No Oil for Pacifists

Since 1975, manufacturing output has more than doubled, while employment in the sector has decreased by 31%. While these American job losses are indeed sobering, they are not an indication of declining U.S. competitiveness. In fact, these statistics reveal that the average American manufacturer is over three times more productive today than they were in 1975 -- a sure sign of economic progress.

Since [the New Deal], federal courts have generally deferred to administrative agencies' interpretations of their authority under their governing statutes, many of which are as open-ended as the Clean Air Act, if not more so.

The Clean Air Act, which dates to 1970, directs the Environmental Protection Agency to set national air quality standards at levels that "in the judgment of the administrator" and "allowing an adequate margin of safety" are "requisite to protect the public health." If that mandate amounts to an unconstitutional delegation, experts in administrative law have warned, then so do the broad marching orders Congress has given to agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, which is charged with regulating broadcasting in light of "public interest, convenience and necessity."

Congress, in a 2005 enactment entitled the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief, bestowed on the secretary of homeland security breathtakingly broad authority to set aside "all legal requirements" that he might regard as standing in the way of building the fence.

This authority extended not only to major federal environmental laws but also to any other laws the secretary, in his "sole discretion," might think of. In early 2008, Secretary Michael Chertoff issued orders setting aside relevant portions of 37 federal statutes (even including the Religious Freedom Restoration Act), as well as all related state and local laws and regulations within a 500-mile swath of the border that cut across four states.

True, in one sense Mr. Chertoff was simply exercising the authority that Congress had given him, which in the ordinary case is what the separation of powers contemplates from the executive branch. But such a broad and unfettered delegation of essentially legislative authority raises substantial constitutional questions. . .

One appeal, brought by El Paso County, Tex., did reach the Supreme Court in the spring of 2009. The justices considered the case (County of El Paso v. Chertoff) at eight consecutive closed-door conferences before rejecting it, without dissent or explanation. By refusing to hear the case, the justices thus left on the books, unreviewed, a deeply disquieting distortion of how the American system of government is supposed to work.

Good fences may make good neighbors, but bad fences make bad law.

Compared with outlays over the past 40 years, the biggest difference in federal spending relative to GDP in the coming decade will be the amount of mandatory spending. In CBO’s baseline projections, mandatory spending averages 13.2 percent of GDP over the coming 10 years, in contrast to the 9.9 percent of GDP it averaged from 1971 to 2010 (see Figure 3-1). That higher level of spending is mostly a result of outlays for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other health programs, which are projected to grow from 10.3 percent of GDP in 2012 to 12.7 percent in 2021.

If Obamacare was a good idea, if it lowered the cost of insurance and guaranteed coverage, if you could keep your insurance and your doctor, why would 729 waivers be needed? . . .

If Obamacare was a good law, no waivers should be necessary. If it accomplished the promises that those who backed it made, no waivers should be necessary.

Obviously, a plan with higher annual limits is potentially more costly than one without them. The money to cover the difference in premiums has to come from somewhere. Without the waivers, it will come from the employer who are forced by law to upgrade to the more expensive plan. In other words, the 729 organizations who have received waivers are not seeking refuge from an unintended consequence, but from the costs associated with one of ObamaCare’s features.

The dude just sold us an expensive universal health-care program on the grounds that it was really a program of deficit-cutting entitlement reform (because it would "bend" the health-care cost curve)! Now that it's time for real deficit-cutting entitlement reform instead of fake reform, he throws up his hands and says, "Sorry, can't be done. I'll just tread water for a while."

Atlantic columnist Andrew Sullivan

Former Congressman (D-Fl) Peter Deutsch

CBS News columnist Andrew Cohen

MSNBC's Mike Barnicle

New York Times columnist Frank Rich

Journalist/Author David Halberstam

Newsday editor Les Payne

The Obama administration "did a really terrible job handling health care reform," he said, because the president relied on Congress to draft a plan.

