An Egyptian court has acquitted 14 policemen charged with killing protesters during last year’s popular uprising.
The verdict is the latest in what activists claim to be a pattern of acquittals for police blamed for the deaths of nearly 850 people during the 18-day revolt that toppled longtime leader Hosni Mubarak.
A Cairo court on Thursday found the policemen not guilty of shooting protesters in front of police stations on Jan. 28, 2011, one of the most violent days of the uprising.
The 14 are among nearly 200 security officers and former regime officials _ including Mubarak himself _ who face trial for the deaths of protesters during the uprising.
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The Senate on Wednesday passed a plan to save the struggling U.S. Postal Service, an effort that could save thousands of jobs and 100 mail processing plants now slated to be closed or consolidated next month.
In an unusual showing of bipartisanship, the Senate voted 62-37 to throw a lifeline to the indebted Postal Service. Without help, the Postal Service would otherwise cut Saturday service, delay mail delivery and close hundreds of postal processing plants and post offices, triggering thousands of job cuts nationwide.
"My hope is that our friends over in the U.S. House, given our bipartisan steps we took this week, will feel a sense of urgency," said Sen. Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat, one of the Senate bill’s co-sponsors. "The situation is not hopeless, the situation is dire."
The House has yet to take up a different bill to reform the Postal Service. However, Rep. Darrell Issa, a key Republican on postal service legislation, called the Senate bill "wholly unacceptable," in a statement released Wednesday.
Congress faces a deadline of May 15, when a moratorium on postal closures expires.
The recession, declining mail volume and a congressional mandate to prefund retirement health care benefits have put the service in a bind. It reported a $5.1 billion loss for the year ended Sept. 30.
The Senate bill, offered by members in both parties, forces the Postal Service to ease off part of its plan to slow down the delivery of first-class mail, the kind of mail that most consumers use.
Postal Service: We need more junk mail
The bill makes controversial changes, including cuts to workers’ compensation benefits, as well as a transition from door-to-door delivery to curbside delivery in some areas, such as suburban neighborhoods.
The Senate bill also prevents the Postal Service from cutting Saturday delivery for two years, until the agency can prove such a cut is needed as a "last resort."
During debate on the postal bill the past two days, the Senate agreed to order the Postal Service to postpone the May 15 expiration of a moratorium on closures until the House passes a postal service bill.
The Senate also agreed to cap executive pay of high-ranking postal officials to that of Cabinet officials, $199,000 cheap credit report. (Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe made $384,000 last year.)
The cost of the Senate bill could prove a major sticking point with the House. The Congressional Budget Office says the bill would cost $33.6 billion over 10 years.
The tab comes from increased borrowing authority for the Postal Service, allowing it to borrow $11 billion more from Treasury. The Postal Service can currently borrow up to $15 billion, and has tapped $12 billion of that loan.
The other cost comes from elimination of regular billion-dollar payments, now required by law, to Treasury to pre-fund health care benefits for retirees. That $23 billion would ease financial pain for the Postal Service, but it also means less revenue to ease federal deficits.
Several Senate Republicans, including Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, said they voted against the bill, because it wasn’t paid for in an appropriate way.
Earlier this year, the Postal Service said it was doing away with overnight delivery of many kinds of first-class mail, opening the door for closing 223 mail processing plants at a cost of 35,000 jobs.
The Senate bill would force the Postal Service to maintain some one-day delivery of first-class mail, mostly for items mailed within the same processing area — saving 100 mail processing plants.
The Senate bill would also tap most of an estimated $10.9 billion overpayment in the Federal Employees Retirement System to pay down postal service debt and use up to $2 billion on buyout packages to entice long-time employees to retire.
Unions oppose the Senate bill, saying it doesn’t provide a good long-term business model.
"We are very disappointed that the Senate approved such a flawed bill, but we are determined to continue the fight for legislation that will provide a path to long-term viability for the Postal Service," said Fredric V. Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.
The U.S. Postal Service is, by law, an "independent establishment" of the executive branch. The agency doesn’t normally use tax dollars for operations, except for its $12 billion loan from Treasury.
