on the Internet for anyone to read, writes Andrew Bolt.

Another email appears to celebrate the death of climate change skeptic John L Daly, with the words, “In an odd way this is cheering news.”

In another communication, the author expresses his fantasy to “beat the crap out of” climate change skeptics.

In another exchange, researchers appear to discuss ways to discredit James Saiers of the Geophysical Research Letters journal, by means of an academic witch hunt, because of his sympathies with climate change skeptics.

“If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.”

Other emails express doubt about whether the world is really heating up and infer that data needs to be reinterpreted.

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

Scientists discuss trying to disguise historical data that contradicts the man-made climate change thesis, such as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), which must be ‘contained’ according to one email.

Suppression of evidence is also discussed, with scientists resolving to delete embarrassing emails.

“And, perhaps most reprehensibly,” writes James Delingpole, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.”

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice!”

Scientists also “discussed ways of dodging Freedom of Information Act requests to release temperature data,” reports the Daily Mail.

The emails show that scientists relied on cronyism and cosying up to FOIA officials to prevent them from being forced to release data.

“When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests,’ the email says. “It took a couple of half-hour sessions to convince them otherwise.”

“Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA became very supportive. I’ve got to know the FOI person quite well and the chief librarian – who deals with appeals.”

It is important to stress that this compendium merely scratches the surface of the monumental levels of fraud that have been exposed as a result of the hacked emails.

People will look back on this moment as the beginning of the end for global warming alarmism and the agenda to implement draconian measures of regulation and control along with the levy of a global carbon tax.

Many more revelations will be forthcoming as a result of this leak, and the desperate effort on behalf of the establishment to whitewash the whole issue will only end up making the damage worse.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/call-for-independent-inquiry-into-climategate-as-global-warming-fraud-implodes.html

The Road to Copenhagen part III: A “Planetary Regime” in the Making

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:10:57 -0800

“It is the sacred principles enshrined in the United Nations charter to which the American people will henceforth pledge their allegiance.” George H.W. Bush addressing the General Assembly of the U.N, February 1, 1992

The machine of mass media is working overdrive now that the Copenhagen summit is approaching. All major media outlets have by now obviously received their talking-points which have an strangely similar ring about them all across the board. Even a superficial comparative study in the overall reporting reveals not only a stunning disregard for national sovereignty, but a willingness to support carbon-taxes imposed by a- as John P. Holdren puts it- “planetary regime”.

Oxford professor Dieter Helm: “I’m in favor of quite a low carbon tax to start with – for political economy reasons, to get it in place.”

Last month experts told the Second Committee Panel Discussion of the UN General Assembly that “a new regime of governance was under way in the global financial system.” The same is being said about global climate measures, global resource management and global development.

The mass media is not only setting the agenda themselves, they more often than not simply parrot the globalists that are being shoved in our face on a daily basis. Many of whom have a Ph.D. behind their name. Under the header ‘Carbon Tax’ is sensible, and perhaps inevitable, advocate says‘, the Los Angeles Times quotes Oxford professor Dieter Helm stating:

“(..) I’m in favor of quite a low carbon tax to start with – for political economy reasons, to get it in place, (…). Across Europe, my guess is within five years everybody will have a carbon tax…”

This, according to Helm, will make sure that the United States will eventually be forced into the global carbon tax policy as well:

“(…) is everybody else doing it? That’s a very good protection for politicians. The answer is yes, they are.”

Back in December of 2001, the Africa division of the UN Development Programme apparently already seriously considered such a tax:

“The main energy sources that would be affected by a carbon tax include coal, petroleum, kerosene and natural gas. The tax would be reflected in an increase in their price, at a level based on the capacity of each type of fuel to emit carbon dioxide.”

Answering the question who would collect the taxes and enforce such a global tax policy, the UN panel was quite clear:

“The panel said a new international tax organization should be created to assume all functions performed by existing institutions. I
t would serve as a global intergovernmental forum for international cooperation on all tax issues.
It would also help resolve conflicts between countries and help them to increase tax revenue by fostering information exchanges and measures that could reduce tax evasion on investment and personal income earned at home and abroad.”

This sounds a lot like John P. Holdren doesn’t it, exclaiming in Ecoscience that “a Planetary Regime- sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment” could impose global policy and enforce it. “Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime”, said Holdren, “could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist.”

Furthermore, the UN panel advocated in 2001:

“We thus endorse the Commission’s proposal to create a global council at the highest political level to provide leadership on issues of global governance. The proposed council would be more broadly based than the G7 or the Bretton Woods institutions.”

In 2007, Reuters quoted Mr. Global Warming Himself, Al Gore as saying that a global carbon trading scheme could be “quite efficient if the world’s top polluters, the United States and China, fully joined.” Gore also stated that a direct tax on carbon would certainly be “an even simpler and more direct measure.”

It was the Bilderberg-appointed Herman Van Rompuy- the new EU-president- who stated recently that “The Climate Conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet.” He also announced that 2009 would be the “first year of global governance.” And he’s not the first to call for such global management. All people who occupy a position of power in the infrastructure of the New World Order have called for it since its very conception shortly after World War II.

As a preface to the coming Copenhagen summit in December, the United Nations Population Fund in a recently published ‘ State of the Population 2009‘ is pushing for global reproductive health services. This means not only universal access to ‘family planning’ but also better access to abortion facilities. Humans, after all, are supposed to be the prime driver of climate change and therefore: less humans means honouring Mother Earth.

In the foreword, the executive director of the UNFPA, Thoraya Obaid addresses the fake global warming hype, saying that “floods, storms and rising seas” will soon envelope the planet if not for quick, decisive and global efforts to combat these calamities.

“A Copenhagen agreement that helps people to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and adapt to climate change by harnessing the insight and creativity of women and men would launch a genuinely effective long-term global strategy to deal with climate change.”

Global strategy. That’s the talking point we hear over and over again from all agencies, UN or otherwise, who have an interest in profiting from the deal they are proposing. Never mind that all nation-states who sign on to the Copenhagen treaty will effectively forfeit their representative systems to this global authority, deciding which taxes will be paid by which nation-state. In the end, all roads seem to lead to a “planetary regime” envisioned by the elite long before “global warming” was even heard of.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/the-road-to-copenhagen-part-iii-a-%E2%80%9Cplanetary-regime%E2%80%9D-in-the-making.html

Global body needed to direct green technology, G77 says

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:02:43 -0800

A green technology body with powers to direct a worldwide transition away from a high-carbon economy is needed to combat climate change, according to the world's developing nations. While most negotiations ahead of the UN's climate change summit in Copenhagen next month have been concerned with which nations should slash greenhouse gas emissions and by how much, the method in which these cuts will be achieved has received far less attention. Yet the importance of green technology – from wind turbines to electric cars to zero-carbon buildings – is enormous.

Developing nations argue that the costs should be paid by the rich nations, and that a new global body is required, perhaps working as part of the UN, to direct the world's low-carbon transformation in sectors as diverse as power, transport and heavy industry.

"We know that, to limit global temperature rises to below 2C, we'll need a step change in global innovation and technology transfer," said Shane Tomlinson of environment consultants E3G. "In the period to 2020, it's vital we avoid high carbon lock-in. The infrastructure decisions that developing countries are taking today, such as new power stations, are going to determine their emissions pathways for 20-30 years."

In the short term, that means rolling out proven technologies such as onshore and offshore wind power, solar photovoltaics and energy efficiency measures. A recent analysis by the Climate Group found that, to meet the emissions targets already agreed by nations, 9.3bn tonnes of CO2 must be prevented from entering the atmosphere by 2020. But these will not be enough for the deep cuts – 80% or more on 1990 levels – that many rich countries will have to deliver by 2050, if the world is to limit warming to the 2C that scientists agree is the safe limit. By then, according to the International Energy Agency, 17 technologies will have to be developed and rolled out to deliver a reduction of 42bn tonnes of CO2. Most of that technology – ranging from carbon capture and storage, solar power and zero-emission vehicles – will need to be deployed in emerging economies.

At Copenhagen, the first decision on technology will be to decide if a new co-ordinating body should have powers to command the clean tech roll out. "The G77 [group of developing nations] and China have proposed a new central executive, political body," said Tomlinson. It would be part of the existing UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which administers the Kyoto protocol.

However, Europe and the US want only an advisory committee – their main concern is that a strong political body may end up channelling funds into state enterprises rather than keeping a level playing field for all businesses. Developing countries say an advisory body would have little power to drive the dramatic changes needed.

The polarised debate has led some to compare the sharing of IP in green technology to arguments over whether pharmaceutical companies should give up patents for expensively developed HIV or malaria drugs in those nations blighted by the illnesses. Alia al-Dalli, deputy resident representative in Morocco for the United Nations Development Programme, said that without local education programmes, the only winners from Copenhagen will be multinational technology companies. "Capacity-development is very important – people need to be educated and aware. You've got to be able to produce technologies by the south for the south, in the south," she said. "It will not merely be technology transfer."

Ambuj Sagar, a professor of policy studies at the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi, said: "The best step would be if we stopped using the term technology transfer and started using something like innovation co-operation to signify that this is not a simple issue. It is not a hand-off from producers of technology to users of technology. We need co-operation instead of a simple reliance on markets to tackle what is an immense challenge."

Climate change scientists reject claims they 'manipulated' data to prove global warming is caused by humans

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:55:05 -0800

The director of a climate research unit at the centre of a row over manipulating data on global warming after hundreds of private emails were stolen by hackers said today it was 'ludicrous' to suggest anything untoward took place during the research.

The material was taken from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, a world-renowned research centre, before it was published on websites run by climate change sceptics, possibly in a bid to undermine next month's global climate summit in Denmark.

But Professor Phil Jones, the centre's director whose emails were at the centre of the row, said he wanted to put the record straight.

Some commentators claimed his emails showed that scientists at the centre manipulated data to bolster their argument that global warming is genuine and is being caused by human actions.

In one email seized upon by sceptics, Prof Jones referred to a 'trick' being employed to massage temperature statistics to 'hide the decline'.

Today, he said the email 'caused a great deal of ill-informed comment, but has been taken completely out of context and I want to put the record straight'.

He said: 'The word 'trick' was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.'

But Lord Lawson, the former chancellor who is now a prominent climate change sceptic, called for an independent inquiry into the claims.

He said the credibility of the unit and of British science were under threat.
'They should set up a public inquiry under someone who is totally respected and get to the truth,' he told the BBC Radio Four Today programme.

'If there's an explanation for what's going on they can make that explanation.'

Kevin Trenberth, a leading climate change scientist whose private emails were also among those stolen, said the leaks may have been aimed at undermining next month's global climate summit in Denmark.

Dr Trenberth, of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado, said he believed the hackers deliberately distributed only those documents that could help attempts by sceptics to undermine the scientific consensus on man-made climate change.

'It is right before the Copenhagen debate, I'm sure that is not a coincidence,' he said.

The lead author on the 2001 and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments said he found 102 of his emails posted online.

'I personally feel violated,' he said.

'I'm appalled at the very selective use of the e-mails, and the fact they've been taken out of context.'

In one of the stolen e-mails, he is quoted as saying: 'We can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.'

He said sceptics had argued it showed scientists can not explain some trends that appear to contradict their stance on climate change.

But Dr Trenberth said his phrase was actually contained in a paper he wrote about the need for better monitoring of global warming to explain the anomalies - in particular improved recording of rising sea surface temperatures.

Last week, a spokesman for the University of East Anglia said: 'It is a matter of concern that data, including personal information about individuals, appears to have been illegally taken from the university and elements published selectively on a number of websites.

'The volume of material published and its piecemeal nature makes it impossible to confirm what proportion is genuine.

'We took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation and have involved the police in what we consider to be a criminal investigation.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1230122/How-climate-change-scientists-dodged-sceptics.html#ixzz0XhbLjIUh

U.S. dollar no longer a one-way bet

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:49:48 -0800

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The one-way bet in the U.S. dollar that has lasted several months may be over for now despite distress over its malaise that has stretched from Washington to Paris.

The dollar recently hit a 15-month low against a basket of other major currencies. This weakness has become a political football in the United States, as opponents of the Obama administration charge that it shows fiscal policy is hurting the U.S. economy. Other countries have also become increasingly vocal about the dollar's decline.

Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke commented on the dollar, saying on Monday that the Fed does watch the dollar's value.

But the greenback has shown resilience in recent days. Activity in the options market, valuation measures and a slight divergence in the tight relationship between stocks and the dollar suggest a possible end to dollar weakness.

There is growing nervousness that the rally in risky assets is overdone, with experts questioning whether the rebound in the global economy can go on without government support.

"A lot of good news is already priced in. For the dollar to meaningfully break below these levels, we'll probably have to see something that adds significantly to the already upbeat outlook for the global economy," said Omer Esiner, senior market analyst at Travelex Global Business Payments in Washington.

Selling the dollar to buy stocks, commodities and higher-yielding currencies has been a popular trade of late as low U.S. interest rates and an abundance of liquidity have lured investors into riskier assets in search of returns.

The dollar fell to a 15-month low against a currency basket this week and is down 15 percent since March. It also hit a 14-month trough versus the euro at 1.5064 on electronic trading platform EBS in late October.

But the euro's struggle to stay above the key $1.50 level may be a sign the market is overextended. The single currency pierced $1.50 for the first time this year on October 21 and closed above it for three straight sessions. It last hit that level on Monday, trading lately at $1.4852.

"The markets have gotten so choppy. Even if the euro breaches $1.51, I'm not entirely sure there's a strong enough risk appetite to chase it much higher," said Amelia Bourdeau, senior currency strategist at UBS in Stamford, Connecticut.

She expects the dollar's rebound to continue into year-end as investors take risk off the table and close out their bets against the currency. She expects the dollar to strengthen to $1.45 per euro in one month and $1.40 in three months.

EQUITIES REMAIN KEY

To keep bears on their toes, Bernanke -- in rare comments on the value of the dollar -- said on Monday that the U.S. central bank is monitoring currency markets "closely" and is "attentive" to the implications of a falling dollar.

His comments, which were backed by European Central Bank chief Jean-Claude Trichet, helped boost the dollar this week. But analysts caution that without a change on the policy front, the impact of verbal attempts to talk up the dollar are likely to be short-lived.

David Gilmore, a partner at FX Analytics in Essex, Connecticut, called the remarks "an introduction of two-way risk, even if in a fairly discreet fashion."

He added that there is "nothing credible" behind Bernanke expressing concerns about the dollar as the Fed has pledged to keep interest rates low for an extended period.

To be sure, the dollar still has room to fall. Despite its losses so far, the greenback remains 7.5 percent above its record low against the euro at $1.6040 set in July, 2008. Speculative positioning data also shows that dollar shorts are not at extreme levels, and more good economic news could hasten more bets against the greenback.

In the near-term, the currency market will likely continue to trade off stocks, analysts say. The 25-day correlation coefficient between the S&P 500 index and euro/dollar is 0.77, Reuters data show, although that relationship has weakened slightly since October.

Ashraf Laidi, chief market analyst at CMC Markets in London, said dollar weakness has increasingly become a catalyst for U.S. equity rallies, which look unsustainable given mixed economic news and the recent struggle in oil prices.

"Aside from U.S. dollar weakness, we have yet to see any fundamental dynamic that justifies U.S. indices higher." If stocks begin to retreat, the dollar could stabilize, he said.

The downside risks in euro/dollar are growing. Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York, said investors are paying "among the largest premiums of the year" for euro puts -- the right but not the obligation to sell euros -- over calls.

Some valuation measures also indicate the dollar is becoming undervalued. Morgan Stanley said the euro/dollar is now 27 percent too high compared with its median fair value.

(Additional reporting by Nick Olivari; Editing by Dan Grebler)

Renters becoming latest victims as foreclosure crisis widens

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:17:41 -0800

MULTIFAMILY DEFAULTS RISING

Some tenants left in dilapidated buildings

By Robin Shulman
Washington Post
Monday, November 23, 2009

NEW YORK -- A new wave of foreclosures stands to hurt people who may have never taken out a mortgage: renters. In cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, where many investors are carrying upside-down mortgages on large rental buildings, some tenants are watching their homes fall apart along with the financing.

Janeia Sandiford, a 24-year-old GED student in New York, has two young children and a deteriorating apartment. When a leak over Sandiford's bathroom and kitchen caused the ceiling to flake off and then cave in, nobody came to fix it for a year, she said. She lacked heat most of last winter, and she has duct-taped her loose-fitting windows in place to cut down on drafts.

"I'm really worried about the kids," she said.

The real estate investment company Ocelot Capital Group bought the building where Sandiford lives and about two dozen others in the Bronx in 2006 and 2007. As the new owners struggled to keep up with payments, 10 of the buildings appeared on the city's list of most dilapidated rental properties in 2007 and 2008. Last winter, as Ocelot defaulted on its loans amid the deepening financial crisis, the buildings plummeted further into decline. Together, they racked up thousands of Code C violations --the most serious kind -- from housing inspectors.

Fannie Mae, which had bought much of the debt from the original lender, entered foreclosure proceedings for Sandiford's building early this spring. A state court appointed receivers.

In the meantime, the building on Manida Street has been beset by problems, according to tenants and their advocates, whose accounts were confirmed by the crumbling walls and damaged plumbing apparent on a tour of the property and its neighbor, also owned by Ocelot. Vandals stole the lock on the front door, giving squatters access to vacant apartments to sell drugs. Plumbing in the building was disrupted after the squatters broke through the walls and stole pipes to sell as scrap metal.

Nationwide pattern
Similar conditions could crop up across the country this winter as foreclosures climb for large rental-unit buildings. In the first three quarters of 2009, 475 foreclosure proceedings were begun against multifamily rental or cooperative homes in the District, according to NeighborhoodInfo DC, a partnership between the Urban Institute and the D.C. Local Initiatives Support Corp. That figure already eclipses the 458 foreclosures for all of 2008.

In Chicago's Cook County, 328 multifamily rental buildings were in foreclosure by the second quarter of this year, compared with 185 last year, according to a yet-unreleased study by the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University.

In Los Angeles, foreclosures for buildings with five or more units totaled 78 -- encompassing 1,344 units -- in the first three quarters of 2009, compared with 49 buildings and 432 units over the same period last year, and 13 buildings and 239 units in the same period of 2007, according to the city's housing department.

In New York, housing analysts estimate that the number of apartment units in buildings at risk of default because of upside-down loans -- in which the property is worth less than is owed on the loan -- could range from 50,000 to 100,000.

And through the first nine months of this year, across the country, Fannie Mae had 74 foreclosed multifamily properties on the books, compared with 25 through the first nine months of last year.

The pattern is also showing up in smaller cities. Apartment buildings and complexes are entering foreclosure in Lexington, N.C., and Des Moines, Iowa. In East Palo Alto, Calif., an investor bought about 1,800 units, or about half the rental properties in town, failed to pay the loan, and one weekend "tore up all their computers, shut down their offices and left," said Mayor Ruben Abrica.

A recent study by Richard Parkus, the head of research in commercial mortgage-backed securities at Deutsche Bank, found that loan performance on multifamily buildings is deteriorating at a dramatic pace. Some 65 to 75 percent of multifamily buildings could face problems refinancing at their current rates, he said in an interview. These problems could "sit and fester" for a while, he said, or result in a burst of loan failures.

"We're at the front end of that wave," said Raphael Bostic, assistant secretary for policy development and research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. "Are we concerned? Absolutely."

A 'sugarplum notion'
Analysts say international speculators and private-equity firms took on mortgage payments larger than their income from rents in such buildings. Some may have hoped they could eject rent-regulated tenants in favor of higher-paying ones.

"It was a sugarplum notion," said David Jones, president and chief executive of the Community Service Society, an advocacy group for low-income New Yorkers, who calls this "predatory equity."

Other buyers may have simply been over-exuberant in a market that seemed as though it could boom forever.

"There was this pervasive view: 'We're all going to the moon, it's going to be a big party from here on out, somehow this could last,' " Parkus said. "Nobody should have lent on these strategies. They're ridiculous."

Other factors have intervened as well. A decline in property values has made it difficult for owners to refinance. High unemployment has pushed up vacancies, cutting into landlords' income.

Yet analysts agree that the potential crisis is different from the one that devastated single-family homeowners.

"It wasn't as outright reckless or abusive or fraudulent as single-family lending," said Jack Markowski, president of the Community Investment Corp. in Chicago and the city's former housing commissioner.

The impact on tenants is uneven. New York City officials say the owners of the vast majority of buildings in foreclosure there are likely to maintain decent standards of living. Yet, of the 200 properties on the city housing agency's 2008 list of buildings with the worst maintenance problems, at least 77 had been in foreclosure, according to data from PropertyShark.com.

In buildings where a landlord is struggling to make loan payments, maintenance is often the first thing to go. Garbage can pile up, lists of overdue repairs get longer, and vermin multiply.

"I went on vacation to California for a week and a half and put out 20 mousetraps and caught 20 mice," said Gloria Robinson, 51, the head of the tenants association at a Bronx building where tenants say maintenance has declined as the landlord manages an upside-down mortgage.

Dire case in the Bronx
Sandiford's building in the Bronx is one of the most dire cases.

"This is a dump," said Sandiford's neighbor Alfredo Martinez, 35, a truck driver. He has stretched a garden hose from his kitchen to bring water to flush the toilet; plastered his disintegrating walls, adding metal screens to stop mice from chewing through; repaired the ceiling twice after a leak caused it to cave in; and installed a steel grate over a window after a burglar stole money, jewelry and video games.

One of the court-appointed receivers for Ocelot properties last month asked a state court to order Fannie Mae to pay him $20,000, saying the company had promised funds to fix life-threatening problems but failed to deliver.

"My responsibilities are clear: collect rents, maintain the property and when it's dangerous, address it," said Marc A. Landis, the receiver, a real estate lawyer experienced in foreclosures. "When I don't have enough money to do that, the lender is supposed to step up to the plate."

Brian Faith, a spokesman for Fannie Mae, wrote in an e-mail that the company is "concerned about welfare of the tenants," noting that it has spent $1.7 million to make repairs and provide oil, utilities and insurance, among other items.

Other lenders maintain that tenants need not suffer, even if their buildings face foreclosure.

"This is a business," said Jamie Woodwell, vice president of commercial real estate research for the Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade group. "The lender has every incentive to make sure . . . the property continues to operate, so that its value continues to be maintained."

Staff researcher Meg Smith in Washington contributed to this report.

Renters becoming latest victims as foreclosure crisis widens

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:17:34 -0800

Obama’s feeble dollar sparks a new goldrush

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:14:47 -0800

Visitors to America might have noticed the television ads urging us to buy gold. One such “spokesman”, formerly in charge of managing the government’s hoard of the yellow stuff, including the ingots buried at Fort Knox, points out that the value of gold has never fallen to zero. Why investors are expected to find such a modest claim reassuring I can’t imagine. But something is persuading people to buy gold, driving the price to and past $1,100 per ounce, from about $270 at the beginning of this decade, and around $700 when the financial crisis first hit.

This is not mere panic buying by a herd of small investors trying to benefit from what is called a momentum play. John Paulson (no relation to Hank), the investor who made $20 billion for his hedge fund between 2007 and 2009 by betting on a collapse of the financial and housing markets, is betting on gold in a big way. Paulson & Co already holds $3 billion in gold-related investments (including AngloGold Ashanti and Kinross Gold), and Paulson has just seeded a new gold-related fund with some $250m of his own funds. His modest objective: appreciation at a rate higher than the increase in the price of gold itself.

All of this means that investors do not believe that President Barack Obama will respond to the enormous pressure put on him during his visit to Beijing and take steps to strengthen the dollar. The president and Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner might talk the talk of a strong dollar but they walk the walk of a declining one. A weak dollar should lift exports and cut imports, which in White House terms means jobs for American workers. And it is jobs that the president asks his aides about first thing every morning. With reason.

Should the unemployment rate remain in double digits when elections roll round a year from now, Republicans would gain congressional seats by making the plausible claim that the Democrats’ deficit spending served only to create a debt burden that will weigh down the living standards of our children and grandchildren.

The economics are every bit as simple as taught in elementary classes. The government is running huge deficits, upwards of 12% of GDP (3% is considered sustainable), and selling its IOUs to pay its bills. The very accommodating Federal Reserve Board is buying those IOUs, printing dollars with which to pay for them. The flood of dollars will, economists argue, some day trigger inflation. That would enable the government to pay off the holders of its bonds and notes in depreciated dollars, which is what the Chinese, holders of over $1 trillion in such paper, fear.

Of course, that hasn’t happened yet. There is simply too much excess capacity in the economy to permit producers to raise prices, and too much unemployment for workers to hold out for higher wages. That will change when the recovery takes hold and the economy starts to grow again. Then, says Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed, I will sell all of the notes and other assets I have accumulated for dollars, and withdraw those dollars from circulation. Meanwhile, says the president, that is when I will take steps to cut the deficit. So don’t worry, be happy.

Not many seem to believe either man. Bernanke is famous for academic work emphasising the danger of tightening too soon, and so might wait so long that inflationary expectations take root. Obama would have to cut spending or raise taxes to reduce the deficit, neither of which he will be inclined to do.