"You can't turn something that complicated loose on the United States Congress," he said, adding that the resulting debate led to great public confusion.

Yea

So is he saying he didn't know how bad the bill was, or is he saying he cast a bad vote? Neither answer is a winner.

This shivering penguin is just one of thousands close to death in Antarctica. Rain storms have killed tens of thousands of chicks -- and scientists blame global warming.

New-born penguins take 40 days to grow water-proof feathers. They can withstand snow, but if rain soaks them to the skin, they die of cold.

Attaching bands to penguins' flippers makes them easier for scientists to study, but may also up the birds' death rates and lower their chances of reproducing.

A team studying king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) has rekindled this debate, which has been running for more than 30 years, and thrown up an additional concern. Not only do bands placed around the birds' flippers make life more difficult for penguins, their effects also undermine the conclusions drawn from such studies. . .

Yvon Le Maho at the University of Strasbourg in France, an author of the current study, published in Nature, says that the time has come for ecologists to embrace new technologies and abandon flipper bands, "certainly as a precautionary principle".

His group's paper also highlights a wider issue: studies on penguins can and are being used to look at the effects of climate change on ecosystems. Le Maho and colleagues have previously used electronic tagging of king penguins to show that just 0.26 ºC of warming in sea-surface temperatures could trigger a 9% decline in adult survival. If banding were used in such studies, its consequences on a population could cripple attempts to extrapolate a climate-linked trend from the data.

"It's very difficult to anticipate what the consequences are," Le Maho says. He says there is a problem with warming affecting ecosystems, but "the numbers have to be reconsidered" where they have been derived from banded studies.

"science" 2007: AGW to dry up Aussie rivers by 2010

"science" 2011: Aussie floods result of AGW

Members of the left pounced first and didn't much care about the facts. Before it was clear just how crazy Jared Loughner is, the left blogosphere and their more high-minded print compatriots were ready to affix blame on their opponents. As the facts emerged, more quickly and thoroughly than every before in the 24/7, twitter-driven media environment, the narrative fell apart. A chorus on the left claimed causation between Sarah Palin and the killings (and then the amorphous "climate" and the deaths) and didn't much care for a careful analysis until it became clear their preferred narrative was false. As for the president, he doesn't buy it at all. He said: "And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud." (Emphasis added.) Or, as I put it, rhetorical civility and mental illness are discrete problems. And it doesn't help the liberal line when it turns out this particular lunatic was a-political and didn't watch news.

So, for my friends on the left: facts count. You can't spin a narrative and not be expected to be called on the underlying, flawed premise.

The response was unlike anything I have seen since the emergence of the new media. It wasn't just conservatives that rebutted the left's narrative, but diligent reporters. We think of "rapid response" as a campaign skill, but in reality that is how pundits, activists, reporters and politicians now react. Because the left's narrative was so noxious -- Sarah Palin or a floating cloud of conservative meanness caused a mass murder -- the right was filled with indignation and responded passionately, quickly and effectively. And, meanwhile, in the race to report on the biggest story of the year, the working press furiously disclosed the facts, which, as I noted above, undercut the left's storyline.

They [progressives] expected to take losses in November. What they got instead was Armageddon. Suddenly an authentic reform movement, linked to the Republican Party, whose goal simply is to stop the public spending curve, had come to life. This poses a mortal threat to the financial oxygen in the economic ecosystem that the public wing of the Democratic Party has inhabited all these years.

In total, the sales of GM stock produced $13.5 billion in receipts to the Treasury. Including exercise of the over-allotment option, Treasury sold over 412 million shares of the total 550 million shares sold. Treasury still holds more than 500 million shares, or 33.3 percent ownership of GM. During its first three weeks on the NYSE, GM's stock traded at between $33.17 and $34.89 per share. . . Of the $49.9 billion in government assistance, $27.2 billion currently remains outstanding. . .

