The British daily paper the Independent reported on Sunday that Dow component Exxon Mobil had expressed interest in Gulf Keystone. The Independent did not cite sources. Texas-based Exxon did not comment on the speculation.
The paper reported Gulf Keystone currently has a market value of about $2.33 billion. Exxon is said to be considering a bid for Gulf Keystone that is just under $12.50 a share based on current dollar/pound conversion rates and that it is probable the British firm may reject that offer.
The Independent reported that Chevron (NYSE: CVX), the second-largest U.S. oil company, and China's Sinopec (NYSE: SNP), Asia's largest refiner, are keeping an eye on the situation.
If successful in its bid for Gulf Keystone, the acquisition would be the largest for Exxon since the $41 billion purchase of XTO, which was announced almost exactly two years ago and made Exxon the largest U.S. natural gas producer.
Gulf Keystone makes for an appealing target because the company is believed to be sitting on massive oil reserves in Iraq's Kurdistan region. Last month, it emerged that Exxon was the first of the oil industry's giants to enter Kurdistan, taking six licenses, the Independent reported.
To say that time is running out on a Santa Claus rally is to put things mildly. The reality is we probably want be getting one this year as the performance of U.S. equities this week clearly indicates. All three major U.S. indexes ended the week down more than 1.5%. That's bad enough, but previously reliable gold is in big trouble as highlighted by the 4.2% drop for SPDR Gold Shares (NYSE: GLD) this week and that includes a gain of nearly 2% on Friday.
Oh well. Try again next week, right? Unfortunately, Europe will still be around next week and with no sign the news from across the Atlantic is going to take a sudden turn for the better, the last trading week before Christmas could be marked by light low volume and sideways trading.
Still, there are some ETFs that will be in play so let's have a look at few now.
PowerShares Dynamic Food & Beverage Portfolio (NYSE: PBJ): With General Mills (NYSE: GIS) and Conagra (NYSE: CAG) stepping into the earnings confessional on Tuesday (over 7% of PBJ's weight), the near-term fate of this conservative ETF could be decided as soon as next week. Next week could mean the difference between a positive and negative performance for the PowerShares Dynamic Food & Beverage Portfolios for 2011.
PowerShares QQQ (Nasdaq: QQQ): Not to diminish the impact of the other earnings reports next week, but Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) will be the week's marquee earnings play and at over 6% of the PowerShares QQQ's weight, we nominate this ETF as one to trade early next week. If things go bad, trade the ProShares UltraShort QQQ (NYSE: QID).
iShares MSCI Belgium Investable Market Index Fund (NYSE: EWK): It was only a matter before this already vulnerable ETF got bit by the downgrade bug and that's what happened on Friday after the close when Moody's Investors Service lowered Belgium's credit rating. Already down 19% for the year, if support at $10 doesn't hold, the iShares MSCI Belgium Investable Market Index Fund could easily fall another 10% or more.
PowerShares DB Gold Double Short ETN (NYSE: DZZ): Even with a drop of nearly 3% on Friday, the PowerShares DB Gold Double Short ETN still finished the week with a gain of nearly 13%. As hard as it may be for some to believe, gold looks very weak right now and with DZZ trading for just over $5, why not take out some insurance on long gold positions in the form of this ETN?
Market Vectors Indonesia ETF (NYSE: IDX): It didn't surprise us to see Indonesian stocks bounce on Friday and with news of an investment grade credit rating for the fast-growing Asian tiger economy we reiterate the view that the Market Vectors Indonesia ETF is one to watch in 2012. Start early by trading IDX next week.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
The financial crisis was ripping across the world
Davis' argument, long discredited by actual surveys of employers, is that unemployment is so high because employers refuse to hire because of Democratic policies. As Paul Krugman has long noted, employers, when surveyed, have consistently and emphatically refuted this claim. Given that the employers answering the surveys are disproportionately Republicans and opponents of regulation who have strong incentives to blame the regulations for their failure to hire, their failure to do so makes the survey results particularly compelling. Davis' statistical index provides no evidence of why employers are not hiring. Indeed, it is inherently incapable of providing such evidence.
Davis missed the developing crisis entirely, publishing an article about “the Great Moderation” in 2008 as the financial crisis was ripping across the world. His ideological blinders are so complete that he cannot even consider the obvious – the crisis was brought on by the criminogenic environment produced by the three “de's” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization plus perverse executive and professional compensation. The economists George Akerlof and Paul Romer wrote an article about accounting control fraud entitled “Looting: the Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” They concluded the article with this passage about the criminogenic environment produced by S&L deregulation in the 1980s.
“Neither the public nor economists foresaw that the [S&L] regulations of the 1980s were bound to produce looting. Nor, unaware of the concept, could they have known how serious it would be. Thus the regulators in the field who understood what was happening from the beginning found lukewarm support, at best, for their cause. Now we know better. If we learn from experience, history need not repeat itself (1993: 60).”
The reason we have tragic levels of unemployment is the financial crisis, which was fully preventable had the anti-regulators put in place by Presidents Clinton and Bush simply understood the concepts of looting and criminogenic environments that we had made clear a quarter-century ago. Absent the restoration of effective financial regulation and prosecutions, and the removal of the perverse compensation systems (which also requires regulation), we will continue to suffer recurrent, intensifying financial crises and the severe unemployment they produce. Effective financial regulation greatly reduces uncertainty by increasing transparency and by preventing Gresham's dynamics. George Akerlof explained to the profession 41 years ago in his famous article on markets for “lemons.”
“[D]ishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market. The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost also must include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence.” The FBI's white-collar crime specialists do not patrol a beat and look for crimes. They sometimes act on anonymous tips or leads from other investigations, but overwhelmingly they depend on criminal referrals from the regulators.
Our principal function as regulators is to serve as the regulatory cops on the beat to prevent the Gresham's dynamic by aggressively finding the frauds, putting them out of business, and providing the criminal referrals that make it possible to prosecute the elite frauds. Absent effective regulators, honest firms often face extinction and their employees will lose their jobs.
Chicago professors, Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel, wrote what remains the U. Chicago bible on accounting control fraud. A generation of American lawyers has been taught this profession of faith from Easterbrook and Fischel's 1991 treatise: “A rule against fraud is not an essential or even necessarily an important ingredient of securities markets….” The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (1991). Markets are self-correcting, bubbles are impossible, and economic crises are impossible. This was the theoclassical profession of faith in a miraculous trinity.
Each of these dogmas has been repeatedly falsified by real life, but facts cannot trump blind faith. Senator McCain's was a member of the “Keating Five.” Charles Keating, the most infamous S&L fraud, used the Senators to try to intimidate us into not taking any regulatory action against Lincoln Savings' massive regulatory violation – a violation that led to billions of dollars in losses. Neither McCain nor Davis learned any useful lesson from this scandal.
Davis has mounted politically consistent attacks on the Democrats based on the high unemployment caused by the epidemic of accounting control fraud that hyper-inflated the bubble and drove the U.S. financial crisis. On January 3, 2010 he published an op-ed with Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy in the Wall Street Journal blaming the Democrats for the high unemployment caused by the Great Recession. This was their tag line: “A recession is a terrible time to make major changes in the economic rules of the game.”
Consider the logic of that assertion. The “economic rules of the game” have just led to an epidemic of accounting control fraud, a hyper-inflated bubble, a Great Recession, and severe unemployment and the theoclassical answer to the catastrophe that their faith-based policies have caused is – engrave those rules in bronze. They literally call on us to repeat the mistakes of the past. Theoclassical economists take their cue from the White Queen, who bragged to Alice that with practice she had learned to believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
The authors acknowledged that the Great Recession had caused severe unemployment, but added the claim that it was the election of Democrats that prevented a prompt recovery.
Obama's economic team (Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke) was strongly neoclassical and economically conservative. The authors then singled out any effort to deal with climate change as particularly undesirable. Apparently it is now a violation of theoclassical principles to require manufacturers to internalize the cost of negative externalities. That is contrary to economics and would lead to a poisoned world in which firms that spent money to restrict harmful emissions would be driven out of business by their competitors who avoided such expenses and obtained a decisive cost advantage. This is another example of a Gresham's dynamic in which bad ethics drives good ethics from the marketplace. The authors ended by opposing allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire. They presented no evidence in support of their partisan attack on Democrats and their ideological attack on “liberals.”
Davis mentioned “policy uncertainty” as one of the contributors to the employers' failure to hire workers in this article, but what he stressed was that the Great Recession so depressed private sector demand for goods and services that most employers felt little desire to hire additional workers because they could not sell additional output. He noted that employers had reduced the intensity of their recruiting because they were in a buyer's market in which they were deluged with applicants and could afford to hire only the most ideal candidates. Even when Davis discussed uncertainty his primary emphasis was on economic uncertainty – the Great Recession. He ended by blaming unemployment on the unemployed.
The long-term unemployed were spending fewer hours looking for jobs. Davis called for ending unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. The prospect of starving in a fortnight would concentrate their minds wonderfully. (Yes, Davis' last argument contradicts his earlier arguments, but this is faith-based callousness posing as science.) His “summing up” paragraph has one clause referencing “uncertainty” as a purported tertiary contributor to the slow reduction in unemployment. Again, Davis offered no support for this assertion.
Davis' latest (October 5, 2011) partisan attack is entitled “Policy Uncertainty Is Choking Recovery.” In five months, Davis' tertiary, minor asserted contributor to the slow recovery has suddenly morphed into a monster that is the cause of the problem. You might think that the survey results showing that businesses have repeatedly falsified this claim would pose a problem for this meme, but the authors hit on the obvious answer to inconvenient truths – they ignored them. Lest you think that this was due to tight space limits placed on a Bloomberg op ed, check their academic paper, which, also ignores the actual surveys.
“But the persistence of policy uncertainty wasn't inevitable. Rather, it reflects deliberate policy decisions, harmful rhetorical attacks on business and “millionaires,” failure to tackle entitlement reforms and fiscal imbalances, and political brinkmanship.” Their thesis boils down to the claim that capitalists are wusses. The reality is that politicians of both parties fall all over themselves saying nice things about business and that the criticisms are addressed to corporate criminals and the wealthy who pay what the vast bulk of Americans view as grossly inadequate taxes.
By their logic, we should eliminate taxes on the wealthy. By entitlement “reforms” they mean reducing Social Security benefits – that will do wonders for private sector demand and robust jobs growth. Indeed, the authors' thesis is eerily reminiscent of Jon Stewart's famous riff when Dick Cheney shot his elderly hunting companion in the face. Stewart noted that Cheney was so powerful that the victim apologized to Cheney for being shot – by Cheney. The authors want us to apologize to the elite financial frauds that became wealthy through the accounting control fraud epidemic that drove the crisis, the Great Recession, the great bulk of the federal budget deficit, the state and local government financial crisis, and severe unemployment.
It wasn't enough that we bailed them out and gimmicked the accounting rules at their demand to ensure that “their” banks could continue to pay them massive bonuses even though they were in economic reality insolvent. How dare we make “harmful rhetorical attacks” on the frauds! We should all apologize immediately to the productive class.
Rather than simple reforms aimed at efficiency improvements and cost savings, the law seeks to remake the U.S. health-care delivery system, dramatically expanding the role of government and imposing new burdens on businesses and individuals. Even in narrowly economic terms, the measure adds to the uncertainty facing households and businesses.
The Democratic leadership in Congress opted to pursue the most radical plan that could muster the necessary 60 votes in the Senate and a thin majority in the House. As a result, the legislation failed to attract a single Republican vote in either chamber. That political strategy ensured the act would become the focus of future electoral battles and rollback efforts.“
The authors then go on to complain that the lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the Act (which they do not note were brought by Republicans) add to uncertainty. Whatever, the Act is, it is assuredly not “radical.” It is modeled on a scheme created by a then conservative Republican Governor, Mitt Romney. In reality, the Obama administration made obsessive efforts to craft a bill with bipartisan support – substantially weakening an already weak bill and taking out, at the demand of Republican and “blue dog” Democrats, the central “cost savings” provision in the bill – the public option.
The Republicans and “blue dog” Democrats promised to kill any such bill. The authors' dread “liberal Democrats” favored a bill that would produce superior health care at a far lower price in line with other developed nations. The private health insurers promised to bury such a bill, so the Obama administration went for the ultra conservative alternative developed by Romney. The authors' partisan slant causes them to deliberately and comprehensively misstate the facts.
To which the obvious first question is: why? I begin my analysis with their tax provisions component. They know that a historically unusual number of tax provisions are set to expire in coming years, so they know that when they use that component they will produce at index showing a surge in uncertainty. “Scheduled expirations of federal tax code provisions were rare before 2000 but have grown rapidly. More than 130 provisions are slated to expire in 2011 and 2012, in many cases setting the stage for new political battles.”
Davis wants to report high uncertainty to fit his priors that he has been asserting without any proof. This is a hopelessly unsound means to produce an index. Any of us could pick a variable that would “prove” our priors. The psychological temptation to prove we are right (especially for theoclassical economists who have gotten everything important horribly wrong) is overwhelming. The bad news is that the tax expirations are the least embarrassing aspect of their index.
An even more ludicrous component is: “the frequency of newspaper articles that refer to economic uncertainty and the role of policy.” First, the authors know, because Davis has been a part of promoting this meme, that Republicans have organized a coordinated campaign to claim that “regulation” and “taxes” are causing the weak recovery from the recession. To now use the publicity that one political party, and at least one of the framers of the index, is generating for partisan purposes as purported objective evidence of the harms of ending the regulatory black holes is so unprincipled as to be beneath contempt. Indeed, the absurdity of this component is demonstrated by the fact that their effort to publicize their index in the form of a partisan op ed and a partisan academic paper has already had the effect of driving their index higher and “proving” their point. Moreover, this is not a new Republican strategy.
They followed the same strategy of attacking regulation and regulators for years, but the coordinated attacks on regulation emanating from the right's “think tanks” (funded by firms that wish to prevent effective regulation) have increased greatly since the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley. Self-generated attacks on regulation become “policy uncertainty,” which becomes a purported empirical basis for preventing effective regulation. The index provides an elegant solution to the Koch brothers' policy goals. The authors' third component is almost humorously bad: “the extent of disagreement among forecasters about future inflation and government spending.” We have a vastly more reliable means to judge the risks of future inflation in the U.S. It is called the U.S. bond market. It prices the risk of inflation continuously. It already incorporates “government spending” because such spending can affect inflation. The U.S. bond markets have consistently been telling us since the crisis became public knowledge that there is no material risk of inflation. Why do the authors believe that “forecasters” are more reliable than bond markets? Why do they believe that businesses are failing to hire because they are concerned that the inflation hawks have remained delusional in their claims that hyper-inflation is just around the corner? What does any of this have to do with regulation?
If CEOs were worried about hyper-inflation because they remained in thrall to some inflation hawk analyst who had been proven grotesquely wrong in every forecast over the last five years, wouldn't those CEOs be happy that the Bush tax cuts were set to expire? Why do CEO's base their decision to hire on the variance among analysts as to the size of the federal budget instead of the size of the federal budget deficit? The authors do not address these issues in their formal paper or op ed.
The authors then assigned arbitrary weights to their three components. The news stories measure is weighted one-half, while the tax repeals and both forms of variance in forecasts (inflation and government spending) each receive an individual weight of one-sixth.
The authors claim in their op ed (but not in their paper, which claims only “some suggestive evidence on causation”) that their index somehow establishes causality and confers the ability to quantify the jobs that would be created if the Republicans would stop their media campaign of blaming “radical” regulation for the slow recovery. (Of course, the authors don't phrase it that way, but given the extreme weight they gave to this single component of their index and the fact that the senior author of the paper is a Republican activist pushing this meme in the media, that is how circular and perverse “causality” is in their index.)
“So how much near-term improvement could we gain from a stable, certainty-enhancing policy regime? We estimate that restoring 2006 levels of policy uncertainty would yield an additional 2.5 million jobs over 18 months. Not a full solution to the jobs shortfall, but a big step in the right direction.”
They also do not explain how we could undo “uncertainty” – as “measured” under their index. As long as the right generates attacks on regulation and claims that it causes uncertainty and those complaints are repeated by their array of web sites the index will “measure” high uncertainty. We went through a remarkable period of radical deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization that created the criminogenic environments that produced three major crises in 25 years and one party is still demanding that we make the three “de's” far worse.
Are we supposed to repeal Dodd-Frank? Would the repeal increase or decrease “policy uncertainty”? How are we supposed to prevent analysts from being hyper-inflation hawks? Would making the tax laws longer remove uncertainty? Congress could still change them at will. The repeal as of a date certain was meant to reduce uncertainty. Every aspect of this index is farcical and a naked partisan weapon of attack on the regulations and prosecutions essential to preventing our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. Theoclassical economists were the architects of these crises. They were the great destroyers of jobs and wealth. The claim that we can never undo their criminogenic designs and that any attempt to even criticize the elite frauds will lead to job losses is pure extortion. Their index does not allow any statements about causality, and they know that the claims of causality and quantification that they made in their op ed are indefensible. The direct surveys of employers do allow us to evaluate causality because they are statements (largely) against the political interests of the business people being surveyed. Those surveys refute the argument.
