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21.05.2009., četvrtak
Four arrested over alleged New York terrorist bomb plot
Four men accused of trying to wage a holy war against America were due in court today over an alleged terrorist plot to bomb two New York synagogues and shoot down military planes.
The men were arrested last night after leaving what they believed were explosives in cars outside Riverdale Temple and the Riverdale Jewish Centre in the Bronx area of the city, authorities said. The bombs were fakes and obtained with the help of an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), according to officials. The New York police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, said that following the arrests one of the men had said they wanted to kill Jews. Speaking at news conference today, he said: "They stated that they wanted to commit Jihad. They were disturbed about what happened in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that Muslims were being killed." None of the four suspects had any known connection to al-Qaida, Kelly said. The arrests came after a long-running investigation that began in Newburgh, about 70 miles (110km) north of New York city. The four men were expected to appear in court charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles, the US attorney's office said. The men were also allegedly plotting to shoot down military planes from the New York Air National Guard base at Stewart airport in Newburgh. The New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, said: "While the bombs these terrorists attempted to plant tonight were – unbeknownst to them – fake, this latest attempt to attack our freedoms shows that the homeland security threats against New York City are sadly all too real." The men were identified as James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen. Three of them are said to be converts to Islam, include Payen who occasionally attended a Newburgh mosque. His statements on Islam often had to be corrected, according to its assistant imam, Hamin Rashada. The plot was discovered after the men bought inactive missiles and explosives from the FBI informant. In June 2008, the informant met Cromitie, who said his parents had lived in Afghanistan and he was upset about the war and the killing of Muslims by the US military. Cromitie also expressed an interest in doing "something to America", it is alleged. In October that year the informant began meeting with the defendants at a Newburgh house fitted with hidden cameras and microphones. Last month, the four men selected the synagogue and the community centre they intended to hit, according to prosecution papers. They also conducted surveillance of military planes at the Air National Guard base. The New York state governor, David Paterson, said three of the men were US citizens and one of Haitian descent. "This case clearly illustrates that the threat of terrorism in New York is persistent ... (and) affects all of our communities, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity," he told Reuters. |
California is the most diverse US state
California's crisis is more than an economic one. California is the most diverse US state; more than half of its 37 million people are non-white. For believers in the benefits of diversity, California represents the largest social experiment in human history, bringing people of different backgrounds together in a way unimaginable in, say, Germany, China, or Brazil.
California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was an immigrant (from Austria) before he was a movie star. In his six years in office he has repeatedly tried to bypass a polarised state legislature – even the annual budget requires a two-thirds majority – by appealing directly to voters. Ballot initiatives were created 100 years ago to empower ordinary citizens, but in recent decades the process has been captured by self-serving elites. Even as California's roads fall apart and public institutions decline – the result of too little spending and public workers who are too expensive – the state continues to operate the finest set of public universities in the US. But the secret of the University of California's success is its ability to obtain ever-higher amounts of funding from private sources and the federal government. Disengagement from the California polity also is true of the state's economic engines. Intel, the world's biggest chip maker and a Silicon Valley mainstay, hasn't built a factory in California for more than 20 years. Hollywood shoots an increasing number of films elsewhere. Agriculture relies heavily on illegal workers from Mexico, who live temporarily near the fields and take their earnings back home. How to forge a single community out of a state so diverse remains an elusive challenge. Some influential people, including Schwarzenegger, say the state needs a new constitution that would restrict ballot initiatives and make budgets easier to pass. More radical thinkers insist that California is ungovernable and should be broken into two or even three states. Creating more Californias would of course require the approval of the federal government in Washington, where elected representatives from California – mainly from Obama's Democratic party – have more power today than at perhaps any time in US history. Nancy Pelosi, the House majority leader, is from San Francisco. Californians run the two most powerful House committees, Energy and Commerce and Education and Labor. Two of the most influential senators also come from California. Why these Washington politicians are idle while their state slides towards ruin says much about what's broken in American politics. Schwarzenegger is a Republican, so Democrats privately wish him to fail. There's a deeper problem: politicians across the spectrum, beholden to special interests, are habituated to denying serious problems. Obama will be forced to help craft a compromise to keep the state financially afloat. Yet as a condition, he may insist that Californians, who are already among the most heavily taxed Americans, pay more. If Californians refuse, Obama could face a widening revolt against the idea of expanded government as the chief response to what ails America at home. |
Confronting a California bailout
While the new Obama administration is commanding global attention, America's future may be written – as so many times before – in and by its largest state. Once the lodestar for American optimism and achievement, California now illustrates the difficulties confronting the US – and how much more can still go wrong domestically.
The most populous and wealthiest of America's 50 states, California has long been a beacon of opportunity for talented and enterprising people from all over the world. One in every four California residents was born in a foreign country. California's two most famous industries, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, depend on infusions of talent from abroad. Its robust agricultural sector is a massive exporter of food, benefiting from the growing appetites of consumers in developing countries. Yet California's technological and entrepreneurial might – standing alone, the state would be the world's eighth largest economy – coexists with a dysfunctional political system that has brought it to the edge of fiscal bankruptcy. On 19 May, the state's voters, in a special election, rejected an array of tax increases and spending cuts required to balance its budget. Now, California faces either an embarrassing federal bailout or a prolonged period of rule by judges, who under California law have the power to vacate labour agreements, abrogate contracts, and generally restructure the state's financial commitments. For President Barack Obama, California's crisis imperils his own reform agenda. Because other American states also face tough fiscal conditions, the political price of bailing out California may be bailing out dozens of other states too. A massive state bailout, while adding enormously to pressure on Obama's government, would expose the weak link in the US system of governance. So-called "unitary" nations such as Britain, France, China, or Kenya essentially have a single set of government obligations: one national police force, one employer for all public school teachers, one overall pension system, etc. By contrast, the US has an "asymmetric" form of government, which allows many overlapping government entities – 7,000 in California alone – to incur debts, hire and fire employees, and impose taxes. Making sense of these asymmetries is difficult. When financial markets concentrate on the fiscal health of the federal government, they miss the extent of government obligations as a whole. The complexity of American governance threatens the benefits of Obama's decision to stimulate the economy through deficit spending. While the national government expands, state governments, such as California's, contract. |
Obama to defend policy on detainees
THE US President, Barack Obama, is planning to take back the initiative in the debate unleashed by his order to shut Guantanamo Bay, which has been criticised by both opponents and supporters.