Indeed, he returned from China announcing his concern about the size of the deficit — and proceeded to push hard to get Congress to pass a $1 trillion healthcare bill and a $250 billion raise for doctors, after approving renewal of the about-to-expire $8,000 credit for new home buyers, and before pressing for passage of a very expensive energy bill. As for tax increases, he has promised not to raise the taxes of families earning less than $250,000 per year, and there aren’t enough higher earners to tap to cut substantially into the deficit.

Which means the printing presses will continue to run, creating the threat of inflation. When that happens, and the dollar depreciates, people flock to commodities — oil (which already has $20 built into its price to reimburse producers for the decline in the value of each dollar), gold, art, property. Arab oil producers can protect themselves by raising the price of oil, John Paulson will rake in another odd billion or so, Goldman Sachs will figure out how to profit from the new inflation, the US and others who have run up large debts will pay back in cheap money, and pensioners will scour supermarket shelves for bargains they can afford with their withered dollars.

America has been there before, and not so long ago. It took Ronald Reagan and then-Fed chairman Paul Volcker to wring inflation out of the system they inherited from Jimmy Carter in the early 1980s. Oh yes, the price of gold promptly fell in half. Which means that investors in gold are betting that the spending policies of the Obama administration and the easy money policy of Bernanke’s Fed will remain in place. If they are wrong, they might end up unloading $1,100 gold and related investments at half that price. There are no sure things when it comes to investing.

But there is an almost sure thing in the currency market. For as far ahead as a reasonable person can see, the Chinese will continue to peg the renminbi to the dollar. That means that a lower dollar cannot make imports from China more expensive. It also means that countries that allow their currencies to float will have greater difficulty competing with China in the US market. Which might, only might, bring together a large coalition of nations, ranging from the US and the EU to Asian and Latin American countries that compete with China for markets, to pressure China to allow its currency to float upward. Their threat: that they will band together and protect themselves from Chinese imports with tariffs and other measures. That would get President Hu Jintao’s attention.

Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute

stelzer@aol.com

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/columnists/article6926940.ece

Obama’s feeble dollar sparks a new goldrush

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:12:02 -0800

Forced labour and rape, the new face of slavery in America

The Watchmen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:09:04 -0800

Human trafficking has become a major issue in the Midwest heartland of America, causing some campaigners to dub it a modern form of slavery.

Figures from the State Department reveal that 17,500 people are trafficked into the US every year against their will or under false pretences, mainly to be used for sex or forced labour. Experts believe that, when cases of internal trafficking are added, the total number of victims could be up to five times larger. And increasing numbers of trafficked individuals are being transported thousands of miles from America's coasts and into heartland states such as Ohio and Michigan.

"It is not only a crime. It is an abomination," said Professor Mark Ensalaco, a political scientist at the University of Dayton, Ohio, who organised a recent conference on the issue. In Ohio a human trafficking commission has just been set up to study the problem, while in the northern Ohio city of Toledo a special FBI task force is tackling the issue. For many local law enforcement officials, it is a bewildering new world.

In one recent incident a 16-year-old Mexican girl was found to have been trafficked across the US border. Doctors noticed the heavily pregnant girl showed clear signs of physical abuse when she was brought into a hospital in Dayton to give birth. The police were called but the couple who had brought her had already fled. When the girl's story emerged, it became clear she had been kept against her will in the nearby city of Springfield and used for labour and sex. "I thought slavery ended a few centuries ago. But here it is alive and well," said Springfield's sheriff, Gene Kelly.

He emphasised the risks to the girl's baby after it had been born if the doctors had not been so alert: "Like the mother, the baby could have ended up a victim for years to come. Who knows? Future labour? Future person to traffic?"

Ohio anti-trafficking campaigner Phil Cenedella, founder of Combating Trafficking Anywhere, believes that the baby was destined to be sold off by her captors. "They would have put the kid on the black market. It is crazy that this is happening." Human trafficking – defined as forcing someone against their will to work for no reward – has been dubbed modern slavery. At the Dayton conference, it was discussed as a growing social problem, not in some far-off foreign land, but among the cornfields of Ohio.

"The problems are broader than we realised," said Ohio's attorney general, Richard Cordray. "What we want to do is find and disrupt these networks."

One of the country's leading anti-trafficking advocates is Theresa Flores, a former victim. Flores puts a different kind of face on human trafficking in America. She is white, middle-class and blond and looks the epitome of a suburban American woman. She grew up in a wealthy suburb of Detroit in Michigan and did well at school. Yet Flores tells a nightmarish story of two years being drugged, raped and sold for sex.

Flores, whose ordeal was turned into a book called The Sacred Bath: An American Teen's Story of Modern Day Slavery, was attacked and raped when she was 15. Her assailant used the threat of photographs he had taken during her rape to force her into having sex with strangers. She became the effective prisoner of a drugs gang that used her as a prostitute and kept her earnings, or gave her away free to gang members as a "reward". "People don't think that trafficking looks like me or that it can happen to someone who came from a nice neighbourhood. But it does. People need to see outside that box," said Flores.

Flores said that her lowest point came when the gang took her to a seedy motel where she was raped by as many as two dozen men. She woke up alone, abused and with no clothes. "I was told I would die if I told anyone. It happened over and over for two years as I became a sex slave for those men," she said.

Anti-trafficking campaigners point out that cases in the US come in a wide variety of forms involving men, women and children. One major area is that of trafficked labour with people used for domestic work or, more commonly, for back-breaking labour in agricultural industries. But trafficking cases have also occurred in businesses such as restaurants, hair salons and beauty parlours. The overwhelming majority of the rest are sex cases, usually involving young women or children forced into prostitution. The methods used to keep people vary. They include confiscating the passports of those brought in from a foreign country or the threat of extreme violence. Other tactics are to threaten family members if a victim does not comply or, as in Flores's case, to use blackmail.

Trafficking represents a new challenge to law enforcement, especially in regions which have traditionally not thought of it as a major problem. That is especially true where it happens within an immigrant community. Languages are a problem as well as cultural issues and a natural fear that many immigrants – some of them possibly illegal – have of contacting the police.

Kelly believes that is the case in Springfield, a town that is almost the Midwestern archetype. It was once featured in a story in Newsweek magazine entitled "The American Dream". But its 65,000 citizens also face all the problems of a modern America in the grip of a deep recession: an immigration crisis and profoundly changing demographics. The town now hosts several prominent minority communities who make up more than a fifth of its population, including Russians, Chinese, Latinos and Somalis. "There are a lot of people who distrust law enforcement. We need to break down those barriers. Our officers need training, especially in languages," said Kelly. "If you can't speak to people, you can't reach them."

Some commentators and experts have accused victims' advocates and academics of overstating the problem, arguing the problem has been exaggerated and expressing scepticism at the notion that vast organised criminal networks are dealing in human beings for sex or labour. Law enforcement officers also acknowledge that the definitions of trafficking may need refining.

In North Carolina last week the mother of a five-year-old girl was charged with human trafficking after being accused of offering her daughter for sex. The child was later found dead. The crime was horrific, but the distinction between trafficking and simple, sadistic child abuse might not be immediately obvious.

"We have a problem with definition. It is not always straightforward and easy to explain," said Laura Clemmens, a government lawyer in Dayton. "The hard part is bringing it into the light. At the moment these crimes are clouded in secrecy."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/22/people-trafficking-usa-prostitution-ohio

Terrorism Trial May Point Way for 9/11 Cases

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:21:55 -0800

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, suspected of being a Qaeda terrorist, was captured in Pakistan in 2004, held in secret prisons run by the C.I.A. and then moved to the naval base at Guantánamo Bay. During about five years of detention, he says, he was confined in harsh conditions, abused during interrogation and denied a lawyer.

Since the spring, Mr. Ghailani has also been a defendant in federal court in Manhattan, the first Guantánamo detainee to be moved to the civilian courts.

From the moment the Obama administration announced that it would seek to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed planner of 9/11, and other Guantánamo detainees in the same federal court, the wisdom of the decision has been debated. Critics of the move have worried that government secrets will leak, that evidence won through harsh tactics could lead to dismissals, or that a trial would be used as a platform to spew hate.

There is much that distinguishes a potential trial of Mr. Mohammed from that of Mr. Ghailani. Mr. Mohammed is a much higher-profile defendant, he could face the death penalty, and he has said he wants to represent himself. But the prosecution of Mr. Ghailani, a Tanzanian accused of aiding the bombing of American Embassies in Africa in 1998, could hold important meaning for prosecutors and defense lawyers alike.

So far, he has fought — unsuccessfully — to hang onto the military lawyers who worked with him at Guantánamo. He has argued — successfully — that prosecutors should seek to preserve as evidence the secret C.I.A. prisons where he was held.

And just last week, Mr. Ghailani and his lawyers filed a formal motion to have his case thrown out, arguing that he had been denied a basic constitutional right afforded everyone in the federal court system: a speedy trial.

Gregory Cooper, one of Mr. Ghailani’s lawyers, put it this way: “I’m the scout going through the forest before the main force comes through.” He added that the cases against his client and Mr. Mohammed were factually “worlds apart.”

The government, for its part, has said in court that it is not going to introduce at trial any statements made by Mr. Ghailani “while he was in custody of other government agencies,” a clear reference to his imprisonment overseas or at Guantánamo.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Ghailani case involves the judge hearing it, Lewis A. Kaplan. Judge Kaplan is the most recent judge assigned to the long and complex series of Qaeda cases in the federal courthouse, and he could wind up presiding over any prosecution of Mr. Mohammed.

Mr. Ghailani, who is believed to be in his mid-30s, was arraigned for the first time in New York on June 9, weeks after President Obama announced he would be sent for trial as part of the effort to close Guantánamo. He pleaded not guilty.

“After over a decade, it is time to finally see that justice is served,” Mr. Obama said at the time.

Mr. Ghailani has been formally charged with participating in a conspiracy that included the 1998 bombings of American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attacks organized by Al Qaeda that killed 224 people. He later gained the trust of Osama bin Laden, working for him as a cook and bodyguard, the authorities say.

Mr. Ghailani has sat quietly in court over the months, assisting his lawyers, responding politely to the judge and forcefully asserting his rights on often novel issues that could arise if the Sept. 11 defendants go to trial.

In an appearance at Guantánamo in 2007, he apologized for helping others who had planned and carried out the attack, but said he had been unaware of its purpose.

“It was without my knowledge what they were doing, but I helped them,” he said, a transcript shows.

One of the first issues Mr. Ghailani raised as a civilian defendant was his desire to retain the help of two military lawyers who had represented him at Guantánamo.

Mr. Ghailani sent a personal letter in broken English to the Defense Department, asking to keep the lawyers. “It seem to me it will be terribly unfair to me to loose these two important figures in my defense,” he wrote.

Judge Kaplan last week rejected Mr. Ghailani’s request.

Virtually from the start of the proceedings against Mr. Ghailani, his lawyers, Mr. Cooper and Peter E. Quijano, made clear they planned to investigate deeply into Mr. Ghailani’s treatment while in detention. Mr. Ghailani has written in court papers that he was subjected to cruel interrogation techniques.

“It appears undeniable that the defendant was subjected to harsh conditions and harsh interrogation techniques while detained in C.I.A. ‘black sites,’ ” his lawyers wrote to Judge Kaplan, asking for an order that the government not destroy any of the overseas jails where Mr. Ghailani was held until the defense could visit and inspect them.

David Raskin, chief of the terrorism unit in the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, suggested in court this summer that his office would seek to have the evidence preserved.

Mr. Raskin’s statement that the government would not use Mr. Ghailani’s statements while he was detained could well be suggestive of its approach should a trial of Mr. Mohammed take place. Mr. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in 2003 as part of the government’s efforts to extract information.

Indeed, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., when asked about a trial in light of the interrogation techniques, said there was other evidence “that gives me great confidence that we will be successful in the prosecution of these cases in federal court.”

If the Sept. 11 detainees decide to mount a defense — still an open question given their requests to plead guilty at Guantánamo — prosecutors will have to give their lawyers a mountain of documents, including classified evidence, under the rules of discovery.

To ensure that secrets do not leak, Judge Kaplan has imposed a protective order on all classified information, which may be reviewed by the defense lawyers only in a special “secure area,” a room whose location has not been disclosed.

The order covers all materials that might “reveal the foreign countries in which” Mr. Ghailani was held from 2004 to 2006 — the period when he was in the secret jails — and the names and even physical descriptions of any officer responsible for his detention or interrogation, the order says.

It also covers information about “enhanced interrogation techniques that were applied” to Mr. Ghailani, “including descriptions of the techniques as applied, the duration, frequency, sequencing, and limitations of those techniques.”

The defense lawyers, who had to obtain security clearance, cannot disclose the information to Mr. Ghailani without permission of the court or the government. Any motions they write based on the material must be prepared in the special room, and nothing may be filed publicly until it is reviewed by the government.

So, last Monday, when Mr. Ghailani’s lawyers filed a motion seeking dismissal of the charges because of “the unnecessary delay in bringing the defendant to trial,” they included only a few mostly blank cover sheets.

The rest of the motion, which presumably offers rich details about Mr. Ghailani’s time in detention, remains secret, and a censored version will be made public only after it is cleared by the government.

Judge Kaplan has set a trial date for next fall.

“There’s a public interest in seeing justice done here,” he said.

Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University Law School, called the Ghailani prosecution “a perfect transition case.”

She cited his role as a relatively obscure defendant in a case involving terrorist acts that occurred before Sept. 11, where there has already been a trial and convictions, but who is also pressing claims from his years in detention.

“It allows them to take a less emotionally charged case, try it in Manhattan, and create the parameters of what the court proceedings would be like,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/nyregion/23ghailani.html?hp

Economic Survey: Job Losses to Bottom Out in 1Q

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:18:17 -0800

Economic Survey: Job Losses to Bottom Out in 1Q

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:42 a.m. ET

Economists expect the joblessness that has weighed down the nation's economic recovery will start to slowly abate in 2010, but they predict consumers will continue to keep a tight rein on spending, according to a new survey.

While signs have pointed to the end of the recession, joblessness remains rampant. The national unemployment rate jumped to 10.2 percent in October, the highest in 26 years. About 9 million people currently receive unemployment benefits.

The November outlook by the National Association for Business Economics, which is set to be released Monday, shows economists expect net employment losses to bottom out in the first quarter of next year. Employers are seen starting to add to their payrolls after that.

''While the recovery has been jobless so far, that should soon change,'' said Lynn Reaser, NABE's president and chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University. ''Within the next few months, companies should be adding instead of cutting jobs.''

But even if companies do start restaffing next spring, they aren't expected to ramp up hiring very quickly. Some 7.3 million jobs have been lost since December 2007, according to NABE. Of the 48 panelists surveyed, 61 percent do not expect a complete recovery of those lost jobs until 2012. And they expect the unemployment rate will remain ''stubbornly high,'' averaging 9.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Panelists ranked high unemployment as their second biggest concern over the next five years, expressing ''extreme concern'' first and foremost about the federal deficit. Those surveyed expect inflation will remain low and the dollar to remain weak, though they see it strengthening against the euro and continuing to be a major reserve currency.

The economy grew at a 3.5 percent pace in the third quarter, the Commerce Department announced last month, a strong signal that the economy is entering a recovery phase from the worst recession since the Great Depression. But the pace of the recovery is expected to be slow because of high unemployment and tight credit.

The latest survey by NABE notes that sluggish consumer spending will continue to weigh on the economy. But it predicts rebounds in housing, growth from business spending as more companies restock lean inventories, and a rise in stock prices.

Economists polled in the survey predict 3 percent real GDP growth in the 2009 fourth quarter, and 3.2 percent growth for all of 2010. For the two years combined, the projected growth is half a percentage point higher than the forecast NABE gave in October.

''Real GDP growth should also be enough to recover losses from the recession and return output to an all-time high by the end of 2010,'' NABE forecasters predict.

Those surveyed say the housing recovery will gather momentum, helped by low interest rates, with housing starts expected to jump 36 percent and residential investment climbing 9 percent next year. Such results would make 2010 the first year since 2005 that the housing sector contributes to overall growth. Economists expect home prices to gain 2 percent next year, after bottoming out in 2009.

Consumer spending gains are expected to be ''lackluster,'' as workers continue to worry about jobs and investments. Panelists also expect to see a ''persistently elevated sense of thrift'' as consumers save more. They expect the personal savings rate to average 4 percent in 2010, the highest level since 1998.

Businesses, though, will increase their spending. The survey said the inventory liquidation of the past year will bottom out and companies will restock in 2010, while also spending more on equipment and software because of higher profits.

Corporate profits are expected to gain 12.4 percent in 2010, which the survey said was average for the first year of an economic recovery. All survey respondents expect the stock market to grow in 2010, with the S&P 500 Index seen rising 9.5 percent next year.

The NABE survey of 48 professional forecasters was taken Oct. 24-Nov. 5.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/23/business/AP-US-NABE-Survey.html

Economic Survey: Job Losses to Bottom Out in 1Q

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:17:57 -0800

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:42 a.m. ET

Economists expect the joblessness that has weighed down the nation's economic recovery will start to slowly abate in 2010, but they predict consumers will continue to keep a tight rein on spending, according to a new survey.

While signs have pointed to the end of the recession, joblessness remains rampant. The national unemployment rate jumped to 10.2 percent in October, the highest in 26 years. About 9 million people currently receive unemployment benefits.

The November outlook by the National Association for Business Economics, which is set to be released Monday, shows economists expect net employment losses to bottom out in the first quarter of next year. Employers are seen starting to add to their payrolls after that.

''While the recovery has been jobless so far, that should soon change,'' said Lynn Reaser, NABE's president and chief economist at Point Loma Nazarene University. ''Within the next few months, companies should be adding instead of cutting jobs.''

But even if companies do start restaffing next spring, they aren't expected to ramp up hiring very quickly. Some 7.3 million jobs have been lost since December 2007, according to NABE. Of the 48 panelists surveyed, 61 percent do not expect a complete recovery of those lost jobs until 2012. And they expect the unemployment rate will remain ''stubbornly high,'' averaging 9.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Panelists ranked high unemployment as their second biggest concern over the next five years, expressing ''extreme concern'' first and foremost about the federal deficit. Those surveyed expect inflation will remain low and the dollar to remain weak, though they see it strengthening against the euro and continuing to be a major reserve currency.

The economy grew at a 3.5 percent pace in the third quarter, the Commerce Department announced last month, a strong signal that the economy is entering a recovery phase from the worst recession since the Great Depression. But the pace of the recovery is expected to be slow because of high unemployment and tight credit.

The latest survey by NABE notes that sluggish consumer spending will continue to weigh on the economy. But it predicts rebounds in housing, growth from business spending as more companies restock lean inventories, and a rise in stock prices.

Economists polled in the survey predict 3 percent real GDP growth in the 2009 fourth quarter, and 3.2 percent growth for all of 2010. For the two years combined, the projected growth is half a percentage point higher than the forecast NABE gave in October.

''Real GDP growth should also be enough to recover losses from the recession and return output to an all-time high by the end of 2010,'' NABE forecasters predict.

Those surveyed say the housing recovery will gather momentum, helped by low interest rates, with housing starts expected to jump 36 percent and residential investment climbing 9 percent next year. Such results would make 2010 the first year since 2005 that the housing sector contributes to overall growth. Economists expect home prices to gain 2 percent next year, after bottoming out in 2009.

Consumer spending gains are expected to be ''lackluster,'' as workers continue to worry about jobs and investments. Panelists also expect to see a ''persistently elevated sense of thrift'' as consumers save more. They expect the personal savings rate to average 4 percent in 2010, the highest level since 1998.

Businesses, though, will increase their spending. The survey said the inventory liquidation of the past year will bottom out and companies will restock in 2010, while also spending more on equipment and software because of higher profits.

Corporate profits are expected to gain 12.4 percent in 2010, which the survey said was average for the first year of an economic recovery. All survey respondents expect the stock market to grow in 2010, with the S&P 500 Index seen rising 9.5 percent next year.

The NABE survey of 48 professional forecasters was taken Oct. 24-Nov. 5.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/23/business/AP-US-NABE-Survey.html

Sewers at Capacity, Waste Poisons Waterways

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:12:03 -0800

It was drizzling lightly in late October when the midnight shift started at the Owls Head Water Pollution Control Plant, where much of Brooklyn’s sewage is treated.

A few miles away, people were walking home without umbrellas from late dinners. But at Owls Head, a swimming pool’s worth of sewage and wastewater was soon rushing in every second. Warning horns began to blare. A little after 1 a.m., with a harder rain falling, Owls Head reached its capacity and workers started shutting the intake gates.

That caused a rising tide throughout Brooklyn’s sewers, and untreated feces and industrial waste started spilling from emergency relief valves into the Upper New York Bay and Gowanus Canal.

“It happens anytime you get a hard rainfall,” said Bob Connaughton, one the plant’s engineers. “Sometimes all it takes is 20 minutes of rain, and you’ve got overflows across Brooklyn.”

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health.

But despite those upgrades, many sewer systems are still frequently overwhelmed, according to a New York Times analysis of environmental data. As a result, sewage is spilling into waterways.

In the last three years alone, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems — including those in major cities — have reported violating the law by dumping untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency.

But fewer than one in five sewage systems that broke the law were ever fined or otherwise sanctioned by state or federal regulators, the Times analysis shows.

It is not clear whether the sewage systems that have not reported such dumping are doing any better, because data on overflows and spillage are often incomplete.

As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater. That has contributed to sewage backups into more than 400,000 basements and spills into thousands of streets, according to data collected by state and federal officials. Sometimes, waste has overflowed just upstream from drinking water intake points or near public beaches.

There is no national record-keeping of how many illnesses are caused by sewage spills. But academic research suggests that as many as 20 million people each year become ill from drinking water containing bacteria and other pathogens that are often spread by untreated waste.

A 2007 study published in the journal Pediatrics, focusing on one Milwaukee hospital, indicated that the number of children suffering from serious diarrhea rose whenever local sewers overflowed. Another study, published in 2008 in the Archives of Environmental and Occupational Health, estimated that as many as four million people become sick each year in California from swimming in waters containing the kind of pollution often linked to untreated sewage.

Around New York City, samples collected at dozens of beaches or piers have detected the types of bacteria and other pollutants tied to sewage overflows. Though the city’s drinking water comes from upstate reservoirs, environmentalists say untreated excrement and other waste in the city’s waterways pose serious health risks.

A Deluge of Sewage

“After the storm, the sewage flowed down the street faster than we could move out of the way and filled my house with over a foot of muck,” said Laura Serrano, whose Bay Shore, N.Y., home was damaged in 2005 by a sewer overflow.

Ms. Serrano, who says she contracted viral meningitis because of exposure to the sewage, has filed suit against Suffolk County, which operates the sewer system. The county’s lawyer disputes responsibility for the damage and injuries.

“I had to move out, and no one will buy my house because the sewage was absorbed into the walls,” Ms. Serrano said. “I can still smell it sometimes.”

When a sewage system overflows or a treatment plant dumps untreated waste, it is often breaking the law. Today, sewage systems are the nation’s most frequent violators of the Clean Water Act. More than a third of all sewer systems — including those in San Diego, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, Philadelphia, San Jose and San Francisco — have violated environmental laws since 2006, according to a Times analysis of E.P.A. data.

Thousands of other sewage systems operated by smaller cities, colleges, mobile home parks and companies have also broken the law. But few of the violators are ever punished.

The E.P.A., in a statement, said that officials agreed that overflows posed a “significant environmental and human health problem, and significantly reducing or eliminating such overflows has been a priority for E.P.A. enforcement since the mid-1990s.”

In the last year, E.P.A. settlements with sewer systems in Hampton Roads, Va., and the east San Francisco Bay have led to more than $200 million spent on new systems to reduce pollution, the agency said. In October, the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said she was overhauling how the Clean Water Act is enforced.

But widespread problems still remain.

“The E.P.A. would rather look the other way than crack down on cities, since punishing municipalities can cause political problems,” said Craig Michaels of Riverkeeper, an environmental advocacy group. “But without enforcement and fines, this problem will never end.”

Plant operators and regulators, for their part, say that fines would simply divert money from stretched budgets and that they are doing the best they can with aging systems and overwhelmed pipes.

New York, for example, was one of the first major cities to build a large sewer system, starting construction in 1849. Many of those pipes — constructed of hand-laid brick and ceramic tiles — are still used. Today, the city’s 7,400 miles of sewer pipes operate almost entirely by gravity, unlike in other cities that use large pumps.

New York City’s 14 wastewater treatment plants, which handle 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater a day, have been flooded with thousands of pickles (after a factory dumped its stock), vast flows of discarded chicken heads and large pieces of lumber.

When a toilet flushes in the West Village in Manhattan, the waste runs north six miles through gradually descending pipes to a plant at 137th Street, where it is mixed with so-called biological digesters that consume dangerous pathogens. The wastewater is then mixed with chlorine and sent into the Hudson River.

Fragile System

But New York’s system — like those in hundreds of others cities — combines rainwater runoff with sewage. Over the last three decades, as thousands of acres of trees, bushes and other vegetation in New York have been paved over, the land’s ability to absorb rain has declined significantly. When treatment plants are swamped, the excess spills from 490 overflow pipes throughout the city’s five boroughs.

When the sky is clear, Owls Head can handle the sewage from more than 750,000 people. But the balance is so delicate that Mr. Connaughton and his colleagues must be constantly ready for rain.