Restoring effective regulatory cops on the beat will increase transparency and reduce the Gresham's dynamic that is the bane of honest firms. Both effects reduce uncertainty and increase employment. For example, there were far more aggressive regulatory and prosecutorial responses to the S&L debacle than the current crisis. We convicted over 1,000 elites in cases designated by the Justice Department as “major” and we brought thousands of civil and enforcement actions against S&L executives. We largely ended nonprime lending, particularly liar's loans by S&Ls in 1990-1991. We placed many hundreds of S&Ls and banks in receivership.
We consistently wiped out the shareholders and subordinated debt holders in those resolutions. We greatly boosted capital requirements, got rid of junk accounting, and put formal requirements for prompt corrective action in place. We rapidly sold the bad assets in our liquidating receiverships. None of these things has been done in Bush and Obama administrations' tepid response to the current crisis.
The recovery from the recession in the early 1990s was relatively rapid. Our aggressive regulatory actions added greatly to certainty because our actions were consistent, added to transparency, and helped honest firms. That result would be consistent with the authors' purported theory (gratuitous uncertainty poses an undesirable risk that slows recovery), but not with their ideological blinders that cause them to see regulation as inherently adding to uncertainty.
Bill Black is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He spent years working on regulatory policy and fraud prevention as Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, Litigation Director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and Deputy Director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement, among other positions.
Davis missed the developing crisis entirely, publishing an article about “the Great Moderation” in 2008 as the financial crisis was ripping across the world. His ideological blinders are so complete that he cannot even consider the obvious – the crisis was brought on by the criminogenic environment produced by the three “de's” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization plus perverse executive and professional compensation. The economists George Akerlof and Paul Romer wrote an article about accounting control fraud entitled “Looting: the Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” They concluded the article with this passage about the criminogenic environment produced by S&L deregulation in the 1980s.
“Neither the public nor economists foresaw that the [S&L] regulations of the 1980s were bound to produce looting. Nor, unaware of the concept, could they have known how serious it would be. Thus the regulators in the field who understood what was happening from the beginning found lukewarm support, at best, for their cause. Now we know better. If we learn from experience, history need not repeat itself (1993: 60).”
The reason we have tragic levels of unemployment is the financial crisis, which was fully preventable had the anti-regulators put in place by Presidents Clinton and Bush simply understood the concepts of looting and criminogenic environments that we had made clear a quarter-century ago. Absent the restoration of effective financial regulation and prosecutions, and the removal of the perverse compensation systems (which also requires regulation), we will continue to suffer recurrent, intensifying financial crises and the severe unemployment they produce. Effective financial regulation greatly reduces uncertainty by increasing transparency and by preventing Gresham's dynamics. George Akerlof explained to the profession 41 years ago in his famous article on markets for “lemons.”
“[D]ishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market. The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost also must include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence.” The FBI's white-collar crime specialists do not patrol a beat and look for crimes. They sometimes act on anonymous tips or leads from other investigations, but overwhelmingly they depend on criminal referrals from the regulators.
Our principal function as regulators is to serve as the regulatory cops on the beat to prevent the Gresham's dynamic by aggressively finding the frauds, putting them out of business, and providing the criminal referrals that make it possible to prosecute the elite frauds. Absent effective regulators, honest firms often face extinction and their employees will lose their jobs.
Chicago professors, Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel, wrote what remains the U. Chicago bible on accounting control fraud. A generation of American lawyers has been taught this profession of faith from Easterbrook and Fischel's 1991 treatise: “A rule against fraud is not an essential or even necessarily an important ingredient of securities markets….” The Economic Structure of Corporate Law (1991). Markets are self-correcting, bubbles are impossible, and economic crises are impossible. This was the theoclassical profession of faith in a miraculous trinity.
Each of these dogmas has been repeatedly falsified by real life, but facts cannot trump blind faith. Senator McCain's was a member of the “Keating Five.” Charles Keating, the most infamous S&L fraud, used the Senators to try to intimidate us into not taking any regulatory action against Lincoln Savings' massive regulatory violation – a violation that led to billions of dollars in losses. Neither McCain nor Davis learned any useful lesson from this scandal.
Davis has mounted politically consistent attacks on the Democrats based on the high unemployment caused by the epidemic of accounting control fraud that hyper-inflated the bubble and drove the U.S. financial crisis. On January 3, 2010 he published an op-ed with Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy in the Wall Street Journal blaming the Democrats for the high unemployment caused by the Great Recession. This was their tag line: “A recession is a terrible time to make major changes in the economic rules of the game.”
Consider the logic of that assertion. The “economic rules of the game” have just led to an epidemic of accounting control fraud, a hyper-inflated bubble, a Great Recession, and severe unemployment and the theoclassical answer to the catastrophe that their faith-based policies have caused is – engrave those rules in bronze. They literally call on us to repeat the mistakes of the past. Theoclassical economists take their cue from the White Queen, who bragged to Alice that with practice she had learned to believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
The authors acknowledged that the Great Recession had caused severe unemployment, but added the claim that it was the election of Democrats that prevented a prompt recovery.
Obama's economic team (Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke) was strongly neoclassical and economically conservative. The authors then singled out any effort to deal with climate change as particularly undesirable. Apparently it is now a violation of theoclassical principles to require manufacturers to internalize the cost of negative externalities. That is contrary to economics and would lead to a poisoned world in which firms that spent money to restrict harmful emissions would be driven out of business by their competitors who avoided such expenses and obtained a decisive cost advantage. This is another example of a Gresham's dynamic in which bad ethics drives good ethics from the marketplace. The authors ended by opposing allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire. They presented no evidence in support of their partisan attack on Democrats and their ideological attack on “liberals.”
Davis mentioned “policy uncertainty” as one of the contributors to the employers' failure to hire workers in this article, but what he stressed was that the Great Recession so depressed private sector demand for goods and services that most employers felt little desire to hire additional workers because they could not sell additional output. He noted that employers had reduced the intensity of their recruiting because they were in a buyer's market in which they were deluged with applicants and could afford to hire only the most ideal candidates. Even when Davis discussed uncertainty his primary emphasis was on economic uncertainty – the Great Recession. He ended by blaming unemployment on the unemployed.
The long-term unemployed were spending fewer hours looking for jobs. Davis called for ending unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. The prospect of starving in a fortnight would concentrate their minds wonderfully. (Yes, Davis' last argument contradicts his earlier arguments, but this is faith-based callousness posing as science.) His “summing up” paragraph has one clause referencing “uncertainty” as a purported tertiary contributor to the slow reduction in unemployment. Again, Davis offered no support for this assertion.
Davis' latest (October 5, 2011) partisan attack is entitled “Policy Uncertainty Is Choking Recovery.” In five months, Davis' tertiary, minor asserted contributor to the slow recovery has suddenly morphed into a monster that is the cause of the problem. You might think that the survey results showing that businesses have repeatedly falsified this claim would pose a problem for this meme, but the authors hit on the obvious answer to inconvenient truths – they ignored them. Lest you think that this was due to tight space limits placed on a Bloomberg op ed, check their academic paper, which, also ignores the actual surveys.
“But the persistence of policy uncertainty wasn't inevitable. Rather, it reflects deliberate policy decisions, harmful rhetorical attacks on business and “millionaires,” failure to tackle entitlement reforms and fiscal imbalances, and political brinkmanship.” Their thesis boils down to the claim that capitalists are wusses. The reality is that politicians of both parties fall all over themselves saying nice things about business and that the criticisms are addressed to corporate criminals and the wealthy who pay what the vast bulk of Americans view as grossly inadequate taxes.
By their logic, we should eliminate taxes on the wealthy. By entitlement “reforms” they mean reducing Social Security benefits – that will do wonders for private sector demand and robust jobs growth. Indeed, the authors' thesis is eerily reminiscent of Jon Stewart's famous riff when Dick Cheney shot his elderly hunting companion in the face. Stewart noted that Cheney was so powerful that the victim apologized to Cheney for being shot – by Cheney. The authors want us to apologize to the elite financial frauds that became wealthy through the accounting control fraud epidemic that drove the crisis, the Great Recession, the great bulk of the federal budget deficit, the state and local government financial crisis, and severe unemployment.
It wasn't enough that we bailed them out and gimmicked the accounting rules at their demand to ensure that “their” banks could continue to pay them massive bonuses even though they were in economic reality insolvent. How dare we make “harmful rhetorical attacks” on the frauds! We should all apologize immediately to the productive class.
Rather than simple reforms aimed at efficiency improvements and cost savings, the law seeks to remake the U.S. health-care delivery system, dramatically expanding the role of government and imposing new burdens on businesses and individuals. Even in narrowly economic terms, the measure adds to the uncertainty facing households and businesses.
The Democratic leadership in Congress opted to pursue the most radical plan that could muster the necessary 60 votes in the Senate and a thin majority in the House. As a result, the legislation failed to attract a single Republican vote in either chamber. That political strategy ensured the act would become the focus of future electoral battles and rollback efforts.“
The authors then go on to complain that the lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the Act (which they do not note were brought by Republicans) add to uncertainty. Whatever, the Act is, it is assuredly not “radical.” It is modeled on a scheme created by a then conservative Republican Governor, Mitt Romney. In reality, the Obama administration made obsessive efforts to craft a bill with bipartisan support – substantially weakening an already weak bill and taking out, at the demand of Republican and “blue dog” Democrats, the central “cost savings” provision in the bill – the public option.
The Republicans and “blue dog” Democrats promised to kill any such bill. The authors' dread “liberal Democrats” favored a bill that would produce superior health care at a far lower price in line with other developed nations. The private health insurers promised to bury such a bill, so the Obama administration went for the ultra conservative alternative developed by Romney. The authors' partisan slant causes them to deliberately and comprehensively misstate the facts.
To which the obvious first question is: why? I begin my analysis with their tax provisions component. They know that a historically unusual number of tax provisions are set to expire in coming years, so they know that when they use that component they will produce at index showing a surge in uncertainty. “Scheduled expirations of federal tax code provisions were rare before 2000 but have grown rapidly. More than 130 provisions are slated to expire in 2011 and 2012, in many cases setting the stage for new political battles.”
Davis wants to report high uncertainty to fit his priors that he has been asserting without any proof. This is a hopelessly unsound means to produce an index. Any of us could pick a variable that would “prove” our priors. The psychological temptation to prove we are right (especially for theoclassical economists who have gotten everything important horribly wrong) is overwhelming. The bad news is that the tax expirations are the least embarrassing aspect of their index.
An even more ludicrous component is: “the frequency of newspaper articles that refer to economic uncertainty and the role of policy.” First, the authors know, because Davis has been a part of promoting this meme, that Republicans have organized a coordinated campaign to claim that “regulation” and “taxes” are causing the weak recovery from the recession. To now use the publicity that one political party, and at least one of the framers of the index, is generating for partisan purposes as purported objective evidence of the harms of ending the regulatory black holes is so unprincipled as to be beneath contempt. Indeed, the absurdity of this component is demonstrated by the fact that their effort to publicize their index in the form of a partisan op ed and a partisan academic paper has already had the effect of driving their index higher and “proving” their point. Moreover, this is not a new Republican strategy.
They followed the same strategy of attacking regulation and regulators for years, but the coordinated attacks on regulation emanating from the right's “think tanks” (funded by firms that wish to prevent effective regulation) have increased greatly since the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley. Self-generated attacks on regulation become “policy uncertainty,” which becomes a purported empirical basis for preventing effective regulation. The index provides an elegant solution to the Koch brothers' policy goals. The authors' third component is almost humorously bad: “the extent of disagreement among forecasters about future inflation and government spending.” We have a vastly more reliable means to judge the risks of future inflation in the U.S. It is called the U.S. bond market. It prices the risk of inflation continuously. It already incorporates “government spending” because such spending can affect inflation. The U.S. bond markets have consistently been telling us since the crisis became public knowledge that there is no material risk of inflation. Why do the authors believe that “forecasters” are more reliable than bond markets? Why do they believe that businesses are failing to hire because they are concerned that the inflation hawks have remained delusional in their claims that hyper-inflation is just around the corner? What does any of this have to do with regulation?
If CEOs were worried about hyper-inflation because they remained in thrall to some inflation hawk analyst who had been proven grotesquely wrong in every forecast over the last five years, wouldn't those CEOs be happy that the Bush tax cuts were set to expire? Why do CEO's base their decision to hire on the variance among analysts as to the size of the federal budget instead of the size of the federal budget deficit? The authors do not address these issues in their formal paper or op ed.
The authors then assigned arbitrary weights to their three components. The news stories measure is weighted one-half, while the tax repeals and both forms of variance in forecasts (inflation and government spending) each receive an individual weight of one-sixth.
The authors claim in their op ed (but not in their paper, which claims only “some suggestive evidence on causation”) that their index somehow establishes causality and confers the ability to quantify the jobs that would be created if the Republicans would stop their media campaign of blaming “radical” regulation for the slow recovery. (Of course, the authors don't phrase it that way, but given the extreme weight they gave to this single component of their index and the fact that the senior author of the paper is a Republican activist pushing this meme in the media, that is how circular and perverse “causality” is in their index.)
“So how much near-term improvement could we gain from a stable, certainty-enhancing policy regime? We estimate that restoring 2006 levels of policy uncertainty would yield an additional 2.5 million jobs over 18 months. Not a full solution to the jobs shortfall, but a big step in the right direction.”
They also do not explain how we could undo “uncertainty” – as “measured” under their index. As long as the right generates attacks on regulation and claims that it causes uncertainty and those complaints are repeated by their array of web sites the index will “measure” high uncertainty. We went through a remarkable period of radical deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization that created the criminogenic environments that produced three major crises in 25 years and one party is still demanding that we make the three “de's” far worse.
Are we supposed to repeal Dodd-Frank? Would the repeal increase or decrease “policy uncertainty”? How are we supposed to prevent analysts from being hyper-inflation hawks? Would making the tax laws longer remove uncertainty? Congress could still change them at will. The repeal as of a date certain was meant to reduce uncertainty. Every aspect of this index is farcical and a naked partisan weapon of attack on the regulations and prosecutions essential to preventing our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. Theoclassical economists were the architects of these crises. They were the great destroyers of jobs and wealth. The claim that we can never undo their criminogenic designs and that any attempt to even criticize the elite frauds will lead to job losses is pure extortion. Their index does not allow any statements about causality, and they know that the claims of causality and quantification that they made in their op ed are indefensible. The direct surveys of employers do allow us to evaluate causality because they are statements (largely) against the political interests of the business people being surveyed. Those surveys refute the argument.
Restoring effective regulatory cops on the beat will increase transparency and reduce the Gresham's dynamic that is the bane of honest firms. Both effects reduce uncertainty and increase employment. For example, there were far more aggressive regulatory and prosecutorial responses to the S&L debacle than the current crisis. We convicted over 1,000 elites in cases designated by the Justice Department as “major” and we brought thousands of civil and enforcement actions against S&L executives. We largely ended nonprime lending, particularly liar's loans by S&Ls in 1990-1991. We placed many hundreds of S&Ls and banks in receivership.
We consistently wiped out the shareholders and subordinated debt holders in those resolutions. We greatly boosted capital requirements, got rid of junk accounting, and put formal requirements for prompt corrective action in place. We rapidly sold the bad assets in our liquidating receiverships. None of these things has been done in Bush and Obama administrations' tepid response to the current crisis.
The recovery from the recession in the early 1990s was relatively rapid. Our aggressive regulatory actions added greatly to certainty because our actions were consistent, added to transparency, and helped honest firms. That result would be consistent with the authors' purported theory (gratuitous uncertainty poses an undesirable risk that slows recovery), but not with their ideological blinders that cause them to see regulation as inherently adding to uncertainty.
Bill Black is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He spent years working on regulatory policy and fraud prevention as Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention, Litigation Director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and Deputy Director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement, among other positions.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Tunisia swears in new president
Tunisia has sworn in a new president, a milestone in the North African country that kicked off the dramatic year-long cry for freedom across the Arab world.
He is Moncef Marzouki, a secularist elected on Monday by an Islamist-dominated parliament, the Constituent Assembly. He will fulfill a more ceremonial role as the affairs of state are handled by the prime minister.
Marzouki is the founder of the center-left Congress for the Republic Party. He is well-known for his firebrand style and his opposition to the old regime.
The secular party has formed a coalition with the Ettakatol and Islamist Ennahda Party. Ennahda came in first to become the largest party in Tunisia's first democratic election since the ouster of former dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.
2011: Defining moment for Tunisia
The Congress for the Republic Party party came in second in the October elections, collecting 29 out of 217 assembly seats.
Marzouki was the only candidate because the nine other candidates for president did not gather the required 15 signatures from Constituent Assembly members.
The new president lived in exile for the last decade. He is a human rights activist, founded the National Committee for the Defense of Prisoners of Conscience and was the head of the Tunisian League of Human Rights.
The elections were historic not only in Tunisia -- which, until now, hadn't had a national election since it became independent in 1956 and for 23 years was ruled by Ben Ali -- but also in the region and the world.
Since Ben Ali was ousted in January -- a month after 26-year-old street vendor Muhammad Al Bouazizi set himself afire after a police officer seized his goods -- residents in several other Arab nations have similarly rallied for democratic reforms and against their leaders, a show of force called the Arab Spring.
He is Moncef Marzouki, a secularist elected on Monday by an Islamist-dominated parliament, the Constituent Assembly. He will fulfill a more ceremonial role as the affairs of state are handled by the prime minister.
