Leaders gather for summit

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

LONDON British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is meeting with about 20 world leaders and key officials over the weekend on climate change, the economy and global poverty, his office said Friday.Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and South African President Thabo Mbeki are be among the chief executives attending the two-day summit in Watford, according to a provisional list of summit participants.Former President Clinton, the World Bank’s Pascal Lamy and European Union trade chief Peter Mandelson were also expected.Summit participants were due to hold two round-table discussions focusing on climate change, development, and globalization, with leaders planning to issue a short joint statement and hold a news conference. The discussions were due to be broadcast live over the Web.

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China alleges Tibetan ’suicide squads’

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

BEIJING China has branded the Dalai Lama a “wolf in monk’s robes” and his followers the “scum of Buddhism.” It stepped up the rhetoric Tuesday, accusing the Nobel Peace laureate and his supporters of planning suicide attacks.The Tibetan government-in-exile swiftly denied the charge, and the Bush administration rushed to the Tibetan Buddhist leader’s defense, calling him “a man of peace.”"There is absolutely no indication that he wants to do anything other than have a dialogue with China on how to discuss the serious issues there,” State Department spokesman Tom Casey said.Wu Heping, spokesman for China’s Ministry of Public Security, claimed searches of monasteries in the Tibetan capital had turned up a large cache of weapons. They included 176 guns, 13,013 bullets, 7,725 pounds of explosives, 19,000 sticks of dynamite and 350 knives, he said.”To our knowledge, the next plan of the Tibetan independence forces is to organize suicide squads to launch violent attacks,” Wu told a news conference. “They claimed that they fear neither bloodshed nor sacrifice.”Wu provided no details or evidence. He used the term “gan si dui,” a rarely used phrase directly translated as “dare-to-die corps.” The official English version of his remarks translated the term as “suicide squads.”Wu said police had arrested an individual who he claimed was an operative of the “Dalai Lama clique,” responsible for gathering intelligence and distributing pamphlets calling for an uprising.The suspect admitted to using code words to communicate with his contacts, including “uncle” for the Dalai Lama and “skirts” for the banned Tibetan snow lion flag, Wu said.Beijing has repeatedly accused the Dalai Lama and his supporters of orchestrating violence in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Protests which began peacefully there on the March 10 anniversary of a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule spiraled out of control four days later.Chinese officials have put the death toll at 22, most of them Han Chinese; the government-in-exile says 140 Tibetans were killed.China also says sympathy protests that spread to surrounding provinces are part of a campaign by the Dalai Lama to sabotage the Beijing Olympics and promote Tibetan independence.The 72-year-old Dalai Lama has condemned the violence and denied any links to it, urging an independent international inquiry into the unrest.”Tibetan exiles are 100 percent committed to nonviolence. There is no question of suicide attacks,” Samdhong Rinpoche, prime minister of the government-in-exile in Dharmsala, India, said Tuesday. “But we fear that Chinese might masquerade as Tibetans and plan such attacks to give bad publicity to Tibetans.”Experts on terrorism and security risks facing Beijing and the Olympics have not cited any Tibet group as a threat.Scholars said the claim of suicide squads was a calculated move by China allowing it to step up its crackdown in Tibetan areas.”There is no evidence of support for any kind of violence against China or Chinese,” said Dibyesh Anand, a Tibet expert at Westminster University in London.Instead, Beijing is “portraying to the rest of China and the rest of the world: these people are basically irrational” and that there was no room for compromise, he said.Tuesday’s accusations could also further divide the Tibetan government-in-exile and other groups like the Tibetan Youth Congress, which has challenged the Dalai Lama’s policy of nonviolence, Anand said.”This is a way of pressuring the Dalai Lama to renounce Tibetans who have created violence,” he said.Andrew Fischer, a fellow at the London School of Economics who researches Chinese development policies in Tibetan areas of China, dismissed Wu’s warnings as “completely ridiculous.”What China is trying to do “is justify this massive troop deployment, a massive crackdown on Tibetan areas and they’re trying to justify intensification of hard-line policies,” Fischer said.Drawing from a deep historical reserve of angry rhetoric, Tibet’s tough-talking Chinese Communist Party boss, Zhang Qingli, recently called the Dalai Lama a “wolf in monk’s robes, a devil with a human face, but the heart of a beast” and deemed the current conflict a “life-and-death battle.” State media has denounced protesting monks as the “scum of Buddhism.”The campaign against the Dalai Lama has been underscored in recent days with showings of decades-old propaganda films on state television portraying Tibetan society as cruel and primitive before the 1950 invasion by communist troops.The escalation of the rhetoric to include claims of possible suicide attacks may also touch upon another sensitive issue for China’s communist leadership - unrest in Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region to Tibet’s north, and Beijing’s tight security measures in the area.On Tuesday, a local government Web site in Xinjiang reported that a protest has broken out in a market in the region on March 23. One official linked the incident to the unrest in Tibet.But U.S.-government funded Radio Free Asia, which first reported the demonstration, said the protesters were demanding authorities not ban headscarves, and that they stop torturing Uighurs and release all political prisoners. It said several hundred Uighurs staged the protests in Hotan and a nearby county and were taken into custody.Fu Chao, an official with the Hotan Regional Administrative Office, disputed that characterization. “The riot was nothing to do with the ban on headscarves, but about responding to the riots in Tibet,” Fu said.Last month, Chinese state media reported that a woman had confessed to attempting to hijack and crash a Chinese passenger plane from Xinjiang in what officials say was part of a terror campaign by a radical Islamic independence group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. The reports said the woman was from China’s Turkic Muslim Uighur minority.While the United States has labeled the East Turkestan Islamic Movement a terrorist organization, the State Department alleges widespread abuses of the legal and educational systems by the communist authorities to suppress Uighur culture and religion.Fischer said China has tried to change the “nonviolent, compassionate” image of Tibetans into one of violence and brutality to draw parallels to the pro-independence stance in Xinjiang.”If they succeed in portraying them that way, then they can treat them the same way they treat Muslims in Xinjiang,” he said.

