Gregg Ends Bid for Commerce Job

Senator Judd Gregg withdrew his nomination for commerce secretary during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

WASHINGTON — Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire abruptly withdrew Thursday as the nominee for commerce secretary, saying he had “irresolvable conflicts” with President Obama over his economic stimulus plan and a concern over what many fellow Republicans believe is the politicization of the 2010 census.

The departure of Mr. Gregg is the latest setback to a White House that has struggled to fill several top positions and to fulfill Mr. Obama’s pledge of building a bipartisan administration. He is the third prospective cabinet secretary — the second for the Commerce Department — to remove his name from consideration.

“I’m a fiscal conservative, as everybody knows, a fairly strong one,” Mr. Gregg told reporters at a news conference in the Capitol. “And it just became clear to me that it would be very difficult, day in and day out, to serve in this cabinet or any cabinet.”

“It was my mistake, obviously, to say yes,” he added.

But the political fallout is left to the White House, which now has a string of appointees who have stepped aside over vetting problems, unpaid taxes or philosophical differences with Mr. Obama. Since the president took office last month, not a week has passed without the White House responding to a personnel crisis.

Mr. Gregg said he alerted Mr. Obama to his decision “several days ago,” but administration officials said the senator’s withdrawal had taken them off guard.

The White House sought to contain the political fallout, issuing a terse statement and pointing out that Mr. Gregg had said he would “support, embrace and move forward with the president’s agenda.”

Mr. Obama, traveling in Illinois, told reporters that he had spoken to Mr. Gregg on Wednesday but that he did not know he planned to withdraw until Thursday. He said that the senator had had a “change of heart” and that he intended to keep his pledge of a bipartisan cabinet.

“I am going to keep working at this,” said Mr. Obama, adding that the American people were “desperate” for Democrats and Republicans to work together.

Mr. Gregg would have been the third Republican in the cabinet. The others are Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Senator Judd Gregg withdrew from consideration to be Commerce Secretary during a press conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

The appearance by Mr. Gregg at his news conference in the Capitol was one of the few he had made in public all week. Senators assumed that he was preparing for his confirmation hearings, but he was huddled with his wife, Kathy, and a small circle of advisers trying to determine how he could undo his decision last week to join the Obama administration.

Mr. Gregg did not vote on the administration’s $789 billion economic stimulus plan the first time it came up in the Senate. He declined to tell reporters on Thursday how he would vote when the bill came up for final passage, but he expressed his disagreement with the policy by criticizing the plan in his withdrawal statement.

“It has become apparent during this process,” Mr. Gregg said, “that this will not work for me, as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the census, there are irresolvable conflicts for me.”

“We are functioning,” he added, “from a different set of views on many critical items of policy.”

The White House signaled last week that it would exert greater control over the Census Bureau, in part because of a concern among minority groups over Mr. Gregg’s leading the Commerce Department. Then, in response to complaints by Republicans, the administration said that it would work closely with the director of the census, but that the census would not be under the direction of the White House.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, had recommended Mr. Gregg for commerce secretary. The White House accepted Mr. Reid’s suggestion, in part, because the president had said he wanted his cabinet to be filled with a variety of viewpoints.

Senator Judd Gregg withdrew his nomination for commerce secretary during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

Mr. Gregg praised Mr. Obama for this in his news conference. “He has been a person who has reached out and aggressively reached out, across the aisle,” the senator said. “And I immensely respect that, and I immensely respect him.”

The roster of fallen cabinet nominees also includes Tom Daschle, who stepped aside last week as the nominee for health and human services secretary because of questions about unpaid taxes, and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who withdrew from consideration as commerce secretary because of an investigation into state contracts.

Senator Judd Gregg with President Obama and Vice President Biden at the White House on Feb. 3, when his nomination was announced.

Mr. Obama’s choice for chief performance officer, Nancy Killefer, pulled her name from consideration because of unpaid payroll taxes for a household employee. Gen. Anthony C. Zinni was offered the position of ambassador to Iraq, but the opportunity was retracted.