Marzouki is the founder of the center-left Congress for the Republic Party. He is well-known for his firebrand style and his opposition to the old regime.
The secular party has formed a coalition with the Ettakatol and Islamist Ennahda Party. Ennahda came in first to become the largest party in Tunisia's first democratic election since the ouster of former dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.
2011: Defining moment for Tunisia
The Congress for the Republic Party party came in second in the October elections, collecting 29 out of 217 assembly seats.
Marzouki was the only candidate because the nine other candidates for president did not gather the required 15 signatures from Constituent Assembly members.
The new president lived in exile for the last decade. He is a human rights activist, founded the National Committee for the Defense of Prisoners of Conscience and was the head of the Tunisian League of Human Rights.
The elections were historic not only in Tunisia -- which, until now, hadn't had a national election since it became independent in 1956 and for 23 years was ruled by Ben Ali -- but also in the region and the world.
Since Ben Ali was ousted in January -- a month after 26-year-old street vendor Muhammad Al Bouazizi set himself afire after a police officer seized his goods -- residents in several other Arab nations have similarly rallied for democratic reforms and against their leaders, a show of force called the Arab Spring.
Saudi woman
A woman was beheaded in Saudi Arabia for practicing witchcraft and sorcery, the kingdom's Interior Ministry said, prompting Amnesty International to call for a halt in executions there.
Amina bint Abdel Halim Nassar was executed Monday for having "committed the practice of witchcraft and sorcery," according to an Interior Ministry statement. Nassar was investigated before her arrest and was "convicted of what she was accused of based on the law," the statement said. Her beheading took place in the Qariyat province of the region of Al-Jawf, the ministry said.
In a statement issued late Monday, the human rights group called the execution "deeply shocking" and said it "highlights the urgent need for a halt in executions in Saudi Arabia."
"While we don't know the details of the acts which the authorities accused Amina of committing, the charge of sorcery has often been used in Saudi Arabia to punish people, generally after unfair trials, for exercising their right to freedom of speech or religion," said Philip Luther, Amnesty International's interim director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme.
Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, practices a puritanical version of Islam and is governed by Shariah, or Islamic law. In the deeply conservative kingdom, sorcery, witchcraft and blasphemy are all offenses that can be punishable by death.
The London-based Saudi newspaper Al-Hayat quoted a source in the country's religious police who said authorities searched Nassar's home and found books on sorcery, a number of talismans and glass bottles filled with liquids supposedly used for the purposes of magic. The source told the paper Nassar was selling spells and bottles of the liquid potions for about $400 dollars each.
CNN could not reach Saudi Arabia's religious police or Justice Ministry for comment.
Amnesty says Nassar's execution is "the second of its kind in recent months. In September, a Sudanese national was beheaded in the Saudi Arabian city of Medina after being convicted on 'sorcery' charges."
The human rights group said the number of executions in Saudi Arabia has almost tripled in 2011.
"So far at least 79 people -- including five women -- have been executed there, compared to at least 27 in 2010," the Amnesty statement said.
This is not the first sorcery case in Saudi Arabia to spark outrage from human rights groups. In 2008, Lebanese TV host Ali Hussain Sibat was arrested on charges of sorcery while in Saudi Arabia on a religious pilgrimage. In 2009, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. While Sibat has not been executed, he remains in prison.
Saudi Arabia's judicial system also made headlines this month for the sentence imposed on Australian national Mansor Almaribe, who was convicted of blasphemy while performing the Hajj in the kingdom, and sentenced to 500 lashes and a year in prison. The Australian government is pleading Almaribe's case.
Amina bint Abdel Halim Nassar was executed Monday for having "committed the practice of witchcraft and sorcery," according to an Interior Ministry statement. Nassar was investigated before her arrest and was "convicted of what she was accused of based on the law," the statement said. Her beheading took place in the Qariyat province of the region of Al-Jawf, the ministry said.
In a statement issued late Monday, the human rights group called the execution "deeply shocking" and said it "highlights the urgent need for a halt in executions in Saudi Arabia."
"While we don't know the details of the acts which the authorities accused Amina of committing, the charge of sorcery has often been used in Saudi Arabia to punish people, generally after unfair trials, for exercising their right to freedom of speech or religion," said Philip Luther, Amnesty International's interim director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme.
Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy, practices a puritanical version of Islam and is governed by Shariah, or Islamic law. In the deeply conservative kingdom, sorcery, witchcraft and blasphemy are all offenses that can be punishable by death.
The London-based Saudi newspaper Al-Hayat quoted a source in the country's religious police who said authorities searched Nassar's home and found books on sorcery, a number of talismans and glass bottles filled with liquids supposedly used for the purposes of magic. The source told the paper Nassar was selling spells and bottles of the liquid potions for about $400 dollars each.
CNN could not reach Saudi Arabia's religious police or Justice Ministry for comment.
Amnesty says Nassar's execution is "the second of its kind in recent months. In September, a Sudanese national was beheaded in the Saudi Arabian city of Medina after being convicted on 'sorcery' charges."
The human rights group said the number of executions in Saudi Arabia has almost tripled in 2011.
"So far at least 79 people -- including five women -- have been executed there, compared to at least 27 in 2010," the Amnesty statement said.
This is not the first sorcery case in Saudi Arabia to spark outrage from human rights groups. In 2008, Lebanese TV host Ali Hussain Sibat was arrested on charges of sorcery while in Saudi Arabia on a religious pilgrimage. In 2009, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. While Sibat has not been executed, he remains in prison.
Saudi Arabia's judicial system also made headlines this month for the sentence imposed on Australian national Mansor Almaribe, who was convicted of blasphemy while performing the Hajj in the kingdom, and sentenced to 500 lashes and a year in prison. The Australian government is pleading Almaribe's case.
Yemenis capture six al Qaeda operatives
Six al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula operatives -- including one high-value target -- were captured by Yemeni security forces, the country's embassy in the United States said Tuesday.
Musaed Al-Barbari, an AQAP leader who authorities say attacked the Sanaa International Airport in 2009, was among those captured, the embassy said.
"The terrorism suspects have been carrying out surveillance, and planning missions aimed at targeting government and high ranking security officials," the embassy said. "Furthermore, the cell was planning on orchestrating attacks on foreign missions and critical state installations."
Authorities found weapons, explosives as well as training and recruiting material in the possession of Al-Barbari, the embassy said.
The embassy also sought to clarify an earlier report -- attributed to security forces -- that 15 AQAP prisoners had escaped from a south Yemen prison Monday.
The fugitives were not members of al Qaeda, but they were facing other criminal charges, the embassy said. Three of the escapees have been captured so far, it said.
Musaed Al-Barbari, an AQAP leader who authorities say attacked the Sanaa International Airport in 2009, was among those captured, the embassy said.
"The terrorism suspects have been carrying out surveillance, and planning missions aimed at targeting government and high ranking security officials," the embassy said. "Furthermore, the cell was planning on orchestrating attacks on foreign missions and critical state installations."
Authorities found weapons, explosives as well as training and recruiting material in the possession of Al-Barbari, the embassy said.
The embassy also sought to clarify an earlier report -- attributed to security forces -- that 15 AQAP prisoners had escaped from a south Yemen prison Monday.
The fugitives were not members of al Qaeda, but they were facing other criminal charges, the embassy said. Three of the escapees have been captured so far, it said.
Genetic Discovery Could Lead to New Treatments
A significant advance in the understanding of the genetic basis of psoriasis was reported by an international team of researchers in two studies published in the February 2009 issue of the journal Nature Genetics. The research involved thousands of DNA samples, including samples from the National Psoriasis Foundation Tissue Bank, predecessor of the National Psoriasis Victor Henschel BioBank.
Psoriasis: Genetic Discovery Could Lead to New Treatments
The first study was a collaborative effort of Foundation-supported researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., the University of Michigan, the University of Utah and colleagues in Canada and Europe. This study focused on common sites within the human genome where a single unit of DNA is changed. It’s called single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP or “snip”). The researchers scanned nearly 450,000 SNPs in each of 1,409 psoriasis patients and compared the DNA variations to those in 1,436 healthy controls.
They initially selected 21 of the most promising “suspect variants” associated with psoriasis. The investigators then went on to validate the authenticity of these variants in another group of 5,048 psoriasis patients and 5,041 controls. The validation step revealed seven confirmed variants, all of which appear to increase the risk of psoriasis.
All seven variants, the study noted, likely play a role in immune system regulation, which is involved in the development of psoriasis. Some of the genes identified in this study are already targeted by effective psoriasis treatments, while others may become targets for future psoriasis treatments.
A second study of 2,831 patients with psoriasis looked for links between the disease and another genetic variation called a “copy number variation.” In using this technique, National Psoriasis Foundation researcher Anne Bowcock and colleagues at Washington University found that the absence of two skin genes — LCE3B and LCE3C — increases the risk of psoriasis. Normally, both genes are activated after an injury to the skin. The researchers suspect the absence of the genes could lead to an inappropriate immune response, which may cause the inflammation that characterizes psoriasis.
The new variants discovered in these two studies have significantly advanced our understanding of the genetic cause of psoriasis, and have revealed important new insights that lead us closer to a cure.
However, there is still much more to discover before we have a complete understanding of psoriasis genetics. You can do your part by donating your DNA (blood and tissue samples) for the study of psoriasis genetics to the National Psoriasis Victor Henschel BioBank. To donate your DNA, visit www.stoppsoriasis.org or call 1-800-723-9166, ext. 372, to learn more.
Psoriasis: Genetic Discovery Could Lead to New Treatments
The first study was a collaborative effort of Foundation-supported researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., the University of Michigan, the University of Utah and colleagues in Canada and Europe. This study focused on common sites within the human genome where a single unit of DNA is changed. It’s called single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP or “snip”). The researchers scanned nearly 450,000 SNPs in each of 1,409 psoriasis patients and compared the DNA variations to those in 1,436 healthy controls.
They initially selected 21 of the most promising “suspect variants” associated with psoriasis. The investigators then went on to validate the authenticity of these variants in another group of 5,048 psoriasis patients and 5,041 controls. The validation step revealed seven confirmed variants, all of which appear to increase the risk of psoriasis.
All seven variants, the study noted, likely play a role in immune system regulation, which is involved in the development of psoriasis. Some of the genes identified in this study are already targeted by effective psoriasis treatments, while others may become targets for future psoriasis treatments.
A second study of 2,831 patients with psoriasis looked for links between the disease and another genetic variation called a “copy number variation.” In using this technique, National Psoriasis Foundation researcher Anne Bowcock and colleagues at Washington University found that the absence of two skin genes — LCE3B and LCE3C — increases the risk of psoriasis. Normally, both genes are activated after an injury to the skin. The researchers suspect the absence of the genes could lead to an inappropriate immune response, which may cause the inflammation that characterizes psoriasis.
The new variants discovered in these two studies have significantly advanced our understanding of the genetic cause of psoriasis, and have revealed important new insights that lead us closer to a cure.
However, there is still much more to discover before we have a complete understanding of psoriasis genetics. You can do your part by donating your DNA (blood and tissue samples) for the study of psoriasis genetics to the National Psoriasis Victor Henschel BioBank. To donate your DNA, visit www.stoppsoriasis.org or call 1-800-723-9166, ext. 372, to learn more.
Activists: Syrian army defectors kill 7 government forces
Syrian army defectors killed seven government security forces in an attack on a convoy Tuesday, a strike in response to the killings of 11 civilians, an activist group told CNN.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the incident took place in Idlib province in the northwest swath of the restive nation. It comes amid growing world outrage over the 9-month-long government crackdown on protesters in Syria.
The group said security forces had opened fire "indiscriminately" in the villages of Maarat Masreen and Kafr Bahmoul near the city of Idlib, killing 11 and wounding many others.
At least 36 people have died on Tuesday, said the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, another activist group. The 11 civilians were among 21 deaths in Idlib province; the group reported eight deaths in Hama, five in Homs and two in Daraa.
UN: 5,000-plus Syrian civilians killed
Report: People on edge in Homs, Syria
Activists: Anti-regime Syrian doc killed
Peres: Syria's Assad 'a killer'
The affiliation of the defectors in this instance was not initially known, but one result of the stiff regime clampdown against the protesters has been the emergence of an armed opposition group of defectors -- the Free Syrian Army.
The Local Coordination Committees of Syria said tank shelling caused casualties in the village of Al-Jaah in Daraa province. The group attributes the shelling to the "big number" of Free Syrian Army troops there.
"The village is in dire condition, crimes against humanity are being committed and all basic services have been cut off along with any communication," the Local Coordination Committees of Syria said.
One activist told CNN two people died when a house was shelled in the western city of Homs.
CNN cannot independently confirm reports of violence in Syria because the government restricts the actions of foreign journalists.
More than 5,000 people have died in Syria, U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said Monday, a figure rejected by Syrian ambassador to the United Nations as "incredible."
But Pillay, who briefed the U.N. Security Council and spoke to reporters afterward, called the situation "intolerable" and said she is "appalled by the constant stream of grave violations that have taken place since the first protests in Syria in March." She said "the nature and scale of abuses" indicate that Syrian forces likely committed "crimes against humanity."
These deaths include civilians, defectors and those executed for refusing to shoot civilians. It doesn't include security and military forces, but the United Nations said hundreds of them "are also thought to have been killed."
The Syrian government, meanwhile, has consistently blamed the violence on "armed terrorist" gang members and denied any efforts to target peaceful civilians.
While Syria is becoming more isolated, Russia -- a longtime friend of the Mideastern country -- has not joined in the worldwide chorus of condemnation against the regime. Russia believes "the Western and Turkish pressure on Syria is an encroachment on its traditional spheres of influence," a Foreign Affairs article said. It was one of four countries that voted against a U.N. Human Rights Council resolution this month condemning widespread violations of human rights in Syria.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday accused the Syrian opposition of trying to provoke a humanitarian crisis to justify foreign military intervention.
"It seems to me that, beyond any doubt, the goal is to provoke a humanitarian catastrophe and get an excuse to demand foreign intervention in this conflict," Lavrov said at a news conference, arguing that Syria should accept Arab League proposals for ending the violence and allow foreign observers in the country.
The United States, European Union, Turkey and the Arab League have imposed sanctions. But Lavrov also said that "history shows that sanctions never work, with very rare exceptions, and we are not ready to use them except as a last resort."
Tony Badran, who wrote the Foreign Affairs article, said Syria gives "Russia a foothold in the Mediterranean through a shared naval maintenance facility at the Syrian port city of Tartus."
"It should have been no surprise that after the Arab League moved against (President Bashar al-Assad), Moscow announced that it would continue to honor all arms contracts with the Syrian government and would be sending warships to make port calls in Syria this summer," he wrote.
Meanwhile, opposition figures said the Syrian government had warned people in Homs to stop anti-government protests, hand in their weapons and surrender defecting military members by Monday night -- or face attack by government forces.
Syrian forces gave a 72-hour warning, said Lt. Col. Mohamed Hamdo of the Free Syrian Army, the opposition group of defected Syrian military personnel. Activists on the ground said the ultimatum was issued Friday for Homs. The government has not acknowledged any deadline for Homs in state-run media, and it was not clear Tuesday morning what had happened in the city overnight.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the incident took place in Idlib province in the northwest swath of the restive nation. It comes amid growing world outrage over the 9-month-long government crackdown on protesters in Syria.
The group said security forces had opened fire "indiscriminately" in the villages of Maarat Masreen and Kafr Bahmoul near the city of Idlib, killing 11 and wounding many others.
At least 36 people have died on Tuesday, said the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, another activist group. The 11 civilians were among 21 deaths in Idlib province; the group reported eight deaths in Hama, five in Homs and two in Daraa.
UN: 5,000-plus Syrian civilians killed
Report: People on edge in Homs, Syria
Activists: Anti-regime Syrian doc killed
Peres: Syria's Assad 'a killer'
The affiliation of the defectors in this instance was not initially known, but one result of the stiff regime clampdown against the protesters has been the emergence of an armed opposition group of defectors -- the Free Syrian Army.
The Local Coordination Committees of Syria said tank shelling caused casualties in the village of Al-Jaah in Daraa province. The group attributes the shelling to the "big number" of Free Syrian Army troops there.
"The village is in dire condition, crimes against humanity are being committed and all basic services have been cut off along with any communication," the Local Coordination Committees of Syria said.
One activist told CNN two people died when a house was shelled in the western city of Homs.
CNN cannot independently confirm reports of violence in Syria because the government restricts the actions of foreign journalists.
More than 5,000 people have died in Syria, U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said Monday, a figure rejected by Syrian ambassador to the United Nations as "incredible."
But Pillay, who briefed the U.N. Security Council and spoke to reporters afterward, called the situation "intolerable" and said she is "appalled by the constant stream of grave violations that have taken place since the first protests in Syria in March." She said "the nature and scale of abuses" indicate that Syrian forces likely committed "crimes against humanity."
These deaths include civilians, defectors and those executed for refusing to shoot civilians. It doesn't include security and military forces, but the United Nations said hundreds of them "are also thought to have been killed."
The Syrian government, meanwhile, has consistently blamed the violence on "armed terrorist" gang members and denied any efforts to target peaceful civilians.