They choose cable television packages for their homes based on which company offers the best local weather forecasts. They know meteorologists by the sound of their voices. When the leaves begin to fall each autumn, clogging sewer grates and pipes, Mr. Connaughton sometimes has trouble sleeping.

“I went to Hawaii with my wife, and the whole time I was flipping to the Weather Channel, seeing if it was raining in New York,” he said.

New York’s sewage system overflows essentially every other time it rains.

Reducing such overflows is a priority, city officials say. But eradicating the problem would cost billions.

Officials have spent approximately $35 billion over three decades improving the quality of the waters surrounding the city and have improved systems to capture and store rainwater and sewage, bringing down the frequency and volume of overflows, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection wrote in a statement.

“Water quality in New York City has improved dramatically in the last century, and particularly in the last two decades,” officials wrote.

Several years ago, city officials estimated that it would cost at least $58 billion to prevent all overflows. “Even an expenditure of that magnitude would not result in every part of a river or bay surrounding the city achieving water quality that is suitable for swimming,” the department wrote. “It would, however, increase the average N.Y.C. water and sewer bill by 80 percent.”

The E.P.A., concerned about the risks of overflowing sewers, issued a national framework in 1994 to control overflows, including making sure that pipes are designed so they do not easily become plugged by debris and warning the public when overflows occur. In 2000, Congress amended the Clean Water Act to crack down on overflows.

But in hundreds of places, sewer systems remain out of compliance with that framework or the Clean Water Act, which regulates most pollution discharges to waterways. And the burdens on sewer systems are growing as cities become larger and, in some areas, rainstorms become more frequent and fierce.

New York’s system, for instance, was designed to accommodate a so-called five-year storm — a rainfall so extreme that it is expected to occur, on average, only twice a decade. But in 2007 alone, the city experienced three 25-year storms, according to city officials — storms so strong they would be expected only four times each century.

“When you get five inches of rain in 30 minutes, it’s like Thanksgiving Day traffic on a two-lane bridge in the sewer pipes,” said James Roberts, deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.

Government’s Response

To combat these shifts, some cities are encouraging sewer-friendly development. New York, for instance, has instituted zoning laws requiring new parking lots to include landscaped areas to absorb rainwater, established a tax credit for roofs with absorbent vegetation and begun to use millions of dollars for environmentally friendly infrastructure projects.

Philadelphia has announced it will spend $1.6 billion over 20 years to build rain gardens and sidewalks of porous pavement and to plant thousands of trees.

But unless cities require private developers to build in ways that minimize runoff, the volume of rain flowing into sewers is likely to grow, environmentalists say.

The only real solution, say many lawmakers and water advocates, is extensive new spending on sewer systems largely ignored for decades. As much as $400 billion in extra spending is needed over the next decade to fix the nation’s sewer infrastructure, according to estimates by the E.P.A. and the Government Accountability Office.

Legislation under consideration on Capitol Hill contains millions in water infrastructure grants, and the stimulus bill passed this year set aside $6 billion to improve sewers and other water systems.

But that money is only a small fraction of what is needed, officials say. And over the last two decades, federal money for such programs has fallen by 70 percent, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which estimates that a quarter of the state’s sewage and wastewater treatment plants are “using outmoded, inadequate technology.”

“The public has no clue how important these sewage plants are,” said Mr. Connaughton of the Brooklyn site. “Waterborne disease was the scourge of mankind for centuries. These plants stopped that. We’re doing everything we can to clean as much sewage as possible, but sometimes, that isn’t enough.”

Wave of Debt Payments Facing U.S. Government

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:09:21 -0800

WASHINGTON — The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.’s on terms that seem too good to be true.

But that happy situation, aided by ultralow interest rates, may not last much longer.

Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.

Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today’s low rates by exchanging short-term borrowings for long-term bonds, the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The potential for rapidly escalating interest payouts is just one of the wrenching challenges facing the United States after decades of living beyond its means.

The surge in borrowing over the last year or two is widely judged to have been a necessary response to the financial crisis and the deep recession, and there is still a raging debate over how aggressively to bring down deficits over the next few years. But there is little doubt that the United States’ long-term budget crisis is becoming too big to postpone.

Americans now have to climb out of two deep holes: as debt-loaded consumers, whose personal wealth sank along with housing and stock prices; and as taxpayers, whose government debt has almost doubled in the last two years alone, just as costs tied to benefits for retiring baby boomers are set to explode.

The competing demands could deepen political battles over the size and role of the government, the trade-offs between taxes and spending, the choices between helping older generations versus younger ones, and the bottom-line questions about who should ultimately shoulder the burden.

“The government is on teaser rates,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates lower deficits. “We’re taking out a huge mortgage right now, but we won’t feel the pain until later.”

So far, the demand for Treasury securities from investors and other governments around the world has remained strong enough to hold down the interest rates that the United States must offer to sell them. Indeed, the government paid less interest on its debt this year than in 2008, even though it added almost $2 trillion in debt.

The government’s average interest rate on new borrowing last year fell below 1 percent. For short-term i.o.u.’s like one-month Treasury bills, its average rate was only sixteen-hundredths of a percent.

“All of the auction results have been solid,” said Matthew Rutherford, the Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary in charge of finance operations. “Investor demand has been very broad, and it’s been increasing in the last couple of years.”

The problem, many analysts say, is that record government deficits have arrived just as the long-feared explosion begins in spending on benefits under Medicare and Social Security. The nation’s oldest baby boomers are approaching 65, setting off what experts have warned for years will be a fiscal nightmare for the government.

“What a good country or a good squirrel should be doing is stashing away nuts for the winter,” said William H. Gross, managing director of the Pimco Group, the giant bond-management firm. “The United States is not only not saving nuts, it’s eating the ones left over from the last winter.”

The current low rates on the country’s debt were caused by temporary factors that are already beginning to fade. One factor was the economic crisis itself, which caused panicked investors around the world to plow their money into the comparative safety of Treasury bills and notes. Even though the United States was the epicenter of the global crisis, investors viewed Treasury securities as the least dangerous place to park their money.

On top of that, the Fed used almost every tool in its arsenal to push interest rates down even further. It cut the overnight federal funds rate, the rate at which banks lend reserves to one another, to almost zero. And to reduce longer-term rates, it bought more than $1.5 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and government-guaranteed securities linked to mortgages.

Those conditions are already beginning to change. Global investors are shifting money into riskier investments like stocks and corporate bonds, and they have been pouring money into fast-growing countries like Brazil and China.

The Fed, meanwhile, is already halting its efforts at tamping down long-term interest rates. Fed officials ended their $300 billion program to buy up Treasury bonds last month, and they have announced plans to stop buying mortgage-backed securities by the end of next March.

Eventually, though probably not until at least mid-2010, the Fed will also start raising its benchmark interest rate back to more historically normal levels.

The United States will not be the only government competing to refinance huge debt. Japan, Germany, Britain and other industrialized countries have even higher government debt loads, measured as a share of their gross domestic product, and they too borrowed heavily to combat the financial crisis and economic downturn. As the global economy recovers and businesses raise capital to finance their growth, all that new government debt is likely to put more upward pressure on interest rates.

Even a small increase in interest rates has a big impact. An increase of one percentage point in the Treasury’s average cost of borrowing would cost American taxpayers an extra $80 billion this year — about equal to the combined budgets of the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.

But that could seem like a relatively modest pinch. Alan Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price, estimated that the Treasury’s tab for debt service this year would have been $221 billion higher if it had faced the same interest rates as it did last year.

The White House estimates that the government will have to borrow about $3.5 trillion more over the next three years. On top of that, the Treasury has to refinance, or roll over, a huge amount of short-term debt that was issued during the financial crisis. Treasury officials estimate that about 36 percent of the government’s marketable debt — about $1.6 trillion — is coming due in the months ahead.

To lock in low interest rates in the years ahead, Treasury officials are trying to replace one-month and three-month bills with 10-year and 30-year Treasury securities. That strategy will save taxpayers money in the long run. But it pushes up costs drastically in the short run, because interest rates are higher for long-term debt.

Adding to the pressure, the Fed is set to begin reversing some of the policies it has been using to prop up the economy. Wall Street firms advising the Treasury recently estimated that the Fed’s purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities pushed down long-term interest rates by about one-half of a percentage point. Removing that support could in itself add $40 billion to the government’s annual tab for debt service.

This month, the Treasury Department’s private-sector advisory committee on debt management warned of the risks ahead.

“Inflation, higher interest rate and rollover risk should be the primary concerns,” declared the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, a group of market experts that provide guidance to the government, on Nov. 4.

“Clever debt management strategy,” the group said, “can’t completely substitute for prudent fiscal policy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/business/23rates.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

Wave of Debt Payments Facing U.S. Government

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:08:12 -0800

Agents for world peace -- inside the United Nations International School

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:23:20 -0800

A cultural institution that gives students an access all areas pass to the world, the United Nations International Schools (UNIS) gives students a trip around the globe in just a stroll down the school hallway.

"We've got over 60 countries represented among the staff and that diversity of cultures from within the teaching staff brings about perspectives that can only really be achieved here," Executive Director Stewart Walker told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.

"Even at other international schools around the world, you don''t find that diversity among the staff and that's a critical piece for us to maintain."

Nestled between the East River and Franklin D. Roosevelt highway in Manhattan, central New York City, UNIS stands at the eastern edge of midtown where it overlooks the rest of the city. As a symbol for both international heritage and cultural diversity, it's a crossroads for children and families across the globe that are looking for a unique, international educational experience.

"We've got these kids around the world who interact with each other and therefore get an international understanding that is based upon personal friendships and personal relationships, which is the strength from it," Walker said.

Established as an International Nursery School in Queens, New York, UNIS was formed by a group of UN parents in 1947 who wanted their children to maintain their cultural upbringing, as well as to receive an education that would allow them to matriculate back into their national educational system.

Quickly transforming from an enrollment of just 20 children to a fully fledged educational institution by the late 1950s that included campuses in both Queens and in Manhattan, the student admission also started to include those outside the UN community -- families from both the non-governmental sector and local New York scene.

Today with 1,550 children from all ends of the globe attending UNIS, a little more than half of the student population has parents that are working for the UN or missions attached to the world body. A quarter of the students are internationally based, with the remaining 10-15 percent from the United States.

"It's not good enough to simply just come here and to be a privileged child who gets a wonderful education," Walker said. "The mission of the school and the United Nations is really about creating a new world order -- one that is based upon peace and understanding."

"It's really to take that experience and to build on it and take the understanding that you have here, to take that commitment you get to community service to make a positive change, to take it out into the world," Walker said.

With the UN values as the cornerstone of UNIS, Walker urges students to go out and make the "positive change that is based upon these ideals that are espoused right through their education here."

The UNIS Junior School provides kids with the necessary cushion when transitioning from home to being in school full-time. Walker says relationship-building starts in Junior A (kindergarten), where teachers work on engaging children in a nurturing environment with group activities both in and out of the playground.

Life-long themes are explored in Junior School in connection with the ideals of the UN Charter, such as self-esteem, respect for others, integrity, personal responsibility, and cooperative partnership.

According to the curriculum on the UNIS website, in addition to the core academic subjects that are taught, kids are taught art, music, science and movement by specialists. Computer studies are introduced early on so that kids are taught different modes of communication and information retrieval, as well as problem solving.

A hands-on environment, the Junior School encourages these youngsters to get an international perspective -- whether it be in a science lab exploring under a microscope lens, cooking a cultural meal, sharing a tale from their origin, or singing a song in their mother tongue.

"Our connection to the UN is critical for us," he said, while commenting on a recent visit by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to rally kids for the UN''s campaign "To Stand Up Against Poverty" on Oct. 16.

Kids prepared posters and signs that welcomed him -- treating him like a "rock star," Walker said.

The skills that the students acquire in Junior School allow them to understand their sense of "self" in preparation for their studies in Middle and High School at UNIS. Middle School builds upon the skills of self-reliance in those crucial years of forming their own personal identities, as well as peer-group identification.

Source:Xinhua

http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6818925.html

Intel: Chips in brains will control computers by 2020 Brain waves will replace keyboard and mouse, …

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:19:14 -0800

Intel: Chips in brains will control computers by 2020
Brain waves will replace keyboard and mouse, dial phones and change TV channels
Sharon Gaudin

November 19, 2009 (Computerworld) By the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer, say Intel Corp. researchers. Instead, users will open documents and surf the Web using nothing more than their brain waves.

Scientists at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh are working to find ways to read and harness human brain waves so they can be used to operate computers, television sets and cell phones. The brain waves would be harnessed with Intel-developed sensors implanted in people's brains.

The scientists say the plan is not a scene from a sci-fi movie -- Big Brother won't be planting chips in your brain against your will. Researchers expect that consumers will want the freedom they will gain by using the implant.

"I think human beings are remarkable adaptive," said Andrew Chien, vice president of research and director of future technologies research at Intel Labs. "If you told people 20 years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop [carrying devices]. There are a lot of things that have to be done first but I think [implanting chips into human brains] is well within the scope of possibility."

Intel research scientist Dean Pomerleau told Computerworld that users will soon tire of depending on a computer interface, and having to fish a device out of their pocket or bag to access it. He also predicted that users will tire of having to manipulate an interface with their fingers.

Instead, they'll simply manipulate their various devices with their brains.

"We're trying to prove you can do interesting things with brain waves," said Pomerleau. "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed ... to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the Web with the power of your thoughts."

To get to that point Pomerleau and his research teammates from Intel, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, are currently working on decoding human brain activity.

Pomerleau said the team has used Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) machines to determine that blood flow changes in specific areas of the brain based on what word or image someone is thinking of. People tend to show the same brain patterns for similar thoughts, he added.

For instance, if two people think of the image of a bear or hear the word bear or even hear a bear growl, a neuroimage would show similar brain activity. Basically, there are standard patterns that show up in the brain for different words or images.

Pomerleau said researchers are close to gaining the ability to build brain sensing technology into a head set that culd be used to manipulate a computer. The next step is development of a tiny, far less cumbersome sensor that could be implanted inside the brain.

Such brain research isn't limited to Intel and its university partners.

Almost two years ago, scientists in the U.S. and Japan announced that a monkey's brain was used to to control a humanoid robot. Miguel Nicolelis, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University and lead researcher on the project, said that researchers were hoping its work would help paralyzed people walk again.

And a month before that, a scientist at the University of Arizona reported that he had successfully built a robot that is guided by the brain and eyes of a moth. Charles Higgins, an associate professor at the university, predicted that in 10 to 15 years people will be using "hybrid" computers running a combination of technology and living organic tissue.

Today, Intel's Pomerleau said various research facilities are developing technologies to sense activity from inside the skull.

"If we can get to the point where we can accurately detect specific words, you could mentally type," he added. "You could compose characters or words by thinking about letters flashing on the screen or typing whole words rather than their individual characters."

Pomerleau also noted that the more scientists figure out about the brain, it will help them design better microprocessors. He said, "If we can see how the brain does it, then we could build smarter computers."

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9141180/Intel_Chips_in_brains_will_control_computers_by_2020?taxonomyName=Development&taxonomyId=11

SAS set to lift veil of secrecy over elite operations

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:16:21 -0800

The incredible heroics of the Special Forces could be revealed for the first time under plans to lift their veil of secrecy.

The Mail on Sunday has learned that the Government may scrap the practice of never commenting on the clandestine operations of the Special Air Service (SAS) and Special Boat Service (SBS).

A confidential Ministry of Defence review is considering dropping the publicity ban and shedding more light on the vital work of these forces. That could include the MoD confirming the names and details of members killed in action on operations.

But many within the MoD and the Armed Forces believe the publicity ban is vital for the elite soldiers’ security.

‘People are very divided on this. Some feel the forces don’t get the recognition for what they do. Others say that the rules are there to protect them,’ said a source.

Even the existence of the internal review, understood to have been ordered by Defence ministers, was being regarded as a State secret. The MoD yesterday said it was not aware that the policy was being reconsidered.

But authoritative sources later confirmed that officials had been debating the merits of bringing Special Forces’ work into the open – with the strict proviso it did not endanger them.

Some senior Government figures believe revealing more information about the forces could help win support for the war in Afghanistan.

One official said: ‘At present we cannot even name personnel if they are killed on operation.’
Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth is understood to be sympathetic to the idea.

But Tory defence spokesman Liam Fox warned: ‘War is not a PR exercise. If we can give our troops adequate praise without compromising them, that’s one thing, but we must never allow missions to become media-led.’

The Daily Mail

NORAD may ground costly 9/11 air defense system

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:12:26 -0800

The government is to review an air defense system established after the September 11, 2001 attacks to determine whether the costly program is still necessary, the New York Times reported Friday.

The review is expected to include a complete reassessment of the threat of a terror attack by air and will consider the cumulative effects of various security measures taken since the 2001 attacks.

"The fighter force is extremely expensive, so you always have to ask yourself the question 'How much is enough?'" Major General Pierre Forgues, the Canadian who currently serves as director of operations for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, commonly known as Norad, told the paper.

The Times notes that US "Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., the head of Norad and Northern Command, ordered the review in response to criticism this year by the Government Accountability Office that the command had failed to conduct 'routine risk assessments.' General Renuart expanded the scope of the review 'to refine how we allocate and request resources today,' said the commands’ spokesman, James Graybeal."

The program currently involves keeping dozens of military aircraft and hundreds of air crew on alert to respond to any threats, though air patrols of US cities ended in 2007.

The review of the program, expected to be complete by next spring, will look at the likelihood of terrorists hijacking a plane or piloting their own aircraft into US or Canadian airspace.

It will try to assess whether the air defense program is necessary in light of various security measures, including airport screening, passenger tracking and secured airliner cockpits, that were implemented after the 9/11 attacks.

"The ability of terrorists to do what they did on 9/11 has been greatly curtailed," Forgues told the Times.

However, he warned that the outcome of the review was not predetermined and the program could be maintained at current levels or even scaled up if deemed necessary.

Norad statistics show that there were 1,000 incidents of suspicious air activity last year, with 400 requiring a Norad response and 200 prompting jet fighters to be scrambled, the Times said.

http://rawstory.com/2009/11/norad-ground-costly-911-air-defense-system/

Britain's new Internet law -- as bad as everyone's been saying, and worse. Much, much worse.

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:09:34 -0800

The British government has brought down its long-awaited Digital Economy Bill, and it's perfectly useless and terrible. It consists almost entirely of penalties for people who do things that upset the entertainment industry (including the "three-strikes" rule that allows your entire family to be cut off from the net if anyone who lives in your house is accused of copyright infringement, without proof or evidence or trial), as well as a plan to beat the hell out of the video-game industry with a new, even dumber rating system (why is it acceptable for the government to declare that some forms of artwork have to be mandatorily labelled as to their suitability for kids? And why is it only some media? Why not paintings? Why not novels? Why not modern dance or ballet or opera?).
So it's bad. £50,000 fines if someone in your house is accused of filesharing. A duty on ISPs to spy on all their customers in case they find something that would help the record or film industry sue them (ISPs who refuse to cooperate can be fined £250,000).

But that's just for starters. The real meat is in the story we broke yesterday: Peter Mandelson, the unelected Business Secretary, would have to power to make up as many new penalties and enforcement systems as he likes. And he says he's planning to appoint private militias financed by rightsholder groups who will have the power to kick you off the internet, spy on your use of the network, demand the removal of files or the blocking of websites, and Mandelson will have the power to invent any penalty, including jail time, for any transgression he deems you are guilty of. And of course, Mandelson's successor in the next government would also have this power.

What isn't in there? Anything about stimulating the actual digital economy. Nothing about ensuring that broadband is cheap, fast and neutral. Nothing about getting Britain's poorest connected to the net. Nothing about ensuring that copyright rules get out of the way of entrepreneurship and the freedom to create new things. Nothing to ensure that schoolkids get the best tools in the world to create with, and can freely use the publicly funded media -- BBC, Channel 4, BFI, Arts Council grantees -- to make new media and so grow up to turn Britain into a powerhouse of tech-savvy creators.

Lobby organisation The Open Rights Group is urging people to contact their MP to oppose the plans.
"This plan won't stop copyright infringement and with a simple accusation could see you and your family disconnected from the internet - unable to engage in everyday activities like shopping and socialising," it said.

The government will also introduce age ratings on all boxed video games aimed at children aged 12 or over.

There is, however, little detail in the bill on how the government will stimulate broadband infrastructure.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/20/britains-new-interne.html

Britain's new Internet law -- as bad as everyone's been saying, and worse. Much, much worse.

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:17:38 -0800

Independence 'would cost banks billions', says OECD

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:40:53 -0800

Britain's biggest banks would have to raise tens of billions more pounds to achieve complete independence from state support, new research has shown.

Calculations from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD) have uncovered the full scale of the reliance of too-big-to-fail banks on taxpayers. To become true stand-alone institutions, they would have to raise their core capital ratios above 20pc. Britain's banks are currently operating with ratios of 8pc-10pc, a level considered by regulators to be conservative.

To lift its core capital ratio above 20pc, a bank the size of Barclays would have to raise £40bn – more than its current market capitalisation of £34bn.

The OECD's analysis is the first quantitative dissection of precisely how much it would cost for the world's biggest banks to insure themselves rather than rely on state support. Its findings on what it would take to make big banks truly independent suggest an equity injection on a scale way beyond that which regulators are currently contemplating.

The calculations were made by Jørgen Elmeskov, the OECD's acting chief economist. He took an example of "the largest 15 euro area banking groups" with an average core capital ratio of 3.1pc – far below those in the UK. Under his calculation, "the ratio would have to rise substantially by 18 percentage points for these banks to see their cost of doing business increase in line with the cost of the guarantee from which they are benefitting".

An 18 per cent increase would give an acting capital ratio of 21.1pc – still 11pc-13pc above the average UK capital level. He added that although such high ratios, of more than a fifth of total assets, are not under consideration, they are not high in comparison with the way balance sheets were constructed some decades ago.

The suggestion is highly controversial, since it is largely through reducing their capital ratios that banks have been able to amplify their profitability substantially in recent years.

Mr Elmeskov said: "It is clear that if one was to redesign the world economy, one would not design it with banks of their current size and degree of systemic importance. Whether it is politically practical to split up banks is doubtful."

However, Mervyn King, Bank of England Governor, has argued that banks considered too-big-to-fail should be broken into smaller, more manageable institutions.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/6631389/Independence-would-cost-banks-billions-says-OECD.html

Copenhagen summit: US considers target for emissions

The Watchmen — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:36:49 -0800

Gordon Brown called for a final push to secure a climate change deal at the Copenhagen summit as indications emerged that the United States was considering setting a proposed target for reducing the country's greenhouse gas emissions.

Todd Stern, the US State Department's climate change envoy, said that President Barack Obama recognised the US had to produce a target for cutting its emissions, though he said any figure would have to be "provisional".

The Prime Minister said he detected a move by nations in both the developed and developing world to reach a compromise agreement.

"I hope and believe other countries will follow their example over the next few weeks," Mr Brown said. "I believe these decisions are a clear sign of growing international momentum for an ambitious, fair and effective agreement in Copenhagen."

The US declaration boosted the hopes of environmentalists pushing for a global agreement at next month's Copenhagen summit."What we are looking at is to see whether we could put down essentially a provisional number that would be contingent on our legislation," said Mr Stern. "We are looking at that, there are people we need to consult with."

The US, which along with China is responsible for 40 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases, is the only major developed country yet to set a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Copenhagen.

Although the US House of Representatives passed a bill that would cut American emissions by 17 per cent of 2005 levels by the year 2020. Mr Obama has called for legislation cutting emissions by 14 percent of 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent in 2050.

The Senate has yet to debate legislation and is unlikely to so before next November's mid-term elections. A draft bill proposes a 20 per cent cut in emissions by 2020 but several Democrats have said they could not support the measure.

A provisional figure would increase the chances of a deal being reached at next month's United Nations global warming summit in Copenhagen provisional target but could still be rejected on Capitol Hill.

Mr Brown warned world leaders yesterday that they "cannot afford to fail" to strike a substantial deal on climate change in Copenhagen next month.

The Prime Minister said the summit had to mark a "decisive global shift" towards tackling the problem. The comments came in a letter to Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen, formally confirming that he will attend the event in person.

Mr Brown urged other leaders to follow his example, insisting their presence sent an "important signal".

More than 60 world leaders will attend the Copenhagen conference, elevating it to the level of a major summit and improving its prospects of success.

The Danish government, which is chairing the meeting, revealed yesterday that over the last week 65 heads of Government have told it that they will attend. Many more are expected to add their names.

Those accepting included Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, President Luiz Inacio da Silva of Brazil, Prime Minister Yukio Hatayama of Japan and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia.

The Danes only formally decided to invite leaders to attend a week ago, and have been taken by surprise by the rush of acceptances. But Mr Obama, President Hu Jintao of China and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India have yet to take up the invitation.

The participation of so many leaders greatly increases the likelihood that the summit will end in a substantive agreement . While a full-blown treaty won't emerge – the cumbersome UN negotiations have moved too slowly over the last year to formulate a legal text – but hopes are rising that there will be a "political agreement" that will lead to legal document being signed within six months.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6630940/Copenhagen-summit-US-considers-target-for-emissions.html

Roman Catholic church stalls on £8m child abuse claims

The Watchmen — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:42:37 -0800

Handed over to foster care when barely a few weeks old and then hauled through the care system's institutional layers, Graham Baverstock had few chances at a childhood. Now aged 51, confined to a wheelchair and reliant on local authority carers, benefit cheques and doctors, he is a damaged man who admits he is quick to anger and slow to trust. He has tried to kill himself twice and thoughts of suicide are never far from his mind.