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Business Highlights

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

WASHINGTON It’s a Herculean task: revamping a financial regulatory system dating back to the Civil War to deal with 21st century crises imperiling the country.Under an ambitious Bush administration plan, the Federal Reserve would take on the unwieldy role of uber cop in charge of financial market stability. Other regulatory agencies could see their influence diminished.The proposal won’t fix the host of economic and financial problems that threatens to plunge the United States into a deep recession, but it might help guard against future troubles. It would take years and a lot of political wrangling - in Congress, on Wall Street, in statehouses and elsewhere - to implement all the changes envisioned.Yet, the initiative, formally announced Monday, casts a fresh spotlight on the best way to protect the country from financial catastrophes in an intricate web of complex, often-changing financial products and the wide array of financial players using them in the United States and beyond. That debate probably will take center stage in the next president’s administration.—Stocks gain on last day of quarterNEW YORK (AP) - Wall Street managed a moderate gain in the final session of a dismal first quarter Monday, but stock prices and the major indexes still ended the first three months of 2007 with massive losses, the casualties of the still continuing credit crisis. The Standard %26 Poor’s 500 index, the benchmark for many widely held investments such as mutual funds, suffered a loss for the quarter of nearly 10 percent.The blip upward came from a better than expected reading in the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index, which is considered a precursor to the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing survey on Tuesday. The index rose to 48.2 in March from 44.5 a month earlier; economists had been expecting a reading of 47.3, according to Dow Jones Newswires. Though the number topped forecasts, a figure below 50 nonetheless indicates a contraction in manufacturing activity.The market’s reaction, however, was likely not as enthusiastic as it might seem from Monday’s gains by the major indexes. Price movements tend to be skewed when volume is as light as it was Monday.It was a difficult quarter on Wall Street, with financial companies’ ongoing credit market losses and the flagging economy wiping out many investors’ appetite for stocks. While the market saw a number of up days during the quarter, the overall trend was sharply lower, with reports of asset write-downs and shaky financial companies pummeling the market - in particular, the near-collapse of Bear Stearns %26 Cos. in mid-March.—Pernod Ricard buys maker of AbsolutSTOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Spirits group Pernod Ricard SA is adding Swedish flavor to a liquor cabinet stacked with Scotch whisky, French champagne and Cuban rum with its $8.34 billion purchase of the state-owned maker of Absolut vodka.The company said Monday it was delighted to add the premium vodka brand to its assortment of drinks, after the Swedish government accepted its bid for Absolut’s parent company, Vin %26 Sprit.The Swedish government celebrated the higher-than-expected price tag for Vin %26 Sprit, but investors were less exuberant, sending shares in France-based Pernod Ricard down 4.3 percent to $103.03 in Paris.Sweden said it selected the Pernod Ricard bid on Sunday over three other offers, by U.S.-based Fortune Brands Inc., Bermuda-based Bacardi Ltd. and an investment group controlled by Sweden’s Wallenberg family.—Less corn could mean higher food pricesWASHINGTON (AP) - From chicken nuggets to corn flakes, food prices at grocery stores and dinner tables could be headed even higher as farmers cut back on the land they’re planting in corn this spring.Corn prices already are high, and a drop in supply should keep them rising. Combine that with the huge demand for corn-based ethanol fuel - and higher energy costs for transporting food - and consumers are likely to see their food bills going up and up.Farmers are now expected to plant 86 million acres of corn this year, the Department of Agriculture predicted Monday, down 8 percent from last year, which was the highest since World War II.Corn is almost everywhere you look in the U.S. food supply. Poultry, beef and pork companies use it to feed their animals. High fructose corn syrup is used in soft drinks and many other foods, including lunch meats and salad dressings. Corn is often an ingredient in breads, peanut butter, oatmeal and potato chips.—Merck, Schering-Plough sink on VytorinNEW YORK (AP) - Shares of Merck %26 Co. and Schering-Plough Corp. fell to record lows Monday, as analysts warned new clinical data would cause sales of their blockbuster cholesterol drug Vytorin to fall further.The companies market Vytorin through a joint venture, but earlier this year, partial results from a clinical study showed that it was no more effective at limiting plaque buildup than Merck’s Zocor, a drug that is already available in generic form. Full results of that study were released Sunday.Vytorin is a combination of Zocor and Schering-Plough’s drug Zetia.Schering-Plough shares plunged as low as $14, touching their lowest levels since August 1996. Merck shares fell as low as $36.82, their lowest since June 2006.Leading physicians are now recommending the use of older drugs called statins before putting patients on Vytorin. Many physicians had prescribed Vytorin in lieu of higher doses of statins because of what some said was an undue fear of side effects.— HUD chief resigns amid criminal probeWASHINGTON (AP) - HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, his tenure tarnished by allegations of political favoritism and a criminal investigation, announced his resignation Monday amid the wreckage of the national housing crisis.He leaves behind a trail of unanswered questions about whether he tilted the Department of Housing and Urban Development toward Republican contractors and cronies.The move comes at a shaky time for the economy when soaring mortgage foreclosures imperil the nation’s credit markets.Some Congressional Democrats had pushed for Jackson to leave.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said HUD will be called on to work with Congress on assisting refinancing for borrowers faced with imminent foreclosure.—Oil prices slide, retail gas hits recordNEW YORK (AP) - Prices surged at the gas pump, hitting a new record Monday even as crude oil accelerated its slide amid a broad-based commodities sell-off.The average price for a gallon of regular unleaded rose to $3.287, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Prices were highest in Hawaii and California, where the average price topped $3.60 a gallon.Gasoline prices are expected to keep rising as the summer driving season brings with it greater demand for the fuel. Last year, prices peaked in May before backtracking; with gasoline already at a record it will like only continue its advance.If crude oil prices, which set records of their own during March continue their advance, that will also add to the cost of gasoline at the pump.On Monday, however, light, sweet crude for May delivery dropped $4.04 to settle at $101.58 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, adding to a decline of nearly $2 a barrel on Friday. Even so, prices finished the first three months of the year 5.8 percent higher than where they started; crude set a record of $111.80 in March before giving up ground.—Citi splits consumer banking, card unitsNEW YORK (AP) - Citigroup named a veteran retail banker Monday to head its North American consumer banking unit, splitting it off from its credit-card business as Citi struggles to become profitable again after suffering its biggest quarterly loss in its 196-year history.The latest move is the biggest sign yet that CEO Vikram Pandit, appointed in December, wants to fix Citi’s major parts rather than sell them off to raise cash - at least for now.It also shows what steps Pandit would take to attract more consumers to Citi’s retail banking unit.Citi’s worst problems are in its investment banking segment, which made huge losing bets on the mortgage industry. But its bread-and-butter business of lending to and collecting deposits from average people has also been underwhelming shareholders.Citi is ubiquitous throughout the United States, but in recent years has lost customers to rival banks such as JPMorgan Chase %26 Co. and Wachovia Corp.—Major indexes rise, commodities slip as quarter endsOn the last day of the quarter, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 46.49, or 0.38 percent, to 12,262.89.Broader stock indicators also rose. The S%26P 500 index advanced 7.48, or 0.57 percent, to 1,322.70, and the Nasdaq composite index rose 17.92, or 0.79 percent, to 2,279.10.Light, sweet crude for May delivery dropped $4.04 to settle at $101.58 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, adding to a decline of nearly $2 a barrel on Friday. Even so, prices finished the first three months of the year 5.8 percent higher than where they started; crude set a record of $111.80 in March before giving up ground.In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures fell 5.58 cents to settle at $3.0492 a gallon, while gasoline futures sank 10.07 cents to settle at $2.6163 a gallon. Brent crude futures fell $3.47 to settle at $100.30 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