While Syria is becoming more isolated, Russia -- a longtime friend of the Mideastern country -- has not joined in the worldwide chorus of condemnation against the regime. Russia believes "the Western and Turkish pressure on Syria is an encroachment on its traditional spheres of influence," a Foreign Affairs article said. It was one of four countries that voted against a U.N. Human Rights Council resolution this month condemning widespread violations of human rights in Syria.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday accused the Syrian opposition of trying to provoke a humanitarian crisis to justify foreign military intervention.
"It seems to me that, beyond any doubt, the goal is to provoke a humanitarian catastrophe and get an excuse to demand foreign intervention in this conflict," Lavrov said at a news conference, arguing that Syria should accept Arab League proposals for ending the violence and allow foreign observers in the country.
The United States, European Union, Turkey and the Arab League have imposed sanctions. But Lavrov also said that "history shows that sanctions never work, with very rare exceptions, and we are not ready to use them except as a last resort."
Tony Badran, who wrote the Foreign Affairs article, said Syria gives "Russia a foothold in the Mediterranean through a shared naval maintenance facility at the Syrian port city of Tartus."
"It should have been no surprise that after the Arab League moved against (President Bashar al-Assad), Moscow announced that it would continue to honor all arms contracts with the Syrian government and would be sending warships to make port calls in Syria this summer," he wrote.
Meanwhile, opposition figures said the Syrian government had warned people in Homs to stop anti-government protests, hand in their weapons and surrender defecting military members by Monday night -- or face attack by government forces.
Syrian forces gave a 72-hour warning, said Lt. Col. Mohamed Hamdo of the Free Syrian Army, the opposition group of defected Syrian military personnel. Activists on the ground said the ultimatum was issued Friday for Homs. The government has not acknowledged any deadline for Homs in state-run media, and it was not clear Tuesday morning what had happened in the city overnight.
Lame responses from CEOs
Jon Corzine, the disgraced ex-CEO of MF Global, went before Congress on Dec. 8 to explain what happened to the estimated $1.2 billion that's missing from the company's books. "I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date," he said in prepared testimony. It's a strategy that's become de rigueur among troubled CEOs since the days of Enron: Chief executives claim they have no idea how their own companies work. Corzine also said that he was "stunned" when he was told "that MF Global could not account for many hundreds of millions of dollars of client money" just one day before the company filed for Chapter 11 on Oct. 31.
Corzine, a former senator and governor of New Jersey, said that he was not involved in the mechanics of the firm's trades and wasn't sure what happened. He resigned on Nov. 3.
Corzine, a former senator and governor of New Jersey, said that he was not involved in the mechanics of the firm's trades and wasn't sure what happened. He resigned on Nov. 3.
Home sales
If you thought the U.S. housing market couldn't get much worse, think again.
Far fewer homes have been sold over the past five years than previously estimated, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday.
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NAR said it plans to downwardly revise sales of previously-owned homes going back to 2007 during the release of its next existing home sales report on Dec. 21.
NAR's existing home sales numbers, released monthly, are a closely followed gauge of the health of the housing market.
While NAR hasn't revealed exactly how big the revision to home sales will be, the agency's chief economist Lawrence Yun said the decrease will be "meaningful."
"For the real estate business, this means the housing market's downturn was deeper than what was initially thought," Yun said.
Yun said the database NAR uses to track existing home sales, the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), has led the real estate agency to over-count existing home sales for several reasons.
The MLS database only includes home sales listed by realtors, and excludes homes listed by owners, providing a very narrow view of the market. And because more people are using realtors to list their homes instead of selling them independently, realtor-listed sales numbers have become artificially inflated, said Yun.
In addition, some of the assumptions NAR used in calculating its data have become outdated, since they were based on 2000 Census data.
First-time homebuyers guide
The MLS has also been expanding its geographic coverage, so it may have appeared that there were more home sales simply because data from new areas were starting to show up. Also because of this geographic expansion, the system has been double-counting sales of some homes that can be considered part of multiple regions.
"Colorado Springs has their own database, but because the Denver market is nearby they may also list that home in the Denver database, so when the home gets sold, both Denver and Colorado Springs will say sales rose -- so that's genuine double-counting," said Yun.
Yun said NAR realized this upward "shift" in data during its most recent re-benchmarking process this year. With the help of the government, economists and other real estate groups, NAR has now taken these factors into account and will issue revised numbers on Dec. 21 at 10 a.m.
"There are multifaceted reasons why things were drifting upward in our database," said Yun. "We have tried to adjust for all these factors so that we have a better understanding of total home sales in America."
Yun emphasized that the revisions will have no impact on consumers because median home price data will not be revised.
Far fewer homes have been sold over the past five years than previously estimated, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday.
* 147
*
* 5
* Comment
NAR said it plans to downwardly revise sales of previously-owned homes going back to 2007 during the release of its next existing home sales report on Dec. 21.
NAR's existing home sales numbers, released monthly, are a closely followed gauge of the health of the housing market.
While NAR hasn't revealed exactly how big the revision to home sales will be, the agency's chief economist Lawrence Yun said the decrease will be "meaningful."
"For the real estate business, this means the housing market's downturn was deeper than what was initially thought," Yun said.
Yun said the database NAR uses to track existing home sales, the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), has led the real estate agency to over-count existing home sales for several reasons.
The MLS database only includes home sales listed by realtors, and excludes homes listed by owners, providing a very narrow view of the market. And because more people are using realtors to list their homes instead of selling them independently, realtor-listed sales numbers have become artificially inflated, said Yun.
In addition, some of the assumptions NAR used in calculating its data have become outdated, since they were based on 2000 Census data.
First-time homebuyers guide
The MLS has also been expanding its geographic coverage, so it may have appeared that there were more home sales simply because data from new areas were starting to show up. Also because of this geographic expansion, the system has been double-counting sales of some homes that can be considered part of multiple regions.
"Colorado Springs has their own database, but because the Denver market is nearby they may also list that home in the Denver database, so when the home gets sold, both Denver and Colorado Springs will say sales rose -- so that's genuine double-counting," said Yun.
Yun said NAR realized this upward "shift" in data during its most recent re-benchmarking process this year. With the help of the government, economists and other real estate groups, NAR has now taken these factors into account and will issue revised numbers on Dec. 21 at 10 a.m.
"There are multifaceted reasons why things were drifting upward in our database," said Yun. "We have tried to adjust for all these factors so that we have a better understanding of total home sales in America."
Yun emphasized that the revisions will have no impact on consumers because median home price data will not be revised.
Apple: 500,000 apps
Cupertino responds to a Google milestone with a flurry of nice round numbers
Last Tuesday, Google (GOOG) announced that Android users had downloaded more than 10 billion apps from the Android Market and that the number of downloads was growing by 1 billion per month. To celebrate the milestone, Google was going to make a new set of "awesome apps" available on the store every day for the next week for only 10¢ each.
The week wasn't over before Apple (AAPL) had issued its own news alert. In a press release that quoted liberally from satisfied developers, Apple announced Monday that its customers had downloaded nearly twice as many apps -- 18 billion -- from the Apple App Store, and that like Google, its number was growing by 1 billion downloads per month.
Moreover, more than 100,000 apps have now been downloaded from the Mac App Store, for which there is no Google equivalent.
There will, however, be no 10¢ app sale from Apple. In fact, according to 148apps.biz, the average price of the 529,000 apps in Apple's App Store is $2.00. The most popular price on the Android Market -- by far -- is $0.00.
Last Tuesday, Google (GOOG) announced that Android users had downloaded more than 10 billion apps from the Android Market and that the number of downloads was growing by 1 billion per month. To celebrate the milestone, Google was going to make a new set of "awesome apps" available on the store every day for the next week for only 10¢ each.
The week wasn't over before Apple (AAPL) had issued its own news alert. In a press release that quoted liberally from satisfied developers, Apple announced Monday that its customers had downloaded nearly twice as many apps -- 18 billion -- from the Apple App Store, and that like Google, its number was growing by 1 billion downloads per month.
Moreover, more than 100,000 apps have now been downloaded from the Mac App Store, for which there is no Google equivalent.
There will, however, be no 10¢ app sale from Apple. In fact, according to 148apps.biz, the average price of the 529,000 apps in Apple's App Store is $2.00. The most popular price on the Android Market -- by far -- is $0.00.
Postal Service delays
The U.S. Postal Service has agreed to hold off on closing any more post offices or mail facilities until May 15, 2012, to allow Congress time to work on a plan to save the service.
The U.S. Postal Service agreed to voluntarily enact a moratorium on closures, after a series of talks with senators, lawmakers said. Sen. Richard Durbin said the postal service agreed to the deal, and he called it a challenge to Congress to "put up or shut up."
The news of the moratorium comes just a week after the Postal Service announced a plan to slow down first-class mail, which would have closed some 250 mail processing plants nationwide and eliminated 28,000 jobs.
"If you don't like what the postal service has put forward (to cut costs) by closing processing facilities and post offices and eliminating jobs, then come up with a better approach," Durbin said. "It's a challenge we need to accept, and this agreement with the postal service gives us that opportunity."
The Postal Service issued a statement saying that they agreed to delay all closings and consolidations, but they'll continue to review the facilities slated for possible closure during this period.
"The Postal Service hopes this period will help facilitate the enactment of comprehensive postal legislation," the agency said in a statement.
Durbin said that in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that reforming the postal service and getting it out of its debt spiral is his first priority when Congress comes back in 2012.
The financially troubled agency is on the brink of insolvency and has unveiled a series of proposals to close post offices, mail processing plants and even slash Saturday mail service as ways to cut costs.
The Postal Service has racked up $5.1 billion in debt this year and faces a deadline to make another $5.5 billion payment to pre-fund health care retirement benefits for future retirees due later this week, a payment required by law.
Durbin said that when lawmakers finish working on a deal to fund the federal government past this Friday, that the measure would relieve the postal service of its obligation to make those payments to the health care retirement fund during the moratorium.
However, Durbin could not provide more details since those negotiations are still underway.
0:00 / 2:26 USPS Postmaster: We will survive
Lawmakers in the House and Senate are working on different bills to save the postal service. The Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe had blasted those bills as not going far enough, although he said that elements of both bills could work.
Union groups cheered news of the moratorium, saying they hoped it would give lawmakers time to find ways to reform the Postal Service in a way that doesn't degrade service.
"This is a positive step, provided the parties use the time to put together a positive plan for the future, including ways to grow the business as well as efficiencies that make sense," said Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, in a statement about the moratorium.
The U.S. Postal Service agreed to voluntarily enact a moratorium on closures, after a series of talks with senators, lawmakers said. Sen. Richard Durbin said the postal service agreed to the deal, and he called it a challenge to Congress to "put up or shut up."
The news of the moratorium comes just a week after the Postal Service announced a plan to slow down first-class mail, which would have closed some 250 mail processing plants nationwide and eliminated 28,000 jobs.
"If you don't like what the postal service has put forward (to cut costs) by closing processing facilities and post offices and eliminating jobs, then come up with a better approach," Durbin said. "It's a challenge we need to accept, and this agreement with the postal service gives us that opportunity."
The Postal Service issued a statement saying that they agreed to delay all closings and consolidations, but they'll continue to review the facilities slated for possible closure during this period.
"The Postal Service hopes this period will help facilitate the enactment of comprehensive postal legislation," the agency said in a statement.
Durbin said that in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that reforming the postal service and getting it out of its debt spiral is his first priority when Congress comes back in 2012.
The financially troubled agency is on the brink of insolvency and has unveiled a series of proposals to close post offices, mail processing plants and even slash Saturday mail service as ways to cut costs.
The Postal Service has racked up $5.1 billion in debt this year and faces a deadline to make another $5.5 billion payment to pre-fund health care retirement benefits for future retirees due later this week, a payment required by law.
Durbin said that when lawmakers finish working on a deal to fund the federal government past this Friday, that the measure would relieve the postal service of its obligation to make those payments to the health care retirement fund during the moratorium.
However, Durbin could not provide more details since those negotiations are still underway.
0:00 / 2:26 USPS Postmaster: We will survive
Lawmakers in the House and Senate are working on different bills to save the postal service. The Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe had blasted those bills as not going far enough, although he said that elements of both bills could work.
Union groups cheered news of the moratorium, saying they hoped it would give lawmakers time to find ways to reform the Postal Service in a way that doesn't degrade service.
"This is a positive step, provided the parties use the time to put together a positive plan for the future, including ways to grow the business as well as efficiencies that make sense," said Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, in a statement about the moratorium.
Intel slashes sales forecast
Intel on Monday announced that it expects to badly miss its sales forecast for the current quarter because of the worldwide hard drive shortage caused by massive floods in Thailand.
The world's largest microchip maker said it continues to forecast that personal computer sales will grow this quarter. But PC makers are reducing their inventories of desktops and laptops, because they're having a difficult time finding hard drives to put in their computers. As the manufacturers reduce their PC stockpiles, they're scaling back their semiconductor purchases from Intel.
As a result, Intel said it now expects fourth-quarter sales to come in between $13.4 billion and $14 billion, significantly lower than its previous estimate of $14.2 billion to $15.2 billion.
Shares of Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) fell more than 4% Monday.
Intel expects to make up for the slumping sales in the middle of next year. The company believes hard drive supply shortages will continue into the first quarter of 2012, after which point PC manufacturers will buy up microprocessors as hard drive supplies recover in the first half of next year.
It's an ominous sign for other companies that make or rely on PCs. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500) CEO Meg Whitman said on a conference call with analysts late last month that the world's largest PC manufacturer expects to "experience headwinds" associated with the hard drive supply shortage during the first half of next year, and the company is slowly reducing its inventory levels. Dell (DELL, Fortune 500) also announced similar inventory realignment.
Companies like Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) may not be affected quite as much if PC sales continue to grow. On a conference call with analysts, Intel Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith said repeatedly that the reason for the sales forecast reduction was supply, not an underlying drop in demand for PCs.
But the impacted companies have said that production will likely be disrupted though at least March 2012, according to IHS iSuppli, leading to a potential PC shortage -- particularly with laptops -- in the first quarter.
As a result, IHS reduced its personal computer shipments forecast by 3.8 million PCs for 2012. The combination of a laptop shortage, forecasted growth in tablet sales, and a worsening global economy led the company to lower its PC shipment growth forecast to 6.8%, down from its previous estimate of 9.5% growth.
Thailand serves as an electronics manufacturing hub for hundreds of companies. As the company suffers its worst flooding in decades, Thai production of consumer electronics supplies, particularly hard drives, has come to a standstill.
The hard drives that are made by Western Digital, Toshiba, and other smaller players in the areas affected by the flooding are mainly designed for notebook and netbook personal computers.
The world's largest microchip maker said it continues to forecast that personal computer sales will grow this quarter. But PC makers are reducing their inventories of desktops and laptops, because they're having a difficult time finding hard drives to put in their computers. As the manufacturers reduce their PC stockpiles, they're scaling back their semiconductor purchases from Intel.
As a result, Intel said it now expects fourth-quarter sales to come in between $13.4 billion and $14 billion, significantly lower than its previous estimate of $14.2 billion to $15.2 billion.
Shares of Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) fell more than 4% Monday.
Intel expects to make up for the slumping sales in the middle of next year. The company believes hard drive supply shortages will continue into the first quarter of 2012, after which point PC manufacturers will buy up microprocessors as hard drive supplies recover in the first half of next year.
It's an ominous sign for other companies that make or rely on PCs. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500) CEO Meg Whitman said on a conference call with analysts late last month that the world's largest PC manufacturer expects to "experience headwinds" associated with the hard drive supply shortage during the first half of next year, and the company is slowly reducing its inventory levels. Dell (DELL, Fortune 500) also announced similar inventory realignment.
Companies like Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) may not be affected quite as much if PC sales continue to grow. On a conference call with analysts, Intel Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith said repeatedly that the reason for the sales forecast reduction was supply, not an underlying drop in demand for PCs.
But the impacted companies have said that production will likely be disrupted though at least March 2012, according to IHS iSuppli, leading to a potential PC shortage -- particularly with laptops -- in the first quarter.
As a result, IHS reduced its personal computer shipments forecast by 3.8 million PCs for 2012. The combination of a laptop shortage, forecasted growth in tablet sales, and a worsening global economy led the company to lower its PC shipment growth forecast to 6.8%, down from its previous estimate of 9.5% growth.
Thailand serves as an electronics manufacturing hub for hundreds of companies. As the company suffers its worst flooding in decades, Thai production of consumer electronics supplies, particularly hard drives, has come to a standstill.
The hard drives that are made by Western Digital, Toshiba, and other smaller players in the areas affected by the flooding are mainly designed for notebook and netbook personal computers.
James Murdoch warned over phone hacking
Correspondence released Tuesday shows that James Murdoch was warned in writing of the seriousness of a threat to sue his News of the World newspaper over phone hacking in 2008.
"Unfortunately it is as bad as we feared," the editor of the tabloid e-mailed proprietor Murdoch about the case, according to a copy of the correspondence published by Parliament Tuesday.
The e-mail from Colin Myler appears to undercut Murdoch's repeated testimony that he did not know details about phone-hacking by his employees.
Murdoch concedes in a letter to lawmakers, also published Tuesday, that he replied to the e-mail, but he does not admit having read it.
James Murdoch to remain BSkyB chairman
Ex-Blair aide testifies on phone hacking
Murdoch is at the center of a scandal over illegal eavesdropping by the newspaper, which he shut down in July in the face of public fury at phone hacking.