Mr. Gregg will remain in the Senate and said he would help Mr. Obama accomplish some pieces of his agenda, like reworking Social Security. “I do believe, genuinely, that I can be even more effective for this presidency in the Senate,” Mr. Gregg said.

Mr. Gregg added that he would not seek re-election to a fourth term in 2010, making him the fifth Republican senator to announce plans to retire next year.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff who had been a strong proponent of Mr. Gregg’s nomination, sought to play down his decision to withdraw. “It is better that it happened now,” Mr. Emanuel said, “than when you have someone in the government.”

Among the responsibilities facing the next commerce secretary is oversight of the government’s multibillion-dollar rescue of the Detroit automakers Chrysler and General Motors.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, a West Virginia Democrat who is the chairman of the Commerce Committee, said he wished that Mr. Gregg had “thought through the implications of his nomination more thoroughly before accepting this post.”

Later in the day, Mr. Gregg said the census had been “only a slight issue” in his decision to withdraw. But the census has been a major issue between Republicans and Democrats for years, and Mr. Gregg has been involved in the dispute. A decade ago, he resisted efforts by President Bill Clinton to increase financing for the 2000 census.

In recent days, Republicans have been upset by suspicions that the Obama administration sought to assert more direct control over the census, a prospect they called troubling given that the president’s chief of staff, Mr. Emanuel, is a former Democratic congressman who helped his party win a majority in the House.

“We respectfully request that you reconsider and reverse your administration’s plans to transfer control of the Census Bureau and the 2010 census to the White House staff,” the House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, wrote Thursday in a letter to the president.

The census has huge implications social and political. It is used to distribute federal money to states and cities based on population, and to redraw Congressional districts — determining how many seats in the House that growing states will pick up at the expense of states with relatively stagnant populations.

White House officials said they did not have any leading contenders for commerce secretary. It could be difficult, they feared, to attract a strong candidate who would be the third person selected for the post.

The administration did have one key position filled Thursday when the Senate, by voice vote, confirmed Leon E. Panetta to run the Central Intelligence Agency.

Jackie Calmes and David Stout contributed reporting from Washington, and Helene Cooper from East Peoria, Ill.

By : Jeff Zeleny Published on : February 12, 2009

A version of this article appeared in print on February 13, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Re-Published By : The Author

Some Arab Women Find Freedom in the Skies



Flight attendants at a graduation ceremony last year in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates.

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Marwa Abdel Aziz Fathi giggled self-consciously as she looked down at the new wing-shaped brooch on the left breast pocket of her crisp gray uniform, then around the room at the dozens of other Etihad flight attendants all chatting and eating canapés around her.

It was graduation day at Etihad Training Academy, where the national airline of the United Arab Emirates holds a seven-week training course for new flight attendants. Downstairs are the cavernous classrooms where Ms. Fathi and other trainees rehearsed meal service plans in life-size mockups of planes and trained in the swimming pool, where they learned how to evacuate passengers in the event of an emergency landing over water.

Despite her obvious pride, Ms. Fathi, a 22-year-old from Egypt, was amazed to find herself here.

“I never in my life thought I’d work abroad,” said Ms. Fathi, who was a university student in Cairo when she began noticing newspaper advertisements recruiting young Egyptians to work at airlines based in the Persian Gulf. “My family thought I was crazy. But then some families don’t let you leave at all.”

A decade ago, unmarried Arab women like Ms. Fathi, working outside their home countries, were rare. But just as young men from poor Arab nations flocked to the oil-rich Persian Gulf states for jobs, more young women are doing so, sociologists say, though no official statistics are kept on how many.

Flight attendants have become the public face of the new mobility for some young Arab women, just as they were the face of new freedoms for women in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. They have become a subject of social anxiety and fascination in much the same way.