This sale represents a major recovery of taxpayer funds, but it is important to note that Treasury received a price of $33.00 per share -- well below the $44.59 needed to be on track to recover fully taxpayers' money. By selling stock for less than this break-even price, Treasury essentially "locked in" a loss of billions of dollars and thus greatly reduced the likelihood that taxpayers will ever be repaid in full.

Treasury has explained its decision to sell at a loss by saying that it wished to unwind government ownership of the automobile industry as quickly as possible. This justification may very well be reasonable, but it is difficult to evaluate. Because Treasury has cited different, conflicting goals for its automotive interventions at different times -- saying, for example, that it wished to save American jobs, to produce the best possible return to taxpayers, or to return the company to private ownership as rapidly as possible -- it is difficult for the Panel or any outside observer to judge whether Treasury's results in fact qualify as successful.

On a per-enrollee basis, private insurance spending has climbed at about half the rate of Medicare since 2005.

Over the longer term, government health care spending has climbed faster that private spending in eight of the past 10 years.

Last summer, I purchased a 2010 LS 460 Lexus, through a U.S. intermediary, from a Japanese producer for $70,000.

Here's my question to you: Was that a fair trade?

I was free to keep my $70,000 or purchase the car. The Japanese producer was free to keep his Lexus or sell me the car.

As it turned out, I gave up my $70,000 and took possession of the car, and the Japanese producer gave up possession of the car and took possession of my money.

The exchange occurred because I saw myself as being better off and so did the Japanese producer.

I think it was both free and fair trade, and I'd like an American mercantilist to explain to me how it wasn't.

Mercantilists have absolutely no argument when we recognize that trade is mostly between individuals.

Mercantilists pretend that trade occurs between nations, such as the U.S. trading with England or Japan, to appeal to our jingoism.

First, does the U.S. actually trade with Japan and England?

In other words, is it members of the U.S. Congress trading with their counterparts in the Japanese Diet or the English Parliament?

That's nonsense. Trade occurs between individuals in one country, through intermediaries, with individuals in another country.

Who might protest that my trade with the Lexus manufacturer was unfair?

If you said an American car manufacturer and their union workers, go to the head of the class.

They would like Congress to restrict foreign trade so they can sell their cars at a pleasing price and their workers earn a pleasing wage.

As a matter of fact, it's never American consumers who complain about cheaper prices.

2010 is in the books: Global Tropical Cyclone Accumulated Cyclone Energy [ACE] remains lowest in at least three decades, and expected to decrease even further... For the calendar year 2010, a total of 46 tropical cyclones of tropical storm force developed in the Northern Hemisphere, the fewest since 1977. Of those 46, 26 attained hurricane strength (> 64 knots) and 13 became major hurricanes (> 96 knots). Even with the expected active 2010 North Atlantic hurricane season [the third most active since WWII], which accounts on average for about 1/5 of global annual hurricane output, the rest of the global tropics has been historically quiet. For the calendar-year 2010, there were 66-tropical cyclones globally, the fewest in the reliable record (since at least 1970) The Western North Pacific in 2010 had 8-Typhoons, the fewest in at least 65-years of records. Closer to the US mainland, the Eastern North Pacific off the coast of Mexico out to Hawaii uncorked a grand total of 8 tropical storms of which 3 became hurricanes, the fewest number of hurricanes since at least 1970. Global, Northern Hemisphere, and Southern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclone Accumulated Energy (ACE) remain at decades-low levels.


source: Dr. Maue

[Y]ou're asking me to judge the constant threat posed by militant Islamist terrorists. That is asking me what I know about our enemy.

I know that al-Qaida hates you because in 1492 the Spaniards completed the Reconquista and in 1924 Turkey's Kemal Ataturk ended the caliphate. I know Osama bin Laden declared war on America in 1998, and in 2001 he proved he meant it.

What an enemy says matters -- what he does matters even more. What he does matters more than the fact you didn't ask for war or don't like TSA examining your pants.