Editor Myler e-mailed Murdoch in June 2008 about a phone-hacking victim's threat to sue News of the World, describing Gordon Taylor as "vindictive."
Myler requested that Murdoch meet him and the paper's lawyer, Tom Crone, for "five minutes" on June 10.
Murdoch appears to agree in his reply three minutes later, but said in his letter to Parliament dated December 12 that he did not review the entire e-mail chain, which includes detailed correspondence about the Taylor claim.
News of the World ultimately settled with Taylor for 700,000 pounds (about $1.2 million.)
It also settled with several other celebrities, including actress Sienna Miller.
Police investigating phone hacking by journalists say that about 5,800 people, including celebrities, crime victims, politicians and members of the royal family, were targets of the practice by journalists in search of stories.
It involves illegally eavesdropping on voice mail by entering a PIN to access messages remotely.
"Unfortunately it is as bad as we feared," the editor of the tabloid e-mailed proprietor Murdoch about the case, according to a copy of the correspondence published by Parliament Tuesday.
The e-mail from Colin Myler appears to undercut Murdoch's repeated testimony that he did not know details about phone-hacking by his employees.
Murdoch concedes in a letter to lawmakers, also published Tuesday, that he replied to the e-mail, but he does not admit having read it.
James Murdoch to remain BSkyB chairman
Ex-Blair aide testifies on phone hacking
Murdoch is at the center of a scandal over illegal eavesdropping by the newspaper, which he shut down in July in the face of public fury at phone hacking.
Editor Myler e-mailed Murdoch in June 2008 about a phone-hacking victim's threat to sue News of the World, describing Gordon Taylor as "vindictive."
Myler requested that Murdoch meet him and the paper's lawyer, Tom Crone, for "five minutes" on June 10.
Murdoch appears to agree in his reply three minutes later, but said in his letter to Parliament dated December 12 that he did not review the entire e-mail chain, which includes detailed correspondence about the Taylor claim.
News of the World ultimately settled with Taylor for 700,000 pounds (about $1.2 million.)
It also settled with several other celebrities, including actress Sienna Miller.
Police investigating phone hacking by journalists say that about 5,800 people, including celebrities, crime victims, politicians and members of the royal family, were targets of the practice by journalists in search of stories.
It involves illegally eavesdropping on voice mail by entering a PIN to access messages remotely.
Lindsay Lohan misses
Lindsay Lohan missed her flight back home from a Hawaiian vacation, but she will be back in Los Angeles in time for an important court appearance Wednesday, her spokesman said Tuesday.
Los Angeles County Judge Stephanie Sautner ordered Lohan to appear in court so she can determine whether the actress is keeping up with her probation provisions, including the requirement that she work at least 12 days a month at the county morgue.
"Lindsay was delayed in Hawaii due to a travel-related issue," Lohan spokesman Steve Honig said. "She will be heading back this evening in time to appear in court tomorrow."
The missed flight, however, forced the cancellation of Lohan's interview with talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, which was set to be taped Tuesday.
"Lindsay offered to tape 'Ellen' tomorrow, but the show was unable to shift things around, and tomorrow is their last day of taping for the season," Honig said.
The "Ellen" interview was to be Lohan's only planned appearance to promote her just-published Playboy magazine photo spread.
There is no indication that Lohan, 25, will have any difficulty in court Wednesday, compared with many of her numerous appearances in the past two years.
Sautner sentenced Lohan to 30 days in jail last month after she admitted that she violated her probation on a necklace theft conviction, but the sheriff sent her home after a few hours because of jail overcrowding.
The judge also ordered the actress to work at least 12 days a month at the Los Angeles County morgue until she completes the 53 remaining days on her court-ordered community service. She must also attend 18 psychotherapy sessions.
If the actress stays on track, her probation would be eased March 29, Sautner said. If she doesn't keep up with the requirements, she will serve the additional 270 days behind bars, the judge said.
"This is what we really call putting the keys to the jail in the defendant's hands," Sautner told Lohan.
When Sautner sentenced Lohan to 120 days in jail in May, she ended up serving 35 days of home confinement instead, because of jail overcrowding and state rules that give prisoners credit for good behavior.
Prosecutors said Lohan missed 12 of 20 scheduled workdays at a downtown Los Angeles women's center, part of the court-ordered community service imposed in May when she pleaded guilty to stealing a necklace from a Venice, California, jewelry store.
Lohan, 25, was already on probation for two drunken driving convictions from 2007.
She also canceled 14 of 19 scheduled appointments for court-ordered psychotherapy, they said.
"From what I see of you, you need a structure," Sautner told Lohan last month, instructing her to return to court each month, starting December 14, to show she is complying with the schedule.
Lindsay Lohan's legal woes, which began four years ago with two drunken driving arrests, have been compounded by her failure to attend counseling classes, and alcohol and drug test failures.
Her probation is scheduled to end within a year unless Lohan breaks any laws before then. It has been extended several times because of violations, including the failed alcohol and drug tests.
Los Angeles County Judge Stephanie Sautner ordered Lohan to appear in court so she can determine whether the actress is keeping up with her probation provisions, including the requirement that she work at least 12 days a month at the county morgue.
"Lindsay was delayed in Hawaii due to a travel-related issue," Lohan spokesman Steve Honig said. "She will be heading back this evening in time to appear in court tomorrow."
The missed flight, however, forced the cancellation of Lohan's interview with talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, which was set to be taped Tuesday.
"Lindsay offered to tape 'Ellen' tomorrow, but the show was unable to shift things around, and tomorrow is their last day of taping for the season," Honig said.
The "Ellen" interview was to be Lohan's only planned appearance to promote her just-published Playboy magazine photo spread.
There is no indication that Lohan, 25, will have any difficulty in court Wednesday, compared with many of her numerous appearances in the past two years.
Sautner sentenced Lohan to 30 days in jail last month after she admitted that she violated her probation on a necklace theft conviction, but the sheriff sent her home after a few hours because of jail overcrowding.
The judge also ordered the actress to work at least 12 days a month at the Los Angeles County morgue until she completes the 53 remaining days on her court-ordered community service. She must also attend 18 psychotherapy sessions.
If the actress stays on track, her probation would be eased March 29, Sautner said. If she doesn't keep up with the requirements, she will serve the additional 270 days behind bars, the judge said.
"This is what we really call putting the keys to the jail in the defendant's hands," Sautner told Lohan.
When Sautner sentenced Lohan to 120 days in jail in May, she ended up serving 35 days of home confinement instead, because of jail overcrowding and state rules that give prisoners credit for good behavior.
Prosecutors said Lohan missed 12 of 20 scheduled workdays at a downtown Los Angeles women's center, part of the court-ordered community service imposed in May when she pleaded guilty to stealing a necklace from a Venice, California, jewelry store.
Lohan, 25, was already on probation for two drunken driving convictions from 2007.
She also canceled 14 of 19 scheduled appointments for court-ordered psychotherapy, they said.
"From what I see of you, you need a structure," Sautner told Lohan last month, instructing her to return to court each month, starting December 14, to show she is complying with the schedule.
Lindsay Lohan's legal woes, which began four years ago with two drunken driving arrests, have been compounded by her failure to attend counseling classes, and alcohol and drug test failures.
Her probation is scheduled to end within a year unless Lohan breaks any laws before then. It has been extended several times because of violations, including the failed alcohol and drug tests.
Economist Warns
The Aftershock Survival Summit is a gripping, no-nonsense presentation that’s quickly becoming a financial beacon in an economic tsunami.
Featuring an exclusive interview with famed economist and best-selling author Robert Wiedemer, this disturbing presentation exposes harsh economic truths along with a dire financial warning — a prophetic message that’s spreading across America like wildfire.
But it’s not just the grim predictions that are causing the sensation; rather, it’s the comprehensive blueprint for economic survival that’s really commanding global attention.
Aftershock Survival Summit Video, Watch NowIt offers realistic, step-by-step solutions that the average hard-working American can easily follow; millions have already heeded its warnings and are rapidly sharing the Aftershock Survival Summit throughout the Internet. To see it for yourself, simply click here.
The overwhelming amount of feedback to publicize the presentation, initially screened for a private audience, came with consequences as various online networks repeatedly shut it down and affiliates refused to house the content.
“People were sitting up and taking notice, and they begged us to make the Aftershock Survival Summit public so they could easily share it,” said Newsmax Financial Publisher Aaron DeHoog, “but unfortunately, it kept getting pulled.”
The controversy stems from direct allegations that the people in Washington have failed miserably. They include former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, tasked with preventing financial meltdowns and keeping the nation’s economy strong through monetary and credit policies.
At one point, Wiedemer even calls out Ben Bernanke, saying that his “money from heaven will be the path to hell.”
This wasn’t the first time Wiedemer’s predictions hit a nerve. In 2006, he and his team of economists accurately predicted the four-bubble meltdown in the housing, stock, private debt, and consumer spending markets that almost sunk America.
Regardless of his warnings and survival advice, Bernanke and Greenspan were not about to support Wiedemer publicly, nor were the mainstream media.
As the warnings went unheeded, and America suffered the consequences, Wiedemer penned his latest prophetic work, “Aftershock: Protect Yourself and Profit in the Next Global Financial Meltdown.”
Once again his contrarian views ruffled feathers and just before the book was publicly released, the publisher yanked the final chapter, deeming it too controversial for newsstand and online outlets such as Amazon.com.
Despite appearances, “Aftershock” is not a book with the singular intention of scaring people, explains DeHoog. “The true value lies in the sound economic survival guidance that people can act on immediately. I was able to read the original version with the ‘unpublished chapter,’ and I think it’s the most crucial in the entire book. After contacting Wiedemer, we [Newsmax] were granted permission to share it with our readers. In fact, viewers of the Aftershock Survival Summit are able to claim a free copy of it.”
In the Aftershock Survival Summit, Wiedemer reveals what the publisher didn’t want you to see. Citing the unthinkable, he provides disturbing evidence and financial charts forecasting 50% unemployment, a 90% stock market collapse, and 100% annual inflation.
“I doubted some of his predictions at first. But then Robert showed me the charts that provided evidence for such disturbing claims,” DeHoog commented.
Editors Note: The Aftershock Survival Summit shows the exact same charts. See them for yourself.
And, Wiedemer isn’t alone in his predictions. Jim Rogers, the best-selling financial author and co-founder of the Quantum Fund, warns, “The S&P's recent downgrade didn't go far enough, as Washington probably doesn't even deserve the AA+ rating.”
And House Speaker John Boehner affirms, “The effect of adding nearly a trillion dollars to our national debt — money borrowed mostly from foreign investors — caused a further erosion of economic confidence in America, and increased uncertainty for millions of private-sector job creators.”
As Wiedemer’s warnings and predictions about money loss, market dives, unemployment, and inflation steadily prove to be accurate, the Aftershock Survival Summit is fast becoming the quintessential financial guide for the 21st century, garnering praise from millions.
Russell H., a financial market adviser from Wichita, Kan., says Aftershock 2012 “scared the hell out of me. It was a great wake-up call.”
Susan G. from Montgomery, Ala., called it “eye-opening, and mind-boggling.”
Richard B. from Apison, Tenn., reflects, “It gave me the courage to make a move which, had I not made, would have left me behind the ‘eight ball.’”
Don E. from Edgewater, Fla., said, “It caused me not only to think . . . but to act.”
Even financial giants are sitting up and taking notice.
The Dow Jones’ MarketWatch said, “Aftershock will teach you how to protect yourself against an increasingly hostile Wall Street-Corporate-America-Washington conspiracy undermining average stock market investors. This is your bible, read it, get into action, and be a winner.”
And, the S&P calls Wiedemer’s work “a compelling argument for a chilling conclusion. [His] track record demands our attention.”
Considering the lowered U.S. debt rating, the volatility of the stock market, and global uncertainty, Wiedemer’s track record proves why his warnings are critical.
According to DeHoog, that’s why Newsmax agreed to air the Aftershock Survival Summit as long as possible to make it available to as many as possible. He warns, “Watch it, and get the tools you need to prosper no matter what happens in our economy.”
Editor’s Note: For a limited time, Newsmax is showing the Aftershock Survival Summit and supplying viewers with free copies of the new, updated “Aftershock” book including the final, unpublished chapter. Go here to view it now.
Read more: Aftershock Survival Summit Predicts the Unthinkable
Important: Can you afford to Retire? Shocking Poll Results
Featuring an exclusive interview with famed economist and best-selling author Robert Wiedemer, this disturbing presentation exposes harsh economic truths along with a dire financial warning — a prophetic message that’s spreading across America like wildfire.
But it’s not just the grim predictions that are causing the sensation; rather, it’s the comprehensive blueprint for economic survival that’s really commanding global attention.
Aftershock Survival Summit Video, Watch NowIt offers realistic, step-by-step solutions that the average hard-working American can easily follow; millions have already heeded its warnings and are rapidly sharing the Aftershock Survival Summit throughout the Internet. To see it for yourself, simply click here.
The overwhelming amount of feedback to publicize the presentation, initially screened for a private audience, came with consequences as various online networks repeatedly shut it down and affiliates refused to house the content.
“People were sitting up and taking notice, and they begged us to make the Aftershock Survival Summit public so they could easily share it,” said Newsmax Financial Publisher Aaron DeHoog, “but unfortunately, it kept getting pulled.”
The controversy stems from direct allegations that the people in Washington have failed miserably. They include former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and current Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, tasked with preventing financial meltdowns and keeping the nation’s economy strong through monetary and credit policies.
At one point, Wiedemer even calls out Ben Bernanke, saying that his “money from heaven will be the path to hell.”
This wasn’t the first time Wiedemer’s predictions hit a nerve. In 2006, he and his team of economists accurately predicted the four-bubble meltdown in the housing, stock, private debt, and consumer spending markets that almost sunk America.
Regardless of his warnings and survival advice, Bernanke and Greenspan were not about to support Wiedemer publicly, nor were the mainstream media.
As the warnings went unheeded, and America suffered the consequences, Wiedemer penned his latest prophetic work, “Aftershock: Protect Yourself and Profit in the Next Global Financial Meltdown.”
Once again his contrarian views ruffled feathers and just before the book was publicly released, the publisher yanked the final chapter, deeming it too controversial for newsstand and online outlets such as Amazon.com.
Despite appearances, “Aftershock” is not a book with the singular intention of scaring people, explains DeHoog. “The true value lies in the sound economic survival guidance that people can act on immediately. I was able to read the original version with the ‘unpublished chapter,’ and I think it’s the most crucial in the entire book. After contacting Wiedemer, we [Newsmax] were granted permission to share it with our readers. In fact, viewers of the Aftershock Survival Summit are able to claim a free copy of it.”
In the Aftershock Survival Summit, Wiedemer reveals what the publisher didn’t want you to see. Citing the unthinkable, he provides disturbing evidence and financial charts forecasting 50% unemployment, a 90% stock market collapse, and 100% annual inflation.
“I doubted some of his predictions at first. But then Robert showed me the charts that provided evidence for such disturbing claims,” DeHoog commented.
Editors Note: The Aftershock Survival Summit shows the exact same charts. See them for yourself.
And, Wiedemer isn’t alone in his predictions. Jim Rogers, the best-selling financial author and co-founder of the Quantum Fund, warns, “The S&P's recent downgrade didn't go far enough, as Washington probably doesn't even deserve the AA+ rating.”
And House Speaker John Boehner affirms, “The effect of adding nearly a trillion dollars to our national debt — money borrowed mostly from foreign investors — caused a further erosion of economic confidence in America, and increased uncertainty for millions of private-sector job creators.”
As Wiedemer’s warnings and predictions about money loss, market dives, unemployment, and inflation steadily prove to be accurate, the Aftershock Survival Summit is fast becoming the quintessential financial guide for the 21st century, garnering praise from millions.
Russell H., a financial market adviser from Wichita, Kan., says Aftershock 2012 “scared the hell out of me. It was a great wake-up call.”
Susan G. from Montgomery, Ala., called it “eye-opening, and mind-boggling.”
Richard B. from Apison, Tenn., reflects, “It gave me the courage to make a move which, had I not made, would have left me behind the ‘eight ball.’”
Don E. from Edgewater, Fla., said, “It caused me not only to think . . . but to act.”
Even financial giants are sitting up and taking notice.
The Dow Jones’ MarketWatch said, “Aftershock will teach you how to protect yourself against an increasingly hostile Wall Street-Corporate-America-Washington conspiracy undermining average stock market investors. This is your bible, read it, get into action, and be a winner.”
And, the S&P calls Wiedemer’s work “a compelling argument for a chilling conclusion. [His] track record demands our attention.”
Considering the lowered U.S. debt rating, the volatility of the stock market, and global uncertainty, Wiedemer’s track record proves why his warnings are critical.
According to DeHoog, that’s why Newsmax agreed to air the Aftershock Survival Summit as long as possible to make it available to as many as possible. He warns, “Watch it, and get the tools you need to prosper no matter what happens in our economy.”
Editor’s Note: For a limited time, Newsmax is showing the Aftershock Survival Summit and supplying viewers with free copies of the new, updated “Aftershock” book including the final, unpublished chapter. Go here to view it now.
Read more: Aftershock Survival Summit Predicts the Unthinkable
Important: Can you afford to Retire? Shocking Poll Results
Iran has 'been able to control' U.S. drone
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that his country has "been able to control" the U.S. drone that Iran claims it recently brought down, Venezuelan state TV reported.