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China alleges Tibetan ’suicide squads’

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

BEIJING China has branded the Dalai Lama a “wolf in monk’s robes” and his followers the “scum of Buddhism.” It stepped up the rhetoric Tuesday, accusing the Nobel Peace laureate and his supporters of planning suicide attacks.The Tibetan government-in-exile swiftly denied the charge, and the Bush administration rushed to the Tibetan Buddhist leader’s defense, calling him “a man of peace.”"There is absolutely no indication that he wants to do anything other than have a dialogue with China on how to discuss the serious issues there,” State Department spokesman Tom Casey said.Wu Heping, spokesman for China’s Ministry of Public Security, claimed searches of monasteries in the Tibetan capital had turned up a large cache of weapons. They included 176 guns, 13,013 bullets, 7,725 pounds of explosives, 19,000 sticks of dynamite and 350 knives, he said.”To our knowledge, the next plan of the Tibetan independence forces is to organize suicide squads to launch violent attacks,” Wu told a news conference. “They claimed that they fear neither bloodshed nor sacrifice.”Wu provided no details or evidence. He used the term “gan si dui,” a rarely used phrase directly translated as “dare-to-die corps.” The official English version of his remarks translated the term as “suicide squads.”Wu said police had arrested an individual who he claimed was an operative of the “Dalai Lama clique,” responsible for gathering intelligence and distributing pamphlets calling for an uprising.The suspect admitted to using code words to communicate with his contacts, including “uncle” for the Dalai Lama and “skirts” for the banned Tibetan snow lion flag, Wu said.Beijing has repeatedly accused the Dalai Lama and his supporters of orchestrating violence in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Protests which began peacefully there on the March 10 anniversary of a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule spiraled out of control four days later.Chinese officials have put the death toll at 22, most of them Han Chinese; the government-in-exile says 140 Tibetans were killed.China also says sympathy protests that spread to surrounding provinces are part of a campaign by the Dalai Lama to sabotage the Beijing Olympics and promote Tibetan independence.The 72-year-old Dalai Lama has condemned the violence and denied any links to it, urging an independent international inquiry into the unrest.”Tibetan exiles are 100 percent committed to nonviolence. There is no question of suicide attacks,” Samdhong Rinpoche, prime minister of the government-in-exile in Dharmsala, India, said Tuesday. “But we fear that Chinese might masquerade as Tibetans and plan such attacks to give bad publicity to Tibetans.”Experts on terrorism and security risks facing Beijing and the Olympics have not cited any Tibet group as a threat.Scholars said the claim of suicide squads was a calculated move by China allowing it to step up its crackdown in Tibetan areas.”There is no evidence of support for any kind of violence against China or Chinese,” said Dibyesh Anand, a Tibet expert at Westminster University in London.Instead, Beijing is “portraying to the rest of China and the rest of the world: these people are basically irrational” and that there was no room for compromise, he said.Tuesday’s accusations could also further divide the Tibetan government-in-exile and other groups like the Tibetan Youth Congress, which has challenged the Dalai Lama’s policy of nonviolence, Anand said.”This is a way of pressuring the Dalai Lama to renounce Tibetans who have created violence,” he said.Andrew Fischer, a fellow at the London School of Economics who researches Chinese development policies in Tibetan areas of China, dismissed Wu’s warnings as “completely ridiculous.”What China is trying to do “is justify this massive troop deployment, a massive crackdown on Tibetan areas and they’re trying to justify intensification of hard-line policies,” Fischer said.Drawing from a deep historical reserve of angry rhetoric, Tibet’s tough-talking Chinese Communist Party boss, Zhang Qingli, recently called the Dalai Lama a “wolf in monk’s robes, a devil with a human face, but the heart of a beast” and deemed the current conflict a “life-and-death battle.” State media has denounced protesting monks as the “scum of Buddhism.”The campaign against the Dalai Lama has been underscored in recent days with showings of decades-old propaganda films on state television portraying Tibetan society as cruel and primitive before the 1950 invasion by communist troops.The escalation of the rhetoric to include claims of possible suicide attacks may also touch upon another sensitive issue for China’s communist leadership - unrest in Xinjiang, a predominantly Muslim region to Tibet’s north, and Beijing’s tight security measures in the area.On Tuesday, a local government Web site in Xinjiang reported that a protest has broken out in a market in the region on March 23. One official linked the incident to the unrest in Tibet.But U.S.-government funded Radio Free Asia, which first reported the demonstration, said the protesters were demanding authorities not ban headscarves, and that they stop torturing Uighurs and release all political prisoners. It said several hundred Uighurs staged the protests in Hotan and a nearby county and were taken into custody.Fu Chao, an official with the Hotan Regional Administrative Office, disputed that characterization. “The riot was nothing to do with the ban on headscarves, but about responding to the riots in Tibet,” Fu said.Last month, Chinese state media reported that a woman had confessed to attempting to hijack and crash a Chinese passenger plane from Xinjiang in what officials say was part of a terror campaign by a radical Islamic independence group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. The reports said the woman was from China’s Turkic Muslim Uighur minority.While the United States has labeled the East Turkestan Islamic Movement a terrorist organization, the State Department alleges widespread abuses of the legal and educational systems by the communist authorities to suppress Uighur culture and religion.Fischer said China has tried to change the “nonviolent, compassionate” image of Tibetans into one of violence and brutality to draw parallels to the pro-independence stance in Xinjiang.”If they succeed in portraying them that way, then they can treat them the same way they treat Muslims in Xinjiang,” he said.