The move comes amid reports that the US Government will bring a top al-Qaeda suspect held at Guantanamo to trial in New York. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian accused in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, would be the first former detainee at Guantanamo, the US naval base where 240 terrorist suspects are held, to face trial in a civilian court in the United States. Mr Obama was due to make a major national security speech overnight as the former vice president Dick Cheney delivered his own address, leading Republican charges that Mr Obama's national security policies leave America vulnerable to terrorists. The President chose the National Archives, which houses the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, to argue that his effort to reframe the legal front in the battle against terrorism honours US values. The speech comes just a day after his plan to close the "war on terror" camp in Cuba suffered a rebuke in the Senate, and after a tough FBI warning not to bring detainees to US soil. Mr Obama's Democratic allies joined Republican critics in a lopsided vote that stripped $US80 million ($103 million) he requested to shut the facility. Still, the White House insisted Mr Obama would work with Congress to honour his vow to shut Guantanamo by January, a year after taking office. Obama aides describe the heavily fortified encampment as a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups and a stain on the US image abroad. But working out how to close the facility, and bring its inmates to justice, or send them to third countries, is proving a headache. Mr Obama is under pressure to decide the fate of the detainees, many of whom have not been charged. Some may be impossible to try - as their evidence may be inadmissible due to interrogation methods branded as torture - but may also be judged too dangerous to release. While under attack from Republicans, Mr Obama will also hope to lance the fury of his own supporters. Many were dismayed by his decision to reconstitute Bush-era military tribunals. |
$10m instead of $10,000: couple on run after bank bungle
A New Zealand couple are reportedly on the run after $NZ10 million - instead of $NZ10,000 - was mistakenly deposited in their bank account.
The couple, who ran a Rotorua service station, were understood to have applied for a $NZ10,000 overdraft from Westpac but instead had the larger amount mistakenly paid into their account. Detective Senior Sergeant David Harvey said some of the money had since been withdrawn and the Asian couple had disappeared, the New Zealand Press Association reported. Interpol had been called in to help find them, NZPA said. The service station has closed its doors after going into receivership. Massey University banking lecturer Claire Matthews said the pair were unlikely to get away with it, "They've taken funds that they're not entitled to, that are not theirs," she told Newstalk ZB. "They've effectively, I guess, become thieves but it is only going to be a matter of time." The business owners could not realistically argue they honestly believed they were entitled to such a huge sum of money, she said. Westpac said court action had begun to recover the money but refused |
Astronauts keep wary eye on landing-day weather
Astronauts checked flight systems on Atlantis and packed up today in hopes of an on-time end to their triumphant Hubble Space Telescope repair mission, although the weather prospects were dismal.
Thunderstorms pounded Nasa's spaceport throughout the morning, and more bad weather was expected Friday when Atlantis was due to return home. The rain did not dampen Nasa's jubilation over the crew's impressive Hubble repairs, which garnered kudos from the president and from members of a US Senate panel that heard astronaut testimony beamed down from space. Commander Scott Altman aimed for a Friday morning touchdown at Kennedy Space Center, but given the poor weather reports, he and his crew were conserving power in order to remain aloft until Monday, if necessary. Mission Control warned the astronauts that Friday's weather would be "iffy." "We flew over today, saw it looked kind of nasty at the moment, but saw some clearing behind it — maybe," Altman radioed down. "As long as you think there's a chance, we'll be willing to do whatever it takes." Atlantis and the seven astronauts rocketed away on Nasa's last visit to Hubble on 11 May. In five back-to-back spacewalks, the astronauts installed two top-of-the-line science instruments and replaced burned-out electronics in two other science scopes. They also gave the 19-year-old observatory a new computer for sending back science data, freshened up the power and pointing systems, and beefed up the exterior with steel foil sheets. The refurbished Hubble is expected to perform better than ever over the next five to 10 years and probe even deeper into the universe, as far back in time as 500 million to 600 million years from creation. A day after the astronauts received a laudatory call from the president, they gave a Senate panel an update from orbit, receiving more praise from the lawmakers. "When we talk about the Hubble and giving it essentially a new life and a new way of going and seeing the universe, you've touched our hearts and you've also made history," said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Democratic chairwoman of the science appropriations subcommittee. The astronauts recounted their most nail-biting moments of the past 1˝ weeks. "You should have seen the action out the back window," said pilot Gregory Johnson. "I was on the edge of my seat." Besides watching the weather, Nasa kept shuttle Endeavour poised for a possible liftoff, in the unlikely event Atlantis suffers some sort of damage or breakdown before heading home. The rescue mission was put in place long ago to minimize the risk the Hubble repair crew was taking. The Atlantis astronauts had to launch into a 350-mile-high orbit to get to Hubble and had nowhere to go in the event their ship was damaged seriously by liftoff debris or space junk, a bigger problem than usual so high up. The international space station is in a different orbit and unreachable. |