"There are people here who have been able to control this spy plane," Ahmadinejad told VTV. "Those who have been in control of this spy plane surely will analyze the plane's system. Furthermore, the systems of Iran are so advanced also, like the system of this plane."
Ahmadinejad did not elaborate or specify what precisely he meant when he referred to people "who have been able to control" the drone. He spoke in Farsi, which VTV translated into Spanish. The Farsi portion of the interview was not audible.
President Barack Obama said Monday that the United States has asked Iran to return the drone aircraft that Iran claims it recently brought down in Iranian territory.
"We've asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond," Obama said.
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Ahmadinejad's comments to VTV seemed to suggest that Iran did not plan to return the aircraft.
"The North Americans at best have decided to give us this spy plane," Ahmadinejad said. "In the unpiloted planes, we have had many advances, much progress and now we have this spy plane."
Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi said the drone no longer belongs to Washington.
"The U.S. spy plane is among the assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran," Vahidi told reporters Tuesday, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency. "Our country will decide what to do with it."
The United States owes Iran an apology and needs to admit its crime, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Tuesday, the Iranian Students' News Agency report.
"The U.S. should know that what it did regarding violation of our air space can put international peace and security in danger," he said. "The U.S. should take responsibility for the consequences of the measure."
American officials have not confirmed that the drone shown in a video released last Thursday by Iranian media is a U.S. aircraft. But Pentagon spokesman George Little has said that an American drone is missing and had not been recovered.
Two U.S. officials have confirmed to CNN that the missing drone was part of a CIA reconnaissance mission that involved both the intelligence community and military personnel stationed in Afghanistan.
Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency said the country's armed forces had downed the drone near Kashmar, some 225 kilometers (140 miles) from the border with Afghanistan on December 4.
The Ahmadinejad interview was aired in Venezuela Monday night.
Officials say the fall of this drone is not related to an incident Tuesday in which a U.S. drone crashed upon landing at an airport in Seychelles. For one thing, they seem to be two different kinds of drones -- the one over Iran was apparently a sophisticated stealth-type vehicle while the Seychelles one is of more conventional design.
"There are people here who have been able to control this spy plane," Ahmadinejad told VTV. "Those who have been in control of this spy plane surely will analyze the plane's system. Furthermore, the systems of Iran are so advanced also, like the system of this plane."
Ahmadinejad did not elaborate or specify what precisely he meant when he referred to people "who have been able to control" the drone. He spoke in Farsi, which VTV translated into Spanish. The Farsi portion of the interview was not audible.
President Barack Obama said Monday that the United States has asked Iran to return the drone aircraft that Iran claims it recently brought down in Iranian territory.
"We've asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond," Obama said.
Cheney on drone situation, Syria's Assad
Local police use border drones
Mystery surrounds drone downed in Iran
Will Iran share stealth tech with China?
Ahmadinejad's comments to VTV seemed to suggest that Iran did not plan to return the aircraft.
"The North Americans at best have decided to give us this spy plane," Ahmadinejad said. "In the unpiloted planes, we have had many advances, much progress and now we have this spy plane."
Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi said the drone no longer belongs to Washington.
"The U.S. spy plane is among the assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran," Vahidi told reporters Tuesday, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency. "Our country will decide what to do with it."
The United States owes Iran an apology and needs to admit its crime, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Tuesday, the Iranian Students' News Agency report.
"The U.S. should know that what it did regarding violation of our air space can put international peace and security in danger," he said. "The U.S. should take responsibility for the consequences of the measure."
American officials have not confirmed that the drone shown in a video released last Thursday by Iranian media is a U.S. aircraft. But Pentagon spokesman George Little has said that an American drone is missing and had not been recovered.
Two U.S. officials have confirmed to CNN that the missing drone was part of a CIA reconnaissance mission that involved both the intelligence community and military personnel stationed in Afghanistan.
Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency said the country's armed forces had downed the drone near Kashmar, some 225 kilometers (140 miles) from the border with Afghanistan on December 4.
The Ahmadinejad interview was aired in Venezuela Monday night.
Officials say the fall of this drone is not related to an incident Tuesday in which a U.S. drone crashed upon landing at an airport in Seychelles. For one thing, they seem to be two different kinds of drones -- the one over Iran was apparently a sophisticated stealth-type vehicle while the Seychelles one is of more conventional design.
Michael Jackson's last house on sale
Furniture made infamous by crime scene photos shown in the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor go on the auction block in Beverly Hills Saturday.
The table where Jackson's sedatives sat and the rug on which paramedics tried to revive him are among more than 500 pieces of fine art and home furnishings that filled Jackson's rented mansion, the house where he died on June 25, 2009.
Julien's Auctions has been careful not to call it a Michael Jackson auction out of legal and public relations concerns, instead marketing it as by the mansion's now-famous address -- 100 North Carolwood Drive.
Jackson did not own the beds, chairs, clocks, paintings, dishes and other items, but their value may skyrocket because of the personal touch added by the pop icon and his children in the months before he died.
Without the connection to Jackson, the property might bring $400,000, Nolan said. But with it "the sky's the limit," Julien's Executive Director Martin Nolan said.
Conrad Murray learns his fate
A chalkboard left behind in Jackson's kitchen may have cost a few hundred dollars, but what his children wrote on it makes it a very valuable object, Nolan said. The note, handwritten on the black board attached to a 26-inch-tall ceramic rooster, reads "love Daddy/ I (heart) Daddy/ Smile it's for free."
It sat in the kitchen where, according to testimony in the trial of Dr. Conrad Murray, Jackson would eat lunch each day with Prince, Paris and Blanket Jackson. It was not known which child wrote the chalk note, but Nolan said his research suggested it was from Paris, who was 11 when her father died.
Another striking piece is Victorian revival style armoire from the Jackson's master bedroom. On the mirror, presumably where Jackson looked each day as he dressed, is a handwritten message of inspiration: "Train, perfection March April Full out May."
The wax-pencil note is significant, considering that Jackson was battling the calendar as he prepared for his "This Is It" concerts set to premiere in London in July 2009.
Dr. Conrad Murray's defense lawyers argued during the trial that the intense pressure on Jackson to rehearse for the 50 shows put him in a desperate fight for sleep, which led to Dr. Murray administering the surgical anesthetic propofol nearly every night in the last two months of his life.
Julien's Auctions backed away from selling the bed in which Jackson received the fatal dose of the propofol after a personal request from his mother, Katherine Jackson, Julien's Executive Director Martin Nolan said.
The auction house's recreation of the bedroom where Jackson died -- euphemistically called "the medicine room" by the company -- features a bed-sized memorial covered with love notes from Jackson fans instead of the death bed.
The nightstand seen next to the death bed in coroner's photos, bearing numerous bottles of sedatives and other drugs, is for sale. the "French occasional table" is listed for between $300 and $500.
The room-size oriental rug that covered the floor where Jackson was placed when paramedics tried to revive him is listed in the auction catalogue for between $400 and $600.
The couch and chairs where Jackson likely sat with show producers worried about his health in the days before his death are for sale.
One chair in Jackson's bedroom has a stain which Nolan suggested was make up spilled by the star as he sat in front of a mirror.
None of Jackson's relatives have expressed an interest in any of the items, Nolan said. He pointed out that they had a chance to take whatever they wanted from the house in the months after his death.
The notes and posters brought to the auction house by Jackson fans and placed on the "medicine room" memorial will be sent to Jackson's mother and children, he said.
Jackson's relationship with Julien's turned sour in the last months of his life when he filed a lawsuit to stop the sale of furnishings from his Neverland ranch.
The singer sued the auction company, claiming he did not authorize the sale of items that were removed from Neverland after he sold the ranch. The suit was settled in April 2009 when Julien's canceled the auction and later returned the items to Jackson.
The table where Jackson's sedatives sat and the rug on which paramedics tried to revive him are among more than 500 pieces of fine art and home furnishings that filled Jackson's rented mansion, the house where he died on June 25, 2009.
Julien's Auctions has been careful not to call it a Michael Jackson auction out of legal and public relations concerns, instead marketing it as by the mansion's now-famous address -- 100 North Carolwood Drive.
Jackson did not own the beds, chairs, clocks, paintings, dishes and other items, but their value may skyrocket because of the personal touch added by the pop icon and his children in the months before he died.
Without the connection to Jackson, the property might bring $400,000, Nolan said. But with it "the sky's the limit," Julien's Executive Director Martin Nolan said.
Conrad Murray learns his fate
A chalkboard left behind in Jackson's kitchen may have cost a few hundred dollars, but what his children wrote on it makes it a very valuable object, Nolan said. The note, handwritten on the black board attached to a 26-inch-tall ceramic rooster, reads "love Daddy/ I (heart) Daddy/ Smile it's for free."
It sat in the kitchen where, according to testimony in the trial of Dr. Conrad Murray, Jackson would eat lunch each day with Prince, Paris and Blanket Jackson. It was not known which child wrote the chalk note, but Nolan said his research suggested it was from Paris, who was 11 when her father died.
Another striking piece is Victorian revival style armoire from the Jackson's master bedroom. On the mirror, presumably where Jackson looked each day as he dressed, is a handwritten message of inspiration: "Train, perfection March April Full out May."
The wax-pencil note is significant, considering that Jackson was battling the calendar as he prepared for his "This Is It" concerts set to premiere in London in July 2009.
Dr. Conrad Murray's defense lawyers argued during the trial that the intense pressure on Jackson to rehearse for the 50 shows put him in a desperate fight for sleep, which led to Dr. Murray administering the surgical anesthetic propofol nearly every night in the last two months of his life.
Julien's Auctions backed away from selling the bed in which Jackson received the fatal dose of the propofol after a personal request from his mother, Katherine Jackson, Julien's Executive Director Martin Nolan said.
The auction house's recreation of the bedroom where Jackson died -- euphemistically called "the medicine room" by the company -- features a bed-sized memorial covered with love notes from Jackson fans instead of the death bed.
The nightstand seen next to the death bed in coroner's photos, bearing numerous bottles of sedatives and other drugs, is for sale. the "French occasional table" is listed for between $300 and $500.
The room-size oriental rug that covered the floor where Jackson was placed when paramedics tried to revive him is listed in the auction catalogue for between $400 and $600.
The couch and chairs where Jackson likely sat with show producers worried about his health in the days before his death are for sale.
One chair in Jackson's bedroom has a stain which Nolan suggested was make up spilled by the star as he sat in front of a mirror.
None of Jackson's relatives have expressed an interest in any of the items, Nolan said. He pointed out that they had a chance to take whatever they wanted from the house in the months after his death.
The notes and posters brought to the auction house by Jackson fans and placed on the "medicine room" memorial will be sent to Jackson's mother and children, he said.
Jackson's relationship with Julien's turned sour in the last months of his life when he filed a lawsuit to stop the sale of furnishings from his Neverland ranch.
The singer sued the auction company, claiming he did not authorize the sale of items that were removed from Neverland after he sold the ranch. The suit was settled in April 2009 when Julien's canceled the auction and later returned the items to Jackson.
Beginning of the end for Putin
Identifying the moment when a political regime begins to decompose is as difficult as dating the onset of a recession. But in histories of the decline of the order built by Vladimir Putin in Russia, last Sunday's parliamentary election is bound to feature prominently.
Despite a campaign marred by what international observers described as "procedural violations," "apparent manipulations," and "serious indications of ballot-box stuffing," the governing United Russia party failed to prevent a sharp drop in its vote total. Official results gave it just short of 50%, down from 64 percent four years ago.
Almost as striking was the surge in backing for three opposition parties that until recently had seemed on their last legs. The Communists won 20%, followed by the social democratic Just Russia party with 13 percent and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultra-nationalist Liberal Democrats with 12 percent.
Russian protesters, opposition leader arrested
Putin's regime is unlikely to collapse anytime soon. In many countries, leaders would be delighted to control 53% of the legislature's seats -- the share United Russia will receive after parties that failed to reach the 7% threshold are eliminated.
Daniel Treisman
Daniel Treisman
But the election makes it official: The downward slide has begun. All previous ballots saw United Russia increase its vote. The party held 70% of the seats in the last Duma, enough to change the constitution at will. Those days are gone. Speaking as results came in, a chastened President Dmitri Medvedev even uttered the dreaded word "coalition."
Personally, Putin still enjoys the approval of 67% of Russians. But his ratings, too, have been slipping. His peak -- 87% approval -- came, oddly enough, in December 2007, the month of the last parliamentary ballot. His negatives are also rising, with one-third of Russians now disapproving of his performance and 53% faulting that of the government he leads.
Some members of the disaffected third were evidently among the sports fans at a martial arts fight last month who booed and jeered after Putin stepped into the ring to congratulate the winner. For Putin, himself a judo black belt, it was an unprecedented humiliation.
The souring mood has two main causes. First, the regime's popularity has always rested on the buoyant economy of the oil boom years. From 2000 to 2008, Russians' real disposable income rose by more than 10% a year on average. The global financial crisis put an end to that. Last year, massive government spending on pensions and public-sector wages boosted incomes by a little more than 4%. But so far this year, disposable income has fallen.
Demonstrators, police clash in Russia
iReporter joins protests in Moscow
Anger boils over after Russian elections
Moscow security forces scatter protests
Putin's appeal has also been eroded by the relentless accumulation of aggravations: bribe-grubbing traffic police, officials who cannot put out forest fires or prevent terrorist attacks, a deranged cop who shoots customers in a Moscow supermarket, and the violence of Chechnya, now spreading across the North Caucasus. These and dozens of similar irritations are heightened by the tin-eared self-congratulation of official pronouncements.
Putin's victory in next March's presidential election remains all but assured. But the last two times he ran, in 2000 and 2004, three months before the vote his ratings were respectively 79 and 81%, far above their current level. This may be the hardest fight he has faced.
Whatever else they reveal, Sunday's results undercut the image, common in the West, of Putin's regime as an effective authoritarian state. In fact, it is a regime that cannot even steal an election decisively.
A massive effort, involving shameless pressures on voters and manipulation of the rules, apparently only managed to improve United Russia's total by a few percentage points. Two exit polls put the party's vote at 46% and 49%. The respected Levada Center, no stooge of the Kremlin, forecast a result of 51%, which was higher than the officially announced total.
Rather than a classic authoritarian government, Putin's is a peculiar hybrid that has combined genuine popularity with counterproductive attempts to over-manage and eliminate all potential threats. Continually centralizing power, the Kremlin has progressively lost control.
Barring a return to rapid growth, it is not clear how Putin and Medvedev can reverse the slide. They will hear conflicting arguments. Some will urge them to reach out to the middle class with a new package of liberal reforms. Yet, unless they suddenly become willing to genuinely share power, this probably will not buy them much support.
Four years of Medvedev's tweets about modernization and rule of law have inoculated the elites against empty Kremlin promises. At the same time, the elections hardly revealed a hunger for liberal economics or even Western-style democracy. The Yabloko party, made up of unimpeachable democrats and civic activists, won just 3% of the votes.
Another option is to woo the masses with additional bursts of populist spending, at least until the presidential vote is over. Yet with the budget already swelled by anti-crisis measures, such a strategy is dangerous. The long-serving finance minister, Alexei Kudrin, was fired last September after publicly criticizing Medvedev's plans to increase military expenditures.
A third possibility is for Putin to trade in his soft authoritarianism for a tougher, more effective model. Yet, even if he wanted to do this, it is doubtful that he has the kind of skilled and ruthless apparatus that could make it work. It is hard to think of extremely repressive regimes that have succeeded in societies as economically developed, highly educated, and rich in communications technology as Russia's is today. Paradoxical as it might sound, authoritarianism in relatively modern countries relies on a significant degree of consent.
That leaves the most likely outcome a continuing downward slide, perhaps temporarily slowed by improved economic performance or accelerated by striking government failures and scandals. The turbulence is just beginning.
Despite a campaign marred by what international observers described as "procedural violations," "apparent manipulations," and "serious indications of ballot-box stuffing," the governing United Russia party failed to prevent a sharp drop in its vote total. Official results gave it just short of 50%, down from 64 percent four years ago.
Almost as striking was the surge in backing for three opposition parties that until recently had seemed on their last legs. The Communists won 20%, followed by the social democratic Just Russia party with 13 percent and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultra-nationalist Liberal Democrats with 12 percent.
Russian protesters, opposition leader arrested
Putin's regime is unlikely to collapse anytime soon. In many countries, leaders would be delighted to control 53% of the legislature's seats -- the share United Russia will receive after parties that failed to reach the 7% threshold are eliminated.
Daniel Treisman
Daniel Treisman
But the election makes it official: The downward slide has begun. All previous ballots saw United Russia increase its vote. The party held 70% of the seats in the last Duma, enough to change the constitution at will. Those days are gone. Speaking as results came in, a chastened President Dmitri Medvedev even uttered the dreaded word "coalition."
Personally, Putin still enjoys the approval of 67% of Russians. But his ratings, too, have been slipping. His peak -- 87% approval -- came, oddly enough, in December 2007, the month of the last parliamentary ballot. His negatives are also rising, with one-third of Russians now disapproving of his performance and 53% faulting that of the government he leads.
Some members of the disaffected third were evidently among the sports fans at a martial arts fight last month who booed and jeered after Putin stepped into the ring to congratulate the winner. For Putin, himself a judo black belt, it was an unprecedented humiliation.
