The state Transportation Department has launched an internal review of possible design flaws in Big Dig handrails that have been linked to the deaths of seven motorists.
José Manuel Barroso says European commission considering ban on credit default swaps to ease market pressure on Greece
The European commission announced moves today to shore up the euro and ward off market pressure on Greece by considering a ban on complex derivatives allegedly being used to undermine the single currency.
The draconian move suggested by José Manuel Barroso, commission president, follows a joint campaign by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, for a prompt clampdown on credit default swaps (CDS).
George Papandreou, the embattled Greek prime minister, who has been arguing in Berlin, Paris, and Luxembourg for the past several days that unbridled speculation on the markets is driving his country towards national insolvency and sovereign debt default, was expected to lobby the White House last night to join the crackdown on the markets.
Papandreou was due to see Barack Obama in Washington last night following meetings in Berlin and Paris with Merkel and Sarkozy respectively.
In concerted criticism of the speculative attacks on the euro, Merkel was also joined by Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg leader and head of the eurozone of 16 countries using the single currency, in demanding swift action to rein in the markets.
Barroso said today it was "not justified" to buy CDSs "by unseen interventions on a risk, on a purely speculative basis ... The commission will examine closely the relevance of banning purely speculative naked sales on credit default swaps of sovereign debt."
The possible ban on CDSs – a form of insurance against the risk of default – would also be raised at the G20.
Following talks with Juncker in Luxembourg on the Greek crisis, the threat to the euro, and the talk across the EU of establishing a European Monetary Fund to bail out distressed eurozone countries, Merkel reserved her strongest criticism for the markets.
"We must discourage financial market speculation," she said. "A fast implementation in the area of credit default swaps must follow. We know this will be done on the American side too, but we think that a step ahead from our side, from the European Union, would help."
The commission announcement came in response to pressure from Merkel, Sarkozy, Juncker and Papandreou, who threatened to take national action against the markets if Brussels balked.
The European crackdown on CDS trading appeared to be the central result of Papandreou's tour of key capitals, a strong political signal aimed at winning time for the Greeks. The apparent determination to regulate the traders as well as the concerted political signals sent today were aimed at relieving the pressure on Greece whose debt and deficit crisis could spiral out of control and undermine the euro.
For the first time Barroso said the eurozone countries were preparing some form of bailout for the Greeks which, nonetheless, would not breach the no-bailout clause in the single currency rulebook.
"The commission has been actively working with euro-area member states to design a mechanism which Greece could use in case of need," he said. "It would include stringent conditionality. The commission is ready to propose a European framework for co-ordinated assistance, which would require the support of euro-area member states."
Market speculation against the euro was "an aggravating factor" in the Greek crisis, Barroso added, but conceded that Greece's problems "were not caused by speculation on the financial markets".
Despite the criticism of the markets and the CDS crackdown led by Merkel, Germany's financial services regulator said it had seen no evidence of speculation against Greek bonds and no growth in the use in effect of CDSs betting on the chances of a Greek default.
Following the weekend announcement from Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, that he favoured setting up a European Monetary Fund to safeguard the euro in future Greece-style crises, it was clear today that any such move will be slow and complex, tiptoeing gingerly through a legal minefield.
While supporting the idea, Juncker said there were "a thousand questions" to be answered. The Germans and the French are certain to scrap over the rules and functions of an EMF. Merkel reiterated that such a fund would mean reopening the Lisbon treaty, a nightmare scenario that could run into trouble with Germany's supreme court.
While the fund would work for the single-currency countries, changing the Lisbon treaty would require the assent of all 27 EU countries. Gordon Brown has already pledged no more changes to European treaties for at least a decade, while a Conservative government in the UK would face major dilemmas over how to respond to changes in the Lisbon treaty.
The 2010 state legislative session is at the halfway mark of its 90-day session. It's unclear just what bills will pass the Legislature before adjournment April 19 besides the budget, which is required.
The California Teachers Assn. has donated another $500,000 to the effort to repeal new corporate tax breaks set to go into effect later this year.