What does this enemy do? He tries to kill you. Have we damaged al-Qaida? Yes. Predator strikes have ripped al-Qaida and Taliban leadership in Afghanistan. It'll take the American left 30 years to admit it, but Iraq has been a huge defeat for al-Qaida.

Is it over? No. We're engaged in a struggle for the terms of modernity, which means there is a cultural war beyond the shooting war. If it sounds daunting, it is -- and it's going to be too real for many New Years to come.

Two big banks, Chase and Wells Fargo, will begin phasing out traditional free checking in New Jersey next month. Consumers can avoid monthly maintenance fees, however, if they meet minimum balance requirements for the account or set up direct deposit.

"The trend is moving away from free checking," said John McWeeney Jr., president of the New Jersey Bankers Association.

New federal banking regulations, the cost of complying with those rules and a reduction in fees banks can charge customers will change the financial products they offer, bankers say.

The Credit Card Act signed into law last year was supposed to stop financial institutions from sleazy antics. But instead, some retailers say, it may restrict stay-at-home moms.

Dress Barn Inc., Home Depot Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other companies are urging the Federal Reserve to drop a proposed rule that would require credit-card issuers to consider only a borrower's "independent" income rather than household income. The new standard, which would apply to new credit-card accounts and requests to increase limits on existing accounts, could make it difficult for some customers to get credit on the spot, especially stay-at-home moms.

All of which goes to show how hard it is to craft legal rules that will produce even a relatively well-defined outcome. We know what the framers of this legislation wanted: they wanted to prevent credit card companies from targeting relatively affluent kids . . . kids like, say, their kids . . . who might take those credit cards and get themselves into trouble running up bills they couldn't pay. But how do you actually do that? Credit card issuers need a solid rule, not a vaguely worded admonition not to let affluent kids get into too much trouble with their first Amex.

You can't just make it illegal to give credit cards to college kids--there are a lot of college kids who work full time and pay their own way. Nor can you simply target an age range, since there are a fair number of self-supporting twenty-year-olds out there who would be justly outraged at being denied credit. So instead, they targeted income--and accidentally denied credit to the housewives.

Shortly after November's electoral defeat for the Democrats, pollster Mark Penn appeared on Chris Matthews's TV show and remarked that what President Obama needed to reconnect with the American people was another Oklahoma City bombing. To judge from the reaction to Saturday's tragic shootings in Arizona, many on the left (and in the press) agree, and for a while hoped that Jared Lee Loughner's killing spree might fill the bill.

With only the barest outline of events available, pundits and reporters seemed to agree that the massacre had to be the fault of the tea party movement in general, and of Sarah Palin in particular. Why? Because they had created, in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's words, a "climate of hate."

The critics were a bit short on particulars as to what that meant. Mrs. Palin has used some martial metaphors--"lock and load"--and talked about "targeting" opponents. But as media writer Howard Kurtz noted in The Daily Beast, such metaphors are common in politics. Palin critic Markos Moulitsas, on his Daily Kos blog, had even included Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's district on a list of congressional districts "bullseyed" for primary challenges. When Democrats use language like this--or even harsher language like Mr. Obama's famous remark, in Philadelphia during the 2008 campaign, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun"--it's just evidence of high spirits, apparently. But if Republicans do it, it somehow creates a climate of hate.

There's a climate of hate out there, all right, but it doesn't derive from the innocuous use of political clichés. And former Gov. Palin and the tea party movement are more the targets than the source.