The dormitory here where the Etihad flight attendants live after training looks much like the city’s many 1970s-style office blocks, its windows iridescent like gasoline on a puddle. But there are three security guards on the ground floor, a logbook for sign-ins and strict rules. Anyone who tries to sneak a man back to one of the simply furnished two-bedroom suites that the women share may be dismissed, even deported.

In the midst of an Islamic revival across the Arab world that is largely being led by young people, gulf states like Abu Dhabi — which offer freedoms and opportunities nearly unimaginable elsewhere in the Middle East — have become an unlikely place of refuge for some young Arab women. And many say that the experience of living independently and working hard for high salaries has forever changed their ambitions and their beliefs about themselves, though it can also lead to a painful sense of alienation from their home countries and their families.

At almost any hour of the day or night, there are a dozen or more young women with identical rolling suitcases waiting in the lobby of their dormitory to be picked up for work on Etihad flights. Though several are still drowsily applying makeup — and the more steady-handed have perfected a back-of-the-bus toilette that takes exactly the length of their usual ride to Abu Dhabi International Airport — they are uniformly well ironed and blow-dried. Those with longer hair wear black hair-ties wrapped around meticulously hair-netted ponytails. They wear jaunty little caps with attached gauzy scarves that hint at hijab, the head coverings worn by many Muslim women. Like college students during exams, all of them gripe good-naturedly about how little they have slept.

There are exclamations of congratulation and commiseration as the women learn friends’ assignments. Most coveted are long-haul routes to places like Toronto and Sydney, Australia, where layovers may last many days, hotels are comfortable and per diem allowances from the airline to cover food and incidentals are generous. Short-haul flights to places like Khartoum, Sudan, are dreaded: more than four hours of work, followed by refueling, a new load of passengers, an exhausting late-night return flight to Abu Dhabi and the shuttle bus back to the dormitory tower with its vigilant guards.

Upstairs, scrubbed of their thick, professional makeup, most of the women look a decade younger. They seem to subsist on snack food: toast made, Arabic-style, by waving flaps of pita over an open flame; slivers of cheap, oversalted Bulgarian cheese; the Lebanese date-filled cookies called ajweh; pillowy rolls from a local Cinnabon outlet that one young Syrian flight attendant proclaimed herself addicted to (an expression she used with self-conscious delight, a badge of newfound worldliness).


They watch bootlegged DVDs — “Desperate Housewives,” “Sex and the City” — bought on layovers in Bangladesh and Indonesia. They drift along the tiled floors between their rooms in velour sweatpants and fuzzy slippers, and they keep their voices low: someone is always trying to catch a wink of sleep before her flight.




A Lonely Existence

It is a hushed, lonely and fluorescent-lighted existence, and it is leavened mostly by nights out dancing. Despite the increasing numbers of women moving to the gulf countries, the labor migration patterns of the last 20 years have left the Emirates with a male-female ratio that is more skewed than anywhere else in the world; in the 15-to-64 age group, there are more than 2.7 men for every woman.

Etihad flight attendants are such popular additions to Abu Dhabi’s modest hotel bar scene that their presence is encouraged by frequent “Ladies’ Nights” and cabin-crew-only drink discounts. It is almost impossible for an unveiled woman in her 20s to go to a mall or grocery store in Abu Dhabi without being asked regularly, by grinning strangers, if she is a stewardess.

One evening last fall, an Egyptian flight attendant for Etihad with dyed blond hair and five-inch platform heels led a friend — a 23-year-old Tunisian woman wearing a sparkly white belt who said that she had come to the Emirates hoping to find work as a seamstress — up to the entrance of the Sax nightclub at the Royal Meridien Hotel.

Just inside, in the bar area, several young Emirates men in white dishdashas were dancing jerkily to deafening club music.

Clutching her friend by the elbow, the Egyptian woman indicated one of the bouncers. “Isn’t he just so yummy?” she shrieked. The bouncer, who had plainly heard, ignored her, and the women filed past. Despite appearances, explained the Egyptian flight attendant — who asked not to be named because she was not authorized by Etihad to speak to the news media — sex and dating are very fraught matters for most of the young Arab women who come to work in the Emirates.