The souring mood has two main causes. First, the regime's popularity has always rested on the buoyant economy of the oil boom years. From 2000 to 2008, Russians' real disposable income rose by more than 10% a year on average. The global financial crisis put an end to that. Last year, massive government spending on pensions and public-sector wages boosted incomes by a little more than 4%. But so far this year, disposable income has fallen.
Demonstrators, police clash in Russia
iReporter joins protests in Moscow
Anger boils over after Russian elections
Moscow security forces scatter protests
Putin's appeal has also been eroded by the relentless accumulation of aggravations: bribe-grubbing traffic police, officials who cannot put out forest fires or prevent terrorist attacks, a deranged cop who shoots customers in a Moscow supermarket, and the violence of Chechnya, now spreading across the North Caucasus. These and dozens of similar irritations are heightened by the tin-eared self-congratulation of official pronouncements.
Putin's victory in next March's presidential election remains all but assured. But the last two times he ran, in 2000 and 2004, three months before the vote his ratings were respectively 79 and 81%, far above their current level. This may be the hardest fight he has faced.
Whatever else they reveal, Sunday's results undercut the image, common in the West, of Putin's regime as an effective authoritarian state. In fact, it is a regime that cannot even steal an election decisively.
A massive effort, involving shameless pressures on voters and manipulation of the rules, apparently only managed to improve United Russia's total by a few percentage points. Two exit polls put the party's vote at 46% and 49%. The respected Levada Center, no stooge of the Kremlin, forecast a result of 51%, which was higher than the officially announced total.
Rather than a classic authoritarian government, Putin's is a peculiar hybrid that has combined genuine popularity with counterproductive attempts to over-manage and eliminate all potential threats. Continually centralizing power, the Kremlin has progressively lost control.
Barring a return to rapid growth, it is not clear how Putin and Medvedev can reverse the slide. They will hear conflicting arguments. Some will urge them to reach out to the middle class with a new package of liberal reforms. Yet, unless they suddenly become willing to genuinely share power, this probably will not buy them much support.
Four years of Medvedev's tweets about modernization and rule of law have inoculated the elites against empty Kremlin promises. At the same time, the elections hardly revealed a hunger for liberal economics or even Western-style democracy. The Yabloko party, made up of unimpeachable democrats and civic activists, won just 3% of the votes.
Another option is to woo the masses with additional bursts of populist spending, at least until the presidential vote is over. Yet with the budget already swelled by anti-crisis measures, such a strategy is dangerous. The long-serving finance minister, Alexei Kudrin, was fired last September after publicly criticizing Medvedev's plans to increase military expenditures.
A third possibility is for Putin to trade in his soft authoritarianism for a tougher, more effective model. Yet, even if he wanted to do this, it is doubtful that he has the kind of skilled and ruthless apparatus that could make it work. It is hard to think of extremely repressive regimes that have succeeded in societies as economically developed, highly educated, and rich in communications technology as Russia's is today. Paradoxical as it might sound, authoritarianism in relatively modern countries relies on a significant degree of consent.
That leaves the most likely outcome a continuing downward slide, perhaps temporarily slowed by improved economic performance or accelerated by striking government failures and scandals. The turbulence is just beginning.
Metals mogul hoping to shine in Kremlin race
Mikhail Prokhorov, who has said he will challenge Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in next year's presidential election, has the reputation as a financial sage.
In 2008 shortly before the global economy crashed, the bank executive turned investor sold off many of his minerals assets, a decision he said was inspired partly by good planning, partly by fortune.
"In business you need to have luck," he told CNN's Matthew Chance. "Sometimes you have great strategy, but something goes wrong. You can't cover all the risks in your life."
Read about Russians' discontent with Putin
Prokhorov's hunch that "this crisis is more global" than previous ones certainly came true, and his decision to cash in means he is now tied for 32nd on Forbes' World's Billionaires list, with assets of $18 billion. In the United States he owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team.
Asked by CNN's Chance about his reputation as an international playboy, he laughed. "I don't care. I try to act natural," he said, adding that he had "no time" to think about having a family.
"I like business, it's my profession," Prokhorov said. "I spend, like, 15 hours a day in the office. It's the great joy in my life, and I never think about money."
As was the case with many other Russian oligarchs, Prokhorov, whose wealth grew with minerals and metals investments, built his fortune in the years following the fall of Communism in the early 1990s.
Inside the mind of an NBA team owner
Russian billionaire to run against Putin
According to Forbes, he and associate Vladimir Potanin, who is at 34 on the Forbes' rich list and was a onetime deputy prime minister under former President Boris Yeltsin, wooed the corporate customers of two huge Soviet-era banks as their holding company Interros acquired interests in metals, engineering, agriculture and media. Prokhorov and Potanin cultivated ties with the Kremlin and attended meetings with Putin, and during the commodities bubble last decade their company took off.
In 2007, Prokhorov was arrested on suspicion of trafficking prostitutes (and released without charge) in the French ski town of Courchevel. In March 2007, Pravda reported his resignation as general director and president of OAO Norilsk Nickel, a subsidiary of Interros.
The following year, according to Forbes, he sold his 25% stake in Norilsk Nickel, the world's largest producer of nickel and palladium, to fellow billionaire Oleg Deripaska in exchange for $7 billion in cash and a 14% stake in the world's top aluminum producer UC Rusal.
"In my perception, the raw materials market was overvalued -- we had a strategy to leave and to diversify," Prokhorov said of his decision.
The sale allowed him to buy the New Jersey Nets in 2009, and he has a 45% stake in the team's real estate project to build a new arena in Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards in 2012. The Muscovite is also publishing a Russian-language magazine Snob in the U.S. while he has invested $200 million to develop Russia's first hybrid car, the Yo.
Prokhorov entered politics only recently, according to the website Russiapedia. In June this year, he joined the right-wing party Right Cause, and was elected its leader. "Prokhorov claimed he could replace Vladimir Putin as Russia's prime minister if the party succeeded in polls and at some point even hinted that he could become president.
"However, party veterans got extremely upset by the businessman's goals and in early September a Right Cause congress ousted Prokhorov and his key allies from the party."
Many a businessman has come unstuck in politics. Now, as Prokhorov prepares to enter next year's Russian presidential election, he will need all his good fortune to continue if he is to beat Putin.
In 2008 shortly before the global economy crashed, the bank executive turned investor sold off many of his minerals assets, a decision he said was inspired partly by good planning, partly by fortune.
"In business you need to have luck," he told CNN's Matthew Chance. "Sometimes you have great strategy, but something goes wrong. You can't cover all the risks in your life."
Read about Russians' discontent with Putin
Prokhorov's hunch that "this crisis is more global" than previous ones certainly came true, and his decision to cash in means he is now tied for 32nd on Forbes' World's Billionaires list, with assets of $18 billion. In the United States he owns the New Jersey Nets basketball team.
Asked by CNN's Chance about his reputation as an international playboy, he laughed. "I don't care. I try to act natural," he said, adding that he had "no time" to think about having a family.
"I like business, it's my profession," Prokhorov said. "I spend, like, 15 hours a day in the office. It's the great joy in my life, and I never think about money."
As was the case with many other Russian oligarchs, Prokhorov, whose wealth grew with minerals and metals investments, built his fortune in the years following the fall of Communism in the early 1990s.
Inside the mind of an NBA team owner
Russian billionaire to run against Putin
According to Forbes, he and associate Vladimir Potanin, who is at 34 on the Forbes' rich list and was a onetime deputy prime minister under former President Boris Yeltsin, wooed the corporate customers of two huge Soviet-era banks as their holding company Interros acquired interests in metals, engineering, agriculture and media. Prokhorov and Potanin cultivated ties with the Kremlin and attended meetings with Putin, and during the commodities bubble last decade their company took off.
In 2007, Prokhorov was arrested on suspicion of trafficking prostitutes (and released without charge) in the French ski town of Courchevel. In March 2007, Pravda reported his resignation as general director and president of OAO Norilsk Nickel, a subsidiary of Interros.
The following year, according to Forbes, he sold his 25% stake in Norilsk Nickel, the world's largest producer of nickel and palladium, to fellow billionaire Oleg Deripaska in exchange for $7 billion in cash and a 14% stake in the world's top aluminum producer UC Rusal.
"In my perception, the raw materials market was overvalued -- we had a strategy to leave and to diversify," Prokhorov said of his decision.
The sale allowed him to buy the New Jersey Nets in 2009, and he has a 45% stake in the team's real estate project to build a new arena in Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards in 2012. The Muscovite is also publishing a Russian-language magazine Snob in the U.S. while he has invested $200 million to develop Russia's first hybrid car, the Yo.
Prokhorov entered politics only recently, according to the website Russiapedia. In June this year, he joined the right-wing party Right Cause, and was elected its leader. "Prokhorov claimed he could replace Vladimir Putin as Russia's prime minister if the party succeeded in polls and at some point even hinted that he could become president.
"However, party veterans got extremely upset by the businessman's goals and in early September a Right Cause congress ousted Prokhorov and his key allies from the party."
Many a businessman has come unstuck in politics. Now, as Prokhorov prepares to enter next year's Russian presidential election, he will need all his good fortune to continue if he is to beat Putin.
First out of a sinking Kyoto ship
For Canada, the cost of either meeting its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, or failing to do so, was too much to bear.
On Monday, the country became the first signatory of the landmark climate treaty to back out of the deal, citing the huge potential cost of legally binding commitments.
Confirming the move, environment minister Peter Kent said to meet its obligations under the accord Canada would have to take every single vehicle off its roads.
"Every car, truck, ATV, tractor, ambulance, police car," he elaborated in a media briefing, before giving another equally unpalatable option of closing down the country's entire farming and agricultural sector and cutting heat to every home, building and factory.
If the country failed to do so, Kent said taxpayers would have to give $14 billion to other countries "with no impact on emissions or the environment."
How did it come to this?
Canada's move was not unexpected. Since being elected into power in 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made it clear he was not a supporter of the controversial pact.
Canada quits climate pact
The Kyoto Protocol is still quite shaky with many countries wanting to jump out of the ship
Li Yan, Greenpeace
The Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997 by the previous Liberal government, which committed Canada to cutting greenhouse gas emissions 6% below 1990 levels by 2012. In fact, levels have been rising, according to readings submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The announcement came after the end of the latest round of talks involving the 195 parties to the UNFCCC in Durban, South Africa.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had just finished saying that a "significant agreement" had been reached, which has been dubbed "The Durban Platform," when Canada pulled the plug.
But while Kent repeated his claim that Kyoto, for Canada, "is in the past," he described The Durban Platform as "the way forward."
What is The Durban Platform?
The new deal, agreed Sunday, brings in major emitters of greenhouse gas emissions including the United States, China, India and Brazil. For that, it was hailed a success, although critics still argue that the timetable is too loose.
The parties agreed to extend the Kyoto Protocol, which was due to expire at the end of 2012, and to discuss a legally binding pact to cover all major emitters by 2015, with any agreed deal to start in 2020.
Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming
Michel Jarraud, WMO secretary-general
"Right now the global climate regime amounts to nothing more than a voluntary deal that's put off for a decade," said Kumi Naidoo, the international executive director of environmental campaign group Greenpeace. "This could take us over the two degree threshold where we pass from danger to potential catastrophe."
The package includes the first contributions to a $100 billion Green Climate Fund to help developing countries to invest in clean energy and adapt to climate change. An Adaptation Committee will be formed to co-ordinate adaptation activities worldwide with agreement on a "Technology Mechanism" to smooth the way.
What impact will Canada's departure have on the treaty?
Canada is just one of the 41 "Annex 1" countries and the European Union to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and its departure is not expected to lead to any kind of collapse.
However, its decision to formally leave the pact does send a symbolic message to other countries which might be looking for a way out, according to Greenpeace.
"The Kyoto Protocol is still quite shaky with many countries wanting to jump out of the ship. This Canadian position to leave behind the Kyoto Protocol does destabilize the positive action," said Li Yan, the group's climate and energy manager in Beijing.
Li said the new deal, to be agreed before 2015, will also include legally binding commitments so countries that opt out now are only delaying the financial pain. "There really is no escape from the responsibility," she added.
Opinion: World needs climate change 'Plan B'
Which countries could follow?
Russia and Japan have already made it clear they're not in favor of extending the Kyoto Protocol, but are yet to formally pull out.
Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the United Nation's Environment Program, said any further departures would seem premature with new the treaty negotiations underway, as agreed in Durban.
Before the Durban talks, Russia's chief negotiator Alexander Bedritsky said the Kyoto Protocol "neither resolves the problems of global warming, nor ensures meeting the global two-degree target, nor provides for environmental integrity."
The U.S. has long refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that it doesn't bind other major emitters, including China, to legally binding limits.
On Tuesday, Beijing expressed regret at the Canadian decision. "It is regrettable and flies in the face of the efforts of the international community for Canada to leave the Kyoto Protocol at a time when the Durban meeting, as everyone knows, made important progress by securing a second phase of commitment to the Protocol," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said at a news briefing, according to Reuters.
What does the most recent science say?
Leading scientists agree that the world is on a path to rising average global temperatures which could have a disastrous humanitarian and environmental impact.
Global carbon dioxide levels rose to an average of 389 parts per million in 2010, compared with 386 ppm in 2009, according to figures released in November by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). A level of 350ppm is considered by scientists to be the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In Copenhagen in 2009, countries agreed to work towards keeping the increase in global temperatures below two degrees Celsius to avoid dangerous levels of climate change.
Extreme weather the norm in 2011
According to the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) provisional status report, 2011 was the 10th warmest year on record and warmer than any other year with a La Nina event.
"Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming ..." WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud said.
On Monday, the country became the first signatory of the landmark climate treaty to back out of the deal, citing the huge potential cost of legally binding commitments.
Confirming the move, environment minister Peter Kent said to meet its obligations under the accord Canada would have to take every single vehicle off its roads.
"Every car, truck, ATV, tractor, ambulance, police car," he elaborated in a media briefing, before giving another equally unpalatable option of closing down the country's entire farming and agricultural sector and cutting heat to every home, building and factory.
If the country failed to do so, Kent said taxpayers would have to give $14 billion to other countries "with no impact on emissions or the environment."
How did it come to this?
Canada's move was not unexpected. Since being elected into power in 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made it clear he was not a supporter of the controversial pact.
Canada quits climate pact
The Kyoto Protocol is still quite shaky with many countries wanting to jump out of the ship
Li Yan, Greenpeace
The Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997 by the previous Liberal government, which committed Canada to cutting greenhouse gas emissions 6% below 1990 levels by 2012. In fact, levels have been rising, according to readings submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The announcement came after the end of the latest round of talks involving the 195 parties to the UNFCCC in Durban, South Africa.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had just finished saying that a "significant agreement" had been reached, which has been dubbed "The Durban Platform," when Canada pulled the plug.
But while Kent repeated his claim that Kyoto, for Canada, "is in the past," he described The Durban Platform as "the way forward."
What is The Durban Platform?
The new deal, agreed Sunday, brings in major emitters of greenhouse gas emissions including the United States, China, India and Brazil. For that, it was hailed a success, although critics still argue that the timetable is too loose.
The parties agreed to extend the Kyoto Protocol, which was due to expire at the end of 2012, and to discuss a legally binding pact to cover all major emitters by 2015, with any agreed deal to start in 2020.
Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming
Michel Jarraud, WMO secretary-general
"Right now the global climate regime amounts to nothing more than a voluntary deal that's put off for a decade," said Kumi Naidoo, the international executive director of environmental campaign group Greenpeace. "This could take us over the two degree threshold where we pass from danger to potential catastrophe."
The package includes the first contributions to a $100 billion Green Climate Fund to help developing countries to invest in clean energy and adapt to climate change. An Adaptation Committee will be formed to co-ordinate adaptation activities worldwide with agreement on a "Technology Mechanism" to smooth the way.
What impact will Canada's departure have on the treaty?
Canada is just one of the 41 "Annex 1" countries and the European Union to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and its departure is not expected to lead to any kind of collapse.
However, its decision to formally leave the pact does send a symbolic message to other countries which might be looking for a way out, according to Greenpeace.
"The Kyoto Protocol is still quite shaky with many countries wanting to jump out of the ship. This Canadian position to leave behind the Kyoto Protocol does destabilize the positive action," said Li Yan, the group's climate and energy manager in Beijing.
Li said the new deal, to be agreed before 2015, will also include legally binding commitments so countries that opt out now are only delaying the financial pain. "There really is no escape from the responsibility," she added.
Opinion: World needs climate change 'Plan B'
Which countries could follow?
Russia and Japan have already made it clear they're not in favor of extending the Kyoto Protocol, but are yet to formally pull out.
Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the United Nation's Environment Program, said any further departures would seem premature with new the treaty negotiations underway, as agreed in Durban.
Before the Durban talks, Russia's chief negotiator Alexander Bedritsky said the Kyoto Protocol "neither resolves the problems of global warming, nor ensures meeting the global two-degree target, nor provides for environmental integrity."
The U.S. has long refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that it doesn't bind other major emitters, including China, to legally binding limits.
On Tuesday, Beijing expressed regret at the Canadian decision. "It is regrettable and flies in the face of the efforts of the international community for Canada to leave the Kyoto Protocol at a time when the Durban meeting, as everyone knows, made important progress by securing a second phase of commitment to the Protocol," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said at a news briefing, according to Reuters.