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Business Highlights

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

WASHINGTON It’s a Herculean task: revamping a financial regulatory system dating back to the Civil War to deal with 21st century crises imperiling the country.Under an ambitious Bush administration plan, the Federal Reserve would take on the unwieldy role of uber cop in charge of financial market stability. Other regulatory agencies could see their influence diminished.The proposal won’t fix the host of economic and financial problems that threatens to plunge the United States into a deep recession, but it might help guard against future troubles. It would take years and a lot of political wrangling - in Congress, on Wall Street, in statehouses and elsewhere - to implement all the changes envisioned.Yet, the initiative, formally announced Monday, casts a fresh spotlight on the best way to protect the country from financial catastrophes in an intricate web of complex, often-changing financial products and the wide array of financial players using them in the United States and beyond. That debate probably will take center stage in the next president’s administration.—Stocks gain on last day of quarterNEW YORK (AP) - Wall Street managed a moderate gain in the final session of a dismal first quarter Monday, but stock prices and the major indexes still ended the first three months of 2007 with massive losses, the casualties of the still continuing credit crisis. The Standard %26 Poor’s 500 index, the benchmark for many widely held investments such as mutual funds, suffered a loss for the quarter of nearly 10 percent.The blip upward came from a better than expected reading in the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index, which is considered a precursor to the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing survey on Tuesday. The index rose to 48.2 in March from 44.5 a month earlier; economists had been expecting a reading of 47.3, according to Dow Jones Newswires. Though the number topped forecasts, a figure below 50 nonetheless indicates a contraction in manufacturing activity.The market’s reaction, however, was likely not as enthusiastic as it might seem from Monday’s gains by the major indexes. Price movements tend to be skewed when volume is as light as it was Monday.It was a difficult quarter on Wall Street, with financial companies’ ongoing credit market losses and the flagging economy wiping out many investors’ appetite for stocks. While the market saw a number of up days during the quarter, the overall trend was sharply lower, with reports of asset write-downs and shaky financial companies pummeling the market - in particular, the near-collapse of Bear Stearns %26 Cos. in mid-March.—Pernod Ricard buys maker of AbsolutSTOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Spirits group Pernod Ricard SA is adding Swedish flavor to a liquor cabinet stacked with Scotch whisky, French champagne and Cuban rum with its $8.34 billion purchase of the state-owned maker of Absolut vodka.The company said Monday it was delighted to add the premium vodka brand to its assortment of drinks, after the Swedish government accepted its bid for Absolut’s parent company, Vin %26 Sprit.The Swedish government celebrated the higher-than-expected price tag for Vin %26 Sprit, but investors were less exuberant, sending shares in France-based Pernod Ricard down 4.3 percent to $103.03 in Paris.Sweden said it selected the Pernod Ricard bid on Sunday over three other offers, by U.S.-based Fortune Brands Inc., Bermuda-based Bacardi Ltd. and an investment group controlled by Sweden’s Wallenberg family.—Less corn could mean higher food pricesWASHINGTON (AP) - From chicken nuggets to corn flakes, food prices at grocery stores and dinner tables could be headed even higher as farmers cut back on the land they’re planting in corn this spring.Corn prices already are high, and a drop in supply should keep them rising. Combine that with the huge demand for corn-based ethanol fuel - and higher energy costs for transporting food - and consumers are likely to see their food bills going up and up.Farmers are now expected to plant 86 million acres of corn this year, the Department of Agriculture predicted Monday, down 8 percent from last year, which was the highest since World War II.Corn is almost everywhere you look in the U.S. food supply. Poultry, beef and pork companies use it to feed their animals. High fructose corn syrup is used in soft drinks and many other foods, including lunch meats and salad dressings. Corn is often an ingredient in breads, peanut butter, oatmeal and potato chips.—Merck, Schering-Plough sink on VytorinNEW YORK (AP) - Shares of Merck %26 Co. and Schering-Plough Corp. fell to record lows Monday, as analysts warned new clinical data would cause sales of their blockbuster cholesterol drug Vytorin to fall further.The companies market Vytorin through a joint venture, but earlier this year, partial results from a clinical study showed that it was no more effective at limiting plaque buildup than Merck’s Zocor, a drug that is already available in generic form. Full results of that study were released Sunday.Vytorin is a combination of Zocor and Schering-Plough’s drug Zetia.Schering-Plough shares plunged as low as $14, touching their lowest levels since August 1996. Merck shares fell as low as $36.82, their lowest since June 2006.Leading physicians are now recommending the use of older drugs called statins before putting patients on Vytorin. Many physicians had prescribed Vytorin in lieu of higher doses of statins because of what some said was an undue fear of side effects.— HUD chief resigns amid criminal probeWASHINGTON (AP) - HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, his tenure tarnished by allegations of political favoritism and a criminal investigation, announced his resignation Monday amid the wreckage of the national housing crisis.He leaves behind a trail of unanswered questions about whether he tilted the Department of Housing and Urban Development toward Republican contractors and cronies.The move comes at a shaky time for the economy when soaring mortgage foreclosures imperil the nation’s credit markets.Some Congressional Democrats had pushed for Jackson to leave.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said HUD will be called on to work with Congress on assisting refinancing for borrowers faced with imminent foreclosure.—Oil prices slide, retail gas hits recordNEW YORK (AP) - Prices surged at the gas pump, hitting a new record Monday even as crude oil accelerated its slide amid a broad-based commodities sell-off.The average price for a gallon of regular unleaded rose to $3.287, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Prices were highest in Hawaii and California, where the average price topped $3.60 a gallon.Gasoline prices are expected to keep rising as the summer driving season brings with it greater demand for the fuel. Last year, prices peaked in May before backtracking; with gasoline already at a record it will like only continue its advance.If crude oil prices, which set records of their own during March continue their advance, that will also add to the cost of gasoline at the pump.On Monday, however, light, sweet crude for May delivery dropped $4.04 to settle at $101.58 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, adding to a decline of nearly $2 a barrel on Friday. Even so, prices finished the first three months of the year 5.8 percent higher than where they started; crude set a record of $111.80 in March before giving up ground.—Citi splits consumer banking, card unitsNEW YORK (AP) - Citigroup named a veteran retail banker Monday to head its North American consumer banking unit, splitting it off from its credit-card business as Citi struggles to become profitable again after suffering its biggest quarterly loss in its 196-year history.The latest move is the biggest sign yet that CEO Vikram Pandit, appointed in December, wants to fix Citi’s major parts rather than sell them off to raise cash - at least for now.It also shows what steps Pandit would take to attract more consumers to Citi’s retail banking unit.Citi’s worst problems are in its investment banking segment, which made huge losing bets on the mortgage industry. But its bread-and-butter business of lending to and collecting deposits from average people has also been underwhelming shareholders.Citi is ubiquitous throughout the United States, but in recent years has lost customers to rival banks such as JPMorgan Chase %26 Co. and Wachovia Corp.—Major indexes rise, commodities slip as quarter endsOn the last day of the quarter, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 46.49, or 0.38 percent, to 12,262.89.Broader stock indicators also rose. The S%26P 500 index advanced 7.48, or 0.57 percent, to 1,322.70, and the Nasdaq composite index rose 17.92, or 0.79 percent, to 2,279.10.Light, sweet crude for May delivery dropped $4.04 to settle at $101.58 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, adding to a decline of nearly $2 a barrel on Friday. Even so, prices finished the first three months of the year 5.8 percent higher than where they started; crude set a record of $111.80 in March before giving up ground.In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures fell 5.58 cents to settle at $3.0492 a gallon, while gasoline futures sank 10.07 cents to settle at $2.6163 a gallon. Brent crude futures fell $3.47 to settle at $100.30 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