NEW YORK, N.Y.
Stocks fell Thursday for the third day in a row after reminders that Europe has not solved its debt crisis and the U.S. economy is far from healed, despite progress on both fronts.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 58 points in early trading to 13,069. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 fell nine points to 1,397. The Nasdaq composite index fell 15 to 3,090.
The declines came despite incrementally good news about the U.S. economy. The government said that the number of people seeking unemployment benefits last week dropped by 5,000 to about 359,000, the lowest since April 2008
The government also said that the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3 percent in the fourth quarter, which met analysts’ expectations and was the fastest pace since spring 2010.
But there was reason for concern, too: The government also said that many more people than it originally estimated filed unemployment claims in recent months. And economists believe the country’s growth has slowed to about 1.5 percent.
European markets fell across the board, despite a report from Germany that its unemployment rate fell slightly over the month. The benchmark stock index was down 1.9 percent in Germany and 1.3 percent apiece in France and Britain.
Though Greece is no longer on the brink of default, deep problems remain for the continent, where stronger countries are arguing that they shouldn’t have to bail out weaker ones paydayloan.
In Spain, workers took to the streets to protest government spending cuts, underscoring the difficulty that governments will have in reining in overblown spending.
The price of oil fell 65 cents per barrel in New York to $104.73. France’s prime minister said there’s a “good chance” the U.S. and Europe will release oil reserves, which could drive down prices by adding supply.
President Barack Obama was expected later Thursday to call on Congress to end tax breaks for oil companies. The price of oil has doubled since October, and the price of gasoline has risen about 20 percent this year.
Among the stocks making big moves:
_ Illumina, a diagnostics company, rose more than 4 percent to $52.06 after the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Group raised its offer for the company to $51 per share.
_ Best Buy fell more than 6 percent after announcing plans for big spending cuts, including closing 50 of its big-box stores.
_ JetBlue fell 8 percent, two days after passengers said a pilot came unhinged and forced a JetBlue flight to make an emergency landing on a flight from New York to Las Vegas.
With just five days to go for nations to put forward nominees to lead the World Bank, there are few signs the United States has finalized its choice to lead the global development lender.
The United States has held the presidency of the Bank since its founding after World War Two, while a European has always led its sister institution - the International Monetary Fund.
But Washington has yet to publicly identify a candidate and some observers think the delay could signal that the White House is having a hard time convincing possible candidates to take the job. The White House and Treasury Department have declined to comment.
Sources with knowledge of the administration’s thinking say the hope was to convince a woman to enter the race to replace Robert Zoellick, who has said he will step down when his term expires at the end of June.
Naming a woman could go some way to address calls from emerging-market nations for a change in the status quo. A woman has never led the bank.
Two sources said Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was a leading contender. However, it is not clear she wants the job. Rice’s name often surfaces as a possible candidate to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.
When asked last week how she would help South Sudan if she was president of the World Bank, Rice replied: “Ridiculously hypothetical.”
Senator John Kerry and PepsiCo’s Indian-born CEO Indra Nooyi had also made an Obama administration short list, according to a source, although Kerry has publicly ruled out the job and another source said Nooyi was no longer in contention.
Another short-list member, Lawrence Summers, a former adviser to President Barack Obama and a one-time Treasury secretary, has declined to comment. He told Reuters he would leave the selection process to the officials in charge of it.
LEAVING THE DOOR OPEN
The delay in identifying a U.S. nominee could leave the door open to a dark-horse candidate from the United States. It has also given other nations time to consider their own nominees.
“It wouldn’t be the first time in history that the White House had to scramble a bit,” said Whitney Debevoise, a former director to the World Bank board.
“I think they have lost the opportunity to put a name out there early and make it uncontested,” he added. “Usually … if the U.S. puts a name out there, then nobody else wants to put their name up because they know they don’t have a chance.”
Emerging and developing countries have been pushing to have more say at both the World Bank and IMF, and have said the decision on Zoellick’s successor should be merit-based.
