The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- Confidence in Obama's leadership shaken in U.S.
- Cameron seeks U.S. advice on gangs after riots
- U.S. suspends work of aid groups in Gaza Strip
| Confidence in Obama's leadership shaken in U.S. Posted: 12 Aug 2011 08:42 PM PDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A spree of bad news -- market gyrations, fears of a double-dip recession, stubborn unemployment and fallout from a debt deal -- has shaken confidence in U.S. President Barack Obama's leadership and could cloud his chances for winning re-election.
Obama is seeking a second term in office in an election that is still far off -- November 2012. But a persistently weak economy coupled with rising perception of political dysfunction in Washington could complicate his political fortunes. The political spectacle that preceded a bipartisan deal this month to raise the U.S. debt ceiling and the subsequent downgrading of America's credit rating by a leading rating agency have spawned stories in the U.S. media about America's decline as a world power on Obama's watch. And opinion polls show that Obama's job approval ratings are edging downward even as members of his own Democratic Party grumble about his leadership and fault his willingness to make concessions to opposition Republicans in Congress. A Reuters/Ipsos poll on Wednesday found that 73 percent of Americans believe the country is off on the wrong track. This was the highest reading since October 2008 when the financial crisis was raging and just weeks before U.S. voters turned away from the Republican Party of then-President George W. Bush to put Obama into the White House. "It is hard to imagine public optimism being more negative about the economy than it is right now. ... In terms of pubic opinion he has got a huge hill to climb," said Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. "I think Americans would like to re-elect the first African American president, but ultimately the presidential election is a referendum on performance," she said. Obama also faces a daily drumbeat of criticism from the field of Republicans seeking their party's presidential nomination to face him in the 2012 general election. The field grows this week with Texas Governor Rick Perry, seen as a potential tough challenger, set to join the race on Saturday. MARKET TURMOIL There have been huge swings in the markets this week. The Dow Jones industrial average has swung hundreds of points in either direction amid concern over the U.S. economy, the debt crisis in Europe and the U.S. credit downgrade. "The debt ceiling fiasco and the downgrade, punctuated by ... stock market gyrations, has made something in me snap," said Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "It's the sound of confidence in Obama's leadership breaking," he wrote in Friday's Washington Post." "The president has failed up until now to produce a coherent explanation about where we are and what we need to do that Americans can understand," said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank. Obama has promised to deliver a steady stream of good ideas to lift hiring, and will head out on a three-day bus tour of the U.S. Midwest on Monday to talk about his vision. But so far he has only renewed calls for action on a batch of measures that he has talked about for months, including the extension of a payroll tax cut and unemployment aid. In the meantime, Americans have been worried by the recent turmoil that has been reminiscent of the 2008 financial crisis, with stock prices down by 10 percent from last month amid concern over another U.S. recession. Christina Romer, a former top Obama economic advisor, said the risk of a recession has increased and urged the president to think big about a program that could create the hundreds of thousands of jobs that she says the economy needs. "He has a unique opportunity now to really make the case to the American people. Congress is home and it is a chance for him to try to build consensus around a bold alternative," said Romer, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. The U.S. Congress is on summer recess. Lawmakers agreed to raise the U.S. debt ceiling in return for measures to lower the deficit. They will convene a special committee to examine reforms of the tax code and government programs like the Medicare health insurance program for the elderly. But Republicans say that big government spending, which is what unnerved markets in Europe, is not the solution. "The need we face is for structural reform, not stimulus," said Glenn Hubbard, a former top economic adviser to Bush. "Making credible long-term improvements in the nation's fiscal position can have powerful short-term effects by lessening uncertainty about future tax burdens." (Reporting by Alister Bull; Editing by Will Dunham) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. | ||
| Cameron seeks U.S. advice on gangs after riots Posted: 12 Aug 2011 08:42 PM PDT LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister David Cameron, under attack over his leadership during the rioting and looting that swept English cities this week, has enlisted U.S. street crime expert William Bratton to advise the government on handling gang violence.