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An Exacting Heart

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

The Menhuhins were one of the great musical partnerships of
the 20th century. When they toured Australia in 1962, the one
full-page advertisement in the program was for a perfume: it showed
a violinist, in a gust of passion, throwing his arm around the lady
pianist as she stood up, her hands lingering on the keyboard.
That placement in the concert program was entirely innocent - or
a sophisticated joke. For brother and sister were close, holding
hands when jointly taking their bows. As Hephzibah explained, they
had a “Siamese soul”.
Yehudi, the more famous, was probably the greatest child prodigy
of the century. So remarkable was his technique and maturity of
expression that at 16 he was chosen by Sir Edward Elgar to record
his violin concerto. Yehudi’s exceptional talent did not fade away;
triumphs continued to the end of his life in 1999.
Hephzibah’s life, the subject of this searching biography by
Jacqueline Kent, was more anguished and possibly more interesting.
Unlike the rosy path of Yehudi, it was marked by two sudden
shifts.
The first occurred when, at the age of 18, Hephzibah bade
farewell to her musical career and opted for married life on a
Victorian sheep property; the second, 16 years later, when she
walked out on her husband and two young children to go and live
with a Viennese sociologist, first in Sydney and then in
London.
Kent shows how the upbringing of the three Menuhin children was
as extraordinary as their talent. The parents, understandably,
shaped their own lives around the advancement of Yehudi. But when
it was pointed out that Hephzibah’s skills were of a similar order
- “Madame Menuhin’s womb is truly an academy of music,” said one
music teacher - their attitude was that these skills must be used
to advance Yehudi’s career, or else help her to become a domestic
adornment.
Hephzibah was anything but a genteel tinkler; her piano-playing
was like a manly stride. But, given the children’s isolation as
they practised and practised, Hephzibah came to develop ambivalent
feelings about it. She knew she had a deep musical instinct, and
aptitude, but often told herself she was not an “artist”. There had
to be some other way of relating to the world.
Deliverance came unexpectedly. In London they were staying in
the same hotel as Lindsay and Nola Nicholas, heirs to the Aspro
fortune. The Menuhins were captivated: “What freshness in the soul
of these young Australians,” Hephzibah noted in her diary. Yehudi
fell for Nola, and married her, and shortly afterwards Hephzibah
proposed to her brother.
Lindsay was musical, and played the organ; later, when Hephzibah
took up music again, he would travel abroad with her, in an attempt
to save their marriage. For her part Hephzibah took life in the
Western District seriously, organising Red Cross activities during
the Second World War and putting much effort - and money - into a
travelling school library.
But she was unsettled by a visit to Theresienstadt in 1947, the
transit camp and ghetto where the Germans staged social and
cultural events for visiting dignitaries, even as individuals were
dragged away to Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Hephzibah, one of the first postwar visitors to the camp, found
her Jewishness dramatised and affirmed there. But no less important
was a new sense of the relative marginality of art, so easily
misapplied and incapable, in most respects, of affecting major
issues. Hephzibah wanted to make a difference, and have access to a
coherent view of the world.
This seemed to be offered by Richard Hauser, a management
consultant living in Sydney. Attracted by his charisma, Hephzibah
moved there and married him. They went to London where she assisted
him in his projects, helping turn his ideas into books and
cheerfully ran what was in effect a crash pad for needy people. But
Hauser became increasingly self-absorbed and dictatorial, and also
more promiscuous. Hephzibah’s last few years, in which she
contracted cancer, were miserable. When she died in 1981, Hauser
was at her bedside, saying, “Why is this happening to me?”
Jacqueline Kent’s biography shows how, despite her talents,
Hephzibah’s insecurities got the better of her. Prepared to be the
handmaid to Yehudi and his “saintly stupidity”, Hephzibah repeated
the scenario with Hauser - who was part guru, part charlatan. Her
dictatorial mother, conditioning Hephzibah to a meagre sense of
entitlement, must bear some of the blame. There was real happiness
with Lindsay Nicholas, but his emotional reticence and lack of
interest in ideas eventually sapped the marriage of any meaning for
her.
Without pushing the point, Jacqueline Kent shows that Hephzibah
could have done with some assertiveness training. An Exacting
Life is well written, well paced, and becomes an enthralling
story.
Jim Davidson is completing a biography of the historian W.
K. Hancock.