Developing and emerging market economies are currently in consultations on putting forward names of non-U.S. candidates. The dilemma for developing regions, however, is finding candidates willing to come forward in a race in which the outcome is felt to be pre-ordained.
Indeed, the two most talked about names among developing countries are former World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, now Nigeria’s finance minister, and Trevor Manuel, the South African national planning minister pay day loans. Former Indonesian finance minister and current World Bank Managing Director Sri Mulyani Indrawati, and Mexico’s central bank governor Agustin Carstens have ruled themselves out.
World Bank board sources said there were also talks under way about possibly appointing a candidate from a developing or emerging economy to head the Bank’s private-sector lender, the International Finance Corp. IFC CEOs have mainly been European.
The World Bank’s 24-member board, which represents all of the institution’s 187 member countries, has set a deadline for Friday for nominations to lead the Bank, and has said it would decide on the next president within a month.
ONE MAN RACE
U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University, is the only formal candidate to have emerged so far. He has been formally nominated by Bhutan and a cluster of developing countries including East Timor, Jordan, Kenya, Namibia and Malaysia.
“Jeffrey Sachs is a good economist and a very good candidate, but we expect to see the rest of the names and what follows in the process,” Mexican Finance Minister Jose Antonio Meade said on Sunday.
Last week, 27 lawmakers wrote to President Barack Obama to “strongly” encourage him to nominate Sachs. Sachs, whose self-proclaimed candidacy aims to challenge what he sees as a history of political appointments by the White House, acknowledges he lacks the Obama administration’s support.
“They’re not talking to me,” he told Reuters.
With his early nomination, Sachs has had a head start in lobbying for support among developing countries where he has a proven track record on issues such as education, health, climate change and fighting poverty.
“I have spoken with at least a couple of dozen leaders around the world in the last week and believe I have strong worldwide support in every region of the developing countries, and a lot of support in Europe as well,” Sachs said.
“For the European countries, they are not surprisingly saying that they are overwhelmingly likely to defer to the U.S. nominee and that they are waiting for that,” he added.
Sachs said while the United States was still likely to determine who gets the job, a desire among developing countries to end tradition suggested that was not a sure bet.
“I don’t think it is automatic because of feelings that this is an important institution and an important moment, and I don’t think the U.S. has simply the green light to choose anybody.”
Officials argued that it is important for the United States to retain the presidency of the bank, otherwise political support and funding for the institution could erode, given that Congress is focused on budget cutting.
The United States is the World Bank’s largest donor.
(This version of the story has been corrected to fix the date in the dateline)
Australia needs to find
You know that investing can be tough. Andrew Lo says it’s even tougher than you think.
Lo, an economist and finance professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, challenges a core idea of financial theory: that markets are "efficient," meaning there’s no point in trying to time your moves in and out of stocks, since everything you could know about them is already baked into the price.
Plenty of smart people think that Lo knows what he’s talking about. In addition to teaching, he has advised the government on ways to limit the damage from future financial crises. He also runs a money-management firm that seeks to put his ideas to work.
Lo argues that the buy-and-hold method of investing (long considered gospel by index fund managers and this magazine) doesn’t effectively limit the risks of today’s markets. He explained his theories to contributor Charles P. Wallace; the conversation has been edited.
You reject the theory of efficient markets in favor of what you call adaptive markets. Meaning?
I don’t entirely reject the idea of efficient markets. It needs updating. The adaptive markets hypothesis says that all economic institutions, like our own species, develop and change over time, depending on the population of investors that are engaged with them.
So what does that mean for investors?
In a normal market, you get the independent valuations of millions of buyers and sellers trying to evaluate a given security.
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During periods of extreme fear or greed, you don’t have the proper balance between those two to generate market efficiency and you get extremes in behavior.
When there’s a strong trend upward, for example, the kind of skepticism that produces reasonable and accurate valuations of securities is not at work, and a bubble develops. It’s very exciting when you’re in the midst of it, but at some point the valuations aren’t justifiable.
It seems as if big market shifts are becoming more common.