There is one year of his life from which Baverstock cannot move on, when as a 14-year-old he was sent to the Catholic-run St William's Community Home for troubled boys in Market Weighton, near York. It was set up by a group of Catholic teachers called the De La Salle Brotherhood in 1960. Since 1992, when St William's was finally closed, close to 200 men have come forward and claimed to have been either physically or sexually abused or both. Now 142 are suing for compensation which could cost the Roman Catholic church in England £8m.

One man has been convicted over the hundreds of allegations. In 2004 the home's former head, Brother James Carragher, was jailed for 14 years for abusing children, all aged between 10 and 16. He was, said one of the detectives involved in the case, "the most evil of men" who had regularly raped the boys in his care. He had earlier served four years in jail for similar offences. Two of his De La Salle colleagues were acquitted and the cases against another three men were dropped before coming to trial.

But last week the legal wrangling over who was responsible for the failings that led to what is the biggest historical abuse claim against the Catholic church in England had looked to be finally resolved when Leeds crown court ruled that the Catholic diocese of Middlesbrough was liable for running the former children's home at the centre of the scandal. The diocese had claimed that the lay order ran it. Although the De La Salle Brothers were in senior positions, Judge Simon Hawkesworth found that they were not employed by the lay order and it was the diocese that had the power to appoint staff.

Dr Jim Whiston, Middlesbrough diocese company secretary, said the bishops and the trustees were very disappointed with the decision. But he dashed the temporary euphoria of Baverstock and the other 141 claimants when he added: "We understand our legal advisers are considering an appeal and we, therefore, intend to make no further comment at this time."

So the case looks set to drag on.

Some 2,000 children and 500 staff were at St William's over the 30-year period that has been the subject of two police investigations and several court cases. Not only the children but also some of the staff have claimed to be victims of what went on at the institution. A soon-to-be-published Independent Police Complaints Commission inquiry may, sources suggest, demand disciplinary action against named officers involved in Operation Aldgate, the second Humberside police investigation that looked at whether the abuse at St William's was a systematic and organised paedophile ring.

One former headteacher, Ben Mackay, told the Observer in 2005 that the charges of child abuse brought against him, which were later dropped, had left him living in "fear and distress".

"They talked of the trauma on the part of these former pupils. They have no idea what it did to us, and I don't think they cared," he said at the time.

But for St William's boys such as Baverstock the news that the diocese was likely to appeal against the judgment was a "slap in the face, a disgrace".

"This is the most horrific scandal, the biggest, the worst, the scale of it is just beyond comprehension. There are others who evaded justice and I find that offensive. But I also find it deeply offensive that the bishops and the priests of the Catholic church are continuing to ask people to come into their churches and pray and respect them when no one in that institution can face up to the reality of what happened here, can turn round and say sorry. It's not about us getting money, it never was.

"We were sent into their care and they should have cared for us. Not raped and abused and beaten us, punched and kicked us and forced cleaning fluid down our throats. We lived in fear and in silence and someone needs to acknowledge that.

"The scale of this is just so big, I have never spoken to anyone I was at St William's with since the day I left, but I saw the scale myself, it was clear. I'd be very surprised if there are any false claimants, it's not a bandwagon you want to climb on, is it? We'll likely all be dead by the time the Catholic church is forced to take any kind of responsibility.

"I need to be believed and children like me were never believed. That's why I need the church to say sorry. It's not going to change anything, my life is destroyed, it'll stay destroyed. But at least I'll have been believed."

Brother Aidan Kilty, Provincial of the De La Salle Brothers, said: "It has always been our understanding that the De La Salle Brothers were, neither in law, nor in practice, the responsible management of St William's. This has now been confirmed by the judgment of the high court."

A spokesman for the lay order said everyone had been left devastated by what had happened at St William's. "It's affected everyone, it's a terrible thing to have hanging over the order." But a source close to the Catholic church said there was a desire to see the case settled once and for all, although there was concern that many of the men bringing the compensation claim may not be true victims but are "jumping on the bandwagon".

"This is such a historical case in all senses of the word, it is a source of frustration that it goes on. It's just driven by outside forces, the insurers; court cases are just a big machine that no one can stop."

David Greenwood, the solicitor co-ordinating the men's action, said four new cases of former pupils claiming to have been abused at St William's had come forward since the publicity over the crown court decision. "These are men, often with very troubled lives, who are looking for some kind of validation. Many will never have spoken about what happened to them. The good news about this case is that they are coming forward and that the police have moved on sufficiently with their practices that they handle these cases well and with expertise that was lacking just a decade ago.

"The scenarios and the patterns are so familiar now that it's immediately obvious someone is speaking the truth. The sad thing is that there are so many more out there; the enormity of the case means there are a large number of men whose lives have been blighted by what happened at St William's and we will never hear of them, many will be in prison, many are dead."

Michael, 47, is another St William's victim. He is extremely proud of having managed to stay out of trouble since leaving the home, a beaten and abused young boy, and he now cares for his seriously ill father. "I'm going to the funeral of one of the boys next week; choked on his own vomit. I gave him a lift from town just the other day, he was pretty broken, you can see it. Another lad I knew committed suicide a while back. A lot more are inside, lifers. It ruins you, an experience like that, especially when you're struggling already," he said.

"A lot of the boys have dropped out of this compensation case, but I'm going to try to stay with it, no matter how long the church tries to stretch it out through the courts. It's the only thing we have left now really, trying to hold them to account."

The Guardian

Evangelist Tony Alamo gets 175 years in jail for sex crimes

The Watchmen — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:00:00 -0800

Evangelist Tony Alamo was sentenced Friday to 175 years in prison for taking underage girls across state lines for sex, effectively punishing him for the rest of his life for molesting children he took as "brides" in his ministry.

During Friday's hearing, some of Alamo's victims testified about how their families were destroyed while the evangelist took over their lives.

Alamo, 75, had been convicted in July on a 10-count federal indictment. U.S. District Judge Harry F. Barnes said Alamo used his status as father figure and pastor and threatened and threatened the girls with "the loss of their salvation."

"Mr. Alamo, one day you will face a higher a greater judge than me, may he have mercy on your soul," Barnes said.

Just before Barnes sentenced Alamo, the evangelist offered a brief statement to the court praising God then later adding:

"I'm glad I'm me and not the deceived people in the world."

Alamo's lawyers said they planned to appeal Barnes' ruling. His defense offered a doctor who said he suffered from hardening arteries, diabetes, glaucoma and other health problems. However on cross-examination the doctor acknowledged he saw Alamo only once in 2004 and that the purpose of Alamo's visit was to get an eye lift to make him appear younger.

The evangelist will stay in Texarkana pending a Jan. 13 hearing in which Barnes will decide whether Alamo's victims will get restitution from him. After that hearing, Barnes said Alamo would go to a federal prison that has hospital facilities.

A woman Alamo took as a child "bride" at age 8 challenged the evangelist from the witness stand Friday to submit himself to God's judgment. Reading from lined notebook paper, she said Alamo tore her family apart by taking her as a child bride and described how she shook uncontrollably when he first molested her.

"You preyed on innocent children," she said staring down Alamo, who wore yellow prison scrubs and a windbreaker for the hearing.

"You have the audacity to ask for mercy. What mercy did you show us?" she said.

A moment later she asked, "What kind of man of God does what you have done?"

The woman told Barnes that she planned to become an FBI agent in order to help other child sex abuse victims.

Two other child brides testified. One, who said she is now employed full-time and has a life of her own outside of the ministry, said she hoped Alamo would spend the rest of his life in jail.

"Maybe the real God, not the God you made up, will have mercy on your soul," the woman said.

Barnes said there was ample evidence that Alamo engaged in a pattern of molesting younger and younger girls in his ministry.

Alamo accused his victims of lying, as he has done throughout his prosecution.

The New York Daily News

More than 5,600 people sign petition in favor of creationism

The Watchmen — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:44:13 -0800

Source:

A Riverside Seventh-day Adventist university is under fire for teaching evolution in its biology classes without telling students that the scientific explanation for the origins of life contradicts church beliefs.

The controversy has spurred debate among Adventists across the country. Some say La Sierra's biology classes are guided by Satan, and others point to the "overwhelming scientific evidence" in supporting evolution.

More than 5,600 people from around the country have signed an online petition that will be presented to the La Sierra University board of trustees at its Nov. 12 meeting. It states that creation occurred in six 24-hour days, expresses concern that evolution is presented as fact in Adventist universities and calls for the universities to explicitly inform students and parents how evolution is taught.

The ultimate goal of the petition drive is to require Adventist teaching on creation in La Sierra biology classes, said Shane Hilde, the Beaumont man and La Sierra graduate spearheading the petition drive. If that doesn't happen, petition supporters may push La Sierra to disassociate itself from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, he said.

The petition does not single out La Sierra, but Hilde said it is the target. Evolution opponents are looking into allegations of pro-evolution biases at other Adventist universities, he said.

The petition does not call for the dismissal of the three La Sierra biology professors who are at the center of the controversy. But Hilde said "that ultimately is what happens in these situations."

"I would blame the administration for hiring people like this," he said.

Lee Greer, one of the three targeted professors, declined to comment publicly. In an e-mail, Professor L. Lee Grismer called the matter a "minor controversy" and declined to discuss it further. Professor Gary Bradley did not return phone calls. In September, Bradley told the Web site Inside Higher Ed that he will not denounce or contradict evolutionary theory in his class.

University spokesman Larry Becker declined to reveal the professors' religious affiliations. About 90 percent of La Sierra's professors are Adventist, he said. Only Adventists are granted tenure.

University President Randal Wisbey declined to be interviewed before Nov. 12, saying he did not want to be seen as attempting to influence the board of trustees. In a written statement, he said, "We expect that students will be introduced to the prevailing scientific views within a supportive classroom environment that values the Seventh-day Adventist Church's contribution to the understanding of biblical creation."

In a May letter, he wrote, "People of faith who look at scientific data can reach differing conclusions and still be collegial as brothers and sisters in the church."

Evolution Debate

Academic tension between religion and the theory of evolution is not new. The 1925 Scopes trial of a teacher accused of violating a Tennessee law against teaching evolution is a landmark in U.S. legal history. Controversies have flared up across the country when local and state school boards have attempted to introduce creationism in public school classrooms.

But organized campaigns to force changes in university-level biology classes are rare, said Steven Newton, a project director for the National Center for Science Education, which defends the teaching of evolution.

Hilde said he was inspired to begin the petition drive in June after he read a letter online from prominent Adventist evangelist Rev. David Asscherick criticizing how La Sierra professors teach evolution, and by a short-lived Web site that advocated for Adventist teaching in biology classes.

A small number of parents and students have expressed concern about La Sierra's biology classes in recent years, Becker said. The university does not have a written policy on the teaching of evolution.

In response to the complaints, the 1,900-student university in September added a freshman-level seminar that discusses the intersection of religion and science, including the Adventist belief that creation occurred over six 24-hour days, Becker said. The seminar is required for all biology majors. The university has long had a similar, senior-level biology course, Becker said.

Hilde said the new seminar is a good step, but it's not enough. Adventist teachings on creation must be presented in biology classes alongside evolution, he said.

Biology instructors at La Sierra should continue teaching evolution, because that is the prevalent scientific view, Hilde said. But "it shouldn't be presented as a preference or as the best explanation," he said. "The church position is God created the Earth in six literal days. La Sierra as an institution of the church needs to treat that as the preferential world view."

Hilde said Adventist beliefs were not mentioned in a biology class he took at La Sierra several years ago.

Opinions Differ

Although the petition drive has spurred debate among Adventists nationwide, some La Sierra biology majors, like Tania Aguilar, were unaware of the controversy. Aguilar, an Adventist, supports adding a discussion on Biblical creationism to courses that include evolutionary theory.

"They should teach both views so people know of and are aware of both sides of the story," Aguilar, 18, said as she strolled out of her anatomy class Tuesday. "Then they can make their own decision what they're going to believe in."

"I agree," said classmate Cynthia Salgado, who is Catholic. "But don't have it in the same class."

Salgado, 19, is taking a course on Adventist beliefs and said that class, and the new freshman seminar, are appropriate venues to discuss Adventist perspectives on creation.

"It should stay in religion classes," she said. "Don't mix science with religion."

About 30 percent of La Sierra students are non-Adventist, Becker said.

Official Teaching

Worldwide Adventist Church President Jan Paulsen addressed the evolution controversy in June by calling on all Adventist university professors to advocate church teaching that creation occurred during six 24-hour days.

"Faith is certainly not subject to the findings of science," he wrote.

Ervin Taylor, executive publisher of Riverside-based Adventist Today magazine and a professor emeritus of anthropology at UC Riverside, does not believe the Bible contradicts evolutionary theory.

He and other Adventists do not take "six days" to literally mean six modern days.

At Loma Linda University, another Inland Adventist institution, the board of trustees recently asked the university administration to prepare a statement on how creationism is taught, said university spokesman Richard Weismeyer.

He declined to comment on how biology classes deal with the subject and whether the board was reacting to the La Sierra controversy.

Leonard Brand, chairman of the university's department of earth and biological sciences, did not return phone calls.

Art Chadwick, a research professor of geology at Southwestern Adventist University in Texas, said instructors who don't instill in their students the view that creation occurred in six literal days should not be allowed to teach at Adventist universities.

At Southwestern Adventist, Biblical creation is brought up in biology classes and in a philosophy of science class, Chadwick said.

"If they claim to be Seventh-day Adventist, then they have a belief system whose integrity depends on what the Bible says about life origins," he said. "Not to present that would be antithetical to what Adventist universities are about. Why not go to a state university?"

Reach David Olson at 951-368-9462 or dolson@PE.com

Ohio Woman Says Clinic Turned Her Away Because She's Not Married

The Watchmen — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 08:33:09 -0800

DAYTON, Ohio — An Ohio woman has been complaining to various officials because she says a hospital facility refused to help her get pregnant because she's not married.

Karri O'Reilly acknowledges that Kettering Reproductive Medicine outside Dayton has religious ties, but she says it should not have turned her away because its parent organization also accepts taxpayer funds.

Kettering Health Network, which is affiliated with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, has released a statement saying it's now reviewing its policies.

Forty-year-old O'Reilly says when she called the clinic to make an appointment for in vitro fertilization she was asked about her husband, and when she said she didn't have one she was told Kettering couldn't treat her.

FOX News / AP

Kettering hospital refused to help unmarried woman get pregnant

Dayton filmmaker Karri O’Reilly’s last project was a horror flick called “Fertile Ground,” about “a crazy lady out in the country who thinks she’s pregnant.”

The title’s irony isn’t lost on her. O’Reilly, 40, has been trying unsuccessfully to become pregnant. After undergoing nine rounds of artificial insemination, she decided to try in vitro fertilization and called Kettering Reproductive Medicine to schedule an appointment. It seemed a logical move: The clinic bills itself on its Web site as “Dayton’s only full-service reproductive center with all services at one convenient location.”

The receptionist peppered her with routine questions, including, “What is your husband’s name?”

“I don’t have a husband,” O’Reilly replied.

“Oh, we can’t treat you then,” she was told. “Kettering Health Network has a policy against treating unmarried people.”

O’Reilly was stunned. “Are you kidding me?” she asked. “Seriously?”

In the weeks since being denied treatment, she has been anything but silent.

“They’re a religious-based organization and it’s within their rights to make these kinds of decisions — provided they don’t take taxpayer money,” O’Reilly said. “But they do. They take a lot of money from the federal government. That means they can’t be discriminatory in treatment. If you take in a dime of taxpayer money, the rules change.”

The rules may be changing, in fact, because of her vocal opposition. Her complaints to numerous officials prompted Kettering Health Network, which is affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist faith, to review its policy. Its network of hospitals includes Kettering, Grandview and Southview Medical Centers as well as Greene Memorial Hospital. Miriam Cartmell, Administrative Director of Women and Children’s Services for Kettering Medical Center, said in a prepared statement, “Like many faith-based organizations, our focus is on offering reproductive medicine service to married couples. We refer requests from individuals to other centers who have historically served these types of requests. We are reviewing our position on this, given the request of this individual.”

O’Reilly said she’s encouraged by the hospital’s decision to revisit the policy. “That’s awesome,” she said. “At least now they will look at it. It’s a step in the right direction.”

O’Reilly, who has served as producer for films such as “Blue Car” and “Saving Shiloh,” has built a successful career and achieved financial stability. A graduate of Wayne High School and the Wright State University film program, she moved to Dayton from Los Angeles four years ago so she could be closer to her parents, Dennis and Lucille O’Reilly, who support her decision. She has upgraded from a 624-square-foot house in L.A. to a 3,500-square-foot home in Grafton Hill. Her two sisters have donated baby gear.

“As far as being in a traditional two-parent family, I would love it too,” she said. At 40, however, she can’t afford to wait any longer: “I’m not the Octomom; I’m not looking for some slot-machine payoff of children. But I’m not going to live my life based on someone’s idealized version of the family.”

She’s not waiting around for Kettering Health Network to change its mind, either; she has already scheduled an appointment with a fertility specialist in Cincinnati. She’s not gay, but she doesn’t think lesbians should be denied treatment. “On their own Web site, Kettering Health Network clearly states they don’t deny treatment or discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sex, ability to pay or sexual preference, yet this policy clearly discriminates against gay people, if only by default.”

Her crusade, in other words, has become a matter of principle.

“It’s so unjust and such a ridiculously outdated policy,” she said. “Why use homophobia and discrimination on the basis of marital status to keep good loving parents from having children?”

More Than 15,000 Bibles Confiscated in Malaysia

The Watchmen — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:36:21 -0800

Source:

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia —

Malaysian authorities have confiscated more than 15,000 Bibles in recent months because they referred to "God" as "Allah," a translation that has been banned in this Muslim-majority country, Christian church officials said Thursday.

The alleged seizure of the Bibles, imported from neighboring Indonesia, is certain to reignite complaints by religious minorities that their right to practice their faiths freely has come under threat as the government panders to the Muslim majority.

A growing sense of discrimination among the minorities is chipping away at Malaysia's reputation as a harmonious multiethnic nation that practices a moderate brand of Islam.

The Rev. Hermen Shastri, general secretary of the Council of Churches of Malaysia, said authorities seized a consignment of 10,000 copies sent from Jakarta to Kuching in Sarawak state on Sept. 11 because the Indonesian-language Bibles contained the word "Allah."

Indonesian language is similar to Malaysian language, both of which use "Allah" as translation for God in both Islamic and Christian traditions.

Another 5,100 Bibles, also imported from Indonesia, were seized in March, said an official from the Bible Society of Malaysia, who asked not to be named for fear of angering the government.

A Home Ministry official said he was not aware of the seizures. He said he couldn't be named without his superiors' clearance.

Malaysia has banned non-Muslims from using the word "Allah" in their texts, saying the word is Islamic and may upset Muslims. About 60 percent of the country's 28 million people are Malay Muslims while 25 percent are ethnic Chinese and 8 percent are Indians. Many of the Chinese and Indians are Christians.

The Roman Catholic Church is challenging the "Allah" ban in court, saying it is unconstitutional and discriminates against those worshipping in Malay language. The case has been stuck in preliminary hearings for almost two years.

Shastri said the church council is concerned over the continued detention "of our holy book, which is depriving congregations ... and denying them the use of their Bible."

"For most of the Christians, this is not an issue of going against the authorities. They have been using (the word "Allah") for a long time," he said.

Church officials say Allah is not exclusive to Islam but is an Arabic word that predates Islam.

Besides the Bible seizures, Malaysia has been embroiled in other religious disputes. Some were over the conversion of minors to Islam and the religion of deceased people who are said to have converted to Islam secretly before their death. Hindus have also protested the demolition of several temples by authorities.

Where paths of faith converge

The Watchmen — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:17:34 -0800

Source:

As the 35 youth at Camp Brotherhood entered the chapel Tuesday, the laughing, shouting and talking fell to a low murmur.

Some even took off their shoes as they entered the worship space to see three chest-high, wooden pedestals set up in front of the altar. One held the Bible, one the Torah, and another the Quran.

The Rev. William Treacy, Camp Brotherhood’s co-founder and chaplain, introduced the books to the group and invited each person to look through them while Rev. Heidi Fish, executive director, chanted “hallelujah.”

“This is the vision we had 40 years ago,” Treacy said of the facility east of Conway. “It’s a vision that took 40 years to get going.”

That vision turned into the 2009 Interfaith Youth Summit, a gathering of young adults ages 12 to 17 from many different faiths. Among the 35 youth were Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, Muslims, Jews and other Christians.

The teens spent the weekend meeting in small and large groups to talk about their faiths, but most importantly to listen and learn about other beliefs. The weekend peaked at a campfire Tuesday evening when the teens burned pieces of paper on which they had written stereotypes and assumptions about their religions.

The summit’s facilitator, Julie Hanson, 44, of Edmonds, said it was challenging to bring up the stereotypes, but the group trusted each other.

“We’re going to bring these questions up, but they’re not being said with hatred,” Hanson said.

Now age 90, Treacy said the gathering is why he and Rabbi Raphael Levine first envisioned the camp in 1966, and conceived Camp Brotherhood. Now Treacy is seeing the idea in action.

“It’s one of the best programs we’ve had in Camp Brotherhood,” Treacy said.

The story of how Treacy and Levine turned a dairy farm east of Conway into Camp Brotherhood almost sounds like the start of a joke — a priest and a rabbi walked into a television studio.

Levine convinced KOMO TV in Seattle to air a weekly program called “Challenge” in which he, Treacy and a Protestant pastor talked about faith, religion and current events in an open, round-table format. The program aimed to ease religious tensions as the country elected its first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. The show aired for 14 years from 1960 to 1974.

Midway through, the group decided to create a place where young Christians, Muslims and Jews could get together and learn about each other in a non-confrontational setting.

Treacy first became interested in teaching people about his faith and learning about other faiths in 1948, when he created and distributed newspaper advertisements across Washington for the Archdiocese of Seattle.

“It was just a culmination of my whole priesthood,” Treacy said. “I consider it part of my ministry.”

In 1968, when the first building at Camp Brotherhood was constructed, the idea flopped. Treacy and Levine had the vision, 300 acres of land and the newly built Fisher Lodge, named for the Fisher family associated with KOMO and Fisher Broadcasting. But the religious community was uninterested.

Treacy said a number of problems contributed. Most denominations and religions already had their own camps, but many people were dubious of Treacy and Levine’s camp.

“Jews and Christians and Muslims getting together? People thought it was a cult,” Treacy said. “They could not believe it was a reality.”

Fish, the camp’s executive director and an ordained Lutheran pastor, said the camp has been misunderstood for much of its existence and often confused with a nearby naturalist community.

“People don’t know what we are,” Fish said. “There are people who have been convinced that we’re a cult; we’ve had people think we’re a nudist club.”

For 40 years, the camp continued to offer lodging and kitchen facilities to public and non-profit organizations, such as schools, art clubs and faith groups. But Treacy and the board didn’t want to be running what they began seeing as a hotel, and about 20 years ago considered selling the land entirely and dissolving the organization.

Treacy said he was discouraged by the lack of interest in interfaith gatherings. Levine did not even live long enough to see the youth summit in existence.

But after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Treacy said people were suddenly more aware of other nationalities and religions.

“There is a movement, a cultural maturation,” Treacy said. “You see it in racial relations, you see it in the election of (President Barack) Obama. There comes a time when people are ready for change. I think we’re nearing that now.”

One week before the Interfaith Youth Summit, religious leaders from various faith organizations gathered at Camp Brotherhood for the Regional Interfaith Leadership Summit run by Northwest Interfaith Community Outreach.

Rabbi Ted Falcon, who helped lead the day of prayer and workshops, said the work of Camp Brotherhood may have been slow to start, but the difference it has made will be lasting.

“It has created a greater consciousness that such things are not only possible but desirable,” Falcon said. “The whole idea that the camp was formed by a rabbi and a priest is truly unique. I don’t know any other place like this.”

Before the adults headed off to workshops, a Tibetan Buddhist led the group that included Christians, Jews and Muslims in a meditative walk around the room, ringing bells and chanting in a foreign language.

Treacy watched from the side. At 90, he wears no glasses and carries no cane. As he walked through the crowd, people stopped to hug him and talk with him.

“I call him the best Muslim I know,” said Jamal Rahman, Sufi minister for the Interfaith Community Church in Seattle.

Rahman said the word “Muslim” means “one who is surrendered to God.”

At the Youth Summit, Treacy talked with the 12- to 17-year-olds as they wrapped up their weekend and summed up what they had learned. Treacy encouraged them to continue the relationships they had formed, whether on Facebook, at a bowling alley or over dinner.

Many of the teens met each other for the first time that weekend, and most had little interaction with other faiths, but they bonded instantly.

“Right off the bat, it’s like everyone has known each other for five years,” said Iman Baghai, 14, of Seattle. “And then all these ethnic stereotypes just crash.”

Baghai said he had never met someone from a Seventh-day Adventist community, and he appreciated dispelling myths about his Muslim faith.

“It can range from having so many kids to blowing things up,” Baghai said of the assumptions people have made about his faith. “It kind of gets to you and it gets annoying. This kind of discussion eases the pain.”

