Wednesday 9 January 2008

A Place in the Auvergne, Wednesday, 9th January 2008

0845

SDEROT

Less than two months ago, Raziel Sasson emerged from his rocket-proof closet, willing now to sleep outside it, with the rest of his family, on mattresses circled on the living room floor.

Raziel, 13, and know as Razi, still gets his father, Moshe, up three times a night to walk him to the bathroom and stand guard outside it. Sometimes he sleeps between his parents, said his mother Shula, 45, and sometimes he does not sleep at all...

"What kind of life is this, when you can't even make you home safe for your children?" Shula Sasson asked.



NAPLES

Garbage collection stopped Dec. 21, prompting violent protests because there was no more room at dumps and a new incinerator is not yet opening.




WASHINGTON

"Unlike tangible goods like cars of breakfast cereals, carbon offsets and renewable energy credits don't offer consumers an easy way to verify they've received the products sold to them," Majoras (Chairwoman of U.S Federal Trade Commission) said at a workshop in Washington.




MADRID

The raids (on private clinics) followed the arrest in December of Carlos Morin, a gynecologist who ran a group of clinics in Barcelona and who was filmed by a Danish television crew apparently offering to perform an abortion on a journalist who said she was seven months pregnant.





PARIS

"The life of a president, on those essential matters that are those of love, is like the life of anybody else," he said. "I am going to make a confession: I get up in the morning, I go to bed at night, like millions of French people."





NEW DEHLI

"Indians are high sticklers for protocol," she (Chitra Danger, director of the Center for International Protocol and Etiquette in Hyderabad) said in an interview. "The very idea of a head of state visiting India in an official capacity with his girlfriend is in very poor taste, and shows extreme insensitivity to our older, more traditional culture."




BERLIN

Stephan Kramar, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said Kock was using the same slogans as the extreme right-wing National Party of Germany in targeting juvenile offenders of immigrant backgrounds in his election campaign.





ATLANTA
A group of prisoners filed a class-action lawsuit Tuesday contending that corrections officers had systematically beaten restrained inmates throughout Georgia, leaving two dead and dozens injured.






WASHINGTON
Nearly half of American diplomats unwilling to volunteer to work in Iraq say one reason for their refusal is they do not agree with the Bush administration's policies in the country.






SEATTLE
The management change (at Starbucks) announced Monday, was hinted at in a February memo Schultz wrote to employees. He wrote that he was worried about the "commoditization of our brand." He said automated coffee espresso machines and pre-bagged coffee beans made stores more efficient, yet removed the "romance and theatre."






WASHINGTON
Enrollments in Medicaid grew two tenths of 1 percent in 2006, the smallest increase since 1998, the report (data published in the journal of Health Affairs) said.









OPINION (Eswar Prasad)
Cornell University

An annual income of $100,000 is enough for a comfortable life in Des Moines but barely enough to get by in New York City.









COMMENTARY (H.D.S. Greenway)
BOSTON

If Clinton wins the White House for two terms , we would also end up having a person with a degree from Yale in the White House for 28 years. Maybe that's why Barack Obama , with his Havard Law degree, bills himself as the candidate of change.












WASHINGTON

"We're paying the price today for the overselling of globalization, the fact that those who pushed globalization in both parties were unwilling to face up to the downside risks and take actions to mitigate them," said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist.











NEW YORK

He (Bear Stearns CEO James Cayne, whose two hedge funds collapsed this summer with investor losses of $1.5 billion) often left work at a time to attend bridge tournaments and would take the occasional Friday off during the summer, in the midst of the subprime crisis, for rounds of golf near his second home in New Jersey.





CHICAGO

Despite full flights, U.S airlines to cut capacity: Travelers saw in 2007, with the fullest jets ever the highest percentage of late arrivals - 23.5 percent through the end of November - in the 13 years the Transportation Department collected such data.






LAS VEGAS
The world's major technology companies are doing their best to convince consumers that they need an expensive, digitally connected home with the latest gadgets.
But there is a problem: an increasing number of people are having trouble just paying for the roof over their heads, much less a television measuring 150 inches, or 3.8 meters.




ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT IAN WALTHEW 2008



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