The theory of Holocaust education, I think all except Jennifer Peto will agree, has been one of the great failures of our time. But it’s important to know how it has failed​--and even more, to understand that our sentimental attachment to Holocaust memorialization can fail us with greater consequence in the future, as can our sentimental horror at those villains who deny the reality of the Holocaust. What happened as we learned about the Holocaust? Generally, nothing at all. Those politicians who speechified at the Holocaust Museum in the ’90s looked the other way, just as their predecessors in the 1930s did, as mass murders continued to take place. On the anti-Semitism front, the Maginot line of Holocaust education, human nature has not only refused to improve, but seems to have gotten worse. In one European country after another, observers​--​non-Jewish observers​--​remark levels of anti-Semitism unprecedented since 1945, despite Europe’s generous application of the Holocaust-memorial carrots and Holocaust-denial sticks. Jewish populations in Sweden are leaving entire cities; the retired chief of Holland’s major conservative party last month advised Jews who are "identifiably Jewish" to leave the country, because the Dutch state cannot protect them from anti-Semitic violence. It’s not Holocaust-deniers who commit attacks on individual Jews in Dutch cities; far from it. The Amsterdammers who jostle and taunt Rabbi Raphael Evers on streetcars are well informed, shouting "Joden aan het gas"​--​Jews to the gas chambers.

Holocaust education may have done more than fail. It might also have produced an unintended, but measurable effect that is even worse. . . The current generation of university students​--Holocaust-educated from the nursery on​--​have been given ideas. And on campuses around the world, not just in Protestant Europe, it is fair to say that the more the current student generation have been taught about the evil of the Holocaust, the more Israel seems to them to resemble Nazi Germany rather than itself. Even if we resist the false suggestion that Israel is conducting a genocide of Palestinians, our Holocaust-instruction has left us all with an equally false notion: that Israel was created by Europeans in the Middle East in order to make amends to European Jews for a European Holocaust.

The falseness of this idea is not merely a matter of historical interest; it is false in a brilliantly focused way. Because in fact, quite apart from the unbroken continuity of Jewish life in Palestine since antiquity, and the recurring affirmation of the connection of the Diaspora to the land of Israel, the creation of Israel was an event that coincided with the creation of most of the modern states of the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The Jewish state in Palestine was created by those who fought and won the First World War, not the Second; and its raw material was the same as the raw material of the majority of the members of the EU and the Arab League: the broken territories of the great colonial powers, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The beneficiaries of this impulse were to create new states for Arabs and Arabic speakers throughout the Ottoman empire, for South Slavs, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Armenians, Kurds, Estonians, Latvians, Ukrainians. Israel’s origin, then, is postcolonial, not imperialist. And those concerned with Israel’s survival should properly be concerned with the survival as free democracies of other postcolonial states on the periphery of tyranny elsewhere, such as Lebanon, Georgia, Ukraine, and even Lithuania and Poland.

When we talk about government response to economic crisis, we tend to focus on the federal government; for one thing, it’s big, and it’s right there in Washington, where it’s easy to keep track of. But economic contraction is often felt most keenly by state and local governments, which deliver highly visible services like schools and police and fire departments.

Unlike the federal government, almost all states have to enact budgets that are nominally balanced. A recession may be the worst time to raise taxes, but it is also the worst time to cut services. Unfortunately, states have to do one or the other. And sometimes, as in those Depression-era school districts, they’re forced to do both.

This may be one of those times. State revenues collapsed in 2009, and though they’re now slowly recovering, the Rockefeller Institute reports that [they dropped as much nearly 17 percent on a year-on-year basis at the height of the recession]. At their current pace, receipts will take more than five years to recover to their 2008 levels. Some states, such as Alaska and Texas, had accumulated substantial rainy-day funds before the crisis, but most have relied on federal aid and budget gimmicks to stave off radical cuts. This year, the stimulus money will run out, and the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives is unlikely to allocate more--particularly since many of the worst problems are in blue states like California, New Jersey, and Illinois.

California has forced people to pay estimated taxes early, while giving IOUs to many of its suppliers. Illinois simply isn’t paying its suppliers at all. New Jersey’s new governor has already gotten into a bruising fight with the teachers union, and recently announced that he was scrapping an $8 billion second rail tunnel to New York City.