Online retail giant Amazon.com notified web-based affiliates across Colorado on Monday that it is dropping them in response to an eight-day-old state law applying state sales tax to such purchases.
• 1,600 homes to be built in East Jerusalem settlement
• Vice-president says the deal undermines trust
Joe Biden, the US vice-president, condemned a plan by Israel to build 1,600 homes on occupied Palestinian land in an East Jerusalem settlement.
The Israeli interior ministry's approval of the plan cast a cloud over a visit to the country by Biden just hours after he pledged strong support for the Israeli government.
In an unusually strong statement issued after he arrived 90 minutes late for a dinner with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden said: "I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units."
He said the blueprint for Ramat Shlomo, an ultra-Orthodox settlement in an area of the West Bank annexed to Jerusalem, "undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions I've had in Israel".
The approvals came just a day after the Israeli defence ministry announced that 112 apartments would be built in Beitar Illit, a settlement on the occupied West Bank. The new building comes at a delicate moment in the long-stalled peace process after Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed to start indirect negotiations.
The interior ministry said the Ramat Shlomo approvals had been passed by the Jerusalem district planning committee. A spokeswoman said there were 60 days to appeal against the decision. Ramat Shlomo, built 15 years ago, is on land captured in the West Bank in 1967 and annexed to Israel in a move not recognised by the international community.
Israel's interior minister, Eli Yishai, who heads a religious party in Netanyahu's governing coalition, said the timing of the plan's approval was coincidental. "There was certainly no intention to provoke anyone and certainly not to come along and hurt the vice-president of the United States," Yishai told Israel's Channel One television.
"Final approval [for the project] will take another few months. I agree that the timing [of the announcement] should have been in another two or three weeks."
Two years ago, when the Israeli government approved 1,300 homes in the same settlement, then US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, criticised the move as having a "negative effect" on peace talks.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said the announcements were "destroying our efforts" in peace negotiations.
"With such an announcement, how can you build trust?" he said. "It's a disastrous situation."
Earlier in the day, Biden said Israel and the Palestinians needed to "take risks for peace". But his talk of a "moment of opportunity" obscures a reality in which the two sides are a long way apart. Although the peace process has been under way for nearly two decades, there have been no direct negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders since Israel's war in Gaza a year ago.
Palestinian officials refused to hold direct talks unless Israel halted all settlement construction, in line with the demands of the US administration and of the US road map. But Netanyahu, agreed only to a temporary, partial curb to settlement building. It did not include East Jerusalem, or public buildings, or homes where construction had already started.
In talks with Netanyahu, Biden appeared to focus not on the struggling peace process but on Iran, saying Washington was committed to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. "There is no space between the US and Israel when it comes to Israel's security," Biden said after their meeting.
"We are determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons," Biden said.
In private, he is also believed to have cautioned the Israeli government against any unilateral military strike on Iran, and to have tried to win Israeli support for the US administration's policy, which is moving towards sanctions against Iran.
Netanyahu made clear the Israeli government hoped for a tougher sanction regime against Iran. "The stronger those sanctions are, the more likely it will be that the Iranian regime will have to chose between advancing its nuclear programme and advancing the future of its own permanence," he said. Netanyahu frequently cites the need to address Iran's nuclear ambitions as his priority in government and Israeli leaders have pointedly not ruled out a military option.
Centaur Gaming, the parent company of the Hoosier Park horse track casino in Anderson, announced Monday it would file for bankruptcy reorganization but vowed to continue its gambling operations without interruption.
Is Britain really broken? And if so, are families or politicians to blame? Or does this provocative debate distract from a more nuanced reckoning of the role of the family, marriage and the upbringing of children in 21st century Britain? Join our panel as they interrogate the questions that go to the heart of who we are and how we live.
The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland chairs the discussion and takes questions from a live audience at Kings Place.
Prenuptial training for young people aims to tackle country's rising divorce rates
There was a time when Iranian women seeking husbands prioritised job status and financial security – not to mention love – at the top of their list of needs.
Now potential suitors face the prospect of having to fulfil a daunting new requirement before asking for a bride's hand – having the right government certificate.