Some young women cope with their new lives away from home by becoming almost nunlike, keeping to themselves and remaining very observant Muslims, she said, while others quickly find themselves in the arms of unsuitable men. “With the Arabic girls who come to work here, you get two types,” the Egyptian woman said. “They’re either very closed up and scared and they don’t do anything, or else they’re not really thinking about flying — they’re just here to get their freedom. They’re really naughty and crazy.”

Treated Like a Heroine


Rania Abou Youssef, 26, a flight attendant for the Dubai-based airline, Emirates, said that when she went home to Alexandria, Egypt, her female cousins treated her like a heroine. “I’ve been doing this for four years,” she said, “and still they’re always asking, ‘Where did you go and what was it like and where are the photographs?’ ”

Many of the young Arab women working in the Persian Gulf take delight in their status as pioneers, role models for their friends and younger female relatives. Young women brought up in a culture that highly values community, they have learned to see themselves as individuals.

For many families, allowing a daughter to work, much less to travel overseas unaccompanied, may call her virtue into question and threaten her marriage prospects. Yet this culture is changing, said Musa Shteiwi, a sociologist at Jordan University in Amman. “We’re noticing more and more single women going to the gulf these days,” he said. “It’s still not exactly common, but over the last four or five years it’s become quite an observable phenomenon.”

Unemployment levels across the Arab world remain high. As the networks of Arab expatriates in the gulf countries become stronger and as cellphones and expanding Internet access make overseas communication more affordable, some families have grown more comfortable with the idea of allowing daughters to work here. Some gulf-based employers now say they tailor recruitment procedures for young women with Arab family values in mind. They may hire groups of women from a particular town or region, for example, so the women can support one another once in the gulf. “A lot of girls do this now because this has a reputation for being very safe,” said Enas Hassan, an Iraqi flight attendant for Emirates. “The families have a sense of security. They know that if their girls start flying they won’t be thrown into the wide world without protection.”

A Feeling of Displacement

Yet not everyone can make peace with life in the United Arab Emirates, the young flight attendants say. Even the landscape — block after sterile block of hotels and office buildings with small shops and takeout restaurants on their lower floors — can contribute to a feeling of displacement. Nearly all year long, for most of the day, the sunlight is bright white, so harsh that it obliterates all contrast. Despite vigilant watering, even the palm trees on roadsides look grayish and embattled.

Some of the young women tell stories of fellow flight attendants who have simply slipped onto planes to their home countries and run away, without giving notice to the airline.

The most successful Arab flight attendants, they say, are often those whose circumstances have already placed them somehow at the margins of their home societies: young immigrant women who are supporting their families after the death of a male breadwinner, for example, and a handful of young widows and divorced women who are eventually permitted to work overseas after their prospects of remarriage have dimmed.

Far more than other jobs they might find in the gulf, flying makes it difficult for Muslim women to fulfill religious duties like praying five times a day and fasting during Ramadan, the Egyptian attendant noted. She said she hoped to wear the hijab one day, “just not yet.” A sense of disconnection from their religion can add to feelings of alienation from conservative Muslim communities back home. Young women whose work in the gulf supports an extended family often find, to their surprise and chagrin, that work has made them unsuitable for life within that family.

“A very good Syrian friend of mine decided to resign from the airline and go back home,” the Egyptian flight attendant said. “But she can’t tolerate living in a family house anymore. Her parents love her brother and put him first, and she’s never allowed out alone, even if it’s just to go and have a coffee.”

“It becomes very difficult to go home again,” she said.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 22, 2008, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Published By : KATHERINE ZOEPF

Forest Plan in Brazil the Traces of an Activist's Vision













Lalo de Almeida

A devastated area of forest used for cattle in March in Brazil. A government plan introduced targets for reducing deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Twenty years ago, a Brazilian environmental activist and rubber tapper was shot to death at his home in Acre State by ranchers opposed to his efforts to save the Amazon rain forest.

