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Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
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MOSCOW -- Several thousand people protested Monday night against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his party, which won the largest share of a parliamentary election in voting that observers said was rigged.
It was perhaps the largest opposition rally in years and ended with police detaining some of the activists. A group of several hundred marched toward the Central Elections Commission near the Kremlin, but were stopped by riot police and taken away in buses.
The total number of those detained was not immediately available.
Estimates of the number of protesters at the rally ranged from 5,000 to 10,000. They chanted "Russia without Putin" and accused his United Russia party of stealing votes.
United Russia took about 50 percent of Sunday's vote, a result that opposition politicians and election monitors said was inflated because of ballot stuffing and other vote fraud. It was a significant drop from the last election, when the party took 64 percent.
In practice,?the loss of seats in parliament appears to mean little; two of the three other parties winning seats have been reliable supporters of government legislation. But, it is a substantial symbolic blow to a party that had become virtually indistinguishable from the state itself.
It has also energized the opposition and poses a humbling challenge to the country's dominant figure in his drive to return to the presidency. Putin, who became prime minister in 2008 because of presidential term limits, will run for a third term in March and some opposition leaders saw the parliamentary election as a game-changer for what had been presumed to be Putin's easy stroll back to the Kremlin.
Also Monday, more than 400 Communist supporters gathered to express their indignation over the election, which some called the dirtiest in modern Russian history. The Communist Party finished second with about 20 percent of the vote.
"Even compared to the 2007 elections, violations by the authorities and the government bodies that actually control the work of all election organizations at all levels, from local to central, were so obvious and so brazen," said Yevgeny Dorovin, a member of the party's central committee.
Related story: Voters punish Putin; observers cite irregularities
Putin appeared subdued and glum even as he insisted at a Cabinet meeting Monday that the result "gives United Russia the possibility to work calmly and smoothly."
Although the sharp decline for United Russia could lead Putin and the party to try to portray the election as genuinely democratic, the wide reports of violations have undermined that attempt at spin.
Boris Nemtsov, a prominent figure among Russia's beleaguered liberal opposition, declared that the vote spelled the end of Putin's "honeymoon" with the nation and predicted that his rule will soon "collapse like a house of cards."
"He needs to hold an honest presidential election and allow opposition candidates to register for the race, if he doesn't want to be booed from Kamchatka to Kaliningrad," Nemtsov said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
Many Russians came to despise United Russia, seeing it as the engine of endemic corruption. The election showed voters that they have power despite what election monitors called a dishonest count.
"Yesterday, it was proven by these voters that not everything was fixed, that the result really matters," said Tiny Kox of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, part of an international election observer mission.
Other analysts suggested the vote was a wake-up call to Putin that he had lost touch with the country. In the early period of his presidency, Putin's appeal came largely from his man-of-the-people image: candid, decisive and without ostentatious tastes.
But, he seemed to lose some of the common touch, appearing in well-staged but increasingly preposterous heroic photo opportunities -- hunting a whale with a crossbow, fishing while bare-chested, and purportedly discovering ancient Greek artifacts while scuba-diving. And Russians grew angry at his apparent disregard -- and even encouragement -- of the country's corruption and massive income gap.
"People want Putin to go back to what he was in his first term -- decisive, dynamic, tough on oligarchs and sensitive to the agenda formed by society," said Sergei Markov, a prominent United Russia Duma member.
The vote "was a normal reaction of the population to the worsening social situation," once Kremlin-connected political analyst Gleb Pavlovsky was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
Only seven parties were allowed to field candidates for parliament this year, while the most vocal opposition groups were barred from the race. International monitors said the election administration lacked independence, most media were biased and state authorities interfered unduly at different levels.
"To me, this election was like a game in which only some players are allowed to compete," Heidi Tagliavini, the head of the observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said.
Tagliavini said that of the 150 polling stations where the counting was observed, "34 were assessed to be very bad."
Other than the Communist Party, the socialist Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party led by mercurial nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky are also expected to increase their representation in the Duma; both have generally voted with United Russia, and the Communists pose only token opposition.
Two liberal parties were in the running, but neither got the 7 percent of the national vote needed to win seats. Nemtsov's People's Freedom Party, one of the most prominent liberal parties, was denied participation for alleged violations in the required 45,000 signatures the party had submitted with its registration application.
About 60 percent of Russia's 110 million registered voters cast ballots, down from 64 percent four years ago.
Social media were flooded with messages reporting violations.