Even though Treacy lived his life as a Catholic priest, which committed him to Christian teachings, he said he believes these kinds of conversations are exactly what Jesus encouraged. Treacy said Jesus never turned people away.

“He ate with them, went to their homes, cooked meals with them,” Treacy said. “The way of Jesus is simply the way of love. If I give a blood transfusion to a Muslim or a Hindu, I’m doing what Jesus wanted me to do.”

• Aaron Burkhalter can be reached at 360-416-2141 or aburkhalter@skagitpublishing.com.

Black cardinal in pole position to be next pope

The Watchmen — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0800

The Scotsman

POPE Benedict has appointed a Ghanaian cardinal to one of the most influential jobs in the Vatican, increasing the possibility that the next pontiff might be a black man.

He named Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, of Cape Coast, Ghana, to head the justice and peace commission, a position roughly equivalent to justice minister.

Turkson, 61, Ghana's first cardinal, becomes only the second African to head the body,
which advises the Pope and the Vatican on justice issues and prepares documents on topics such as human rights, immigration and law.

He has just completed a high-profile stint as the relator, or secretary-general, of the three-week synod on Africa that ends on Sunday, and has been tipped in Church circles to be a strong candidate for the papacy after the death of Benedict.

Turkson's new appointment will give him increased visibility in the Roman Catholic Church and around the world.

The Catholic Church is growing faster in Africa than on any other continent and Turkson has years of experience in relations with Islam, an attribute that should stand him in good stead for a shot at the papacy.

He was born in Ghana and educated there as well as in the United States. At the start of the synod three weeks ago, Turkson was asked if, after Barack Obama became the first black US president, the next pope could be an African. He answered: "Why not?"

There have been only two African popes in the history of the Church, the last in the fifth century.

Vatican's fury as court bans crucifixes in Italian classrooms because they 'breach religious rights of children'

The Watchmen — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:47:23 -0800

Crucifixes have been banned in Italian schools by a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights.

The decision has enraged politicians, with Italy's foreign minister Franco Frattini saying: 'This is a death blow for a Europe of values and rights.

'Europe's roots lie in its Christian identity. At a time when we're trying to bring religions closer, the Christian religion gets whacked.

'The government will appeal.'

The case was brought by a Finnish woman, Soile Lautsi, who is married to an Italian.

Both are atheists. She had complained that her children had to attend a school in northern Italy which had crucifixes in every room, as laid down in law as a reflection of the country's Roman Catholic heritage.

The European court's ruling, which will be enforced in three months, said crucifixes could disturb children who were not Christians.

It could force a Europe-wide review of the use of religious symbols in government-run schools.

The court rejected arguments by Italy's government that the crucifix was a national symbol of culture, history and identity, tolerance and secularism.

And it ordered the Italian government to pay 5000 Euro moral damages to Lautsi.

The judgement said that having a crucifix in the classroom was a 'violation of the right to parents to educate children as to their own wishes and a violation of liberty of religion of pupils'.

Italy has been in the throes of national debate on how to deal with a growing population of immigrants, mostly Muslims, and the court sentence is likely to become another battle cry for the centre-right government's policy to restrict newcomers.

Army veteran banned from selling poppies in shopping centre over health and safety rules

Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini said having a cross in the classroom was ' a symbol of our tradition.'

Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini introduced legislation in 1924 ordering all classrooms to display crucifixes. Despite several attempts to have the law overturned in recent years it has stood.

Mrs Lautsi, a Finnish national, said that she felt having a crucifix in the classroom where her children Dataico, 11, and Sami Albertin, 13, were taught was a 'violation of their freedom' and of 'right to freedom of religion'.

The eight-year case centred on a State primary school in Abano Terme near Padua in northern Italy and she brought the case to Strasbourg after her local court threw it out.

Today in a 16-page decision the seven judges of the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled in her favour, saying: 'The presence of the crucifix could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion.

'This could be encouraging for religious pupils, but also disturbing for pupils who practised other religions or were atheists, particularly if they belonged to religious minorities.'

The court added that secular, state-run schools must 'observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education,' where attendance is compulsory.

It further rejected Italian legal arguments that the crucifix was somehow a symbol that promoted pluralism.

Today a Vatican spokesman said: 'We will look closely at the judgement before making any comment.'

However a Vatican source said: 'This goes completely against the grain and we are furious at this decision.'

Conservative Catholic politicians were also furious with Agriculture Minister Luca Zaia of the Northern League calling it 'shameful' and a member of PM Silvio
Berlusconi's People of Freedom Party, Antonio Mazzocchi, saying that Europe was forgetting its Christian heritage.

Alessandra Mussolini, whose grandfather brought in the legislation, stormed: 'This is an attempt to erase our Christian roots. They are trying to create a Europe without identity and tradition.'

Crucifixes are common in Italian public buildings despite the postwar Constitution's separation of Church and State. In practice, with Catholicism being such a part of Italy's cultural identity, local bodies decide whether they want crosses in schools and courthouses, and the majority of them do.

There has been outrage in the past after it emerged some Italian schools had dropped Nativity plays and Easter plays so as not offend Muslim pupils and other religions.

The Daily Mail

Pope invites Tony Blair to Vatican summit to discuss Church's fears that politics is losing its religion

The Watchmen — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:37:21 -0800

Losing influence: Pope Benedict XVI greets pilgrims before his weekly address at the Vatican today

Catholic convert Tony Blair is among several world leaders being invited to attend a top level summit with Pope Benedict XVI to discuss the role of the Church in politics.

The two-day summit will be held at the Vatican and will include other Catholic politicians from all over the world, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, U.S. vice president Joe Biden, former Spanish PM Jose Maria Aznar, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Church officials have been quietly working on the conference, which will be called 'Witnesses of Christ in the Political Community', for several months.

Items to be discussed include the family, right to life, Christian roots, education and bio-ethics.

Vatican sources said that Pope Benedict XVI was becoming 'increasingly concerned' at how Christian values were being eroded because of various world governments introducing legislation against Catholic teaching.

During his time in office Mr Blair chose to remain a member of the Church of England after spin doctor Alistair Campbell famously warned him: 'We don't do religion.'

Some Labour policies were at odds with the Catholic Church and Mr Blair even incurred the wrath of the late Pope John Paul II by refusing to back down over the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The former Prime Minister famously converted to Catholicism after he left Downing Street in 2007.

He has met current Pope Benedict XVI and he has also set up The Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Two months ago he told the Communion and Liberation Committee in Rimini, Italy, that switching to Catholicism was like 'coming home' and is now 'where my heart is.'

Vatican sources said the timing of the meeting would be pushed forward to early next year given the decision earlier this week by the European Court of Human Rights that Italy should remove crucifixes from classrooms.

A senior Vatican official said: 'There is growing alarm within the Vatican and especially the Holy Father that not enough prominence is being given to basic Christian and family values by governments.

'This has been further increased by this week's ruling by the European Court of Human rights and the display of crucifixes in Italian classrooms - it is outrageous that such an institution could interfere in the cultural heritage of Italy in such a way.'

The landmark decision caused outrage amongst Italian politicians and was also slammed by the Vatican who described it as 'wrong, short sighted and regretful.'

The Daily Mail

Pope calls for strengthening of religious freedom in Iran

The Watchmen — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:55:52 -0800

By John Thavis
Posted: 11/2/2009

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI called on Iran to strengthen guarantees of religious freedom for the country's tiny Catholic minority.

Welcoming Iran's new ambassador to the Vatican Oct. 29, the pope praised the "deep religious sensibility" of the Iranian people, and said the Catholic community there -- which dates to the church's early centuries -- has a long history of living in harmony with the Muslim majority.

"The Holy See trusts that the Iranian authorities will know how to strengthen and guarantee for Christians the freedom to profess their faith," the pope told the ambassador, Ali Akbar Naseri, in a speech.

He said the Vatican expects the Iranian government to "assure to the Catholic community the essential conditions for its existence, notably the possibility of having sufficient religious personnel and ease of movement throughout the country to ensure religious services for the faithful."

The pope said he hoped for a dialogue with authorities that would help "improve the situation of Christian communities" in the context of civil society, as well as reinforce their sense of belonging to the life of the nation.

In Iran, a country of about 70 million people, there are about 100,000 Christians, the vast majority of whom are Armenian Orthodox. According to Vatican statistics, Catholics number about 17,000.

The pope avoided specific mention of international political issues, including Iran's nuclear energy program. But the ambassador used his speech to the pontiff to denounce critics of the Iranian nuclear program, as well as what he called the "Islamophobic politics" of the West.

The ambassador said Iran's program to develop a nuclear energy program is in line with international norms and reflects Iran's support for nuclear disarmament.

He said it was a source of "amazement and strong protest" that Iran's peaceful nuclear program has been obstructed by some powerful nations, while countries that have nuclear weapons continue to be supported.

The United States and other Western countries fear that Iran could turn enriched uranium into weapons, and as a compromise solution the International Atomic Energy Agency recently proposed that Iran ship and store most of its uranium abroad. The proposal was being given consideration by Iran.

The ambassador said Iran's Christians have always enjoyed respect for their rights. He noted that despite their low numbers the country's Christians still are allocated three parliamentary seats.

The ambassador outlined a wide array of potential areas for Iranian-Vatican cooperation, saying the two states shared common positions against atheism, social injustice and oppression, the use of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism -- in particular religious terrorism -- and the "military aggression of arrogant powers."

He also complained of an "imperialism of information" in the modern world, and the "spread of immorality" through satellite dishes and the Internet.

In resolving world problems, the ambassador said, a decisive contribution can be made by "the two great Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islam." He omitted Judaism, the third monotheistic religion with a spiritual tradition that goes back to Abraham.

In his speech, the pope said faith in God should prompt all believers to work for the defense of human values and rights, beginning with religious liberty and freedom of conscience. He noted with satisfaction the series of regular dialogue sessions between the Vatican and Iranian Muslim representatives in recent years.

The pope thanked the ambassador for the "kind words" of his speech, and for the greeting he brought from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Fannie Mae to Rent Foreclosed Homes Back to Borrowers

The Watchmen — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:02:17 -0800

Nick Timiraos | The Wall Street Journal | November 5, 2009

Fannie Mae plans to allow homeowners facing foreclosure to stay in their homes and rent them for up to one year as part of the latest effort to help troubled borrowers while keeping a glut of foreclosed properties from hitting the housing market.

The Deed for Lease Program, which Fannie plans to roll out on Thursday, will offer borrowers who fail to complete or don't qualify for a loan modification or other workout to deed their property to the lender in exchange for a lease. Borrowers-turned-tenants will be able to sign leases of up to 12 months and will pay market rents, which in most cases are lower than the cost of mortgage payments.

Fannie Mae wouldn't say how many homeowners it expects will take advantage of the program. The company acquired 57,000 properties through foreclosure during the first half of the year, bringing its total real-estate owned inventory to 63,000 properties valued at $6 billion. The rental program will allow Fannie to hold inventory off of already saturated housing markets and makes a bet that the housing market will be stronger one year from now.

"If you keep more people in their homes, it's better for the community. It's better for the financial institutions that own those homes," says Jay Ryan, vice president of equity investments at Fannie Mae. "Hopefully less foreclosure product on the market will help stabilize those communities."

Borrowers who haven't missed any mortgage payments aren't eligible for the program, and the borrower's mortgage servicer would have to show that a borrower isn't eligible for a loan modification before the homeowner could apply for the Deed for Lease program.
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"I'm sure Fannie is hoping that when they sell the properties, the values will be higher," says David Berson, chief economist for PMI Group Inc., a private-mortgage insurer. "A year from now, we should be a year further into the economic recovery, and housing demand will be stronger…That will allow you to release homes that have been foreclosed upon but not put on the market."

The program could also help Fannie preserve the value of its nonperforming assets because occupied homes are more likely to hold up better that vacant homes. The rental programs also provide some rental income to the government-backed mortgage finance giants.

"If they can keep the property occupied and have at least some positive cash flow, that may end up being less worse than going the route of kicking them out and having a vacant home," says Thomas Lawler, an independent housing economist based in Leesburg, Va.

The move by Fannie follows a program by Freddie Mac that began offering month-to-month leases to owner-occupants who had lost their homes to foreclosure. But Freddie continues to market those homes for sale. The Fannie Mae program differs in one important respect: foreclosed homes won't be listed for sale. In February, both companies began allowing tenants whose landlords had lost their properties to foreclosure to sign month-to-month leases.

Borrowers will have to show that the monthly rent is less than 31% of their gross income. The program, which will use a professional management company to handle maintenance, will allow borrowers to renew their leases on a term or monthly basis and properties that are sold during the lease period will include an assignment of that lease to the new owner.

So far, around two-thirds of owner-occupants who have been offered monthly leases by Freddie Mac have taken them, and the break down of owner-occupants to tenants who have rented under the program is roughly two-to-one.

Freddie Mac says it is considering whether to extend longer-term leases to some troubled homeowners. "We're looking into our options because there are certain markets where there's just so much inventory on the market," said Ingrid Beckles, senior vice president of default asset management at Freddie Mac.

In recent months, some industry analysts have been puzzled over why more homes haven't been put up for sale as the rate of borrowers who default climbs higher. Well-intentioned efforts to keep families in their homes have led to delays that some analysts believe is prolonging the mortgage crisis by creating a "shadow" inventory of pent-up supply that will ultimately hit the market.

That has prompted some to question the logic of keeping homes off of the market at a time when demand for bank-owned properties has been soaring. The number of foreclosed properties for sale in Las Vegas, for example, has fallen to a less than three months' supply, according to SalesTraq, a local real-estate research firm. But housing demand typically falls in the winter, and the number of foreclosures continues to grow. "We're past the peak of when you would want to sell," says Mr. Lawler.

Over the past year, the Obama administration has increasingly used Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as the centerpiece of its housing-rescue policy, charging the mortgage-finance companies with spearheading a campaign to modify and refinance millions of troubled and at-risk homeowners. The rental programs join a series of other initiatives, including efforts to improve short sales, where a borrower sells the home for less than the value of the mortgage designed to help borrowers that may not qualify for those programs.

Write to Nick Timiraos at nick.timiraos@wsj.com

Scots Secretary Jim Murphy In Rome To Plan Pope's Visit To Scotland

The Watchmen — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:13:52 -0800

JIM MURPHY will travel to Rome this week to finalise a deal to bring the Pope to Scotland.

The Scottish Secretary will have talks with the Vatican about the details of Pope Benedict's tour of the UK next year.

It follows a meeting last week between Murphy and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who invited the Pope to Britain when he met him at the Vatican in February.

A preliminary itinerary included visits to Edinburgh, Birmingham and Oxford.

And it's now hoped a trip to Glasgow will be on his schedule.

Pope John Paul II said Mass in the city's Bellahouston Park and at Murrayfield in Edinburgh during his historic 1982 visit.

An insider said: "Jim has been given a lot of responsibility for liaising with the Vatican, not just in terms of the possibility of the Pope coming to Scotland. He's also taking a lead in terms of smoothing things over for the whole of the Pope's tour.

"It's now looking more likely that the Pope will come to Scotland."

Cardinal Keith O'Brien, leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland, will be with him in Rome.

It's thought that a formal announcement over the papal visit will be made either by the Vatican or the Government before Christmas.

Murphy said: "A visit from the Pope would be a fantastic occasion and welcomed by all faiths.

"It is too early to say if the Pope will be coming to Scotland next year but it certainly won't be for a lack of trying on my part."

m.aitken@sundaymail.co.uk

The Sunday Mail

Pope Benedict’s ‘Impelling Duty’: Rebuild the Full and Visible Unity of the Church

The Watchmen — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:12:09 -0800

By Deacon Keith Fournier
10/24/2009
Catholic Online

'To reunite all his children, scattered and led astray by sin, the Father willed to call the whole of humanity together into his Son's Church'.

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (Catholic Online) – On April 20, 2005 newly elected Pope Benedict XVI gave his first message at the end of a Mass he had concelebrated with the members of the College of Cardinals in the Sistine Chapel. He signaled his mission: “Nourished and sustained by the Eucharist, Catholics cannot but feel encouraged to strive for the full unity for which Christ expressed so ardent a hope in the Upper Room. The Successor of Peter knows that he must make himself especially responsible for his Divine Master's supreme aspiration. Indeed, he is entrusted with the task of strengthening his brethren (cf. Luke 22: 32). With full awareness, therefore, at the beginning of his ministry in the Church of Rome which Peter bathed in his blood, Peter's current Successor takes on as his primary task the duty to work tirelessly to rebuild the full and visible unity of all Christ's followers. This is his ambition, his impelling duty.”

The announcement of October 20, 2009 that an Apostolic Constitution will establish a “Personal Ordinariate” for Anglican Christians and their Clergy to enter into the full communion of the Catholic Church while retaining elements of their distinctive Anglican identity is generating a lot of Press. Secular news sources have offered some interesting analysis. A Wall Street Journal article written by Stacy Meichtry was entitled ,“The Great Unifier?” Though worth reading, it is the Title which will endure. The question mark will fall away as this historic moment unfolds over the coming years. Pope Benedict XVI is indeed the “Great Unifier.” The writer claims “Few expected Pope Benedict to reach out to other Christian churches aggressively when he was elected in April 2005”. However, anyone aware of the writings, history and ecclesiology (theology of the Church) of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, knew this would happen. In fact, I believe he is only warming up.

A Wall Street Journal article written by Francis X. Rocca entitled “The Pope Lets a Thousand Liturgies Bloom” is also worth reading. The Vatican correspondent for the Religious news Service wrote: “It may seem ironic that Pope Benedict should be presiding over such diversification of worship. After all, as head of the Vatican's doctrinal office for more than two decades prior to his 2005 election as pope, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger built a reputation as the church's most vigilant guardian of orthodoxy, receiving the nickname "God's Rottweiler." Benedict is hardly permissive when it comes to liturgy. …Though even most Catholics are not aware of it, many sanctioned modes of worship have co-existed within the church over its 2,000-year history. The Ambrosian Rite, celebrated only in certain parts of northern Italy, with its own special prayers, vestments and type of chant, is one of the most ancient, dating back at least to the fourth century. Not to speak of the many Eastern Catholic Churches in full communion with Rome, which share a rich liturgical heritage with Eastern Orthodoxy.”

Some in the “religious” Press, like Rod Dreher who writes for Beliefnet, are zeroing in on the other implications. Dreher was impressed by the excellent piece written by European Catholic Journalist Sandro Magister entitled “Knock, and It Shall Be Opened to You. As Long As It's According to Tradition.” He discusses Magisters claim in his own analysis entitled “Pope Benedict's Brilliant Strategy.” However, it is more than a strategy by this Pope, it is a mandate. Dreher has just discovered that this Pope really believes that the authentic Christian Tradition is not only about preserving the past and protecting orthodoxy and orthopraxy, but also about securing the path to the future. Many who have observed his ministry for years have known it all along. What is most heartening is that Dreher, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, encourages another aspect of the work of unity undertaken by this Pope, the full communion of the “two lungs” of the Church, East and West.

Dreher writes: “What a blessing it would be if he and the Orthodox patriarchs could come to an understanding that could pave the way for reunion. Personally, I don't see how it could be done, given the wide divergence between Orthodox and Catholic theology since the Great Schism. But with God, all things are possible -- and I think as a purely secular matter (that is, for the sake of establishing a united front for the preservation and growth of the faith against a de-Christianizing world), re-establishing communion between Eastern and Western Christianity would be great for both. Long may this pope -- and the ecumenism of tradition -- live and prosper!” I say “Amen to that!”

The authentic ecumenical mission, the full and visible unity of the Church, was at the heart of Pope John Paul’s pontificate – and is at the heart of Pope Benedict’s - because it is in the center of the heart of the Lord. “I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me." (John 17: 20, 21) The Servant of God John Paul II released an Encyclical Letter bearing that scripture as its official name Ut Unum Sint. The implications of that Encyclical Letter have not been grasped by many Catholics. One of my favorite theologians, an Orthodox Layman named Oliver Clement, took up one of the challenges in the Encyclical and wrote a gem of a little book in 1997 entitled “You are Peter: An Orthodox theologians Reflection on the Exercise of Papal Primacy.”

In Catholic theology we teach what the early fathers, Saints and Councils throughout the ages have all affirmed; to belong to Jesus is to belong to His Body. Our membership in the Church is a participation in the life of God; what the Apostle Peter referred to as a “participation in the Divine nature”. (2 Peter 1:4) We speak of our Christian friends in other Christian communities who have been validly baptized in accordance with a Trinitarian formula as already being in “imperfect communion” with the One Church. This is why Catholics do not “re-baptize” a Christian from another community who comes into the Catholic Church. We speak of them as coming into “full communion” because they are already joined to the one Church in an “imperfect” or incomplete communion.

The Church is not some “thing”, outside of us, which we try to “fix” or have our “issues” with. The Church is not some human organization we created so that we could meet to study the Bible, support one another and do good works - as commendable as each of those endeavors may be. The Church is God’s Plan. Jesus came to found that Church and begin the New Creation. It is a communion from above into which we enter through Jesus Christ. It is His Body. He is the Head and we are the members. Through our Baptism the Church becomes our home, our mother, the place in which we now live our lives in Christ. To perceive, receive and to live this reality requires a continuing and dynamic conversion brought about by grace, which is mediated to us through the Sacraments and, most especially through our Eucharistic communion. We are sons and daughters of the Church now. In living our lives within her we are enlisted in the mission of carrying forward in time the continuing work of Jesus Christ.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, citing several ancient sources, states: “To reunite all his children, scattered and led astray by sin, the Father willed to call the whole of humanity together into his Son's Church. The Church is the place where humanity must rediscover its unity and salvation. The Church is "the world reconciled." She is that bark which "in the full sail of the Lord's cross, by the breath of the Holy Spirit, navigates safely in this world." According to another image dear to the Church Fathers, she is prefigured by Noah's ark, which alone saves from the flood. [St. Augustine, Serm. 96, 7, 9: PL 38, 588; St. Ambrose, De virg. 18, 118: PL 16, 297B; cf. already 1 Pet 3:20-21] [30, 953, 1219]” (#895)

This Church is both human and divine; thus her members still sin. Sometimes evil enters and rots her from within. Sadly, she has been divided, but that is not the Lord’s Plan. She is the means through which all men and women are invited to participate in the life of God and find true unity. She is, as the fathers were fond of saying, “the world reconciled” and a seed of the Kingdom to come. To her has been entrusted the Sacraments (Mysteries), the Word of God, and the gift of a Teaching Office - Magisterium - through which Jesus Christ continues to speak through the Holy Spirit. The Church is not an optional “extra” that we add on to our lives, she is our life and we live our lives now in Christ. From His wounded side she was birthed at the tree of Calvary, the altar of the new world. Through faith we are invited into this mystery and by grace we come to more fully comprehend and live it as we respond to the ongoing call to conversion and newness of life.

Pope Benedict’s ‘Impelling Duty’ is to rebuild the full and visible unity of this Church. It will be forged through orthodoxy (right teaching) and orthopraxy (right practice) but it will be lived within a legitimate diversity of expression within the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. What happened last week is just the beginning.

Supreme Court Refuses to Stop Release of Documents in Priest Sex Cases

The Watchmen — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:54:00 -0800

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States Supreme Court on Monday turned away a last-ditch appeal to stop the release of documents from sexual abuse lawsuits against priests in a Roman Catholic diocese in Connecticut.

The court refused to hear the appeal from the diocese, in Bridgeport, which has fought for years to prevent the release of the documents. Last month, the justices refused to grant a delay while they considered the diocese’s full appeal.

The order was issued without comment.

The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and The Hartford Courant have asked to see the documents. The Connecticut Supreme Court has ruled that more than 12,000 pages from 23 lawsuits against six priests should be unsealed.

The documents include depositions, affidavits and motions.

The records have been under seal since the diocese settled the cases in 2001. They could shed light on how Cardinal Edward M. Egan of New York handled the allegations when he was the bishop of Bridgeport.

The diocese says the First Amendment prohibits civil authorities from intruding in internal church decisions about priest assignments. Diocesan officials released a statement on Monday saying they were disappointed with the decision, but would work with the Connecticut courts on releasing the documents.

“We continue to believe that the constitutional issues presented, including the First Amendment rights of religious organizations and the privacy rights of all citizens, are significant and important for the court to consider,” the statement said.

The diocese also said that there had been a “true culture change” in the church, and that leaders had worked hard to address sexual abuse by the clergy and to support victims.

A hearing was planned for Nov. 9 in Superior Court in Waterbury, Conn., to determine when to release the documents.

Vatican Condemns ‘Dangerous’ Halloween

The Watchmen — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:13:38 -0700

THE Vatican yesterday slammed tonight’s Halloween celebrations as “anti-Christian” and “dangerous” because of its links to the occult.

The ghosts and goblins fun festival falls before tomorrow’s deeply-significant Roman Catholic holy day of All Saints.

The condemnation follows similar criticism from Catholic bishops in Spain who earlier his week urged parents not to let their children dress up for Halloween.

The Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano quoted liturgical expert Joan Maria Canals as saying: “Halloween has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.”

Canals urged parents “to try to direct the meaning of the feast towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death”.

L’Osservatore praised a church in Alcala de Henares, Spain, which had decided to hold a prayer vigil tonight, and the Paris archdiocese’s idea of having children play a lucky- dip game called Holywins instead of observing Halloween.