"I'm being hired by the British government to consult with them on the issue of gangs, gang violence and gang intervention from the American experience and to offer some advice and counsel on their experience," Bratton told Reuters in New York. British police flooded the streets again on Friday night to ensure weekend drinking does not reignite the rioting that shocked Britons and sullied the country's image a year before it hosts the Olympic Games. Steve Kavanagh, deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said 16,000 officers, instead of the usual 2,500, would remain on duty in London in their biggest peacetime deployment -- a measure of the perceived public order challenge. Other forces, including those in Nottingham, Birmingham and Liverpool, said they would maintain a high level of policing over the weekend, though they said they did not expect further trouble after a couple of nights of quiet. Even in normal times, alcohol-fuelled street disorder is common across urban Britain at weekends. Cameron, describing the four nights of looting, arson and violence, in which five people were killed, as "criminality, pure and simple", said the initial police response had been inadequate. His remarks drew a sharp reaction from the police service, which is facing deep cuts in numbers as part of a government austerity drive aimed at cutting the large public debt. "The fact that politicians chose to come back is an irrelevance in terms of the tactics that were by then developing," said Hugh Orde, head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, referring to Cameron and other senior ministers who cut short their holidays after two days of mayhem at home. Bratton, credited with curbing street crime as police chief in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, said he would help the British government develop strategies on dealing with widespread rioting and gang culture. "The government is very interested in trying to quickly come up with strategies and plans to deal with the issues and concerns identified during these riots," said Bratton, a former police chief and now chairman of private security firm Kroll. A Downing Street spokesman said Cameron had spoken to Bratton on Friday, and that Bratton would join a series of meetings in the autumn, working unpaid and in a personal capacity. Bratton has worked with the British police at other times over the past 20 years. Cameron himself has not escaped criticism. A ComRes poll for The Independent newspaper showed that 54 percent of Britons say he failed to provide leadership early enough to control the riots, while an ICM survey for The Guardian showed that only 30 percent thought Cameron responded well to the riots and 44 percent thought the opposite. More than 1,200 people were arrested during and after the unrest. One London looter, 24-year-old Natasha Reid, turned herself in to police because she could not sleep for guilt after stealing a television, according to her defence lawyer. In another case, Chelsea Ives, 18, one of thousands of people enrolled as "ambassadors" to help visitors to the 2012 Olympics, was identified by her mother who saw her on television after allegedly throwing bricks at a police car. Ives denied charges of burglary and violent disorder. Courts have sat through the night to process those accused of crimes ranging from assault to stealing a bottle of water. Offenders include a millionaire's daughter, a charity worker and a journalism student, but most are unemployed young men. Some police forces have taken unusual steps to crack down on the protesters and deter future violence. Greater Manchester Police launched a 'Shop A Looter' campaign using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to encourage people to inform on those suspected of looting, and posted pictures on its website (http://www.gmp.police.uk/disorderconvictions) of people convicted of offences. Those pictures included a 46-year-old man sentenced to four months in prison for assaulting a police officer and a 28-year-old man sentenced to eight months for stealing clothes. "The fightback has well and truly begun," Cameron told an emergency session of parliament on Thursday, outlining a range of measures aimed at preventing any repeat of England's worst riots in decades. Targeting street gangs became a top priority. The trouble began in London after police shot dead a black man and refused to give his relatives information about the incident, but then degenerated into widespread looting and violence in many parts of the capital and other major cities. HARSH MEASURES The Conservative Party, which irked right-wing supporters by going into coalition with the left-leaning Liberal Democrats last year, is desperate to show it is tough on crime. A Conservative minister said on Friday he would see if he could make it easier to evict people from government housing for rioting. "...I don't think this is a time to pussyfoot around," said communities minister Eric Pickles, adding that his plan would require legal changes. "These people have done their best to make people frightened on the streets where they live. They've done their best to destroy neighbourhoods, and frankly I don't feel terribly sympathetic towards them." British media reported that one London council was already trying to evict a tenant from such housing after the tenant's son was charged with offences linked to the riots. A 68-year-old man who was attacked as he tried to put out a fire set by rioters in London on Monday night died of his injuries, officials said on Friday. Three men were killed in Birmingham, central England, when a car drove into them as they tried to stop rioters, and a man died after being shot during riots in Croydon, south London. The scale and ferocity of the rioting, not only in inner-city areas but also in some middle-class suburbs, has generated a law and order debate with starkly different views. "There's got to be a curfew put in place. I would have put in as many police as possible straightaway -- they did that eventually. I probably would have used teargas myself," said Graham Sawyer, 46, a construction site project manager from Romford, east of London. (Additional reporting by Peter Griffiths, Mohammed Abbas, Tim Castle, Adrian Croft and Olesya Dmitracova in London and Ray Sanchez and Daniel Trotta in New York; editing by Tim Pearce) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. | ||
| U.S. suspends work of aid groups in Gaza Strip Posted: 12 Aug 2011 08:12 PM PDT GAZA (Reuters) - The United States has suspended operations of the aid organizations it funds in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip because the Islamist group had demanded confidential information about their work, a U.S. official told Reuters on Friday. "USAID-funded partner organizations operating in Gaza are forced by Hamas's actions to suspend their assistance work. (They) were put on hold effective August 12," said the official, who is based in the region. He added that "through a series of measures (Hamas) has imposed over the past months, it has created an environment which jeopardizes the ability of nongovernmental organizations to provide assistance to Gaza's most vulnerable residents." The official, who declined to be named, said Hamas had demanded access to files and records of NGOs, which would reveal financial and administrative information, details of staff members and information on beneficiaries. He said that Hamas had shut down the International Medical Corps (IMC) an NGO and USAID partner organization, after its officials objected to "unwarranted audits". "We are disappointed that Hamas has once again chosen to put its political agenda ahead of the welfare of the Palestinian people," the official said, calling on the group "to cease its interference ... so that we can resume our humanitarian and development activities in Gaza." Palestinian-based NGOs funded by the European Union have in the past also complained of Hamas meddling in their affairs. Hamas administration official Taher al-Nono said an understanding had been reached which would allow independent auditing teams to inspect the files of NGOs, but he added that Hamas had the right to monitor their work in the territory. The IMC will be allowed to reopen its offices on Saturday or Sunday, he added. Responding to the USAID decision to suspend its partner organizations' work, Nono said "Such a decision sounds odd a day after the understanding was reached ... we reject any foreign intervention in Palestinian affairs." The U.S. official said some 600,000 Gazans -- about a third of the population of the coastal strip -- were receiving some $98 million worth of assistance from USAID projects in health, education, construction and infrastructure. Washington has designated Hamas as a terrorist group and it is shunned by the West for spurning permanent coexistence with Israel. The group seized control of the Gaza Strip from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction in 2007. Western-backed Abbas holds sway in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Palestinians want both territories for a future state with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital. (Writing by Ori Lewis in Jerusalem, editing by Tim Pearce) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
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