Many people reported seeing buses deliver groups of people to polling stations, with some of the buses carrying young men who looked like football fans, who often are associated with violent nationalism.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. has "serious concerns" about the elections.
Russia's only independent election monitoring group, Golos, which is funded by U.S. and European grants, has come under heavy official pressure in the past week. Golos' website was incapacitated by hackers on Sunday, and its director Lilya Shibanova and her deputy had their cell phone numbers, email and social media accounts hacked.
Also Monday, more than 400 Communist supporters gathered to express their indignation over the election, which some called the dirtiest in modern Russian history. The Communist Party finished second with about 20 percent of the vote.
"Even compared to the 2007 elections, violations by the authorities and the government bodies that actually control the work of all election organizations at all levels, from local to central, were so obvious and so brazen," said Yevgeny Dorovin, a member of the party's central committee.
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Source: http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/05/9227108-thousands-protest-against-putin-in-moscow
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Sunday, December 4, 2011
Oil price drops below $100 a barrel (AP)
NEW YORK ? Oil prices are falling after a four-day surge as traders await a key U.S. jobs report.
Benchmark crude dropped by 96 to $99.40 per barrel in New York. Brent crude lost $1.66 at $108.32 in London.
Prices had risen every trading day since Thanksgiving. They were boosted by tension over Iran's nuclear program and an effort by the Fed and central banks of other nations to increase the flow of dollars to foreign banks.
Now traders are awaiting the November unemployment report, to be released Friday by the Labor Department. High unemployment has been a drag on the economy and has kept demand for oil and gas weak.
"Everything's on hold right now," PFGBest analyst and oil trader Phil Flynn said. "We're a little worried about what those jobs numbers will be tomorrow."
Government data released Thursday suggested that the U.S. jobs market remains weak. The number of people who applied for unemployment benefits rose above 400,000 last week for the first time in a month, the Labor Department said. Applications would need to fall below 375,000 for an extended period to cut into the nation's 9 percent unemployment rate.
Separately, other reports gave a better reading on the economy. Manufacturing activity in the U.S. rose in November to a seven-month high. Auto makers including Chrysler, General Motors and Ford reported big increases in sales last month. And builders spent more in October on homes, offices and shopping centers, though construction spending remains anemic compared with previous years.
At the pump, retail gasoline prices slipped by less than a penny to $3.292 per gallon, according to AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service. A gallon of regular is about 69 cents cheaper than it was at its peak this year, near $4 per gallon, but it's still almost 43 cents higher than at the same time last year.
In other energy trading, natural gas prices jumped 7 cents, or 2 percent, to $3.62 per 1,000 cubic feet, after the government reported an unexpected decline in U.S. supplies last week.
Heating oil fell by 5 cents to $2.97 per gallon, and gasoline futures fell 1.86 cents to $2.5398 per gallon.
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Saturday, December 3, 2011
PROMISES, PROMISES: Records shielded by candidates (AP)
WASHINGTON ? In the final weeks of Mitt Romney's term as Massachusetts governor, a small team of aides combed through statehouse filing cabinets. They filled more than 630 cartons with papers destined for the state archives as the primary documentary legacy of his administration. One floor, though, was almost completely off limits to them: Romney's inner sanctum, his third-floor office.
The former legislative affairs director who headed the archiving effort, John O'Keefe, recalls that his team was given a stack of Romney's public schedules spanning four years and a limited variety of other documents from the governor's executive office, but not much else. "We were told we were not in charge of archiving the third floor," he says.
Three weeks before Romney left office in January 2007, O'Keefe's team turned the cartons culled from the statehouse over to archives officials and left 290 more boxes ? mostly leftover bulk records from prior administrations ? that were authorized for shredding. But the Massachusetts Republican's personal gubernatorial records ? including emails exchanged with his aides, private calendars and other materials ? were unaccounted for, say O'Keefe and others who worked in the Romney administration at the time.
"They were either left with the governor or were left behind," said O'Keefe, now city manager in Manchester, Vt.
The mystery deepened when the chief legal counsel for Romney's Democratic successor, Gov. Deval Patrick, said recently that just before Patrick took office, material on a state government web server that housed Romney's emails was erased. Top Romney aides also bought and removed their state-issued computer hard drives, and remaining leased computers were replaced. Romney said he followed the law in authorizing the purge, and his campaign aides said their actions were based on a 1997 Massachusetts court ruling that all governors' records are private.
Romney's selective policy toward public access and preservation of his executive records raises stark questions about how transparent his administration would be if he were to become president.