Yes. If you rank the top 50 one-day moves in the S&P 500, a fair number of those happened within the last five or 10 years. That tells you that we’re in a different, riskier market now.
What’s going on?
A combination of a lot of smart guys and technology. People have the ability to enact a trade instantaneously. And they have a lot of complex new tools, such as hedge funds and derivatives, at their disposal.
Technological innovations often have unintended consequences. My analogy is someone clearing some brush using a handsaw. You can clear a lot more brush using a chainsaw, but you might lose a finger, or suffer other attendant consequences. We now have everybody with chainsaws going after all sorts of opportunities, and that’s really where the potential for crises can emerge.
Until we’ve learned how to develop better technologies, I think we’re going to keep seeing more crises. There’s a good chance we’ll see a pretty important shock wave coming out of Europe if they don’t get their act together with regard to European sovereign debt payday advance low fees.
But doesn’t a simple buy-and-hold strategy address a lot of these issues of risk?
Buy-and-hold doesn’t work anymore. The volatility is too significant. Almost any asset can suddenly become much more risky. Buying into a mutual fund and holding it for 10 years is no longer going to deliver the same kind of expected return that we saw over the course of the last seven decades, simply because of the nature of financial markets and how complex it’s gotten.
Okay, but even during the so-called lost decade (2000 to 2010) someone who regularly put money into a 60% stock/40% bond portfolio would have had about a 4% return. Why isn’t that good enough?
Think about how that person earned 4%. He lost 30%, saw a big bounce-back, and so on, and the compound rate of return over the period was 4%. But most investors did not wait for the dust to settle. After the first 25% loss, they probably reduced their holdings, and only got part way back in after the market somewhat recovered.
It’s human behavior. Ask actual individual investors what their net rate of return was over the last three years, and see if it’s the same rate returned by the market. I bet you it’s not.
So what choice do I have instead?
We’re in an awkward period of our industry where we haven’t developed good alternatives. Your best bet is to hold a variety of mutual funds that have relatively low fees and try to manage the volatility within a reasonable range. You should be diversified not just with stocks and bonds but across the entire spectrum of investment opportunities: stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, and domestically and internationally.
Most of us didn’t sign up for the kind of volatility we’re seeing right now. So keep in mind that if you’re holding equities, you are probably taking more risk than you thought.
Does the government have a role in preventing these crises?
It’s not possible to prevent financial crises. But we can better understand what they are caused by, when they are likely to occur, and how we can prepare for them when they do happen.
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In the same way you cannot legislate away hurricanes, but you can do a lot to prepare for the worst of their effects. I believe we should have an independent agency to study crises, the way the National Transportation Safety Board looks at airline crashes.
Some 2,000 pages of regulations came out of the last crisis.
The Dodd-Frank Bill [which significantly strengthened financial regulations] was like a "Fire, ready, aim." It was a reaction. Now, some of that reaction was quite useful. But the laws that have been proposed, like the Volcker Rule [which would prevent banks from making some speculative investments], have hosts of unintended consequences that we won’t really understand for years until after those laws are actually implemented.
In Silicon Valley’s white-hot competition for tech talent, programmers can face a daily barrage of calls from recruiters seeking to woo them to rival companies with offers of better pay and perks.
But workers for some of the biggest names in the business claim their phones fell silent because of a conspiracy among their employers. And they claim the world’s biggest tech icon was at the center.
A lawsuit filed in federal court in San Jose claims senior executives at Google Inc., Intel Corp., Adobe Systems Inc., Intuit Inc., Lucasfilm Ltd., Pixar and Apple Inc. violated antitrust laws by entering into secret anti-poaching agreements not to hire each other’s best workers. In doing so, the suit contends the companies were able to keep wages artificially low by preventing bidding wars for the best employees.
The plaintiffs also claim that company e-mails show Steve Jobs himself sought and orchestrated at least some of the so-called “gentlemen’s agreements” while Apple’s CEO.
