Source: Reuters BOSTON, May 2 (Reuters) - About two million Boston-area residents and hundreds of businesses will remain under a water-boil order heading into the workweek after a huge water pipe break on Saturday ...
May Day rally in Los Angeles, CA (photo: Calvin Fleming via Facebook)
Los Angeles’ May Day immigration reform rally was attended by approximately 60,000 people — including Emilio Estevez and Gloria Estefan and a contingent of 500 LGBT supporters as well as groups representing almost every ethnic and progressive group in the greater Southern Califonria area — making it the nation’s largest.
Outrage over Arizona’s new immigration law spurred marchers across the country, and in Washington DC, U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) was arrested along with 34 other immigration rights advocates as they staged a sit-in on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House gates.
AFP - European governments endorsed an unprecedented 110-billion-euro bailout to save Greece from bankruptcy and shore up the single currency after Athens agreed to draconian spending cuts.
Reuters - Anti-government protesters in the Thai capital showed no sign of leaving the city's main shopping district on Monday despite new warnings of clashes and losses during a two-month crisis that has already killed 27 people.
AP - Actress Helen Wagner, who played mild-mannered Nancy Hughes on the CBS soap opera "As the World Turns" for more than a half-century and spoke its first words, has died at age 91.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Gen Stanley McChrystal’s actual command of Special Forces from the beginning of his command in Afghanistan – and everyone has seen the reports of McChrystal’s chilling admission in March that:
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”
- and remembers McChrystal’s COIN sales pitch for the Obama escalation about the measure of success being not insurgents killed but civilians protected. Or as he said at the time:
“We say, ‘We are here for you. We respect and want to protect you’, and then we destroy their home, kill their relatives, destroy their crops,” McChrystal said. “It’s difficult for them to connect those two.”
So isn’t it about time that McChrystal be forced to explain why – under his command – civilian casualties are increasing in Afghanistan, in fact reaching “173 civilian deaths from violence in Afghanistan from March 21 to April 21, marking a 33 percent increase over the same time period last year…”
Two women and a child became the latest innocent victims of Nato forces on Friday after occupation troops sprayed their car with machine-gun fire, Afghan officials have reported.
Late Wednesday night, a relative of an Afghan member of Parliament was shot and killed during an operation involving NATO forces in Nangarhar Province, setting off angry demonstrations the following morning that blocked the main road to Kabul for an hour amid chants of “Death to America.”
The lawmaker, Safia Sidiqi, said troops came to her house just before midnight. She was in Kabul at the time, but she said her brother had called her to say there were thieves outside the house. She said she had called the provincial police and was told that American troops were conducting an operation.
“They came to my house intentionally and killed one of my family members,” she said. “The Americans knew this was my house.”
So General McChrystal, rather than issue another round of regrets, perhaps you could explain why the top commander of international forces in Afghanistan is completely unable to deliver on his promises to protect civilians? Are you unable to command your forces – or have you simply been lying?
Progressive economist Dean Baker calls out Pete Peterson, the billionaire pushing the deficit "crisis", and his sidekick Robert Rubin for their immense hypocrisy:
Peter Peterson and Robert Rubin are both enormously wealthy men. (They joked about dividing their lunch tab based on their net worth.) They are lecturing the country on the need to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for retirees who have a tiny fraction of their wealth. Many of the victims of the cuts that they would push are people who are already struggling.
This would be difficult to accept in any case, especially since thereareways to get the long-term deficit down to size that don't involve nailing middle income and/or poor people. However, it would be hard to find two people who have benefited more from taxpayer handouts than these two individuals.
Peter Peterson has been the recipient of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars through the fund manager's tax break. This tax break, which is also known as the "carried interest tax deduction" allows managers of hedge and equity funds to pay tax on their earnings at the 15 percent capital gains tax rate, instead of having it taxed as normal income. As a result, Peterson paid a lower tax rate on much of his earnings than tens of millions of people working as school teachers, fire fighters, and other middle income jobs.
Peterson not only collected the money himself, he came to Washington in 2007 to lobby Congress when it debated ending the tax break. He apparently wanted to make sure that his friends would still be able to benefit from this tax break even after he had retired.
After setting the country on a course for the current crisis with the policies he pushed as Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin went to work as a top executive at Citigroup. In this capacity, he earned $110 million before leaving the company in the middle of its 2008 meltdown.
As we know, Citigroup was one of the major actors in the housing boom. It produced hundreds of billions of dollars worth of mortgage backed securities.It would have gone belly up in the crisis were it not for tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer loans and hundreds of billions in guarantees. (That the government's guarantees restored Citi to life, which allowed us to get our money back is beside the point.)Rubin's public line is that he should not be blamed for Citi's collapse or the role it played in bringing down the economy; he really didn't know what they were doing.
This is an interesting claim for someone who got paid $110 million by the bank. Presumably Citi could have employed someone who didn't have a clue about what was going on for something considerably closer to the minimum wage. In any case, being at the center of a collapsed megabank that helped bring down the economy would not ordinarily be a credential that would give a person standing to lecture the country about fiscal policy and the need for sacrifice.
Yet, in Washington in 2010, Peterson and Rubin hold the high ground, lecturing the rest of us on the need to tighten our belt. As I said, I have work to do.
AFP - Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, who was believed killed in January, appeared in a new video dated early April and vowed attacks on major cities in the United States, the SITE monitoring group said Monday.
AP - A devastating and deadly line of thunderstorms slammed Tennessee and northern Mississippi over the weekend, killing at least 11 people, closing scores of highways, and leaving weeks of cleanup for thousands of residents whose homes were damaged.
AP - United Airlines and Continental Airlines agreed to combine in a $3 billion stock swap to create the world's biggest airline, people with knowledge of the deal said Sunday.
AP - No remedy in sight, President Barack Obama on Sunday warned of a "massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster" as a badly damaged oil well in the Gulf of Mexico spewed a widening and deadly slick toward delicate wetlands and wildlife. He said it could take many days to stop.
AP - Police investigating a terror attack that could have set off a deadly fireball in Times Square focused Sunday on finding a man who was videotaped shedding his shirt near the SUV where the bomb was found.