Such fiscal problems have been building for a long time. Politicians love to bestow goodies on their constituents, especially retirement benefits for public-sector workers--largesse that some future sucker ultimately has to pay for. Decades of this kind of behavior have left a lot of states with growing structural deficits. Many states have tried to paper over these shortfalls by issuing bonds or raiding special funds such as pensions; as a result, the overall debt of state and local governments has risen from $1.7 trillion in 2004 to $2.4 trillion in 2010, a 40 percent increase. The unfunded liability of the pension systems should also be added to that figure; according to economists Joshua Rauh and Robert Novy-Marx, that liability is more than $3 trillion, just for the states alone. Even when tax revenues eventually recover, this problem will not go away. . .

States with a permanent mismatch between taxes and spending will not be able to squeak by on budget gimmicks and backdoor borrowing forever; either they’ll find a way to bring their budgets into balance, or they’ll run out of money and default on their obligations. The path they choose will make a big difference in the future of the states, and of their citizens--and in the life of the nation as a whole.

After losing House, Democrats will try new strategy: bipartisanship

"We are using a bunch of search term[s] to help point people to HealthCare.gov. Part of our online efforts to help get accurate information to people about the new law (i.e. also use Facebook, Twitter, blogs and webcasts)," an HHS official confirmed by e-mail.

Interestingly, the Obama administration now appears to have pulled its ad on Google -- or perhaps Google made the decision to quit running it. But the administration's paid entry still comes up first if you search for "Obamacare" through Bing, and it also comes up first (after "Stories") if you search through Yahoo! (On Yahoo!, "Obamacare and elderly," "Obamacare and abortion," and the like, also show up as paid entries.) In fact, when the playing field is evened -- that is, when the administration isn't using taxpayers' money to channel people to its site -- then www.healthcare.gov doesn't even crack the first 50 pages of Google's listings for "Obamacare."

"Vickie" says she’s tired of living in fear: the fear of immigration officials, Utah politicians targeting people like her and the bad economy here.

So after 18 years in Utah, working without documents, she says her family will probably return to Mexico. . .

Vickie and [her daughter] Lizzie (whom The Salt Lake Tribune agreed not to identify by their real names because they feared repercussions) are examples -- and explanations -- of a recent trend shown by some studies: More undocumented immigrants may now be going home than are coming to Utah. . .

Vickie talks about why her family may join the flow south. Immigration officials started deportation proceedings against her after they found she used a false Social Security number. She was held in jail for 17 days. Her husband was still in detention when she was interviewed. She lost a job because her boss worried her return would bring attention from authorities "and nobody there has papers." In a tough economy, it’s hard for her to find other work--and as a noncitizen she does not qualify for welfare or unemployment benefits.

Obamacare has dominated the public debate over the legality and desirability of the White House's regulatory agenda, but the legislation seeking to reform Wall Street may in fact create more serious constitutional difficulties.

The Dodd-Frank legislation passed in the summer is supposed to remedy weaknesses in the U.S. financial system -- ensuring transparency and accountability, and removing risks that banks are "too big to fail." Yet the bill created a structure of almost unlimited, unreviewable and sometimes secret bureaucratic discretion, with no constraints on concentration -- a breakdown of the separation of powers, which were created to guard against the exercise of arbitrary authority.

Take, for example, the resolution/seizure authority of Title II, ostensibly designed to end bailouts and "too big to fail" risks. The Treasury can petition federal district courts to seize not only banks that enjoy government support but any non-bank financial institution that the government thinks is in danger of default and could, in turn, pose a risk to U.S. financial stability. If the entity resists seizure, the petition proceedings go secret, with a federal district judge given 24 hours to decide "on a strictly confidential basis" whether to allow receivership.

There is no stay pending judicial review. That review is in any event limited to the question of the entity's soundness -- not whether a default would pose a risk to financial stability or otherwise violate the statute.

The court can eliminate all judicial review simply by doing nothing for 24 hours, after which the petition is granted automatically and liquidation proceeds.