After his death at age 44, Francisco Alves Mendes, better known as Chico, became a martyr for a concept that is only now gaining mainstream support here: that the value of a standing forest could be more than the value of a forest burned and logged in the name of development.

This month, Brazil took what environmentalists hope will be a big step forward in realizing Mr. Mendes’s vision. The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva introduced ambitious targets for reducing deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions in a nation that is one of the world’s top emitters of this heat-trapping gas.

The plan promises to make Brazil a more influential player in global climate-change discussions, helping to push the United States and the European Union to agree to emissions cuts and head off the adverse effects of climate change. It could also encourage more pledges from wealthy countries seeking to essentially pay Brazil to preserve the forest for the good of all humanity.

But some environmentalists question whether the new targets, which would reduce Brazilian deforestation by 72 percent by 2017, are achievable in a country that has shown few signs of adjusting its development model as a major food provider to the world, especially in the midst of a global economic crisis.

To achieve the first phase of planned cuts, Brazil would have to reduce deforestation next year by 20 percent, to less than 4,000 square miles. That would be the lowest amount per year ever recorded in Brazil, said Paulo Adario, the Amazon campaign director for Greenpeace in Brazil.

Brazil’s economy is centered on the export of agricultural products, like soybeans and beef, and commodities like iron ore.

“The Brazilian model is to be the food supplier to the world and a big supplier of ethanol,” Mr. Adario said. “The economy will continue to move in the same basic direction. There is no magic in Brazil.”

Up until now, Brazil’s economic choices have driven much of the deforestation in the Amazon, he said. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, the military government encouraged landless families to settle in the region. Road-building, land speculators and ranchers followed, and the forests fell at a quickening pace.

The burning and decomposition of trees produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

Mr. Mendes organized tappers to confront crews and flew abroad to confront lenders paying for roads. His efforts to stop logging in an area planned for a forest reserve led to his death. Since his killing, on Dec. 22, 1988, more than 20 reserves have been created, protecting more than eight million acres.

Mr. Mendes was an early advocate of the idea that people who live in the forest could create livelihoods from sustainable forest resources, rather than the one-time economic benefit of cutting down trees. Carbon financing, the compensation of forest dwellers for pursuing sustainable industries, would provide an added incentive, which is vital given the uncertain markets for natural rubber and other non-timber forest products.

“The notion that we in the north will help pay for that climate service is an important development and represents the mainstreaming of the concept that Chico Mendes and those like him were pioneers in creating,” said Richard H. Moss, the head of climate change programs at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington.

The killings of Mr. Mendes and of Sister Dorothy Stang, a 73-year-old Catholic nun who was gunned down in 2005 for speaking out against logging in the Amazon, ratcheted up international pressure on Brazil to find ways to limit forest clearing without sacrificing development.

“Brazil was always on the defensive when it came to the question of climate change,” said Carlos Minc, Brazil’s environment minister. “And now it has completely changed, passing a bolder plan than India and China.”

Mr. Minc said the plan would help meet a demand of some of the more developed countries, including the United States, which has said it would not agree to firm emissions targets until less-developed countries that produce significant amounts of greenhouse gases do the same.

Deforestation produces more than a fifth of human-generated carbon dioxide by some estimates. Some 75 percent of Brazil’s carbon dioxide emissions come from deforestation, Mr. Minc said.

Brazil’s plan would sharply slice those emissions, reducing them by some 4.8 billion tons by 2018. Some environmentalists contend that deals involving compensation for forest protection could weaken climate agreements in many ways. They also say the plan leaves the most difficult targets to the government that will follow Mr. da Silva’s. His term ends in 2010.

Still, it is viewed by some scientists and climate experts as major step forward. “For the first time we have out in the open very clear goals for reduction in deforestation,” said Walter Vergara, the lead climatologist for Latin America at the World Bank.

The global recession could end up being a godsend by lowering demand for agricultural goods.