The article added: “These and similar initiatives in South America allow Catholic communities to have an alternative to the feast.”

Last year the Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire appealed for a total boycott, describing Halloween as a “dangerous celebration of horror and the macabre”.

The Vatican’s criticism of Halloween comes after it praisedthe witches and wizards saga Harry Potter – an about-face after an earlier strong condemnation of the series.

Meanwhile, officials from Italy’s Cats Protection League said it would increase patrols of volunteers tonight to stop black cats being snatched by Satanists.

Source:

Bankruptcy court reopens case of Tony Alamo follower to look for possible assets

The Watchmen — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:38:01 -0700

By Associated Press
7:44 AM CDT, October 21, 2009

TEXARKANA, Ark. (AP) — A bankruptcy judge has agreed to reopen the closed Oklahoma bankruptcy case of a member of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries.

A trustee overseeing the case of Thomas Scarcello asked to reopen the case to look for possible assets Scarcello may not have reported. Trustee Gerald Miller says his office has learned that some information may not be accurate.

Court records show Scarcello filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in the Eastern District of Oklahoma in September 2009. The case was closed and his debts were released in December 2008.

Fort Smith attorney Darrell Johnson represented Scarcello in the bankruptcy case and says he doesn't know what is happening. Johnson says he hasn't been able to talk with Scarcello.

Alamo was convicted in July of taking young girls across state lines for sex and is awaiting sentencing.

___

Information from: Texarkana Gazette, http://www.texarkanagazette.com

$3 Million Awarded In Suit Against Tony Alamo's Enforcer

The Watchmen — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:00:00 -0700

Little Rock, AR -- Evangelist Tony Alamo's alleged enforcer has been ordered to pay $3 million in restitution to two boys he's believed to have beaten bloody on the preacher's behalf.

Federal Judge Harry Barnes' order comes as alleged enforcer John Kolbek remains a fugitive. But lawyer W. David Carter said his clients can collect on church properties listed in Kolbek's name.

Carter represents two men who grew up in the church. Each described a twisted world where trivial infractions caused beatings, punitive fasts and threats of damnation from Alamo.

Alamo remains in jail pending a Nov. 13 sentencing hearing over his federal conviction on a 10-count indictment accusing him of taking young girls across state lines for sex.

Digtriad

Impact of pope's decree begins to dawn on Church of England members

The Watchmen — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 02:07:06 -0700

For many sitting in the pews of Saint Augustine's Anglican church in north London it was a particularly special Sunday. There were three confirmations and one man received his first communion.

But amid the applause and smart outfits there was another sense of occasion, with people coming to terms with one of the biggest developments in Christendom since the Reformation.

Last week's decree from Pope Benedict, announcing the creation of a special section in the Roman Catholic church for ex-Anglican communities, has aroused strong opinions among traditionalist clergy. It has cast doubt on the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the future of the Anglican Communion.

And the impact of the announcement is beginning to dawn on rank and file members of the Church of England.

"I've been a member of this congregation for years and this is exciting news, it's really hopeful for us," said Rachel Graham, a parishioner at St Augustine's in Kilburn. "We appreciate that we are able to have worshipful integrity here. When this church was built there was a hope for unity with Rome. We're not here by mistake."

It was too early to make a decision about the pope's decree – which would allow Anglicans to move to the Catholic church, but keep their own liturgy and married priests – she said. The Vatican has released no further details about the decree, an apostolic constitution, but its very existence has given Graham and other parishioners plenty to think about.

"We hope we can all come together and be looked after by the bishop of Rome."

Graham, a mother of five, is not in a minority at Saint Augustine's. Before the general synod meeting in July 2008 – "when it all went wrong", she said, and the Church of England's governing body threw out all concession to traditionalists – a petition was circulated among the parish's female members objecting to the introduction of women bishops. Only four did not sign.

"My problem with women [clergy] is that they don't understand it's not about discrimination, but the church," Graham said. "They take offence at being seen as not good enough, but there's no tradition of women in the priesthood. There's nothing in scripture. It's not reasonable that women stand as priests." There were many other roles that women could play in the life of the church, she added.

Her friend and fellow parishioner Cecilia Anim also spoke of her support for the pope's initiative. "It reaffirms our belief that the holy father is putting us in the direction we want to go in to keep the sacrament sacred."

"We're sending man to the moon, but you can't change God's word or the Bible. Jesus chose 12 men as his apostles."

Saint Augustine's has sought alternative oversight from the bishop of Fulham, the Right Rev John Broadhurst, and will not accept a female priest as an incumbent or team vicar.

While feelings on the subject vary, the congregation generally sticks to the ABC line, according to the Rev Canon Anthony Yates, who said the pope's decree had not distracted him or the rest of the Saint Augustine team from their daily business. "At the back of the church is the Vatican statement and we're going to consider it.

"We had hoped unity [between Rome and the Anglican church] might be reached, but that's not possible because of recent events," he said.

There was a significant group within the Anglican Communion who would be happy to move to Catholicism if some provision were made for them, he said, before adding: "We think of group or groups, rather than the whole Anglican Communion." We do welcome the pope's response. I'm not one to criticise it."

Broadhurst, the bishop of Fulham, who was the principal celebrant and preacher at today'smass, would not say whether he would move to Catholicism.

As chair of Forward in Faith, the group pushing hardest at the Vatican's door, he said he would consider the question with his members. "The pope's offer is very impressive and very generous and, in a sense, it has taken the initiative and will force us to consider our future together."

He did not share the feelings voiced yesterday by the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, that the Vatican had behaved inexcusably towards Williams for not informing him of the decree until two weeks before its publication.

Nor did he believe the decree's arrival was the fault of Williams. "You can't have a secret document and share it with everybody. The trouble with Rowan is his heart is conservative Catholic, but his brain is liberal progressive. There's a spat between the two sides of a very interesting man."

The rebels

The Right Rev Andrew Burnham, bishop of Ebbsfleet

Looks after parishes and congregations opposed to women clergy; asked the Vatican last year to help him and like-minded congregations leave the Anglican communion; said in 2008 he would leave if provision were made

The Right Rev Keith Newton, bishop of Richborough

Also cares for flocks opposed to women clergy; met with Vatican officials last year to discuss defection

The Right Rev John Broadhurst, bishop of Fulham

Chair of Anglo-Catholic movement, Forward in Faith; married with four children, one called Benedict; was confirmed as a Catholic when younger

The Right Rev John Hind, bishop of Chichester

Signed letter opposing ordination of a gay bishop in 2003; said he may convert over the issue of women bishops

The Right Rev Michael Nazir-Ali,

bishop of Rochester

Used to worship as a Catholic; does not oppose ordination of women and has ordained them in the past; leading light among conservative evangelicals; has said he would not rule conversion "in or out".

The Guardian

Vatican thumbs up for Karl Marx after Galileo, Darwin and Oscar Wilde

The Watchmen — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:20:41 -0700

Karl Marx, who famously described religion as “the opium of the people”, has joined Galileo, Charles Darwin and Oscar Wilde on a growing list of historical figures to have undergone an unlikely reappraisal by the Roman Catholic Church.

L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said yesterday that Marx’s early critiques of capitalism had highlighted the “social alienation” felt by the “large part of humanity” that remained excluded, even now, from economic and political decision-making.

Georg Sans, a German-born professor of the history of contemporary philosophy at the pontifical Gregorian University, wrote in an article that Marx’s work remained especially relevant today as mankind was seeking “a new harmony” between its needs and the natural environment. He also said that Marx’s theories may help to explain the enduring issue of income inequality within capitalist societies.

“We have to ask ourselves, with Marx, whether the forms of alienation of which he spoke have their origin in the capitalist system,” Professor Sans wrote. “If money as such does not multiply on its own, how are we to explain the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few?”

With reassessments such as these it may be wondered which formerly unacceptable figure could be next. Last year the Vatican erected a statue of Galileo as a way of saying sorry for trying the astronomer in 1633 for his observation that the Earth moved around the Sun; in February a leading official declared Darwin’s theory of evolution compatible with the Christian faith, and in July L’Osservatore praised Oscar Wilde, the gay playwright, as “a man who behind a mask of amorality asked himself what was just and what was mistaken”.

Professor Sans argues that Marx’s intellectual legacy was marred by the misappropriation of his work by the communist regimes of the 20th century. “It is no exaggeration to say that nothing has damaged the interests of Marx the philosopher more than Marxism,” he said.

This overturns a century of Catholic hostility to his creed. Two years ago Benedict XVI singled out Marxism as one of the great scourges of the modern age. “The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit,” he told an audience in Brazil.

Then again the Pope has been busy reappraising modern capitalism. Benedict’s latest encyclical, Charity in Truth, offers a direct response to the recession, arguing that global capitalism has lost its way and that Church teachings can help to restore economic health by focusing on justice for the weak and closer regulation of the market.

His predecessor, John Paul II — who hated communism and as pontiff helped to bring it down in his native Poland — was keenly aware of the failings of the West and the effects of unbridled capitalism on post-communist societies.

Professor Sans’s view of Marx was not without criticism. He argued that Marx’s “materialist” view of history had wrongly reduced man to no more than a product of his material, economic and physical circumstances. He also said that after the fall of communism in 1989, few believed any more that private property was in itself wrong or unjust, and “given the experience of the past half century” no one believed that collectivisation of property was the answer.

Marx, who predicted that capitalism would be destroyed by its internal contradictions and be replaced by communism after a transitional period, was born in 1818 in Trier in Germany to Jewish parents. Although it was a majority Catholic town, his father, Heinrich, converted to Lutheran Protestantism to escape anti-Semitism.

Marx was baptised as a Christianbut he remained an atheist all his life. He once observed that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Marx was expelled from several European countries for his radical espousal of a working-class revolution. He moved to London in May 1849 and lived there until his death in 1883.

Professor Sans’s article was first published in La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit paper, which is vetted in advance by the Vatican Secretariat of State. The decision to republish it in the Vatican newspaper gives it added papal endorsement.

The London Times

Offer Raises Idea of Marriage for Catholic Priests

The Watchmen — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:49:04 -0700

The New York Times

By RACHEL DONADIO

ROME — In making it easier for traditionalist Anglicans to become Catholic, Pope Benedict XVI once again revealed the character of his papacy: to reach out to the most fervent of like-minded believers, even if they are not Catholic. Yet some observers wonder whether his move could paradoxically liberalize the church — or at least wedge it open — on a crucial issue: celibacy.

In a momentous move on Tuesday, the Vatican said it would help Anglicans uncomfortable with female priests and openly gay bishops join a new Anglican rite within the Catholic Church.

The invitation also extends to married Anglican clergy. And so some have begun to wonder, even if the 82-year-old Benedict himself would never allow it, would more people in the Roman Catholic Church begin to entertain the possibility of married Catholic priests?

“If you get used to the idea of your priests being married, then that changes the perception of the Catholic priesthood necessarily,” said Austen Ivereigh, a Catholic commentator in London and a former adviser to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor of Westminster.

“We face the prospect in the future of going to a Catholic church in London and it being normal to find a married Catholic priest celebrating at the altar, with his wife sitting in the third pew and his children running up and down the aisle,” he said.

It remains unclear how many Anglican priests will make the transition to the church. At a news conference announcing the new structure on Tuesday, Cardinal William Levada, the Vatican’s chief doctrinal officer, said only that 20 to 30 Anglican bishops had inquired about becoming Catholics, although priests far outnumber bishops.

Married priests are permitted in the eastern Catholic rites, and one of Benedict’s central goals is full communion with the Orthodox — and they, too, allow priests to marry. Anglican priests, married or not, are already permitted to become Catholic priests, but on a case-by-case basis. The new dispensation would for the first time allow in groups of married priests.

“Now we’re opening up a whole structure within the Latin rite, within the Western rite, which will allow married priests to function,” said Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Seminary at Georgetown University and a liberal Catholic commentator.

Mr. Reese raised a series of intriguing hypothetical questions: Would unmarried Anglican priests who want to become Catholic priests have to take a vow of chastity? (The answer is presumably yes.) Could a Catholic man convert to Anglicanism, be ordained as an Anglican priest, then rejoin the Catholic Church under the new Anglican rite? (The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, dismissed that idea as “a trick.”)

The overture toward the Anglicans speaks to a central theme in Benedict’s papacy: his desire to bring in traditional believers at all costs to help Catholicism become a “creative minority” in increasingly secular Europe.

Many saw it in line with the pope’s decision in January to revoke the excommunication of four schismatic bishops from the ultratraditional Society of St. Pius X, including one, Bishop Richard Williamson, who had denied the scope of the Holocaust. Aimed at healing a rift within the church, the move created global outrage and led a significant number of Catholics in Benedict’s native Germany to leave the Catholic Church.

Despite the outrage and a bumpy start toward reconciliation, the first formal meeting to bring the schismatic group, already pardoned by Benedict, back into the church will take place next week.

“Today more than ever, with Joseph Ratzinger as pope, the ecumenical path seems not to be a march toward modernity, but a return to the land of tradition,” Sandro Magister, a veteran Vatican reporter in Italy, wrote on his blog on Tuesday.

Many liberal Catholics in the United States lamented that the decision over the Anglicans again demonstrated that Benedict reached out only to the most conservative elements on the Catholic spectrum, not the more progressive ones.

And many experts noted that the decision also reflected a similar tendency inside the Vatican: as in the case with the schismatic bishops, the arrangement with the Anglicans was hammered out by doctrinal offices, generally staffed by more conservative clergy, without close consultation with the office responsible for ecumenical dialogue, whose staff members tend to be more moderate. Many saw it as yet another sign that the true power of Benedict’s papacy lies in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the doctrinal office, which he oversaw for two decades before becoming pope.

Coincidence or not, the Vatican announced the creation of the structure for Anglicans only after Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, a strong voice for ecumenical dialogue, had retired, and when Cardinal Walter Kasper, the director of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Vatican’s main point person for relations with the Anglicans, was out of town.

Last Thursday, Cardinal Kasper said at a news conference that the Vatican did not intend “to fish in Anglican lakes,” that the aim of its dialogue with the Anglicans was not conversion. On Tuesday, Cardinal Levada said he had asked people involved in ecumenical dialogue to attend the Anglican news conference, but they were not in Rome.

He did acknowledge the complication of allowing married priests into the church.

“I think for some people it seems to be a problem, because as you know there have been many Catholic priests who have left the priesthood to get married,” Cardinal Levada said. “And the question arises, ‘Well, if these former Anglicans can be married priests, what about us?’ ”

But he said there were differences between Anglicans seeking to convert to Catholicism and Catholic men who commit to a celibate priesthood and then decide “that they want to leave the priesthood in order to have a married life.”

“I don’t think it’s an insurmountable problem,” Cardinal Levada said.

For liberal groups, usually ignored by the church hierarchy, the Anglican ruling was a rare, if mixed, moment of hope. Allowing married priests, liberals noted, could go a long way to overcoming the deep shortages of priests in the developed world.

“I think it’s very interesting and probably somewhat encouraging, in the sense of ‘yes, there is a flexibility, there is an openness,’ ” said Sister Christine Schenk, the executive director of Future Church, a Catholic group based in Cleveland that favors married clergy.

Laurie Goodstein contributed reporting from New York.

New Vatican plan lets Anglicans convert easier

The Watchmen — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:50:55 -0700

By NICOLE WINFIELD
The Associated Press
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 11:43 AM

VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican announced a stunning decision Tuesday to make it easier for Anglicans to convert, reaching out to those who are disaffected by the election of women and gay bishops to join the Catholic Church's conservative ranks.

Pope Benedict XVI approved a new church provision that will allow Anglicans to join the Catholic Church while maintaining many of their distinctive spiritual and liturgical traditions, including having married priests.

Cardinal William Levada, the Vatican's chief doctrinal official, announced the new provision at a new conference.

In the past, such exemptions had only been granted in a few cases in certain countries. The new church provision is designed to allow Anglicans around the world to access a new church entity if they want to convert.

The decision immediately raised questions about how the new provision would be received within the 77-million strong Anglican Communion, the global Anglican church, which has been on the verge of a schism over divisions within its membership about women bishops, an openly gay bishop and the blessing of same-sex unions.

The Anglican's spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, downplayed the significance of the new provision and said it wasn't a Vatican commentary on Anglican problems.

"It has no negative impact on the relations of the communion as a whole to the Roman Catholic church as a whole," he said in London.

Conservative Party lawmaker Ann Widdecombe, who left the Church of England because of its policies for the Catholic Church, welcomed the Vatican's decision.

"I'm delighted if it does become easier, because when we had the last big exodus in 1992 over the ordination of women, the Catholic Church was not ready," she said in London. "There were enormous discrepancies up and down the country, and the direction from the Vatican came late in the day."

The new Catholic church entities, called personal ordinariates, will be units of faithful established within local Catholic Churches, headed by former Anglican prelates who will provide spiritual care for Anglicans who wish to be Catholic.

They would most closely resemble Catholic military ordinariates, special units of the church established in most countries to provide spiritual care for the members of the armed forces and their dependents.

"(This will) facilitate a kind of corporate reunion of Anglican groups" into the Catholic Church, Levada said.

Anglicans split with Rome in 1534 when English King Henry VIII was refused a marriage annulment.

The new canonical provision is a response to the many requests from Anglo-Catholics who want to come back, increasingly disillusioned with the progressive bent of the Anglican Communion. Many have already left and consider themselves Catholic but have not found an official home in the 1.1-billion strong Catholic Church.

By welcoming them in with their own special provision, Benedict has confirmed the increasingly conservative bent of his church. The decision follows his recent move to rehabilitate four excommunicated ultra-conservative bishops, including one who denied the full extent of the Holocaust, in a bid to bring their faithful back under the Vatican's wing.

Levada declined to give figures on the number of requests that have come to the Vatican, or on the anticipated number of Anglicans who might take advantage of the new structure.

One group, known as the Traditional Anglican Communion, has made its bid to join the Catholic Church known. The fellowship, which split from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1990, says it has spread to 41 countries and has 400,000 members, although only about half are regular churchgoers.

The new canonical provision allows married Anglican priests and even seminarians to become ordained Catholic priests - much the same way that Eastern rite priests who are in communion with Rome are allowed to be married. However, married Anglicans couldn't become Catholic bishops.

The Vatican announcement immediately raised questions about how the Vatican's long-standing dialogue with the Archbishop of Canterbury could continue. Noticeably, no one from the Vatican's ecumenical office on relations with Anglicans attended the news conference; Levada said he had invited representatives to attend but they said they were all away from Rome.

Just last week, the Vatican's top ecumenical official, Cardinal Walter Kasper, told reporters: "We are not fishing in the Anglican pond," when asked about the Vatican's negotiations with would-be converts.

Levada stressed that ecumenical dialogue with the global Anglican church would remain a priority. But he said the goal of that dialogue for 40 years had been to achieve "full visible unity."

To downplay suggestions of poaching, the Catholic archbishop of Westminster and Williams, the Anglican leader, issued a joint statement saying the decision "brings an end to a period of uncertainty" for Anglicans wishing to join the Catholic Church.

And at a press conference in London, Williams tried to put the best face on the decision.

"It has no negative impact on the relations of the communion as a whole to the Roman Catholic church as a whole," he said.

But Williams' representative in Rome, the Very Rev. David Richardson, called the Vatican's decision "surprising," given that the Catholic Church in the past had welcomed individual Anglicans in without creating what he called "parallel structures" for entire groups of converts.

"The two questions I would want to ask are 'why this and why now,'" he told The Associated Press. "Why the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has decided to embrace that particular method remains unclear to me."

Also unclear, he said, was the Vatican's target audience: those Anglicans who have already left the Anglican Communion, or current members. Levada said it covered both.

"If it's for former Anglicans, then it's not about our present difficulties, then it's people who have already left," Richardson said. If it's current Anglicans, "There is in my mind an uncertainty for whom it is intended."

The Anglican Communion has been roiled for years over disagreement on the role of women. But the long-standing divisions over how Anglicans should interpret the Bible erupted in 2003 when the Episcopal Church consecrated the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

Williams has struggled ever since to keep the church from splitting, frustrated by moves by churches in the United States, Canada and elsewhere to bless gay relationships.

At least four conservative U.S. dioceses and dozens of individual Episcopal parishes have voted to leave the national denomination since 2003, with many affiliating themselves instead with like-minded Anglican leaders in African and elsewhere.

The Vatican announcement was kept under wraps until the last moment: The Vatican only announced Levada's briefing Monday night, and Levada only flew back to Rome at midnight after briefing Catholic bishops and Williams about the decision.

---

Associated Press reporters Bob Barr and Gregory Katz in London and Rachel Zoll in New York contributed to this report.

Vatican / U.S. Partnership Fighting Against AIDS

The Watchmen — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:34:11 -0700

Sponsors Conference on Saving Children in Africa

By Edward Pentin

ROME, OCT. 15, 2009 (Zenit.org).- A Rome conference which drew together world leaders in the field of HIV/AIDS has highlighted the urgent need to improve prevention of mother-to-child transmission of the disease.

It also managed to unite both the Church and the Obama administration in a potentially highly effective and fruitful partnership in saving the lives of millions of children.

The three-day conference was co-hosted by Caritas Internationalis -- a confederation of 162 Church humanitarian organizations -- and the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See. The meeting, which ends Friday, was also aimed at improving access to testing and treatment for children living with HIV and HIV/tuberculosis co-infection.

The conference brought together many leading experts in the field, including missionaries, health care workers, and the executive director of UNAIDS. Also participating were representatives of non-governmental organizations, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the World Health Organization and pharmaceutical companies.

Every year, approximately 370,000 children under 15 become infected with HIV, mainly through mother-to-child transmission. About 90% of these infections occur in Africa where as many as 800 children die every day from the disease. The children are infected during their mother's pregnancy, labor and delivery, or through breastfeeding.

"The world has failed these children because there are inexpensive and effective measures to prevent the transmission of HIV to unborn children and to infants, but most HIV-positive women are not aware of them, or do not have access to them," said Lesley-Anne Knight, secretary-general of Caritas Internationalis, in her opening remarks. "This is a terrible tragedy, but it is also a scandal -- because we can do something about it."

Knight added that not enough effort is being made to diagnose their condition, nor are adequate treatments being produced that are suitable for HIV infected children, 50% of whom die before the age of two.

For this reason, Caritas Internationalis launched the HAART for Children campaign earlier this year. The initiative calls on pharmaceutical and diagnostics manufacturers, governments, and academic and research institutions to develop and provide better medicines and tests for children that can be used in low-income and rural areas.

Extending coverage to make it universal was the focus of many interventions. "HIV infection is certainly not just a scientific problem, but a much more complex, economic, social problem," said Dr. Giuseppe Profiti, president of the Vatican-affiliated Bambino Gesu Children's Hospital. "It's about redistribution of knowledge, means, results, resources and science at large […] to cover everyone if possible."

Social justice medicine

Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, argued that universal access to medicine and resources was principally about social justice. "It's also about dealing with underlying causes of inequality, building a delivery system that is less costly but which reaches the majority of those people who are unfortunately without a voice," he said. Quoting Martin Luther King, Sidibe noted that "when the world cares enough, resources can always be found."

Effective ways to stem mother-to-child transmission include HIV testing and education of parents; counseling HIV positive women to avoid unwanted pregnancies; and preventing the transmission of the virus through the use of anti-retroviral drugs and safer infant practices.

The Church has a major role to play in extending this prevention through its outreach, the speakers agreed. She is already doing so on a large scale with a dedicated army of volunteers working in the field, and is responsible for 30%-70% of health care in various developing countries, said Dr. Carl Stecker, senior technical advisor for HIV/AIDS with Catholic Relief Services. "This is something we can do, that we can shine at, and which is fairly non-controversial," he said.

It's partly this non-controversial aspect that promises greater Church-public sector collaboration, even if some governments might favor condom distribution as part of their HIV/AIDS prevention programs. "There's a lot of common ground here," said Monsignor Robert Vitillo, head of advocacy efforts related to HIV/AIDS at Caritas's delegation in Geneva. "But that doesn't mean we're in any way stepping back from our insistence of trying to do prevention with responsible behavior within marriage. We do both."

The U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, Miguel H. Diaz, welcomed what he sees as real potential for collaboration between the Obama administration and the Church on this issue, partly owing to the absence of areas where the two have clashed. "This is a concrete example of coming together, to focus on the care of children, and by doing so we're focusing on prevention and treatment of children and mothers for the sake of a common cause," he told ZENIT.

"I've argued from the beginning that I'm going to be a bridge builder and I'm going to try as much as possible to engage the positive dimensions and those areas where we can collaborate." He said this was one such example and, although there are some areas of disagreement, "certainly there is so much we can do together here to save children."

Partnerships

Since PEPFAR was established by U.S. President George W. Bush in 2003, effective methods of preventing of mother-to-child transmission have grown significantly worldwide, according to Deborah Birx, director of the federal government's Global AIDS Program. President Obama has set aside a further $65 billion towards combating AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria over six years.

Dr. Antonio Gerbase, of the WHO's HIV department, revealed that the WHO's priority for 2010 and 2011 will be the treatment of women and children, and the prevention of mother-to-child HIV/AIDS. "Together with the Catholic Church and other partners, we would like to move on this, because they reach populations which are often difficult to reach," he said. "For us, this is a very fruitful partnership."