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An Exacting Heart

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

The Menhuhins were one of the great musical partnerships of
the 20th century. When they toured Australia in 1962, the one
full-page advertisement in the program was for a perfume: it showed
a violinist, in a gust of passion, throwing his arm around the lady
pianist as she stood up, her hands lingering on the keyboard.
That placement in the concert program was entirely innocent - or
a sophisticated joke. For brother and sister were close, holding
hands when jointly taking their bows. As Hephzibah explained, they
had a “Siamese soul”.
Yehudi, the more famous, was probably the greatest child prodigy
of the century. So remarkable was his technique and maturity of
expression that at 16 he was chosen by Sir Edward Elgar to record
his violin concerto. Yehudi’s exceptional talent did not fade away;
triumphs continued to the end of his life in 1999.
Hephzibah’s life, the subject of this searching biography by
Jacqueline Kent, was more anguished and possibly more interesting.
Unlike the rosy path of Yehudi, it was marked by two sudden
shifts.
The first occurred when, at the age of 18, Hephzibah bade
farewell to her musical career and opted for married life on a
Victorian sheep property; the second, 16 years later, when she
walked out on her husband and two young children to go and live
with a Viennese sociologist, first in Sydney and then in
London.
Kent shows how the upbringing of the three Menuhin children was
as extraordinary as their talent. The parents, understandably,
shaped their own lives around the advancement of Yehudi. But when
it was pointed out that Hephzibah’s skills were of a similar order
- “Madame Menuhin’s womb is truly an academy of music,” said one
music teacher - their attitude was that these skills must be used
to advance Yehudi’s career, or else help her to become a domestic
adornment.
Hephzibah was anything but a genteel tinkler; her piano-playing
was like a manly stride. But, given the children’s isolation as
they practised and practised, Hephzibah came to develop ambivalent
feelings about it. She knew she had a deep musical instinct, and
aptitude, but often told herself she was not an “artist”. There had
to be some other way of relating to the world.
Deliverance came unexpectedly. In London they were staying in
the same hotel as Lindsay and Nola Nicholas, heirs to the Aspro
fortune. The Menuhins were captivated: “What freshness in the soul
of these young Australians,” Hephzibah noted in her diary. Yehudi
fell for Nola, and married her, and shortly afterwards Hephzibah
proposed to her brother.
Lindsay was musical, and played the organ; later, when Hephzibah
took up music again, he would travel abroad with her, in an attempt
to save their marriage. For her part Hephzibah took life in the
Western District seriously, organising Red Cross activities during
the Second World War and putting much effort - and money - into a
travelling school library.
But she was unsettled by a visit to Theresienstadt in 1947, the
transit camp and ghetto where the Germans staged social and
cultural events for visiting dignitaries, even as individuals were
dragged away to Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Hephzibah, one of the first postwar visitors to the camp, found
her Jewishness dramatised and affirmed there. But no less important
was a new sense of the relative marginality of art, so easily
misapplied and incapable, in most respects, of affecting major
issues. Hephzibah wanted to make a difference, and have access to a
coherent view of the world.
This seemed to be offered by Richard Hauser, a management
consultant living in Sydney. Attracted by his charisma, Hephzibah
moved there and married him. They went to London where she assisted
him in his projects, helping turn his ideas into books and
cheerfully ran what was in effect a crash pad for needy people. But
Hauser became increasingly self-absorbed and dictatorial, and also
more promiscuous. Hephzibah’s last few years, in which she
contracted cancer, were miserable. When she died in 1981, Hauser
was at her bedside, saying, “Why is this happening to me?”
Jacqueline Kent’s biography shows how, despite her talents,
Hephzibah’s insecurities got the better of her. Prepared to be the
handmaid to Yehudi and his “saintly stupidity”, Hephzibah repeated
the scenario with Hauser - who was part guru, part charlatan. Her
dictatorial mother, conditioning Hephzibah to a meagre sense of
entitlement, must bear some of the blame. There was real happiness
with Lindsay Nicholas, but his emotional reticence and lack of
interest in ideas eventually sapped the marriage of any meaning for
her.
Without pushing the point, Jacqueline Kent shows that Hephzibah
could have done with some assertiveness training. An Exacting
Life is well written, well paced, and becomes an enthralling
story.
Jim Davidson is completing a biography of the historian W.
K. Hancock.