What does the most recent science say?
Leading scientists agree that the world is on a path to rising average global temperatures which could have a disastrous humanitarian and environmental impact.
Global carbon dioxide levels rose to an average of 389 parts per million in 2010, compared with 386 ppm in 2009, according to figures released in November by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). A level of 350ppm is considered by scientists to be the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In Copenhagen in 2009, countries agreed to work towards keeping the increase in global temperatures below two degrees Celsius to avoid dangerous levels of climate change.
Extreme weather the norm in 2011
According to the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) provisional status report, 2011 was the 10th warmest year on record and warmer than any other year with a La Nina event.
"Our science is solid and it proves unequivocally that the world is warming ..." WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud said.
Higgs boson
Scientists say they have found hints of the existence of the Higgs boson, a never-before-seen subatomic particle long thought to be a fundamental building block of the universe.
In a highly anticipated press conference, researchers announced that two independent experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva have turned up signs of the so-called "God particle."
While the experiments haven't yet turned up enough data to confirm the Higgs boson's existence, experts say finding the elusive particle would rank as one of the top scientific achievements of the past 50 years.
What is the Higgs boson?
The Standard Model of particle physics lays out the basics of how elementary particles and forces interact in the universe. But the theory crucially fails to explain how particles actually get their mass.
Particles, or bits of matter, range in size and can be larger or smaller than atoms. Electrons, protons and neutrons, for instance, are the subatomic particles that make up an atom.
Scientists believe that the Higgs boson is the particle that gives all matter its mass.
Experts know that elementary particles like quarks and electrons are the foundation upon which all matter in the universe is built. They believe the elusive Higgs boson gives the particles mass and fills in one of the key holes in modern physics.
Higgs boson is the last missing piece of our current understanding of the most fundamental nature of the universe.
Physicist Martin Archer
How does the Higgs boson work?
The Higgs boson is part of a theory first proposed by physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s to explain how particles obtain mass.
The theory proposes that a so-called Higgs energy field exists everywhere in the universe. As particles zoom around in this field, they interact with and attract Higgs bosons, which cluster around the particles in varying numbers.
Imagine the universe like a party. Relatively unknown guests at the party can pass quickly through the room unnoticed; more popular guests will attract groups of people (the Higgs bosons) who will then slow their movement through the room.
The speed of particles moving through the Higgs field works much in the same way. Certain particles will attract larger clusters of Higgs bosons -- and the more Higgs bosons a particle attracts, the greater its mass will be.
Why is finding the Higgs boson so important?
While finding the Higgs boson won't tell us everything we need to know about how the universe works, it will fill in a huge hole in the Standard Model that has existed for more than 50 years, according to experts.
"The Higgs boson is the last missing piece of our current understanding of the most fundamental nature of the universe," Martin Archer, a physicist at Imperial College in London, told CNN.
"Only now with the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] are we able to really tick that box off and say 'This is how the universe works, or at least we think it does'."
"It's not the be all and end all -- but in terms of what can we say practically about the world and how the world is, it actually tells us a lot."
Gordon Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, added that finding evidence of the Higgs boson would be a "very wonderful success of science and of people for four centuries."
Why is the Higgs boson called the "God particle?"
The popular nickname for the elusive particle was created for the title of a book by Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman -- reportedly against his will, as Lederman has said he wanted to call it the "Goddamn Particle" because "nobody could find the thing."
"'God particle' is a nickname I don't really like," says Archer. "It's nothing to do with religion -- the only (theoretical) similarity is you're seeing something that's a field that's everywhere, in all spaces."
How are scientists searching for the Higgs boson?
For the past year scientists have searched for the Higgs boson by smashing protons together at high energy in the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
If we don't see [Higgs], it means the universe is more complicated than we thought.
Physicist Martin Archer
Inside the LHC, which is located 328 feet underground in a 17-mile tunnel and is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, high speed proton collisions generate a range of even smaller particles that scientists sift through in search of a signal in the data suggesting the existence of the Higgs boson.
"You're just hoping that somewhere in these collisions that you see something ... some sort of a statistical bump," says Archer.
Scientists: 'God particle' proof closer than ever
If Higgs bosons exist, they are elusive, popping up and then disappearing again quickly. It means, says Archer, that scientists at the LHC will only be able to observe their decaying remnants.
It has taken years for scientists to narrow down the range of mass in which they believed the Higgs boson could exist -- but during the past year a statistical bump suggests they're on the right track.
"Now they're starting to get a bump, the scientists should be able to get that result more and more," says Archer.
What if scientists don't find the Higgs boson?
The general consensus among physics academics is that the Higgs field and boson exists, according to Archer.
"It just makes sense within the framework that we've got everything set up in, given that everything else that we can describe and we can see seems to be described in this simple way," says Archer.
Nearly every scientist believes that the Large Hadron Collider will either prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson once and for all -- so if the LHC doesn't find it, it doesn't exist, experts say.
Martin Archer believes a failure to find the Higgs boson would be even more exciting than discovering the elusive particle.
"If we don't see it, it actually means that the universe at the most fundamental level is more complicated than we thought," says Archer, "and therefore maybe the way we've been attacking physics isn't right."
In a highly anticipated press conference, researchers announced that two independent experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva have turned up signs of the so-called "God particle."
While the experiments haven't yet turned up enough data to confirm the Higgs boson's existence, experts say finding the elusive particle would rank as one of the top scientific achievements of the past 50 years.
What is the Higgs boson?
The Standard Model of particle physics lays out the basics of how elementary particles and forces interact in the universe. But the theory crucially fails to explain how particles actually get their mass.
Particles, or bits of matter, range in size and can be larger or smaller than atoms. Electrons, protons and neutrons, for instance, are the subatomic particles that make up an atom.
Scientists believe that the Higgs boson is the particle that gives all matter its mass.
Experts know that elementary particles like quarks and electrons are the foundation upon which all matter in the universe is built. They believe the elusive Higgs boson gives the particles mass and fills in one of the key holes in modern physics.
Higgs boson is the last missing piece of our current understanding of the most fundamental nature of the universe.
Physicist Martin Archer
How does the Higgs boson work?
The Higgs boson is part of a theory first proposed by physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s to explain how particles obtain mass.
The theory proposes that a so-called Higgs energy field exists everywhere in the universe. As particles zoom around in this field, they interact with and attract Higgs bosons, which cluster around the particles in varying numbers.
Imagine the universe like a party. Relatively unknown guests at the party can pass quickly through the room unnoticed; more popular guests will attract groups of people (the Higgs bosons) who will then slow their movement through the room.
The speed of particles moving through the Higgs field works much in the same way. Certain particles will attract larger clusters of Higgs bosons -- and the more Higgs bosons a particle attracts, the greater its mass will be.
Why is finding the Higgs boson so important?
While finding the Higgs boson won't tell us everything we need to know about how the universe works, it will fill in a huge hole in the Standard Model that has existed for more than 50 years, according to experts.
"The Higgs boson is the last missing piece of our current understanding of the most fundamental nature of the universe," Martin Archer, a physicist at Imperial College in London, told CNN.
"Only now with the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] are we able to really tick that box off and say 'This is how the universe works, or at least we think it does'."
"It's not the be all and end all -- but in terms of what can we say practically about the world and how the world is, it actually tells us a lot."
Gordon Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics, added that finding evidence of the Higgs boson would be a "very wonderful success of science and of people for four centuries."
Why is the Higgs boson called the "God particle?"
The popular nickname for the elusive particle was created for the title of a book by Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman -- reportedly against his will, as Lederman has said he wanted to call it the "Goddamn Particle" because "nobody could find the thing."
"'God particle' is a nickname I don't really like," says Archer. "It's nothing to do with religion -- the only (theoretical) similarity is you're seeing something that's a field that's everywhere, in all spaces."
How are scientists searching for the Higgs boson?
For the past year scientists have searched for the Higgs boson by smashing protons together at high energy in the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
If we don't see [Higgs], it means the universe is more complicated than we thought.
Physicist Martin Archer
Inside the LHC, which is located 328 feet underground in a 17-mile tunnel and is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, high speed proton collisions generate a range of even smaller particles that scientists sift through in search of a signal in the data suggesting the existence of the Higgs boson.
"You're just hoping that somewhere in these collisions that you see something ... some sort of a statistical bump," says Archer.
Scientists: 'God particle' proof closer than ever
If Higgs bosons exist, they are elusive, popping up and then disappearing again quickly. It means, says Archer, that scientists at the LHC will only be able to observe their decaying remnants.
It has taken years for scientists to narrow down the range of mass in which they believed the Higgs boson could exist -- but during the past year a statistical bump suggests they're on the right track.
"Now they're starting to get a bump, the scientists should be able to get that result more and more," says Archer.
What if scientists don't find the Higgs boson?
The general consensus among physics academics is that the Higgs field and boson exists, according to Archer.
"It just makes sense within the framework that we've got everything set up in, given that everything else that we can describe and we can see seems to be described in this simple way," says Archer.
Nearly every scientist believes that the Large Hadron Collider will either prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs boson once and for all -- so if the LHC doesn't find it, it doesn't exist, experts say.
Martin Archer believes a failure to find the Higgs boson would be even more exciting than discovering the elusive particle.
"If we don't see it, it actually means that the universe at the most fundamental level is more complicated than we thought," says Archer, "and therefore maybe the way we've been attacking physics isn't right."
5 dead in Belgium
A grenade and gun attack in this eastern Belgian city left five people dead, including the attacker, and 119 wounded Tuesday, authorities said.
A 23-month-old baby died in a hospital late Tuesday after being wounded in the attack near a Christmas market in a city center square, said Katrin Delcourt, a spokeswoman for the Liege provincial governor's office. Others killed in the attack included two teenage boys, aged 15 and 17, and a 75-year-old woman, Liege public prosecutor Danielle Reynders told reporters.
Some 52 people were treated for injuries by medics at a field hospital set up near the scene, the prosecutor said, while others went to hospitals in the area.
Police fear the death toll will rise overnight, a spokeswoman for Liege police said.
The attacker was identified as Nordine Amrani, 33, of Liege, Reynders said.
He died in the attack in which he hurled three grenades and fired weapons from a rooftop into the crowded square near a court building, she said.
Belgium attack witness saw carnage
The man acted alone in the attack in Place St. Lambert, and police are not looking for other suspects, she said, adding that he had left his home with a pistol, a semi-automatic rifle and the grenades in his bag.
Police had asked the attacker, who had been previously convicted on drugs and weapons offenses, to come in for an interview in an ongoing investigation, the prosecutor said. He had never been charged with terror offenses.
Reynders said officials were not yet able to explain the motive for the attack.
Delcourt, the spokeswoman for the provincial governor's office, told CNN that Amrani was on conditional parole. She could not give details of the police investigation.
It remained unclear whether he had committed suicide or had died when one of the grenades exploded in his face, she said.
One of the weapons he had, a light automatic rifle, is a standard-issue weapon in the Belgian army, Delcourt said.
A senior Belgian security source, who has been briefed on the investigation but did not want to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, told CNN that Amrani's police meeting scheduled Tuesday was for suspected rape.
Amrani was on an elevated walkway above the square when he began throwing grenades down into the crowd and then firing, before shooting himself in the head with his revolver, the source said.
Amrani was previously in prison on drugs and arms racketeering charges, the source said, having been caught cultivating "several thousand" cannabis plants.
Authorities will carry out an autopsy in part to see if he was under influence of drugs during the attack, which has shocked the country and its security service, the source said.
He said that during Amrani's 40 months in jail, he was not diagnosed with any mental disorder or seen to be politicized before being released on conditional parole. The source said authorities have found no ties to Islamist terrorism.
Liege resident Kevin Hauzeur told CNN that he ducked for cover as he heard a "huge explosion and two or three gunshots" in the city center.
A lot of people were in the area at the time to shop at the Christmas market, Hauzeur said. The crowd was "spinning around, crying -- it was really chaotic," he said.
He said he had seen what appeared to be the body of an attacker before police cleared everyone from the area. Police told him the man had shot himself, Hauzeur said.
A CNN correspondent at the scene Tuesday evening said dozens of police in fluorescent jackets remained in the cordoned-off square but it was otherwise deserted.
Municipal cleaning vehicles sprayed the central market area with water, he said, overseen by a large Christmas tree, which remained illuminated.
Oliver Moch, a spokesman for the Citadelle hospital, the largest in the Liege area, said 31 people injured in the attack had been admitted for treatment there.
The Belgian Red Cross also had a team on site in Liege, operations director Gregory Jones told CNN earlier. It was providing psychological support.
King Albert II and Queen Paola went to Liege to meet the mayor, provincial governor and workers with the Red Cross and emergency services following the attack, the Belgian royal palace told CNN.
Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo also traveled to Liege, his spokesman said.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague issued a statement saying: "There can be absolutely no place for appalling acts of violence such as this in any society, and I condemn this attack in the strongest terms."
Charles Boisoin, whose apartment overlooks the city center, told CNN shortly after the attack that he and his neighbors had been instructed by police not to leave their homes. The city center was virtually deserted and all he could hear and see were helicopters flying overhead, he said.
Television footage and images from the scene showed blood on the sidewalk, as well as police officers and vehicles gathered nearby.
The provincial governor's office initially said that police were searching for at least one suspect.
Liege is Belgium's third-largest city, after Brussels and Antwerp, the national tourist office says. Dating back centuries, it is an important cultural and industrial center for the country.
A 23-month-old baby died in a hospital late Tuesday after being wounded in the attack near a Christmas market in a city center square, said Katrin Delcourt, a spokeswoman for the Liege provincial governor's office. Others killed in the attack included two teenage boys, aged 15 and 17, and a 75-year-old woman, Liege public prosecutor Danielle Reynders told reporters.
Some 52 people were treated for injuries by medics at a field hospital set up near the scene, the prosecutor said, while others went to hospitals in the area.
Police fear the death toll will rise overnight, a spokeswoman for Liege police said.
The attacker was identified as Nordine Amrani, 33, of Liege, Reynders said.
He died in the attack in which he hurled three grenades and fired weapons from a rooftop into the crowded square near a court building, she said.
Belgium attack witness saw carnage
The man acted alone in the attack in Place St. Lambert, and police are not looking for other suspects, she said, adding that he had left his home with a pistol, a semi-automatic rifle and the grenades in his bag.
Police had asked the attacker, who had been previously convicted on drugs and weapons offenses, to come in for an interview in an ongoing investigation, the prosecutor said. He had never been charged with terror offenses.
Reynders said officials were not yet able to explain the motive for the attack.
Delcourt, the spokeswoman for the provincial governor's office, told CNN that Amrani was on conditional parole. She could not give details of the police investigation.
It remained unclear whether he had committed suicide or had died when one of the grenades exploded in his face, she said.
One of the weapons he had, a light automatic rifle, is a standard-issue weapon in the Belgian army, Delcourt said.
A senior Belgian security source, who has been briefed on the investigation but did not want to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, told CNN that Amrani's police meeting scheduled Tuesday was for suspected rape.
Amrani was on an elevated walkway above the square when he began throwing grenades down into the crowd and then firing, before shooting himself in the head with his revolver, the source said.
Amrani was previously in prison on drugs and arms racketeering charges, the source said, having been caught cultivating "several thousand" cannabis plants.
Authorities will carry out an autopsy in part to see if he was under influence of drugs during the attack, which has shocked the country and its security service, the source said.
He said that during Amrani's 40 months in jail, he was not diagnosed with any mental disorder or seen to be politicized before being released on conditional parole. The source said authorities have found no ties to Islamist terrorism.
Liege resident Kevin Hauzeur told CNN that he ducked for cover as he heard a "huge explosion and two or three gunshots" in the city center.
A lot of people were in the area at the time to shop at the Christmas market, Hauzeur said. The crowd was "spinning around, crying -- it was really chaotic," he said.
He said he had seen what appeared to be the body of an attacker before police cleared everyone from the area. Police told him the man had shot himself, Hauzeur said.
A CNN correspondent at the scene Tuesday evening said dozens of police in fluorescent jackets remained in the cordoned-off square but it was otherwise deserted.
Municipal cleaning vehicles sprayed the central market area with water, he said, overseen by a large Christmas tree, which remained illuminated.
Oliver Moch, a spokesman for the Citadelle hospital, the largest in the Liege area, said 31 people injured in the attack had been admitted for treatment there.
The Belgian Red Cross also had a team on site in Liege, operations director Gregory Jones told CNN earlier. It was providing psychological support.
King Albert II and Queen Paola went to Liege to meet the mayor, provincial governor and workers with the Red Cross and emergency services following the attack, the Belgian royal palace told CNN.
Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo also traveled to Liege, his spokesman said.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague issued a statement saying: "There can be absolutely no place for appalling acts of violence such as this in any society, and I condemn this attack in the strongest terms."
Charles Boisoin, whose apartment overlooks the city center, told CNN shortly after the attack that he and his neighbors had been instructed by police not to leave their homes. The city center was virtually deserted and all he could hear and see were helicopters flying overhead, he said.
Television footage and images from the scene showed blood on the sidewalk, as well as police officers and vehicles gathered nearby.
The provincial governor's office initially said that police were searching for at least one suspect.
Liege is Belgium's third-largest city, after Brussels and Antwerp, the national tourist office says. Dating back centuries, it is an important cultural and industrial center for the country.
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