He's not alone. Other leading candidates for the presidency ? incumbent Barack Obama and Texas Gov. Rick Perry ? have touted their commitment to transparency. But their administrations also have been selective at times in the records they disclose. They have limited, stalled or denied access when it suited their purposes.
"What I wish Americans could expect is a politician who talked a good game and walked a good game, too," said Ken Bunting, executive director of the nonpartisan National Freedom of Information Coalition. "The reality is everybody gives lip service to transparency and accountability."
Romney's submission of paper documents to the Massachusetts archives was made "in the interest of transparency and to help provide a record of his time in office," said Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior campaign adviser. But the holdings in the archives are far from comprehensive. An Associated Press reporter sent from Washington earlier this fall spent a week examining the Romney archives, but did not find paper copies of any emails to or from Romney or any internal calendars or in-house memos ? all commonly used by governors. There are no state archives records accounting for what happened to those materials.
A self-described champion of open government, Obama signed an executive order committing to transparency the day he took office in January 2009. In September his administration issued a "national action plan" requiring all agencies to take detailed steps to improve openness.
His administration's performance has bright spots but has not nearly fulfilled Obama's pledges. The federal government responded to fewer records requests in 2010 even as the numbers of requests grew, according to an AP study earlier this year. Agencies often frustrate requests with delays ? such as the administration's slowness in responding to the AP's requests for records related to government loans to the now-bankrupt solar company Solyndra.
Perry has touted his decision ordering Texas state agencies to post electronic data online, but he has also curtailed access to his private calendars and travel records. As Perry revved up his presidential bid last September, his chief of staff, Jeffrey S. Boyd, sent emails to the governor's staff, warning them of growing records requests and ordering, "Do not utilize email unless it is essential to do so."
The growing use by government agencies and political campaigns of new channels of electronic communication, including text messages, online videos and social media services, has opened new dimensions in the availability of public records. But candidates haven't been especially transparent.
Newt Gingrich agreed to release payment records of his consulting work for the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation only after the news service Bloomberg revealed details of his role with the government-sponsored agency. Rep. Michele Bachmann's staff declined AP requests for receipts and other records that would show how she spent millions in government money to cover payroll and other expenses, instead offering only limited information already published by the House.
The administration of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who decided not to enter the race, told the AP it would cost $30,000 to provide comprehensive electronic and paper files from his second term. And the office of Minnesota's Tim Pawlenty, who ran but then dropped out, estimated a cost of $1,150 to provide the AP with records of just one of dozens of out-of-state trips he took while governor.
Romney's purge of electronic records is matched by the Perry administration's policy of deleting all inter-office emails older than one week ? a policy started by his predecessor, former President George W. Bush. Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle said Boyd's email warning was simply "to remind employees to only use email when necessary."
"There's the potential for a lot more raw information than in the past as emails and other electronic communications replace phone and face-to-face conversations," said Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit public interest group. "The problem is we're seeing officials and governments moving more and more to shield those materials from public access."
Only about one-quarter of the 630 cartons of Romney paper records are available for inspection at the Massachusetts archives. State legal officials have yet to say whether the 1997 court ruling allows access to the other material. Even if they do, Assistant State Archivist Michael Comeau said, staff shortages and time-consuming redaction checks could extend delays close to the 2012 election. More than 75 cartons examined by the AP revealed staff and legislative documents but no internal materials written to or from Romney himself ? except for ceremonial bill-signing and official letters.
As governor, Romney's careful line on providing records was based on a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that "the governor is not explicitly included" among agencies covered by the state's Public Records Law, which generally requires agencies to submit to records requests. Other governors since 1997 have interpreted the ruling similarly.
Archived records from Romney's communications office ? among the few third-floor materials that were saved ? show that between 2003 and 2007, his administration at times provided documents requested by media and others. But in many cases, Romney officials either turned down requests or offered partial responses, saying the requests were "overly broad" or that disclosure "would not serve the public interest."
"It's the discretionary nature of the responses that's worrying," said Gavi Wolfe, legal counsel for the Boston office of the American Civil Liberties Union. "If they're in the public interest and don't impinge on privacy or investigations, records should be made public."
The AP submitted detailed questions to Romney about how his administration handled public records when he was governor, but the campaign provided only a brief statement: "The governor's office in Massachusetts is not subject to the state's public records law. As a legal matter, it is not required to disclose any documents."
Fehrnstrom, Romney's chief spokesman during that era, said the Romney campaign does not possess any remaining gubernatorial records outside of the Massachusetts archives.