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Alaska’s largest city grows up

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska In a city where fashion sense has always played a distant second to staying warm, a cluster of boutiques in the budding “SoNo” district, south of Alaska’s only Nordstrom store, does a surprisingly brisk business in $50 body lotions and $180 designer jeans.The homage to New York City’s trendy SoHo district is just one of the many signs that this once-unruly oil-boom town at the edge of the American wilderness has been tamed.In some respects, Anchorage could even be called sophisticated.”Anchorage has really changed since I moved here 30 years ago,” said Ellen Arvold, owner of the Out of the Closet luxury consignment shop, where leopard-print Prada ballet flats and Louis Vuitton handbags are big sellers. “People don’t think there’s a market for us, but there really is.”Strip malls have replaced strip clubs, big-box stores draw more customers than bars, and residential neighborhoods have supplanted the RV parks that once sprawled across the state’s most populous city.”Anchorage has kind of grown up,” said longtime resident Charles Wohlforth, who writes the annual Alaska travel guide for Frommer’s. “It’s left its adolescence and is becoming more of a mature city.”The tumultuous years of oil booms and busts in the 1970s and ’80s have given way to two decades of steady growth, and Anchorage’s economy has expanded to include burgeoning retail, health care and tourism industries.The influx of non-oil, non-military jobs has altered the city’s demographics, making it less like a frontier town.At one time, men far outnumbered women in Alaska. But in 2006, the city of 270,000 had 102 men for every 100 women, state demographer Eddie Hunsinger said. The ratio for the rest of Alaska was 108 to 100.Leese Lloyd and Ashley Brusven, young baristas who grew up in Anchorage, said the notion that the city has an overabundance of men is an outdated stereotype.”Where are they?” Brusven joked as customers in the adjacent New Sagaya City Market surveyed stuffed grape leaves, caprese, baklava and other un-Alaskan foods.The city is also reshaping its modest skyline with a $100 million museum expansion, a $93 million convention center and a parking garage with room for 830 vehicles. Companies are putting up new hotels and glass-plated office buildings.Development has its critics. Many Alaskans see Anchorage as increasingly out of sync with the rest of the state, prone to sprawl, traffic, crime and the other usual urban ills.”Rural Alaskans have a love-hate relationship with Anchorage,” said Stephen Haycox, a history professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage. “What they hate is that people in Anchorage don’t have a good understanding of rural Alaska, which is a truly different world. But they love that Anchorage has neat things to buy and neat things to do.”The growth has triggered a steady exodus north to the state’s first suburban community, the farm and sled-dog country of the Matanuska-Susitna Valley. About 2,000 people leave Anchorage each year for Mat-Su.Anchorage’s latest promotional campaign, called “Big Wild Life,” depicts city life as a mix of bold outdoorsy activities and urban comforts. The Web site of the Anchorage Convention and Visitors Bureau highlights the city’s spas, opera and symphony, and downplays the long, cold winters by describing Anchorage as “a city of lights and flowers.”While Anchorage is no longer the rugged place Jack London knew, many characteristics of classic Alaska remain. Winter temperatures can dip to minus-20 and daylight dwindles after five hours in December. The peaks of the Chugach Mountains form an imposing backdrop, a striking reminder of the wilderness beyond.Grizzlies, black bears and moose are still a common sight. Moose browse along the popular paved trail system, trot through cookie-cutter condo developments and occasionally attempt to navigate fast-moving traffic.In November, a bull moose tangled his rack in a municipal Christmas light display before strolling into the courtyard at a lounge and dance club in SoNo. With the dead string of lights dangling from his noggin, the moose grew tipsy on fermented crabapples, prompting the local paper to nickname him “Buzzwinkle.”

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Cops seek clues in NYC therapist slaying

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

NEW YORK Psychologist Kathryn Faughey didn’t sound worried about her safety in the hours before she was butchered in her office, said a friend who exchanged e-mails with her that evening.On her mind, though, was another member of their circle of guitar enthusiasts, a man she had offered to help with personal problems. Faughey mentioned him in her last message, sent only about a half-hour before she was killed, said the friend, Don Hurley.Detectives interviewed the man, William Kunsman, in Pennsylvania on Thursday. He was not considered a suspect, but the development showed how determined investigators were to track down any clues into the killer.An attacker slashed Faughey 15 times with a meat cleaver and a 9-inch knife in her Manhattan office Tuesday evening. A psychiatrist who worked in the building, Dr. Kent Shinbach, came to Faughey’s rescue and was badly injured.Kunsman met Faughey, 56, at a guitar camp several years ago, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.Kunsman was found through Faughey’s recent e-mail records, which contained messages about his personal problems, the law enforcement official said. Pennsylvania state troopers picked him up at his home around 4:30 a.m., and he was let go 8 1/2 hours later, after he asked for a lawyer, the official said.”The reasons they had for questioning me were valid,” said Kunsman, of Coplay, Pa., adding that he was “extremely saddened” to hear of Faughey’s death. “I’ve been in more contact with Kathryn lately. I’ve been speaking to her a lot lately on the phone and by e-mail. I guess that’s what led them here.”Kunsman, who is married with six children, last spoke to Faughey on Tuesday afternoon but declined to detail the conversation. “That’s personal. She was just being a friend,” he said.Hurley, who knew Faughey through an online club for people interested in C.F. Martin %26 Co. guitars, said he and Faughey traded e-mails on the evening of her death about a variety of topics, including Kunsman. Hurley, a recently retired Sunday Times of London reporter, said Faughey had reached out to Kunsman after he “lost his way a little bit.”In her last message, Faughey mentioned Kunsman but gave no indication that she was concerned about her safety or that she was expecting any visitors.Hurley said he found it hard to believe Kunsman had anything to do with the attack, a view echoed by Faughey’s husband, Walter Adam. He told reporters Kunsman was a friend of the couple.Kunsman said that when detectives arrived he hadn’t even heard about Faughey’s death. “It didn’t become clear to me until during the questioning what had happened,” he said.The killer left behind several clues, dropping two bags near the basement door through which he escaped. The bags were filled with adult diapers, women’s clothing, rope, duct tape and eight knives apparently not used in the attack, police said.Police also recovered three knives at the scene, including a 9-inch knife and a meat cleaver that were apparently bent from the force of the attack.Investigators initially believed the killer may be a patient of Faughey, but were also questioning other acquaintances.Faughey, a licensed psychologist, described herself as a specialist in cognitive behavioral therapy. On her Web site, Faughey said she treated patients for relationship issues, coping with breakups, anxiety, panic attacks, stress over job changes and online intimacy, such as relationship issues arising from computer and text messaging.Colleagues said she was unlikely to have knowingly seen a patient who had a problem with aggression or violence.Faughey was an avid guitar player. In the past few years, she had attended several get-togethers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere with fellow Martin guitar enthusiasts and had become fast friends with some of them.She named her six-string guitar Little Anna, which she adoringly described in one posting on the Unofficial Martin Guitar Forum as the “archetype of the trusted friend, sister, confidante.”