Acquiring the appropriate official qualifications before popping the question is part of a plan for prenuptial training courses approved by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with the aim of reversing declining Iranian marriage rates and rising divorce statistics.
From next week, online courses will be offered to young people to prepare them for the pitfalls of married life. The three-month courses, involving weekly tests, will be run by the state-governed national youth organisation, and those who successfully complete them will receive a certificate as proof of their readiness for matrimony. Mohsen Zanganeh, the head of the national youth organisation for Tehran province, said the courses would provide young people with an understanding of the "alphabet of life" and were intended as an essential gateway to marriage.
"We intend that within the next two years, if a boy attempts to woo a girl, she will answer only if he has finished his course," he told the Fars news agency. "We are trying to increase the level of information among young people concerning marriage."
Zangeneh said the course would run along similar lines to a universityand have a panel of 40 experts serving as its scientific board. The idea has been partly prompted by the rising divorce rate.
Iranian decision-makers are also alarmed at a rise in the average marrying age, which scientists say is leading to an increase in premarital sex and abortions arising from unwanted pregnancies.
Attorney General Gary King would get extra muscle to go after taxpayer money lost to fraud, if Gov. Bill Richardson signs a state budget the Legislature passed last week.
Mayors of small and medium-sized Pennsylvania cities say the Legislature must allow them to raise new tax revenue to prevent more of them from falling into financial crisis.
Even as public schools are reeling from state budget cuts, private and parochial schools in the Las Vegas Valley are confronting their own financial struggles, with recession-slammed parents struggling to make tuition payments.
With lawmakers already frustrated over a lack of oversight, recent reports on the state's landmark $536 million Everglades agreement with U.S. Sugar Corp. may add momentum for a legislative response in an attempt to prevent a repeat of the controversial deal, a key House lawmaker said Monday.
SEYMOUR, Conn. -- High atop Great Hill, Bomba's Farm harkens back to a time when it was farm stands, not grocery superstores, that provided families with fruits and vegetables, and the meat produced there was truly "farm fresh."
Author and illustrator Eric Hill shows how he draws 'my little puppy'
JOPLIN, Mo. -- Conservationists are unhappy about Missouri Southern State University's plan to build a medical school on 40 acres of native prairie land.
Truancy prevention, summer-school programs for at-risk youth and tax-preparation help for low-income people are among the programs the state Department of Social Services is planning to eliminate as it tries to shrink its budget in the upcoming fiscal year.
NJ Transit's payroll increased 24 percent from 2006 to 2009, much faster than the rate of inflation, according to a report in The Asbury Park Press.
The troubled Massachusetts governor has been portrayed as Obama's political doppelgänger. But their fates aren't intertwined
Think Scott Brown's victory in liberal Massachusetts – for Ted Kennedy's seat, no less – has become an overworked metaphor to describe Barack Obama's political plight? You haven't seen anything yet.
This November, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick will stand for re-election. The national media have long treated Patrick as Obama's political doppelgänger: they share Chicago roots, they both rely on political consultant David Axelrod (as well as some Axelrod-tested talking points) and they are both African-American.
And Patrick is in big trouble.
But though a Patrick victory would be a surprise, the pundits will err if they see his defeat as any sort of referendum on Obama. The fact is that Patrick's political problems are of his own making, and they date back to the earliest days of his administration in 2007.
After running a netroots-driven hope-and-change campaign in 2006, Patrick got off to a rough start, helping himself to a taxpayer-funded Cadillac Escalade and spending more than $10,000 in public money on new drapes for his office. Chagrined, he refunded most of it. But he has continued to stumble from one misadventure to another.
Patrick made controversial high-level appointments that proved disastrous. He pushed an ill-advised, ultimately unsuccessful plan to build three gambling casinos. He agreed to a 25% increase in the sales tax, defying a long history of voter-led tax revolts in the state. Worst of all in the insular world of Massachusetts politics, he has alienated Democratic insiders and the powerful public-employee unions, leading to a sense that he'll be largely on his own during the difficult campaign ahead.