This appears to have been designed to deal with investment banks (not regulated by any agency except the SEC), but the way the law is written anything could be seized. It's all Chavez, all the time. Under this law, the feds could seize a department store chain that offers credit, or a car dealership, or any number of businesses. It is an invitation to overreach.

The blizzard is definitely a force for conservatism, and not only because it has had the global-warming crowd scrambling for explanations. The blizzard reveals something basic: Liberals in government want to tell us what to eat, counsel us about how and when to die, and in general attempt to engineer our lives. But when reality knocks, they can’t do the basic stuff such as clearing the streets . . . Mayor Bloomberg may be receiving an unfair amount of criticism for his lackluster performance in coping with Mother Nature, given the almost unprecedented nature of the storm, but the unplowed city streets provide a metaphor for the nanny state: It can order us to do anything, but it can’t take care of the basic obligations of government.

Data from the Department of Commerce show that short-term stimulus funds did not go to increase federal purchases, or state and local purchases, or even consumption purchases by much over the past few years. Thus the packages did not materially stimulate GDP or employment. . .

Unfortunately, most Keynesian models have been not adjusted to incorporate these facts, so they keep making the same predictions. . .

Another example of the problem with the modeling assumptions is the multiplier from "general aid to state governments," which is assumed to be 1.36 in the Zandi model. Yet the Commerce Department data are very clear that virtually none of this aid to state governments in the 2009 stimulus (ARRA) went into government purchases; most went to reduce borrowing. Here is a diagram from the Commentary article which shows this. You cannot get a multiplier of 1.36, or even much greater than zero, when none of the funds went to government purchases and more than half went to reduced borrowing.

Women skydiver on trial in Belgium for love-triangle parachute murder

Portland man says sports bar off to a great start until a man started shooting customers

1 in 10 Americans prefer colonoscopies to PC security

Woman charged with stealing underwear, cheese

The sentencing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos Oil Company, to a labor-camp term of 13.5 years shows once again that when their personal interests are at stake, Russian leaders are openly contemptuous of the opinion of the civilized world.

The charges against Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev were so absurd that the Russian regime should have been embarrassed to bring them. The two were charged with stealing 200 million tons of oil from Yukos subsidiaries, more than the total annual output of many oil-producing countries. Viktor Khristenko, the Russian trade minister, said at the trial that the theft of oil is a serious problem. It is accomplished by boring into pipelines and siphoning off oil. "But I know nothing about theft on the scale of millions of tons," he said.

The need to keep Khodorkovsky behind barbed wire, however, was not negotiable. Like the other oligarchs who amassed wealth in the 1990s, Khodorkovsky made his fortune on the strength of corrupt connections. But unlike all of the others, he sought to transform Yukos into a modern enterprise with Western standards of transparency and corporate governance. In doing so, he put to the test the notion that capitalism is automatically self correcting. Unfortunately, capitalism is self correcting only within a solid moral and legal context. In Russia, such a context does not exist. Khodorkovsky therefore became a direct threat to the criminal status quo instead of a force for reform.

The incumbent president of Ivory Coast is hardening his resistance to international pressure to stand down, even refusing to take a phone call from Barack Obama.

Laurent Gbagbo, who is widely viewed as having lost a recent election, is refusing to leave office despite attempts to persuade him from West African leaders and others in the broader international community.

Lanny J Davis, a lawyer who used to work for Bill Clinton, has resigned from his job advising Mr Gbagbo, claiming that the president had stopped taking his calls, and refused one from the US president.

Mr Davis said he had repeatedly tried to set up a phone conversation between Mr Gbagbo and Mr Obama which would have given the Ivorian "options for a peaceful resolution, that would avoid further bloodshed and be in the best interests of his country".

"Unfortunately, the decision was made in Abidjan not to allow President Obama's call to be put through to Mr Gbagbo, despite my repeated objections to that decision," he wrote in his resignation letter, which was seen by CNN.

WH in secret talks with high level Taliban who turns out to be imposter. . . In related news, media calls Palin stupid