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White King and Red Queen

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Karl Marx was a devoted chess player, if an ordinary
one. After the failed European revolutions of 1848, he lived in
London where, to his wife’s frustration, he would disappear for
days at a time on chess binges with his fellow emigres. A friend
and regular opponent recalled that Marx brought to his game “the
same barely suppressed aggression that he manifested in politics”
and, if he lost, would fly into a rage.
Lenin, father of the Russian Revolution, was also a keen player
but by all accounts a much stronger one than Marx. Lenin had three
conditions for playing chess against him: no taking back moves, no
hard feelings on the part of the loser, and no gloating by the
winner.
The two revolutionaries - theorist and activist - were on the
same side of politics, but we can only imagine the fireworks that
might have erupted had they met across the chessboard.
However volatile such an encounter might have been it would have
had nothing on the chessboard battles waged at the height of the
Cold War. Culminating in a series of matches in 1972 in Iceland
between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, two unlikely but not
unwilling Cold War warriors, theirs was competition drawn on
strictly ideological lines.
In Spassky’s corner was the weight of the Soviet Union and a
massive chess infrastructure designed to produce and maintain world
superiority in this most intellectual of pursuits; behind Fischer
was little more than his lone genius and the belated realisation of
Richard Nixon’s America that there was the opportunity to gain
international prestige and strike a psychological blow against a
despised enemy.
There would be many more battles fought over the chessboard but
none as symbolic of the times or as crucial to the participants,
and none would capture the attention of the world in the same
way.
In White King and Red Queen, Daniel Johnson’s account
of the Spassky-Fischer rivalry is, appropriately, at the heart of
his analysis of chess as a “mega-metaphor” for the psychological
struggle of the Cold War. But he takes a long run-up to get
there.
En route we get glimpses of the game’s origins (possibly a form
of divination using dice, devised by Buddhist monks in India); its
popularity in the Muslim world (its usefulness to warriors in
developing strategic and warlike thinking overcame Islam’s
prohibition against games of chance and the use of images); and
learn that the Orthodox church long disapproved of the game,
regarding it as heresy and witchcraft, and a form of gambling.
Johnson describes its growing popularity in Tsarist Russia,
charts the evolution of international tournaments in the late 19th
century and notes the “love affair” between chess and the
intelligentsia of Europe, with its underlying tension between
masters motivated by aesthetics - “chess as art for art’s sake” -
and those who made a living from it.
It is when Johnson arrives at 1917 and the Russian revolution
that he properly hits his stride, recounting how when the
Bolsheviks left the cafes of Europe to take over the Kremlin they
took chess with them. It was quickly adopted by the Soviet state
and promoted widely as a form of mental training, for war and
peace.
Effort and money were invested in tournaments and training in an
attempt to dominate the West in “this most rarefied of competitive
recreations”. Joseph Stalin did much to promote the game as a tool
of cultural diplomacy, even though he did not seem to have been a
chess player (”as a young man he preferred terrorism”, notes
Johnson), and chess became a means to overcome the Soviets’
international status as outsiders and was used to enhance its
legitimacy and standing through success in tournaments.
The Soviets became so closely identified with chess that the
image of the serious-minded, logical, scientific Soviet man became
the stereotype. At a time when the USSR could not compete with the
West economically, politically or militarily, it was essential for
national self esteem and anti-capitalist propaganda.
From this point Johnson finds himself in dense terrain and the
going slows. His concentration on the minutiae of chess politics,
the (admittedly appalling) treatment of top players whose politics
were found wanting by the state, the preponderance of Jewish
players in those ranks and some curious forays into tangential
territory - such as a discussion of race IQ theories and an
interpretation of 2001: A Space Odyssey that pitches the
computer HAL as the Soviet Union - seem irrelevant to his larger
focus.
His hyperbole also detracts and distracts: “If, like all wars,
the Cold War was a continuation of politics by other means, then
chess was the most cerebral of those means. By providing the safety
valve that kept the lid on the Cold War, chess helped to save
civilisation from itself.”
Johnson, a former literary editor of The Times and the
newspaper’s German correspondent when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989,
is clearly a fan of chess - a talented player, he once achieved a
draw against grandmaster Garry Kasparov - but he is no fan of the
Bolsheviks or their Soviet descendants.
He frequently resorts to easy insult and caricature to kick the
rulers of a regime that is long and deservedly dead and the reader
might wonder at times whether telling the story of chess in the
Cold War is his only, or indeed main, purpose.
He does give a hint of another purpose when he writes that,
“Despite the lifting of at least official censorship, in the
post-communist era no major writer has yet emerged equal to the
task of describing, even in retrospect, the unspeakable ordeal of
seven decades of communism. The most fatal form of censorship is
self-censorship.”
The suspicion arises that this is the service Johnson hopes to
perform for the generations of Russians and citizens of Soviet
satellite states who suffered for so long; that although he claims
to be writing about chess and the Cold War, his agenda is to tell
the story of their suffering through the case study of chess
practitioners at the hands of the Soviet authorities and their (in
his view, intrinsically flawed) dogmatic view of the world.
Whether this is a worthwhile use of his energy is debatable when
his central story was already so compelling.

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