My friend Jon Keller, a prominent political analyst, wrote a scorched-earth blogpost this past weekend in which he essentially bade the governor goodbye and good riddance. Keller said the election will be "about getting rid of a failed politician whose freshness date, dismayingly, seems in hindsight to have begun expiring as he left the stage on election night."
Certainly the polls offer no solace to Patrick and his supporters. The most recent, by Suffolk University, showed him narrowly leading his two most plausible opponents, Republican Charles Baker, a health-insurance executive, and state treasurer Tim Cahill, who was elected as a Democrat but is running for governor as an independent. With Patrick's support at just 33%, pollster David Paleologos told Jessica Van Sack of the Boston Herald, "This race is really between Charlie Baker and Tim Cahill. Whoever emerges between the Baker-Cahill race is likely to be the winner."
Then, too, Massachusetts has a long history of electing Republican governors to keep an eye on the Democratic legislature, from Bill Weld, who won in 1990, through Mitt Romney, who was succeeded by Patrick. Baker, a well-regarded top aide to Weld, would seem to fit that mould rather nicely.
Yet the storyline may prove to be not quite so simple. For one thing, Patrick, despite his missteps, has managed to score some notable victories, including tough ethics reform, taxpayer-friendly changes to the public-employee pension system (although not enough), reorganisation of the state's wretched transportation bureaucracy and an education-reform law that emphasises standards and accountability.
Patrick's efforts to combat carbon emissions led a former California environmental official to say that Patrick "is trying to make California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger look like a carbon girlie man". Moreover, Patrick, a formidable campaigner, has maintained his nice-guy persona, with no hint of personal scandal. That matters in a state whose last three house speakers have run afoul of the authorities, and in which a state senator was caught by a surveillance camera stuffing cash down her bra.
As for the opposition, most observers see Tim Cahill as little more than a spoiler. It's Charlie Baker who probably has the best shot of defeating Patrick. And, thus far, the idea of Baker is proving more compelling than the reality. Liberal on social issues (he supports same-sex marriage, and his running mate, state senator Richard Tisei, is gay) and conservative on taxes and spending, Baker would appear to be the very model of an electable Massachusetts Republican.
Yet he got peevish last week when Boston Globe columnist Brian McGrory asked him about the Big Dig, the leaking $22bn Boston tunnel system that Baker helped oversee during the 1990s. Then, too, the rise of Scott Brown – more conservative and more populist than a typical Massachusetts Republican – seems to have thrown Baker off his stride. Recently Baker went so far as to duck a question on whether human activity contributes to global warming, thus managing to come off as less straightforward than Romney – no mean feat.
All this may seem like deep inside baseball, of little interest outside Massachusetts. The point is that whether Patrick loses his re-election bid, as expected, or manages an improbable comeback, it will have nothing to do with Barack Obama.
Despite their surface similarities, Patrick's and Obama's life experiences are dramatically different. Patrick grew up poor in a black section of Chicago. Obama's existence, by contrast, was rootless and marked by his struggle for a racial identity.
One important characteristic defines them both, however. Each was elected promising not just to enact a specific set of proposals but to change the very way business is conducted. Each has found it much harder than he'd expected to fulfill that promise.
If Deval Patrick loses this autumn, it will tell us little about what Massachusetts voters think about Obama. But if he wins, it may provide Obama with something of a road map he can study – and possibly follow to his own re-election victory in 2012.
Proponents of legislation that would require employers to offer workers paid sick days have amended the bill to exempt smaller businesses and to reduce the number of sick days employees can earn each year.
Proactive tax planning to take advantage of timely tax saving opportunities.
Comprehensive business services that integrate income tax compliance
and planning with investments and insurance choices.
Consulting services that review businesses to find hidden opportunities to
increase wealth accumulation and retention.
Foreign investor tax services.
Individualized accounting system setup for new businesses.
State of the art payroll tax services and sales tax preparation.
Preparation of business and individual tax returns and financial
statements.
Budgeting and projection preparation and monitoring, facilitating the
creation and tracking of events.
Assistance in selection and installation of computer hardware and
software, ongoing monitoring and updating of systems.