Theresa Dolan, who was director of administration under Romney and six previous governors, said prior administrations had engaged in limited electronic house cleaning, but the selling of hard drives to Romney's aides was not common practice.
After The Boston Globe first reported that his aides had purged electronic files, Romney defended the move, saying the deleted files might have contained confidential medical, judicial or personnel records. Still, when Romney's archive team found hundreds of Social Security numbers and other confidential files at the end of his administration, they separated those materials from thousands of other documents that were turned over to the archives. O'Keefe recalled that anything "confidential in nature" was turned over to a private vendor for shredding. That shredding, O'Keefe said, was approved by the state's Records Conservation Board.
The board's files do not mention any purged electronic files. While Massachusetts governors are not subject to disclosure requirements, they are still obliged to preserve both electronic and paper records, said Laurie Flynn, chief legal counsel for Secretary of the Commonwealth William F. Galvin.
Suggesting that Romney's Massachusetts administration "deliberately sought to delete public records" in advance of his 2007 presidential run, the Democratic National Committee has pressed three separate Massachusetts public records requests for more background on the purge. Romney's campaign has responded with its own request to Patrick's office asking for any evidence of collaboration between his staff and Obama re-election officials.
Wolfe, the ACLU lawyer, said the electronic purge set an "alarming" precedent: "I would be concerned about the chief executive wanting to shield the actions of his administration from public scrutiny." Romney has waved off those concerns, saying that if elected, his presidential administration "would do what's required by the law and then some."
In three years in the White House, Obama set an even more ambitious standard. Obama signed an executive order on his first day in office, committing publicly to improving transparency and setting clear goals for federal agencies to respond quickly and expansively to records requests. His directive led to the opening of White House visitor logs and plans to improve response times and declassify outdated secret documents. Earlier this year, the administration followed up with an "open government partnership" aimed as a template for other world governments.
"The president has set a historic standard when it comes to openness," said campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt.
But many of Obama's broad pledges have not been met. In the face of criticism, the Justice Department abandoned a proposal that would have allowed officials to pretend that some government files didn't exist when people asked to see them. And the government completely turned down records in one-third of all records requests in 2010 ? even censoring 194 pages of internal emails about Obama's Open Government directive.
The White House and Energy Department have been selective about turning over records related to the GOP-led congressional investigation of Solyndra. The AP pressed three separate appeals for records in September, but Energy Department officials said they would take months because of the number of documents and requests to read them. In early October, as Congress threatened to issue subpoenas, administration officials quickly released thousands of pages and DVDs filled with emails.
White House officials would not comment on the sudden shift, but LaBolt said, "The president and this administration are changing the ways Washington works in terms of transparency."
In Texas, Perry has made similar claims, pointing to broad swaths of data now available online ? from state agency payments to death certificates. And though Texas provides general expenditures for Perry's security guards when he travels, Perry has opposed viewing of travel vouchers and other detailed items, citing operational security.
"The people of America aren't seeing the real Rick Perry," said Keith Elkins, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. "They may get a glimpse of him on the campaign trail, but the real record has been hidden and carefully parceled out."
___
Associated Press writers Brett J. Blackledge, Matthew Daly and Jack Gillum contributed to this report.
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NATO attack could hurt war on terror: Pakistan (Reuters)
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) ? Pakistan, enraged by a NATO cross-border air attack that killed 24 soldiers, could withdraw its support for the U.S.-led war on militancy if its sovereignty is violated again, the foreign minister suggested in comments published on Thursday.
The South Asian nation has already shown its anger over the weekend strike by pulling out of an international conference in Germany next week on Afghanistan. It stood by that decision on Wednesday, depriving the talks of a central player in efforts to bring peace to its neighbor.
"Enough is enough. The government will not tolerate any incident of spilling even a single drop of any civilian or soldier's blood," The News newspaper quoted Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar as telling a Senate committee on foreign affairs.
"Pakistan's role in the war on terror must not be overlooked," Khar said, suggesting Pakistan could end its support for the U.S. war on militancy. Despite opposition at home, Islamabad backed Washington after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Pakistan military sources also said it had cancelled a visit by a 15-member delegation, led by the Director General of the Joint Staff, Lieutenant-General Mohammad Asif, to the United States that was to have taken place this week.
NATO helicopters and fighter jets attacked two military border posts in northwest Pakistan on Saturday in the worst incident of its kind since 2001.
Details are still sketchy about what happened in the early morning hours, but Pakistani military sources said the attack came in two waves.