But it could also slow the flow of technology needed to make industries more efficient and limit pledges from foreign governments like Norway, Sweden and Germany, whose payments would help preserve the forest. So far, those countries have not suggested that they would reduce their contributions, Mr. Minc said.

“The global recession and the climate crisis don’t necessarily have to be adversaries, with one competing for the resources of the other,” Mr. Minc said.

By : ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

Man United seek more silver at Club World Cup final


YOKOHAMA, Japan (AFP) - Manchester United go into the Club World Cup final against Liga de Quito on Sunday driven by their desire to claim more silverware, and the odds are heavily stacked in their favour.

No British team has ever won the tournament, with Liverpool coming closest in 2005 when they made the final but were beaten by Sao Paulo 1-0.

Sir Alex Ferguson had some concerns with his side's defensive lapses against Gamba Osaka on Thursday when they conceded three late goals, and is aware that Liga used lightning counter-attacks to break down Pachuca in their semi-final.

With that in mind, he is taking nothing for granted, knowing through experience that games against South American opponents are never easy.

"I'm very pleased that we're in the final, but we will be facing a stern test, as Liga de Quito are very strong defensively," he said of the Ecuadorians.

"My assistant Mick Phelan and I saw a video of their semi-final against Pachuca and also had them watched by a scout. Quito are a typically South American side -- solid at the back and dangerous in front of goal.

"It will certainly be anything but an easy match, but it is the final of the Club World Cup so you can't expect an easy ride."

Ferguson said Saturday that striker Dimitar Berbatov had still not fully shaken off a virus but will be on the bench, adding that he would likely make changes to the team that played Thursday

"I've not decided on my team but I may go for fresh legs this time," he said, confirming only that Park Ji-Sung was a definite starter.

The South American champions know they are clear underdogs against their European counterparts, but vowed to pull out all the stops for the biggest match of their lives

Their Argentine coach Edgardo Bauza, who will be in charge for the last time before quitting the team, remains confident.

"It will be the match of our lives," he said.

"Even though we are not favourites we will be at the top of our game and do our best. I don't know how we will handle the best team in England but I know my players will give everything they've got."

Ferguson has repeatedly drummed into his squad the importance of winning this tournament and it seems to be rubbing off, with the players excited about lifting a trophy no British team has ever got their hands on before.

Written by : AFP

South Korean actress Ok So-ri gets suspended term for adultery

South Korea's popular actress, Ok So-ri (hangul= 옥소리; 'Ok Bo-gyeong' - 옥보경), age 40, was convicted Wednesday of adultery, for an affair she admitted having with a well-known 38-year-old opera singer. She blamed it on a loveless 11-year marriage.

Goyang, Gyeonggi Province Regional court Judge Cho Min-seok ruled that, "The accused deserves to be blamed. But we took into account her husband's indifference to his wife and she has already gone through immense mental agony since the trial started." Her husband, Park Chul (박철), a radio talk show personality, sought the maximum sentence of two years imprisonment, while the prosecutors were seeking 18 months. She was sentenced to eight months in prison, but avoided jail because the sentence was suspended for two years. The Court imposed upon her lover a six-month suspended term.

In September 2008, a lower court had declared both partners jointly responsible for their divorce, and awarded custody of their nine-year-old daughter to Mr Park. Ok had been trying to overturn a 1953 law that criminalizes extramarital affairs and can send a person to jail for up to two years for adultery. Her lawyers alleged in a court petition: "The adultery law ... has degenerated into a means of revenge by the spouse, rather than a means of saving a marriage." For this purpose she brought a case before the Constitutional Court of Korea, which ruled against the actress and in handing the decision said that society would be harmed if it overturned the law and that the "two-year jail term is not excessive when comparing it to responsibility." The Constitutional Court of Korea (헌법재판소 , Heonbeop Jaepanso) is an independent and specialized court, whose primarily role is the reviewing constitutionality under the Constitution of the Republic of Korea.