But there is still a long way to go, and speakers who work in the field gave concrete grassroots examples of how collaboration could be improved. Sister Maria Theresia Hornemann, a nurse in the Congregation of the Missionary Servants of the Holy Spirit, pointed out that antiretroviral treatment is too expensive for patients. "In principle it is the responsibility of the government," she said. "But more often than not, what we receive from governments is apathy and outright refusal to even recognize the problem."

Sister Isabelle Smyth of the Medical Missionaries of Mary said resources need to also be allocated to educating mothers and children on how to use antiretroviral drugs, and for nutrition to feed HIV/AIDS sufferers once they have been treated. "This is where PEPFAR, Bill Gates, and others who are giving money need to realize that you need to give it to us in a holistic way," she said.

Focusing on prevention before infection, another participant called for greater emphasis on education, sowing Christian values, and the need to stress that human trafficking and the number of sexual partners is a "huge cause" in the spread of HIV.

Representatives from the pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott Laboratories and Eli Lilly and Company gave presentations on their progress in producing better AIDS tests and drugs, and how they are doing so freely or without profit to the world's poor countries. But conference participants stressed that too often the drugs are unsuitable for children and without proper formulations and dosages.

In the midst of dealing with solutions, technical aspects and figures, participants were wary of not losing the human importance of the discussions. "In the final analysis," said Lesley-Anne Knight, "we are not dealing with global statistics, but with individual, precious lives."

Ambassador Diaz said even if one life is saved as a result of this meeting, the collaboration between the U.S. government and the Church on this issue "is already making a difference."

* * *

Edward Pentin is a freelance writer living in Rome. He can be reached at: epentin@zenit.org.

Catholics and Muslims defend life against abortion law in Indonesia

The Watchmen — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:31:46 -0700

Rome, Italy, Oct 16, 2009 / 04:07 pm (CNA).- Catholics, Muslims, Protestants, Buddhists and Hindus have joined together to protest the liberalizing of Indonesia’s abortion laws. Although the bill has been approved by the country's Parliament, it still needs to be signed by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

At a press conference at the headquarters of the Indonesian Ulemas Council in Jakarta, religious leaders and diverse non-governmental organizations condemned the “moral defect” of the norm that has legalized abortion in certain instances. Leaders underscored that “all religious creeds respect human life from the moment of conception.”

“No reason can justify abortion, the killing of a human life,” they said. The new law would allow abortion on demand up to the sixth week and when the life of the mother is in danger.

Father Sigid Pramudji Pr, the secretary general of the Bishops’ Conference of Indonesia, underscored: “We reject any proposal for induced abortion.” Ma’ruf Amin, director of the Indonesian Ulemas Council, said his organization would be filing a constitutional challenge against the new law.

Originally the battle against the new law began with Catholics and Muslims, who were later joined by Protestants, Buddhists, Hindus and members of pro-women organizations.

Pope Benedict counsels FAO on reducing hunger amidst recession

The Watchmen — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:26:49 -0700

Vatican City, Oct 16, 2009 / 05:21 pm (CNA).- As the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) celebrated its anniversary today, Pope Benedict XVI sent a message to the group's director, Jaques Diouf. The Holy Father asserted in his message that truly helping man requires measures aimed at both his spiritual and material dimensions. Technology alone will not suffice, he said.

As it does on each of its anniversaries, the FAO observed World Food Day, which commemorates its founding on October 16, 1945. The theme of this year's day is: "Achieving food security in times of crisis."

Pope Benedict began his message to Diouf by reflecting on the current global economic crisis.

"The current crisis, which affects all sectors of the economy without distinction, strikes particularly seriously at the agricultural world where the situation has become dramatic," he said. "The crisis calls on governments and on the various components of the international community to make decisive and effective choices."

Defeating hunger, the Pope wrote, means ensuring people have "real access to adequate and healthy nourishment."

"This is, in fact, a concrete expression of the right to life which, though solemnly proclaimed, all too often fails to be fully implemented," he stressed.

Thinking about the theme for this year's World Food Day, Benedict XVI stated that "agriculture must be able to command a sufficient level of investment and resources." The theme also "helps us to understand that the goods of creation are by their nature limited, and hence they require responsible management capable of favoring food security, also with a view to that of future generations."

"Achieving this objective," the Pope noted, "calls for a modification in lifestyles and ways of thinking."

What is needed is "a form of cooperation that protects the cultivation methods of each area and avoids the thoughtless exploitation of natural resources."

Pope Benedict also pointed to the spiritual realm, writing that efforts to preserve natural resources should also safeguard "the values specific to the rural world and the fundamental rights of people who work the land."

The Pontiff also offered guidance for finding alleviating world hunger.

"Experience shows that technical solutions, advanced though they may be, are ineffective if they do not focus on the person, who remains the principle protagonist and who, in his spiritual and material dimension, is the origin and aim of all activity," he said.

Pope Benedict closed his message by recalling that access to food "is a fundamental right of individuals and peoples, and will become a reality, and hence a form of security, if adequate development is guaranteed in all the various regions.

Jesuit Superior General (Visits Malta)

The Watchmen — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:22:48 -0700

The Malta Independent

Jesuit Superior General, Fr Adolfo Nicolás sj flew in from Rome on Thursday to spend a week in Malta. This is Fr Nicolás’s first ever visit to the island, where he will be accompanying Jesuit Provincials from all over Europe during their annual Conference over the coming days.

Once the Jesuit Conference for European Provincials is over, Fr Nicolás is expected to spend a further two days visiting various Jesuit communities and works, as well as one of Malta’s Detention Centres.

Fr Adolfo Nicolás sj will be available for a question and answer session with students and staff in the University Chapel following a Mass on Wednesday 21 October at 12.30pm. He will pay a special visit to the students of St Aloysius College on Thursday at 11.30am. This will be the first time that the whole school, including the Primary section taken on in 2008, will be gathered together.

All Jesuits and their lay collaborators are invited to attend a meeting with Fr Nicolás on Thursday evening.

Fr Nicolás was elected head of the Society of Jesus, the largest male religious order worldwide, in January of last year, a role he will occupy for life.

Texas man faces execution after jurors consult Bible to decide fate

The Watchmen — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:13:22 -0700

Amnesty International has appealed to the state to commute the sentence on Khristian Oliver, 32, who is due to die on November 5.

He was sentenced to death in 1999 for murdering a man whose home Oliver was burgling. The victim was shot in the face and beaten with his own rifle.

It later emerged that while deciding whether he should be given the death penalty, jurors consulted the Bible. Four jury members admitted that several copies had been in the jury room and that highlighted passages were passed around.

At one point, a juror reportedly read aloud from a copy, including the passage: "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death."

Defence lawyers argued in appeals that jurors had been improperly influenced by the Bibles but the trial judge rejected the claim, a decision upheld by a Texas appeals court.

The US constitution calls for the separation of state and religion. In 2005, the state supreme court in Colorado overturned a death penalty on a convicted murderer because jurors had consulted the Bible while deliberating over his sentence.

Commuting Robert Harlan's sentence to life imprisonment without parole, the court ruled that the Bible constituted an "improper outside influence" and a reliance on what it called a "higher authority".

However, a federal appeals court ruled last year that while the Bible should not have been allowed into the deliberation room at Oliver's trial, there was no clear evidence to indicate they had influenced the jurors' decision. In April this year, the US Supreme Court refused to hear Oliver's appeal.

Kate Allen, Amnesty International's UK director, said Oliver's trial was a "travesty".

"Religious texts provide consolation and spiritual guidance for billions of people the world over, but this use of the Bible to decide life or death in a capital trial is deeply, deeply troubling," she said.

The Telegraph

A Mother, a Sick Son and His Father, the Priest

The Watchmen — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:52:05 -0700

O’FALLON, Mo. — With three small children and her marriage in trouble, Pat Bond attended a spirituality retreat for Roman Catholic women in Illinois 26 years ago in hopes of finding support and comfort.

What Ms. Bond found was a priest — a dynamic, handsome Franciscan friar in a brown robe — who was serving as the spiritual director for the retreat and agreed to begin counseling her on her marriage. One day, she said, as she was leaving the priest’s parlor, he pulled her aside for a passionate kiss.

Ms. Bond separated from her husband, and for the next five years she and the priest, the Rev. Henry Willenborg, carried on an intimate relationship, according to interviews and court documents. In public, they were both leaders in their Catholic community in Quincy, Ill. In private they functioned like a married couple, sharing a bed, meals, movie nights and vacations with the children.

Eventually they had a son, setting off a series of legal battles as Ms. Bond repeatedly petitioned the church for child support. The Franciscans acquiesced, with the stipulation that she sign a confidentiality agreement. It is now an agreement she is willing to break as both she and her child, Nathan Halbach, 22, are battling cancer.

With little to lose, they are eager to tell their stories: the mother, a once-faithful Catholic who says the church protected a philandering priest and treated her as a legal adversary, and the son, about what it was like to grow up knowing his absentee father was a priest.

“I’ve always called him Father Henry — never Father, never Dad,” said Nathan, at home between hospital visits. “I always felt he picked religion over me.”

The relationship between Ms. Bond and the priest is hardly unique. While the recent scandals involving the Roman Catholic Church have focused on the sexual abuse of children, experts say that incidences of priests who have violated sexual and emotional boundaries with adult women are far more common.

Clergy members of many faiths have crossed the line with women and had children out of wedlock. But the problem is particularly fraught for the Catholic Church, as Catholics in many countries are increasingly questioning the celibacy requirement for priests. Ms. Bond’s case offers a rare look at how the church goes to great lengths to silence these women, to avoid large settlements and to keep the priests in active ministry. She has 23 years of documents, depositions, correspondence, receipts and photographs relating to her case, which she has kept in meticulous files.

Those files reveal that the church was tightfisted with her as she tried to care for her son, particularly as his cancer treatments grew more costly. But they also show that Father Willenborg suffered virtually no punishment, continuing to serve in a variety of church posts.

The church entity Ms. Bond dealt with is the Order of Friars Minor, commonly known as the Franciscans, whose members were known as mendicants because they survived on handouts from the communities they served.

“I know better than Franciscans what it’s like to beg, because nothing has happened without my begging the Franciscans,” said Ms. Bond, who is 53.

Church officials, however, say they acted generously.

“The province went well beyond what the law would require, and was concerned for the boy and his well-being,” said the Rev. William Spencer, provincial minister of the Franciscan Province of the Sacred Heart, which is Father Willenborg’s province in St. Louis. “We were willing to do whatever we could to respond to him.”

The priest Ms. Bond fell in love with so many years ago, Father Willenborg, is currently the senior pastor of Our Lady of the Lake, a large, historic parish of 1,350 families on the shores of Lake Superior in Ashland, Wis. The church spire is visible from miles away, and the parish operates an adjoining school. On a recent Sunday, Father Willenborg affably led a morning Mass for about 300 people, adding a special blessing for the grandparents in the congregation. Afterward, in his office, he acknowledged that he does have a son, is aware his son is terminally ill, and said that he had tried to be attentive.

He said he did not want to talk about the situation, and pointed out that Ms. Bond had more to lose than he did because she had signed a confidentiality agreement that, if broken, requires her to pay a penalty. He asserted that Ms. Bond had shown no care for his needs and was only concerned about money, and that his son had shunned him. He said that he and the Franciscans had done nothing bad.

“We’ve been very caring, very supportive, very generous over these 20-something years. It’s very tragic what’s going on with Nathan, but, you know?” said Father Willenborg, before trailing off and ending the interview.

‘A Chosen One’

Father Willenborg’s Franciscan superiors were aware of his relationship with Ms. Bond well before Nathan was born. A year earlier, Father Willenborg and Ms. Bond had conceived another child. Ms. Bond said that Father Willenborg suggested she have an abortion, which she found unthinkable. He finally informed his Franciscan superiors of their liaison.

The pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. The Franciscans kept Father Willenborg in place as rector of their seminary in Quincy, Ill.

The couple then resolved to keep the relationship platonic, according to Ms. Bond, (whose recounting of events is consistent with what Father Willenborg said in a legal deposition). But a few months later, during an Easter-season retreat they had planned together for about 90 women, Father Willenborg showed up at her door. Ms. Bond said she was sure that Nathan was conceived that night.

Their relationship, she said, made her feel happier than she ever had in her life. She would watch him work, and feel proud that he was a comfort to so many people. As a Catholic, she said she knew their relationship was wrong, but she was also swept up in the feeling that there was something spiritual and even exalted about it.

“Here I am this small-town girl, and at the time I didn’t feel that I was very attractive,” she said, “and yet he’s putting his vows on the side and he wants to be with me, in the most intimate, loving way. It was quite an honor.”

“It’s such a powerful thing because you think — and this is the illness of it, too — you are led to believe and you let yourself believe, that you are a chosen one. That you are so special,” she said, adding of the priest, “It’s not that they’re putting God aside, it’s that they’re bringing you up to their level.”

Before their baby was born, the Franciscans strongly advised Ms. Bond to give it up for adoption, the correspondence shows. She refused.

“What would I say to my other children, after coming home from the hospital: ‘I’m sorry, I forgot to bring your family member home’?” she said.

Father Willenborg himself performed the baptism. Ms. Bond named the boy Nathan John Paul Halbach, giving him the last name of her former husband, who was still an involved father to the three children they had together and supported them financially.

Ms. Bond retained a lawyer, and the Franciscans gave her $1,000 toward the costs of the birth that were not covered by insurance, and $505 toward baby furniture. The Franciscans further agreed to pay $600 a month for the baby’s first 10 months, until Ms. Bond could return to work in a travel agency, and after that $350 a month in child support until Nathan turned 18. It added up, after bank and legal fees, to about $85,000 paid in a lump sum.

End to an idyll

For eight months, Father Willenborg continued to visit Ms. Bond’s home at night. She said he would go right to the crib, pick up the baby and bring him to the bed to cuddle with them.

An unexpected turn of events brought their idyll to an end. A young woman showed up at Ms. Bond’s house in a rage. She told Ms. Bond that she had been in a sexual relationship with Father Willenborg for years, since she was in high school. (Reached by phone last week, the woman confirmed the relationship, and said it had caused her a lifetime of pain. She asked to remain anonymous.) Immediately, the Franciscans sent Father Willenborg to a treatment center in New Mexico run by a religious order, for priests with sexual disorders and substance addictions.

Ms. Bond says that after that, they had sex together only once more: immediately after he returned from seven months at the center. She still has the receipt from the hotel room.

In a deposition years later, Father Willenborg said that the Franciscans had never disciplined him, and never suggested that he leave religious life. He was assigned to New Orleans to work with AIDS patients, and a few years later to the headquarters of his order’s province in St. Louis to oversee “spiritual formation” for priests, which includes educating them on how to remain celibate.

Ms. Bond, meanwhile, got help from a support group for women and priests involved in relationships. The group, Good Tidings, was founded by Cait Finnegan and her husband, a former Catholic priest, originally with the idea that they would help priests who had fallen in love to discern whether to leave the priesthood and marry, or remain in the priesthood and end the relationship.

“We were naïve,” Mrs. Finnegan said. “We quickly discovered that many of these priests were playboys. They weren’t looking for any discernment, they were simply staying and playing. It was the women who needed the support. Unfortunately, many women accept the kind of abuse from a priest that they would never accept if they were dating another man.”

She said that in 25 years, Good Tidings had been contacted by nearly 2,000 women who said they were involved with priests, many who had signed child support and confidentiality agreements like Ms. Bond’s. There are similar support groups in at least seven countries.

A landmark study in 1990 by the scholar A. W. Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine, found that 20 percent of Catholic priests were involved in continuing sexual relationships with women, and an additional 8 percent to 10 percent had occasional heterosexual relationships.

“It’s not so much that people don’t know it happens, but they don’t know how much it happens,” Mrs. Finnegan said.

Father Willenborg had no contact again with his son until the boy was 13. Nathan remembers being so excited to finally meet his biological father that he insisted on getting a haircut. He remembers that Father Willenborg took him to McDonald’s and to see the movie “What Women Want.”

Nathan recalled, “It was sort of hard meeting this guy for the first time, at a place where we couldn’t talk to each other.”

In the next few years, Nathan said his disappointment grew. Father Willenborg did not visit, though he lived only 15 minutes away. He had promised to take Nathan to a baseball game, but it was two years before he stopped by and later called to say he had tickets. Nathan finally told Father Willenborg he did not want to see him.

The child support money had run out long before Nathan turned 18. Ms. Bond had used $38,000 of it as a down payment on a house. She remarried, twice, and her last husband was a lawyer who encouraged Ms. Bond to petition the Franciscans for money to help send Nathan to college.

The Franciscans resisted, and they ended up in court. Father Willenborg insisted on a DNA test, which showed the probability of paternity was 99.9 percent.

“That really pushed me away further,” Nathan said. “It was ridiculous. He knew I was his son.”

After months of court proceedings, the Franciscans agreed to pay half of Nathan’s college expenses, plus $586 a month, until he turned 21.

Charles Todt, who served as a lawyer for Ms. Bond, said, “They spent the least amount they could possibly spend under any circumstances.”

In his second year at the University of Missouri, Nathan began seeing double. He became dizzy and had problems remembering things. He was found to have brain tumors, and they were growing fast.

Illness and Mounting Costs

With the costs mounting for chemotherapy, radiation and craniotomies, Ms. Bond again turned to the church. The Franciscans agreed to pay 50 percent of any “extraordinary” medical costs, until he turned 23. Ms. Bond said she was greatly relieved. She was involved in a messy divorce with her third husband, and could not go back to work because caring for her son had become a full-time job.

She finally found a doctor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City who proposed an experimental treatment on Nathan’s tumors, which had returned despite all the previous treatments. They flew to New York for a one-week consultation, and ended up staying for three months while he was in and out of the hospital for treatment.

The Franciscans initially gave them $1,000 toward the trip, but then refused Ms. Bond’s further requests for reimbursements for lodging expenses for her and Nathan in New York. This is what pushed her over the edge, she said. Dozens of e-mail messages between Ms. Bond and church lawyers document the back-and-forth. Catherine A. Schroeder, the Franciscans’ lawyer, said Ms. Bond failed to provide proper receipts, an accusation that Ms. Bond denies.

The head of the province then was the Rev. Michael Perry, who was recently elected vicar general of the entire Order of Friars Minor. Reached at his office in Rome, Father Perry declined to speak on the record about the decisions he made, except to say, “Efforts were made not only to respect the law but to take into account the dignity and the rights and the care of the child.”

To pay for the New York trip, Ms. Bond’s daughter Carrie Milton liquidated her 401(k) plan and sold T-shirts that said, “Cancer Sucks,” and Ms. Bond’s son Christian Halbach emptied his savings account.

Ms. Bond prays to God constantly. But she has long left the Catholic Church and attends a Methodist church.

Nathan is now so ill that he rarely leaves his house except for hospital visits. The highlight of his day is lumbering to the mailbox, leaning on his mother, who was told recently by doctors that she had carcinoid tumors in her appendix and colon. Strangers who get Nathan’s name and address from Web sites for cancer victims send him dozens of cards, often homemade, urging him not to give up.

Recently the mail included a card from Father Willenborg.

“I never understood,” Nathan said, “why he thought cards could make it all O.K.”

The New York Times

JPMorgan Chase Reports Strong Profit of $3.6 Billion

The Watchmen — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:56:42 -0700

By ERIC DASH

A year after accepting a bailout from Washington, a resurgent JPMorgan Chase reported a second consecutive quarter of surprisingly strong profit on Wednesday, solidifying its position at the pinnacle of American finance.

JPMorgan’s results — $3.6 billion in profit for the third quarter — fanned hopes on Wall Street that the nation’s banking industry was entering a new period of prosperity, despite lingering troubles. The robust showing from JPMorgan, and tentative signs that consumer loan losses might soon peak, has set the pace for other big banks that will report results in coming days.

JPMorgan’s profit was powered by its investment banking division, where earnings more than doubled from the period a year earlier thanks to trading in the fixed-income markets and a flurry of deals. The results from that unit more than offset the bank’s losses on credit card loans and home mortgages, which continued to rise as consumers struggled with a weak economy.

The earnings seemed to light a fire under Wall Street. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 144.80 points, closing above 10,000 for the first time in more than a year.

Although the recession weighed heavily on its businesses, JPMorgan appeared to be taking advantage of the financial crisis to leapfrog investment banking rivals in the rankings and expand its consumer lending franchise. Meanwhile, it added another $2 billion to its consumer credit reserves for future losses, bringing the total amount it has set aside to $31.5 billion.

Net income rose to 82 cents a share, far surpassing analysts’ estimates for the third quarter. The bank reported a profit of $527 million, or 9 cents a share, in the third quarter of 2008.

“The revenue growth was very impressive,” said Anthony Polini, an analyst at Raymond James & Associates. “They’re benefiting from a turn in the economy, and they’re asserting their dominance.”

The results also reflected the broader rebound in once-stymied financial markets, with companies again issuing stock, raising money from bond markets and signing merger deals. After being forced to take huge write-downs on the value of some its investment banking assets a year ago, JPMorgan said it booked about a $400 million gain on the sale of mortgage securities and buyout loans.

Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chairman and chief executive, said the earnings reflected broad growth across several of the bank’s business lines but gave only a cautious outlook. “While we are seeing some initial signs of consumer credit stability, we are not yet certain that this trend will continue,” he said in a statement.

Consumer loss rates remain high, but there were several upbeat signs in the bank’s numbers. Bank officials said they saw “a little bit of stabilization” in home values, especially for lower price properties and in states like California. And while delinquencies remain high, fewer borrowers were falling behind on the mortgage.

Michael J. Cavanagh, the bank’s chief financial officer, called that a “hopeful sign” but stopped short of declaring that heavy losses were over. “We have to watch the economy and see where it heads,” he said in a conference call with journalists.

JPMorgan was the first of the nation’s biggest banks to report its third-quarter earnings. Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs also release results this week. As one of the first major banks to warn of troubles with subprime mortgages, home equity loans and credit cards, JPMorgan is seen as a bellwether for the financial industry.

Although the housing market and economy remain weak, analysts expect to see a slowdown in consumer loan losses at the biggest banks and for them to start setting aside less money in their reserves. Meanwhile, the troubles are quickly moving to bad commercial real estate loans, which will place a heavier burden on smaller lenders.

Mr. Dimon still must contend with several looming issues at JPMorgan. His decision last month to replace the two co-heads of the investment banking division with a single leader, James E. Staley, raised concern within the ranks. JPMorgan’s credit card division is unlikely to turn a profit until 2011, and, like the most of the industry, its consumer franchise has seen a fall-off in new mortgage lending.

Mr. Dimon also faces obstacles in Washington. He must balance paying bonuses to JPMorgan investment bankers on blow-out earnings with public furor over Wall Street pay. New regulations on credit cards threaten to lower the profitability of that business, and lenders face other legislative efforts to curb bank fees and derivatives trading.

And JPMorgan, despite repaying its $25 billion taxpayer investment in early June, is still awaiting the sale of the government’s warrants in the bank. That could be a windfall for taxpayers. Their value, now at nearly $2 billion, has increased by almost $800 million since rivals like Goldman Sachs cut deals to buy them back this summer, according to Linus Wilson, a finance professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Even so, JPMorgan is emerging from the current crisis with renewed confidence. Its investment bank, which posted a $1.9 billion profit, reported strong trading revenue, though short of the record levels earlier this year when the markets were in constant flux and prices skyrocketed. Meanwhile, the bank has continued to pick up business from corporations that are issuing bonds and selling stock to raise capital.

The bank’s consumer businesses, however, are still bleeding from bad loans. Its mortgage and consumer banking operations posted a narrow $7 million profit, while its credit card division lost $700 million in the third quarter. By next year, charge-offs could reach 11 percent of loan balances.

The corporate bank, meanwhile, booked a $341 million profit even as executives set aside more money for losses on souring commercial real estate loans.

“You are seeing the underlying earnings power is there, albeit challenged by the need in this quarter to add to reserves,” Mr. Cavanagh said of the bank’s results. “Stabilization is just the first phase; we need losses to return to more normalized levels.”

Mayor Who Added Jobs Lost Some, Too

The Watchmen — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:54:36 -0700

By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

During much of his tenure, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has taken credit for helping to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in New York City, from high-paying construction work to sales jobs at dozens of new big-box stores. Even as the city plods through the recession, the mayor has set a goal to “retain and create” an additional 400,000 jobs over the next six years.

The debate over how much influence a mayor, a governor or a president has over jobs is one that may never be settled. But if Mayor Bloomberg can be judged on the numbers he has used as evidence of his own success, those numbers, while generally accurate, also contain some warning signs about the future of employment in the city.

Even in the downturn, the city has 130,000 more jobs than it had when Mr. Bloomberg became mayor, according to state labor statistics. Working-class New Yorkers who kept their jobs or stayed in the same field saw their pay rise faster than the rate of inflation.

But the overall job market constantly shifts, particularly in a recession, when the economy sheds jobs and even whole industries. And in New York, middle- and working-class jobs that have disappeared — in fields like manufacturing, wholesale distribution and administrative services — have been replaced by jobs in sectors like retail, food service and home health care that generally pay less.

“There’s been much more growth in lower-wage industries than in middle-wage industries,” said James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group. “That’s a challenge for people struggling to maintain a decent livelihood in New York City, given the cost of housing and everything else.”