"The attack began at around 12:05 a.m. and lasted for about 30 minutes, when the contacts were made and it was discontinued," said one source.
The source said NATO helicopter gunships and jet fighters came back after 35 minutes. The Pakistanis returned fire in a battle that lasted for another 45 minutes.
When it was over, 24 Pakistani soldiers were dead and 13 wounded.
The two posts in question -- Volcano and Boulder -- are perched about 8,000 feet high on a ridgeline near the Afghan border. They are among about 28 such posts in Mohmand Agency set up to prevent cross-border movements by Taliban militants, another military source said.
The source said that there were no militants in the area, however, because they had been flushed out by a Pakistani military operation conducted over the year.
The top U.S. military officer denied allegations by a senior Pakistani army official that the NATO attack was a deliberate act of aggression.
General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Reuters in an interview: "The one thing I will say publicly and categorically is that this was not a deliberate attack.
The army, which has ruled Pakistan for more than half of its history and sets security and foreign policy, faced strong criticism from both the Pakistani public and the United States after Osama bin Laden was killed in a secret raid by U.S. special forces in May.
The al Qaeda leader had apparently been living in a Pakistani garrison town for years.
Pakistanis criticized the military for failing to protect their sovereignty and U.S. officials wondered whether some members of military intelligence had sheltered him. Pakistan's government and military said they had no idea bin Laden was in the country.
The army seems to have regained its confidence and won the support of the public and the government in a country where anti-American sentiment often runs high.
Protests have taken place in several cities every day since the NATO strike along the poorly-defined border, where militants often plan and stage attacks.
In an apparently unrelated attack, a bomb blew out a wall of a government official's office in Peshawar, the last big city on the route to Afghanistan, early on Thursday, police said. There were no reports of casualties.
The United States has long wanted Pakistan, whose military and economy depend heavily on billions of dollars in American aid, to crack down on militant groups that cross its unruly border to attack Western forces in Afghanistan.
More recently, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked Pakistan to bring all militant groups to the negotiating table in order to stabilize Afghanistan.
The NATO attack makes Pakistani cooperation less likely.
NATO hopes an investigation it promised will defuse the crisis and that confidence-building measures can repair ties.
But the army is firmly focused on the NATO attack, and analysts say it is likely to take advantage of the widespread anger to press its interests in any future peace talks on Afghanistan.
Pakistan says it has paid the highest price of any country engaged in the war on militancy. Thousands of soldiers and police have been killed.
Critics allege Pakistan has created a deadly regional mess by supporting militants like the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network to act as proxies in Afghanistan and other groups to fight Indian forces in the disputed Kashmir region.
"The sacrifices rendered by Pakistan in the war on terror are more than any other country," Khar was quoted as saying. "But that does not mean we will compromise on our sovereignty."
(Additional reporting by Jibran Ahmad in PESHAWAR; Writing by Michael Georgy and Chris Allbritton; Editing by Nick Macfie)
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Friday, December 2, 2011
Apple official statement: Siri?s lack of abortion info isn?t intentional (Yahoo! News)
Omission of clinics doesn't indicate an anti-abortion stance, says Apple
Siri, the iPhone 4S's new voice assistant, can be?incredibly helpful and?incredibly silly, but one of the things it can't do is causing an uproar among abortion and women's rights activists around the country. The accusations have been flying around the internet for the past few days, as people point out that Siri will help you find a hooker or the closest bar, but asking it to find an abortion clinic or birth control will give you a big fat zero. Is Siri pro-life, people asked?
Not surprisingly, Apple has now?steadfastly denied any claim that Siri has any opinion on the subject. The voice assistant, Apple spokesperson Natalie Kerris points out, is still in beta release, which means that it still has many bugs to be worked out. "These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better, and we will in the coming weeks," she said.
As?TUAW reporter Chris Rawson notes, one possible reason for the lack of responses is that Siri gets a lot of her business information from Yelp, rather than relying on competitor Google. A quick Google search for abortion clinics will yield several possibilities, depending on where you're searching, but they aren't the sort of businesses that tend to get reviewed on Yelp very often. A more targeted query ? requesting the location of the nearest?Planned Parenthood, for example ??tends to bring up results consistently through both Siri and Google.
Abortion is a touchy subject no matter how you look at it, so it's not surprising that Apple felt the need to respond to the accusations. The company was very careful not to hint at a stance for or against it; they simply pointed out that Siri is still a work in progress, and hopefully people won't overreact too much to issues which were coincidental at best.
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This article was written by Katherine Gray and originally appeared on Tecca
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