The Korean Times says that "in the past three years about 1,200 people have been indicted annually for adultery, but very few have been jailed." Minwoo women's rights group leader, Lee Hye-kyung opined that "the law is problematic in that it focuses only on the technical aspects of sexual intercourse and allows the government to intrude on the most private part of adult sexual life."

From Wikinews, the free news source you can write!

Boxing: Pacquiao stuns De La Hoya with eighth round TKO

From Wikinews, the free news source you can write!

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Las Vegas, Nevada hosted the De La Hoya-Pacquiao match

Filipino WBC Lightweight Champion, Emmanuel "The Pacman" Pacquiao (48-3-2, 36 KOs) stopped American boxer and promoter Oscar "Golden Boy" De La Hoya (39-6, 30 KOs) after eight rounds of the "The Dream Match" in MGM Grand Garden Arena, at Las Vegas, Nevada on December 6, 2008. De La Hoya's corner threw in the towel before the start of the 9th round of the 12-round, non-title fight at the 147-pound welterweight limit. It was officially a technical knockout.

"Pacman" dominated the fight, from the opening bell, landing his straight left hand to the American's face, and later opens up with combinations in the seventh and eighth rounds. Two of the three judges scored all eight rounds for him, while a third gives De La Hoya the first round. Finally, Pacman gives De La Hoya a beating and closes his left eye in the eighth round. Pacquiao said, "You're still my idol." De La Hoya replied, "No, you're my idol."

De La Hoya at a pre-fight press conference.

The camp of Manny Pacquiao has previously claimed that "Golden Boy" had weaknesses the Filipino boxer would exploit. Trainer Freddie Roach accurately foretold the outcome when he earlier said, "I'm not saying we're not going to knock him out. If it happens, fine. We'll take it. What we're going to do is break him down round by round. We're working on staying away from the jab and the left hook. The hook is a power shot. But Oscar makes a mistake with his jab. I'm not saying what it is, but I've seen it."

Meanwhile, sportinglife.com reported that Pacquiao "confirmed he's up for a showdown with Ricky "Hitman" Hatton, telling Sky Box Office: "My job is to fight in the ring, that's the promoter's job. I can fight any time, anywhere. I can go to England to fight Hatton, no problem." Hatton replies: "Manny's proved again that he's pound-for-pound the number one in the sport and I still might get my dream of becoming the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world."

Pacquiao stands to earn nearly US$15 million, which also includes his share of the pay-per-view earnings while De La Hoya is guaranteed $20 million for the fight.

Financial Time Bombs

THE economic crisis has made it painfully obvious that the United States economy has become very vulnerable to broken gears in the global financial system. But this is not simply a financial or economic problem — it is a grave national security risk, and our government must treat it as such.

Historically, Washington’s national security and financial apparatuses have operated independently. Intelligence analysts have focused on explicit threats posed by weapons and conflicts. Those parts of the government charged with ensuring economic health have a different mind-set, monitoring capital markets where they assume threats are not malicious, but competitive in nature. This needs to change.

For a model, consider the evolution that took place in the 1990s with respect to cyber-threats. While this was initially the preserve of information technology experts and companies, government officials came to recognize the enormous potential threats to the power grid, the Internet and government computer systems.

In terms of economic security, however, a complicating factor is that financial experts and national security officials view risk in very different ways. The meltdown on Wall Street is largely a result of an overriding incentive to see risks as low. The group dynamic among financial houses was to lend more under more precarious conditions — if you didn’t, a competitor would, and he would generate greater near-term returns, lure more investors and get a higher bonus.

Conversely, the national security community, tends to maximize risk assessments. Aerospace companies sell more weapons if the threat is judged to be increasing. National security analysts don’t get jobs if they say there is no danger. It’s all about playing up risk — sometimes too far, as the miscalculation over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction threat showed.

Despite these divergent views of risk, the talents of professionals in the capital markets and national security experts must be combined if America is to identify and respond to financial threats.