“I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple,” then-Google chief executive Eric Schmidt wrote in a 2007 email cited by the plaintiffs. The email was originally furnished to the U.S. Justice Department, which investigated similar allegations in 2010. The same email included a forwarded message from Jobs complaining that Google’s recruiting department was trying to lure away an Apple engineer.
“Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?” Schmidt wrote. Google’s director of staffing replied that the recruiter “will be terminated within the hour.”
The companies’ attorneys said the facts even as presented by the plaintiffs show no evidence of a conspiracy.
Rather, they said in court filings that some companies had separate one-to-one pacts among themselves as they worked together on various business ventures.
“The obvious explanation for the existence of these agreements were the collaborations,” said Apple defense attorney George Riley, as the two sides squared off Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Jose. Riley told Judge Lucy Koh that such arrangements were common.
The case hinges on a practice described in court documents as “cold-calling.” Under the practice, recruiters from one company will call an employee at another company who has the skills the company needs. The practice can lead to bidding wars as workers play the companies off one another to get the highest pay.
Cold-calling, the suit contends, helps workers get a sense of what they’re worth in a free market for employment in which all the companies are competing against one another for top employees. When the cold-calling stops, workers lose the knowledge and the leverage they could otherwise use to demand higher pay.
The Justice Department’s 2010 investigation included all the same companies except Lucasfilm, and the plaintiffs in some ways mimic the language from the department’s original case. The companies settled without admitting any wrongdoing but agreed not to enter into future agreements preventing them from cold-calling each other’s employees to recruit them.
Because the Justice Department’s case was settled quietly without any public dispute, court records contain little detail about any specific alleged agreements among companies.
Some of those details did come to light, however, in a recent filing by the plaintiffs, which quotes emails they obtained from the companies that had previously been given to the Justice Department business cards.
In a 2005 email describing a purported agreement between former Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen and his then-counterpart at Apple, an Adobe human resources executive wrote: “Bruce and Steve Jobs have an agreement that we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and vice versa,” according to court documents.
Ex-Palm Inc. CEO Ed Colligan wrote to Jobs in 2007: “Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal,” the plaintiffs’ filing said.
In internal company communications, Intel CEO and Google board member Paul Otellini described a gentleman’s agreement between the two companies: “Let me clarify. We have nothing signed. We have a handshake `no recruit’” between himself and then-Google CEO Schmidt. “I would not like this broadly known.”
Defense attorneys contend the emails are being distorted by the plaintiffs and show nothing beyond legitimate one-to-one agreements. Apple declined to comment.
“Intel disagrees with the allegations contained in the private litigation related to recruiting practices and plans to conduct a vigorous defense,” said Sumner Lemon, an Intel spokesman.
Adobe said the company does not comment on pending litigation.
The other companies named in the suit did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment.
Whichever side prevails, the case underscores the high wages talented tech workers can command in Silicon Valley, where the tech industry added thousands of jobs last year. According to federal labor statistics, mid-level tech workers in the region such as computer security specialists, web developers and network architects earn more money than anywhere else in the country, with average annual salaries topping $110,000.
Many of those workers could get thousands more if the case goes their way, lead plaintiff’s attorney Joseph Saveri said. Given the potentially tens of thousands of workers affected if the plaintiffs succeed in turning the suit into a class-action case, Saveri said the combined damages for the companies could reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars if decided at trial.
Such penalties would sink many companies. But Apple recently reported cash reserves of more than $97 billion. Google also has billions in cash on hand.
One anti-trust attorney not involved in the case doubts the companies have much to worry about anyway.
Antitrust cases that revolve around hiring practices are difficult to win, said David Balto, a Washington, D.C.-based antitrust lawyer who investigated Microsoft as a staff attorney for the Federal Trade Commission in the 1990s. Among the legal challenges they face is defining who exactly makes up the class of workers harmed by the alleged violations, since people with different jobs have different employment options, he said.
“I don’t think anybody at these companies is losing a nanosecond of sleep because of this lawsuit,” Balto said.
Ecuador received a loan commitment from China last month for at least $1 billion, helping finance a budget deficit that
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