Several research groups have concluded that jobs created for working-class New Yorkers will continue to be in these low wage fields. A study by a nonpartisan group, the Center for an Urban Future, said that the two occupations that will have the most openings in New York City through 2014 are retail salesperson, with an average annual pay of $20,690, and cashier, with a pay of $16,800.

“Working-class people with limited educational backgrounds and limited skills are going to be fighting for scraps at the bottom,” said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future.

By August 2008, Mayor Bloomberg oversaw a city with 3.244 million jobs, its highest number since 1969, according to Mr. Parrot. With roughly 227,000 more jobs than when the mayor took office, the city had surpassed national job growth rates, a point the mayor proudly noted in his 2009 State of the City address, when he said the city had added a quarter-million jobs before the slowdown.

But much as boom times can make elected officials look like Midases, recessions can tarnish them. From August 2008 to August 2009, the city lost 96,739 private-sector jobs. These included 35,986 finance and insurance jobs, which paid $280,872 annually on average in 2008. They also included 10,712 construction jobs, which paid on average $68,119.

Some trends predated the recession. The manufacturing industry, in steady decline for decades, lost 43 percent of its New York City jobs from January 2002 to August 2009. In 2008, these jobs paid on average $52,758 a year.

According to the Center for an Urban Future, manufacturing accounts for about 3.2 percent of the job market here, compared with 8 percent in San Francisco and 12.7 percent in Los Angeles. At the same time, New York City has a higher proportion of lower-paying health care and social assistance jobs — 17.4 percent of the work force — than those cities.

“New York used to be a place that really nurtured a middle class,” Mr. Bowles said. “There’s compelling evidence that we have done worse than other cities.”

Seth W. Pinsky, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the city’s business-development arm, defended the city’s efforts to create more middle-income jobs and says these jobs have not yet been fully realized for the long term.

“The New York City economy is in some ways like an aircraft carrier,” Mr. Pinsky said. “You can’t change 50-year trends in five years.”

The mayor has used several programs to try to keep or add jobs, including development projects like modernizing the Hunts Point Terminal in the Bronx, which supplies wholesale food for many of the city’s groceries and restaurants. He has created an emergency loan program for small businesses and streamlined the process of obtaining business permits. A construction boom — not only of private residential buildings, but also of public projects like schools, libraries and a new police academy — stimulated the building trades.

The mayor has also invested tens of millions of city dollars to encourage the creation of a thriving biotechnology industry, seen by many as the growth sector of the future. The city has invested in a large research space at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park and is building the $700 million East River Science Park, a complex of office and lab space next to New York University Medical Center that is scheduled to open next year.

To try to reserve new jobs for lower-income New Yorkers, he says he will push community colleges to do a better job of turning out students with job skills.

Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University who has been an informal advisor to Mr. Bloomberg, credited the mayor with creating jobs by taking on projects like the science park, the Hunts Point market, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Homeport in Staten Island.

“He took on some of the messiest and most complicated projects,” he said. “Economic development takes longer than educating a child in school. It doesn’t take eight years. It takes 15 years. The great successes of Bloomberg are getting things done that previous mayors were afraid to deal with.”

But at the moment, opportunities are concentrated in lower-wage fields. Dale Grant, whose firm, Grant Associates, runs one of the city’s work-force training centers in Queens, said that her company used to be able to place people in entry-level jobs like bank teller, paying $10 to $12 an hour but eventually leading to bank careers paying $50,000 to $60,000 a year. Those jobs have virtually disappeared, she said, replaced by lower-paying jobs in high-end retail like Gracious Home and Banana Republic, where entry level positions often pay $20,000 to $25,000 a year while assistant manager jobs pay $40,000 to $50,000 a year.

Her firm also places people in education jobs that include teaching assistant positions in charter schools that pay $30,000 to $35,000 a year and tutoring jobs that would pay $30,000 to $40,000 if they were full time, but ordinarily they are not.

But even retail jobs can be hard to find in this economy. Carlos Peralta, 37, of Bushwick, worked in a Brooklyn warehouse from 2004 to 2009, earning $22,000 a year cutting phone company cable. Since he lost his job three months ago, he has been applying for jobs at retailers like BJ’s Wholesale Club. So far he has had no interviews.

“I’m on the computer all night” looking for a job, he said.

He is also considering going to college, and has been researching scholarships he found out about from the unemployment office.

For New Yorkers who held onto their jobs, the last few years brought larger paychecks, at least through 2008, according to the Census Bureau’s most recent income estimates. Adjusted for inflation, median income in New York City rose 8 percent, to $51,116, between 2002 and 2008, according to the bureau.

Frank Zucco, 46, a painter from Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, watched his pay rise to about $65,000 in 2008, from about $45,000 in 2002. This year he is on track to earn $80,000, including about $20,000 in overtime because of demand for workers on public sector projects, like school construction. Mr. Zucco, who is also the financial secretary for his union local, said that he has found his fellow painters have been doing just as well.

“There’s no more money in the private sector. Most of the work moved over to city work and public work,” he said. “As far as New York is concerned, Mayor Bloomberg has been doing pretty good in terms of creating jobs for us.”

Many experts are hesitant to give too much credit, or blame, to mayors for job creation or losses. Steve Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative group, said that cities are their own economic engines and that politicians have little impact. “Most municipal economic development strategies matter only on the margins,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

Some advocates for low-wage workers would like Mr. Bloomberg to exert one power that he, along with the City Council, does have: to create a city minimum wage that exceeds the federal minimum, currently $7.25 an hour. Cities that have done so, like San Francisco ($9.79) and Santa Fe ($9.85), have not suffered, according to Paul Sonn, legal co-director of the National Employment Law Project. Andrew Brent, a Bloomberg spokesman, said that the mayor favored a higher minimum wage everywhere, not just in New York; Mr. Pinsky, of the city’s economic development corporation, said that the minimum wage was a matter for the State Legislature to address.

For now, minimum wage is the best that some workers can hope for. In her eight years in New York, Adela Valdez has watched her wages ebb from a $19,200-a-year job washing laundry in Manhattan and a $21,000-a-year factory job making lampshades to her current job, working as a home care aide in Queens for $14,400 a year. Julissa Bisono, an organizer with Make the Road New York, which gives legal assistance to low-wage workers, said Ms. Valdez is stuck.

“She hasn’t found any job that pays better than what she is making now,” said Ms. Bisono.

Dow Closes Above 10,000 for First Time in Over a Year

The Watchmen — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:50:13 -0700

The Dow Jones industrial average, one of the most-watched markers of the financial world, closed above 10,000 points on Wednesday, a milestone of the stock market’s recovery from the depths of the financial crisis.

At the close, the Dow was up 144.8 points or 1.5 percent at 10,015.86. It had not closed above 10,000 since Oct. 3, 2008.

“The last time we saw 10,000 we were going the wrong way,” said Doreen Mogavero, president of the brokerage Mogavero, Lee & Company, who was on the trading floor Wednesday afternoon. “This is a little bit nicer feeling.”

Last October, the Dow fell below 10,000 as Washington rushed in to avoid an all-out collapse of the financial system.

But now, while the Dow has recovered 3,450 points since bottoming out in early March, it and other major stock indexes are still shadows of their former selves, meaning that many investors are a long way from whole.

The Dow is more than 4,000 points off its all-time highs, and broader measures of the market are down 30 percent from their peaks. And the companies that constitute the stock indexes are still grappling with shaky revenues, credit losses and huge uncertainties about the American economy’s long-term growth.

But on Wednesday, shares pushed higher after a major bank turned a $3.6 billion profit, earnings rose at a major computer-chip maker, and retail sales held up better than expected.

Investors went shopping on the reports, lifting stock markets from London to New York to Mexico City.

The broader Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was 1.75 percent or 18.83 points higher at 1,092.02, and the Nasdaq was up 1.5 percent or 32.34 points at 2,172.23.

The Dow first closed above 10,000 in March 1999. It retreated in the years after the dot-com bubble deflated, then retook 10,000 in late 2003 and peaked at 14,000 in October 2007.

Still, many investment specialists dismiss the significance of such big, round benchmark numbers, and say that no sophisticated investors or hedge funds make investment decisions based on whether a stock index’s total value can be measured in four or five digits.

“It’s psychological,” said Tom Fitzpatrick, chief technical analyst at Citigroup Capital Markets.

The major stock indexes have rebounded by 50 percent or more in a scorching rally that began in early March and galloped higher through the summer and early autumn, as the economy stabilized and once-bleeding companies began to report better profits and rising revenue.

That optimism got louder on Wednesday.

Investors rushed to take positions on companies and commodities that could benefit from a broad upturn in corporate profits and the global economy. Crude oil prices hit their highest levels since last October, topping $75 a barrel. Safety bets like the dollar and government bonds got creamed.

Financial stocks surged after JPMorgan Chase announced a third-quarter profit that trounced expectations. JPMorgan was the first major financial company to announce earnings, and the sight of rising revenues and stabilizing losses at one of Wall Street’s most powerful banks lifted expectations that the financial sector was back on its feet, a year after its near-implosion.

Shares of JPMorgan climbed 3 percent, and its rising tide lifted shares of other banks like Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citigroup, which are all scheduled to report their own quarterly results in the days ahead.

Even regional banks shared in the hoopla, despite lingering problems with their mortgage portfolios and worries that the smaller banks are more exposed to losses in the commercial real estate market.

Investors swept up shares of computer companies, search engines and software makers after Intel reported profits that surpassed Wall Street’s expectations and foreshadowed a return to global growth. Shares of Intel, which reported a profit after markets closed on Tuesday, were up 3 percent.

Shares were also higher in Asia and Europe. The FTSE 100 in London rose 1.987 percent while the DAX in Frankfurt was 2.45 percent higher. The CAC-40 in Paris rose 2.1 percent.

In Asia, the Shanghai index rose 1.2 percent, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index increased 2 percent. Japan’s Nikkei index slipped 0.2 percent.

The New York Times

US facing massive economic ‘power shift’ with dollar’s downward spiral

The Watchmen — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:33:45 -0700

The dollar's position as the world's leading reserve currency faces increased pressure as the financial crisis allows emerging economies greater influence on the world stage, analysts said.

A report last week in The Independent claiming that China, Russia and Gulf States are among nations prepared to ditch the dollar for oil trades has heightened the uncertainty surrounding the US currency's future.

The dollar slumped against rivals last week in the wake of the British daily's controversial report.

"The US dollar is being hurt by the continued talk of a shift away from a dollar-centric world," said Kit Juckes, an analyst at currency traders ECU Group.

"Three conclusions stand out very clearly. Firstly, the shift in economic power away from the G7 economies is continuing. "Secondly, there is a growing acceptance amongst those winners that one consequence of this power shift will be to strengthen their currencies.

"And finally, as long as the US economy is not strong enough for any rise in interest rates to be conceivable for a long time, the dollar's underlying downtrend will remain in place," added Juckes.

The Independent, under the front-page headline "The Demise of the Dollar", reported last Tuesday that Gulf states, together with China, Russia, Japan and France, were considering replacing the dollar as the currency for oil deals.

"In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning -- along with China, Russia, Japan and France -- to end dollar dealings for oil," wrote The Independent's Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk.

They would switch "to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar," added Fisk, citing Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources.

The report was denied by a host of countries, including Kuwait, Qatar and Russia, while France dismissed it as "pure speculation."

Even so, the United Nations itself last week called for a new global reserve currency to end dollar supremacy, which had allowed the United States the "privilege" of building up a huge trade deficit.

UN undersecretary-general for economic and social affairs, Sha Zukang, said "important progress in managing imbalances can be made by reducing the (dollar) reserve currency country's 'privilege' to run external deficits in order to provide international liquidity."

Zukang was speaking at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, whose President Robert Zoellick recently warned that the United States should not "take for granted" the dollar's role as preeminent global reserve currency.

Meanwhile at a G20 summit in Pittsburgh last month, world leaders unveiled a new vision for economic governance, with bold plans to fix global imbalances and give more clout to emerging giants such as China and India.

Following the summit, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner repeated Washington's commitment to a strong dollar.

But last week the finance chief was left to watch as traders used The Independent's report as an opportunity to push lower the troubled US unit.

The report "has helped concentrate the minds of traders and investors alike, and has given them another excuse to take the dollar lower," GFT Global Markets analyst David Morrison told AFP.

"Despite what the Fed and other central bankers say, a weaker dollar is desirable because it is necessary to rebalance the global economy.

"As long as the decline is gentle and orderly, then they're happy. But aggressive selling would spook the markets," he added.

Commerzbank currency analyst Antje Praefcke agreed that the market's reaction was significant because it showed that the dollar was on a downward trajectory.

"The questionable article in the Independent was of course disclaimed," Praefcke said.

"It is nonetheless an interesting study of the pscychological factors which are currently putting pressure on the dollar. Even if conspiracy theories turn out to be nonsense, the dollar is subsequently able to retrace only some of its losses."

AFP

Gold at $1,500? Don't hold your breath

The Watchmen — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:31:06 -0700

However, unlike other commodities it has relatively few uses other than as an ornament. Copper is used in wiring, iron is used to manufacture steel but gold's main uses are – and always have been – as a store of value and as a way to demonstrate personal wealth. Even if solid gold bathroom taps are not to your taste, they certainly make a point.

This means that gold really should be considered as a currency – and nothing else. This brings us on to the subject of fiat money.

Fiat currencies are not backed by gold. When most currencies were on the gold standard, a unit of currency could be exchanged by central banks for a fixed weight of gold. That way, paper money could be used instead of using gold or silver coins.

Today's currencies are all fiat money. The £5 note is no longer backed by anything. It is legal tender and has a value because the government declares it as legal tender and will accept taxation payments on this particular bill of exchange. But, when push comes to shove, a £5 note is just a piece of paper with no intrinsic value at all. It certainly isn't worth £5.

Britain suspended the gold standard in 1914 to fund the Great War before returning to it in 1925. It was finally abandoned in September 1931 and no currency in the world is now backed by gold. The reason? Not having your currency backed by something with real value meant that governments can print cash at will.

Speak to any American libertarian about gold and they will talk at length about the evils of fiat money. They will tell you about how the Roman denarius, a silver coin, was diluted from 100pc silver to 84pc, then 43pc and finally to 0.05pc until nobody would take the coin as a means of exchange because it had no value.

They will utter eyebrow-raising polemics about China's "flying money" and how Kublai Khan printed a currency that cost him nothing at all - becoming the father of all the fiat money in the world today.

You may then be treated to the story of how Scottish economist John Law became the most hated man in France. He had to flee to Italy after introducing a fiat currency that almost brought the country to its knees. History shows that fiat money loves failure.

This is the main argument that gold bugs use to talk up the gold price. Because all currencies are fiat, the world's major currencies will ultimately devalue against precious metals like gold and silver, the currencies of old.

With the dollar in what some call a "death spiral" is the gold price likely to hit the $1,500 an ounce level in short shrift as some suggest? Is last week's three consecutive all-time highs a taste of things to come - or is a classic bubble building in gold?

Ultimately what happens to the gold price will depend on the fate of the US dollar, the world's reserve currency.

Things are certainly in place for the dollar to be devalued. The US is massively in debt to the rest of the world and the government is increasing the money supply through quantitative easing. Last week's record highs were prompted by a fall in the dollar and in particular by concern that the oil-producing nations would stop pricing crude in dollars. Ultimately this will probably happen – but not for a very long time.

Most central banks hold vast quantities of dollars as their currency reserves. If they act to devalue the dollar by agreeing to oil sales in other currencies, they will devalue their own investments.

According to the latest data from the US Treasury Department, China is the world's largest holder of treasury securities, with $800.5bn of the instruments. Japan is at number two with $724.5bn and the UK is in third place, holding $220bn of American debt securities.

Despite the strong case for a devaluing dollar, it will probably be a painfully slow process. The dollar is probably not imminently doomed. However, the currency will almost certainly devalue over time and this is a long-term positive for the gold price.

Of course, we are now in uncharted territory as far as the gold price goes but last week's gains could represent a top for now. It is likely that the dollar was oversold last week.

On Friday, Ben Bernanke hinted that the Fed may raise rates sooner than expected and the dollar pared some of its losses.

Investors wishing to buy into gold should wait for it to retrench – as it inevitably will. The main reason to own gold is as a store of value but the price will fluctuate.

Gold at $1,500 is inevitable at some point in the future but it's probably not going to happen any time soon. Don't chase the price just now.

The Telegraph

FTSE 100 breaches 5200 to hit 12-month high

The Watchmen — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:29:43 -0700

Breaching this level is significant, said David Jones, chief market strategist at IG Index.

"This area had successfully capped any strength since the middle of September and today’s levels are the highest seen for more than a year, which should help banish any worries that the recovery was running out of steam," he said.

London's index of leading shares was up 57 - or 1.1pc - at 5221 by noon as a broad range of sectors showed gains.

Insurer Old Mutual was the biggest riser - up 3.5pc. Telecoms, miners and retailers also gained, with Vodafone up 2.8pc, Xstrata rising 2.1pc and Burberry increasing 2.5pc.

In Europe Germany's DAX and France's CAC rose 1.45pc and 1.2pc, buoyed by better-than-expected third-quarter profit from Royal Philips Electronics.

US markets are expected to open up.

The Telegraph

U.S. Budget Deficit Estimate $1.4 Trillion

The Watchmen — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 03:23:05 -0700

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government spent a record $1.4 trillion (876.9 billion pounds) more than it collected in the fiscal year ended September 30, congressional analysts said on Wednesday, in their final estimate before the official numbers are issued.

Bank bailouts, stimulus spending and declining tax revenues due to a deep recession led the government to post a deficit that amounts to 9.9 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product for the 2009 fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office said.

The Treasury Department will report the actual deficit later this month. The deficit for fiscal 2008 was $459 billion.

The $1.4 trillion estimate is less than the budget office's estimate of $1.58 trillion issued in August, but the discrepancy arises from differences in calculating the costs of bailing out mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , not any sudden change in economic conditions, CBO said.

The government took in $2.1 trillion in fiscal 2009, a 16.6 percent drop from the previous year as the recession led to sharp declines in individual and corporate income taxes, CBO said.

On the other half of the ledger, outlays increased 17.8 percent to $3.5 trillion, CBO said.

Among the most expensive items were $154 billion for bailouts under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, $91 billion for the Fannie and Freddie bailouts, and $100 billion under the massive stimulus package approved in February.

Excluding items in the stimulus package, spending for unemployment benefits more than doubled to $120 billion, CBO said.

One bright spot: the government's interest payments on its debt actually decreased 23 percent to $199 billion thanks to lower interest rates, CBO said.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan, editing by Philip Barbara)

The DIY fish supper: Future kitchen grows its own vegetables and seafood

Health News — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 03:02:36 -0700

If you thought kitchen technology had reached its peak with the microwave oven, think again.

Future cooks will use an indoor biosphere which grows vegetables and fish ready to be prepared with absolute freshness.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but this sort of technology is already under development to help households take the pain out of going green.

A study produced to help buyers at John Lewis plan for changing lifestyles details how technology can preserve the quality of life while dramatically cutting energy and water use.

It highlights advances already in development such as washing machines and dishwashers which clean with sound waves.

There will also be 'frugal fridges' which will suggest recipes based on what is inside and even compact and recycle food waste.

But perhaps most dramatic is the self-contained biosphere farm, created by Philips, to provide fish and fresh produce 52 weeks a year.

It will also deliver fresh hydrogen, which can be used to power a car, and run on food waste from the kitchen.

The plants produce oxygen, which is fed into the fish tank to keep the occupants happy.

The tank is kept clean by shrimps, which can also be eaten.

Elsewhere in the house, showers will filter waste water through a bed of reeds, allowing it to be reused to flush the lavatory or even make a cup of tea using, of course, a low-energy kettle.

Architects already use 3D printers to create the models they use in building design.

However, the technology will be applied to a machine which can use waste plastic to manufacture goods ranging from cups and spoons to a pair of trainers.

Last week, the energy regulator Ofgem warned that power tariffs might need to rise by 60 per cent by 2016 to fund a new generation of wind farms, nuclear and clean coal power stations.

Against this background, John Lewis and experts at the Future Laboratory, who are looking ahead to 2030, say there will be a fundamental shift in lifestyles and products to minimise energy use.

The head of product sourcing at the store, Sean Allam, said there would be a big move away from throwaway household gadgets with the store looking at ten-year guarantees on some items.

Partisan divide deepens on US war in Afghanistan

Investigative Judgment — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 03:00:00 -0700

Divisions between Democrats and Republicans at the US Senate continue to deepen as President Barack Obama reconsiders the future of the US role in Afghanistan.

Republican Senator John McCain in a TV interview on Sunday warned President Obama that a failure to send more troops to Afghanistan will be "an error of historic proportions."

Obama's former rival emphasized that the president had found himself caught between military commanders and Democratic lawmakers.

"I think the great danger now is a half-measure ... trying to please all ends of the political spectrum," McCain was quoted by CNN as saying.

He earlier had asked Obama to trust his top commanders who are calling for more troops to tackle the growing insurgency in Afghanistan.

The commander of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley Mc-Chrystal, has asked for 40-thousand more soldiers.

Democrats, however, oppose any troop surge and have introduced legislation to prohibit funding for further deployment.

Obama and his war council are busy looking for an effective military strategy in Afghanistan.

The mounting number of Western soldiers coming home in body bags has sent support for the war plummeting in Europe, Canada, and the United States.

Press TV

Aim Tasers lower, police told

The Police Brutality Network — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 03:00:00 -0700

RCMP and OPP change policy after maker urges stun gun users to avoid firing at suspects' chests
Police forces across Canada, including the RCMP and OPP, are immediately changing their Taser use policy after the manufacturer issued a directive that officers should not aim the weapon at a suspect's chest.

Taser International said in a bulletin that it's no longer advisable to aim the conducted energy weapon, which sends out a jolt of electricity, at a target's chest area to avoid impact to the heart.

"[W]e have lowered the recommended point of aim from centre of mass to lower centre of mass for front shots," the company said in a new training bulletin.

Rather than the chest area, which could lead to electricity affecting the heart, the company said police officers should target the back, legs or abdomen.

The new directive comes as the two-year anniversary approaches of the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, who died Oct. 14, 2007 at Vancouver International Airport.

Taser International is giving its closing submissions this week at the public inquiry headed by retired B.C. judge Thomas Braidwood, who is looking into the circumstances of Dziekanski's death.

Dziekanski, who was approached by four RCMP officers, died within minutes after he was jolted by an RCMP Taser.

A spokesman for the RCMP headquarters in Ottawa Friday said a directive has been sent out to officers to immediately avoid targeting a suspect's chest and head.

Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Joe Bosie said Sunday that officers received a memo about the new policies last week.

"It makes sense," said Bosie. "Those probes or needles are very sharp and if you were to discharge a Taser in or above the heart area like the neck or eyes it could cause serious injury."

While the latest Tasers are wireless, most others include barbed darts attached to wires that strike the victim, before delivering an electric jolt.

Toronto police had no comment on the new policy, saying a spokesperson would not be available to discuss the matter until Tuesday.

Spokespersons for York, Peel and Durham regional police were also unavailable to discuss the matter.

Vancouver police spokesman Const. Lindsey Houghton said Sunday the municipal force has also received the new directive from Taser International.

"We immediately began advising and training officers to change where they aim from upper back or upper chest to lower centre of mass per the bulletin," he said.

The Calgary and Winnipeg police forces have also advised their officers to lower their aim when using the Taser.

Taser International has strenuously denied at the public inquiry that the weapon was the direct cause of Dziekanski's death.

The 40-year-old Dziekanski was on his first-ever flight from Poland to join his mother in Kamloops, B.C. when he was left lost and wandering at the airport for nearly 10 hours.

Police were summoned after a 911 call of reports that a distraught man was throwing furniture around the arrivals lounge. Within 30 seconds of the RCMP surrounding Dziekanski, the weapon was deployed and fired five times, leaving Dziekanski writhing in agony on the ground.

In its training bulletin, the company said that by avoiding the chest area, it lessens the controversy about whether the jolts do or do not affect the heart.

The risk of a cardiac arrest after the weapon was deployed was "extremely low," according to the company.

While Taser International noted sudden cardiac arrests can occur on "golf courses, in airports" or anywhere, the involvement of a Taser discharge at around the same time would place police officers and the company in a "difficult situation to ascertain what role, if any," the Taser played, according to the bulletin.

B.C. Civil Liberties executive director David Eby said Sunday the weapon should be banned and that changing the targeted area on where to aim is not enough.

"We are disappointed that police have to wait for the company to issue a directive before making these changes," said Eby. "Admittedly that is a step towards limiting the use, but it's hard to imagine in what situation it makes sense to aim at a suspect's back."

In 2004, Robert Wayne Bagnell, 44, died after Vancouver police used a Taser on him, sending two electrical shocks to his chest. His death was later cited as restraint-associated cardiac arrest due to acute cocaine intoxication.

Bagnell's sister, Patti Gillman of Belleville, Ont., has since become an advocate against the use of Tasers by police.

"Finally this is an acknowledgment from Taser that the weapon isn't as safe as they've been claiming," she said Sunday. "Hopefully this will make police even more skeptical about using Tasers."

Amnesty International says 330 people died in the United States after being jolted by stun guns between June 2001 and late 2008. In Canada, the human rights watchdog says at least 26 such deaths occurred from 2003 to 2008.

The Toronto Star