For example, while China has behaved appropriately during the global financial crisis, there is no doubt that its enormous reserves give it de facto veto power over some of Washington’s interest rate and exchange rate policies. What would we have done if Beijing had responded differently? And the desires of Russia (then fighting in Georgia) were a consideration during the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts, because it is one of the largest holders of government agency debt.

Al Qaeda has declared that damage to the American economy is its second most important goal after mass casualties. Presently, who would warn the White House if foreign entities made a concerted attack on our financial system? Who is charged with detecting such activity?

The Obama administration needs to place a new priority on the national security implications of capital and commodities markets. The National Security Council needs to draw together the powerful talents and tools from segregated agencies to tackle the problem.

Our spy agencies alone lack the direction and specialized expertise to provide the real-time market analysis required. It calls for talent more likely found among hedge fund managers and open-market traders. After all, the data does not need to be captured clandestinely — much is readily available from exchanges, brokers and other open sources. Quick analysis — with the sorts of quantitative engines traders use, redesigned for national financial security objectives — may be the most critical aspect.

There is a tremendous range of global threat indicators that can be gleaned from careful scrutiny of trading activity. For example, in August 2006 an unexplained decline in certain airline stocks took place shortly before the arrests in Britain of terrorists plotting to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners.

The global financial meltdown is going to give our enemies new ideas to create economic havoc. We don’t have much time to plan our response.

Charles Duelfer, the former director of the Iraq Survey Group, is the author of the forthcoming “Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq.” James Rickards was general counsel of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management and oversaw its rescue by the Federal Reserve.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 21, 2008, on page WK11 of the New York edition

By CHARLES DUELFER and JIM RICKARDS
Published: December 20, 2008

United States Economy

The United States economy will produce roughly $15 trillion worth of goods and services in 2008, making it easily the largest in the world. China is next, at about $12 trillion, according to one widely used method. Per person, the American economy has the fourth largest output - more than $45,000 for every man, woman and child, on average - behind Luxembourg, Bermuda and Liechtenstein.

In 2007, the American economy began to slow significantly, mostly because of a real-estate slump and related financial problems. Many economists believe that the economy entered a recession at the end of 2007 or early in 2008. A committee of academic economists, overseen by the National Bureau of Economic Research, makes the most commonly cited determination about when recessions begin and end. Because the committee defines a recession as a broad-based and protracted downturn in economic activity, its members typically wait many months before announcing that the economy has entered a recession. They have made no such announcement lately.

The economy was last in recession in 2001. Contrary to widespread belief, the terrorist attacks of 2001 did not cause the downturn that year. The economy slowed as the dot-com bubble started leaking in early 2000 and began to shrink in early 2001. The recession ended in November 2001.

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Over the last few decades, recessions have become less common than they once were. Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, and others have described this development as the "great moderation". While the economy used to swing between expansion and contraction every few years, there have been only two relatively brief recessions over the last 25 years. Perhaps the most important reason is the new flexibility of businesses. Executives can now track the ups and downs of their sales and inventories more closely than they used to, thanks in large part to computers. Better transportation, like FedEx, also helps companies to keep their warehouses lean. So a company is less likely to find itself suddenly stuck with too many workers and products - and then have to make sharp cutbacks.

Yet there are also now increasing worries that a boom in consumer spending, helped along by more consumer debt, played a large role in lifting economic growth over the last generation. If this is the case -- and if, as many analysts believe, the mortgage crisis marks the end of the debt boom -- economic growth may slow significantly in coming years.

Despite the healthy economic growth, many families have not received large pay increases. Starting in the mid-1970's, compensation - pay and benefits - for the typical worker began to grow more slowly than it had in the 1950's and '60s. Over the last 30 years, there has been only one period, from about 1996 to 2002, when hourly pay grew for most workers a lot faster than inflation. The most recent expansion, which began in late 2001, could end up being the first one on record in which median household income did not rise faster than inflation.

Published at The New York Times

By : David Leonhardt, Apr. 26, 2008