February 4, 2013
TimesCast Media+Tech: The successes and failures of this year’s Super Bowl ads. | Ang Lee on the technology behind “Life of Pi.” | An interactive project encourages action against human trafficking.
High-Level Feud Bares Tensions in Iran
Label: World
TEHRAN — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad escalated a bitter political fight this week with Iran’s most influential political family by disclosing secret film recordings of what he purported were fraudulent business deals.
During a Sunday session of Parliament, broadcast on state radio, Mr. Ahmadinejad singled out the head of the Parliament, Ali Larijani, a political rival with strong links to influential Shiite Muslim clerics and one of several brothers who have held top positions in the Iranian government.
His older brother, Sadegh, 52, heads Iran’s judiciary, while another brother, Mohammad Javad, a Berkeley-educated mathematician, is also a judiciary official.
On Monday, Iran’s state newspaper, Kayhan, which is run by an editor appointed by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hinted that Ayatollah Khamenei had been forced to step in to prevent both men from giving potentially damaging news conferences, which were both canceled at the last minute.
This was not the first time Ayatollah Khamenei has been forced to intervene in this feud. In October, he issued an edict aimed at stopping the infighting, saying that those creating divisions in the leadup to the June 14 presidential elections “betray” the country.
Mr. Ahmadinejad, who went to the Parliament in a failed attempt to head off the impeachment of his labor minister, Abdolreza Sheikholeslami, said Mr. Larijani and his fellow lawmakers had obstructed the government, stepped beyond their constitutional boundaries and written letters ordering the annulment of government decisions.
Instructed by Mr. Larijani to stick to the subject of the impeachment, Mr. Ahmadinejad said, “Don’t order me to close my mouth because you say it’s the law.”
With that, Mr. Ahmadinejad, who for years has threatened to reveal the names of corrupt officials, played a video clip of a conversation in which another of Mr. Larijani’s brothers, Fazel, appeared to discuss the purchase of a state company under favorable terms, the semiofficial Tabnak Web site reported. While Fazel Larijani used to head a medical association in Iran, his current position is unclear.
The public naming, rare in Iran, could signal a new phase in an already intense scrum between Mr. Ahmadinejad, who represents a powerful group of young, ambitious politicians, and Mr. Larijani, who is the official representative of the holy city of Qum, the center of Shiite scholarship in Iran.
Mr. Ahmadinejad said his associate, Saeed Mortazavi, 45, was also present at the taped meeting. In January, Mr. Mortazavi was dismissed as the head of Iran’s enormous social welfare organization under pressure from Parliament. Some days later, however, he was rehired by the president in the same position, this time as official caretaker.
During the conversation, read out in part by Mr. Ahmadinejad to astonished lawmakers, Fazel Larijani appears to try to use his family connections to buy a factory from the social welfare organization. He promises leniency for Mr. Mortazavi, who faces several criminal proceedings over assertions that he played a role in the deaths of three protesters in a substandard prison in 2009.
“These are audio and video, and the tape is clear,” Mr. Ahmadinejad is quoted as saying by the Iranian Students’ News Agency. “If the honorable Parliament speaker sees fit, we can turn over the 24 to 25 hours to you,” he said of the recordings. On Monday, Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency, a mouthpiece for Mr. Ahmadinejad, deepened the split by publishing the audio tape on its Web site.
Ali Larijani, cheered on by the Parliament, which has lost nearly each serious political battle with the president, silenced the room, saying, “Let him tell his words. If there is anything about my family, then let him talk about it.”
Mr. Larijani said it was a “mafia film” and recalled how he had a meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s estranged brother, Davoud. “He said many things against you,” Mr. Larijani told the president, “about economic corruption, about your inner circle and your relations with foreign countries.”
For his part, Fazel Larijani strongly denied any wrongdoing, saying that while he did appear in the clip, the words were not his, but rather had been added in a voiceover. Calling Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Mortazavi “mafialike individuals,” he said he would sue them both for “spreading lies and disturbing public opinion.”
On Monday, several officials criticized Mr. Ahmadinejad and Ali Larijani, accusing them of lacking self-control and bringing shame on the country. “They broke the leader’s heart and gave the friends of the Islamic republic almost a seizure,” said Mojtaba Zolnour, a special consultant to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, the semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency reported. “They provided ammunition for the foreign media on the eve of our election.”
Iceland, Prosecutor of Bankers, Sees Meager Returns
Label: Business
Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times
"Greed is not a crime. But the question is: where does greed lead?" said Olafur Hauksson, a special prosecutor in Reykjavik.
REYKJAVIK, Iceland — As chief of police in a tiny fishing town for 11 years, Olafur Hauksson developed what he thought was a basic understanding of the criminal mind. The typical lawbreaker, he said, recalling his many encounters with small-time criminals, “clearly knows that he crossed the line” and generally sees “the difference between right and wrong.”
Today, the burly, 48-year-old former policeman is struggling with a very different sort of suspect. Reassigned to Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, to lead what has become one of the world’s most sweeping investigation into the bankers whose actions contributed to the global financial crisis in 2008, Mr. Hauksson now faces suspects who “are not aware of when they crossed the line” and “defend their actions every step of the way.”
With the global economy still struggling to recover from the financial maelstrom five years ago, governments around the world have been criticized for largely failing to punish the bankers who were responsible for the calamity. But even here in Iceland, a country of just 320,000 that has gone after financiers with far more vigor than the United States and other countries hit by the crisis, obtaining criminal convictions has proved devilishly difficult.
Public hostility toward bankers is so strong in Iceland that “it is easier to say you are dealing drugs than to say you’re a banker,” said Thorvaldur Sigurjonsson, the former head of trading for Kaupthing, a once high-flying bank that crumbled. He has been called in for questioning by Mr. Hauksson’s office but has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
Yet, in the four years since the Icelandic Parliament passed a law ordering the appointment of an unnamed special prosecutor to investigate those blamed for the country’s spectacular meltdown in 2008, only a handful of bankers have been convicted.
Ministers in a left-leaning coalition government elected after the crash agree that the wheels of justice have ground slowly, but they call for patience, explaining that the process must follow the law, not vengeful passions.
“We are not going after people just to satisfy public anger,” said Steingrimur J. Sigfusson, Iceland’s minister of industry, a former finance minister and leader of the Left-Green Movement that is part of the governing coalition.
Hordur Torfa, a popular singer-songwriter who helped organize protests that forced the previous conservative government to resign, acknowledged that “people are getting impatient” but said they needed to accept that “this is not the French Revolution. I don’t believe in taking bankers out and hanging them or shooting them.”
Others are less patient. “The whole process is far too slow,” said Thorarinn Einarsson, a left-wing activist. “It only shows that ‘banksters’ can get away with doing whatever they want.”
Mr. Hauksson, the special prosecutor, said he was frustrated by the slow pace but thought it vital that his office scrupulously follow legal procedure. “Revenge is not something we want as our main driver in this process. Our work must be proper today and be seen as proper in the future,” he said.
Part of the difficulty in prosecuting bankers, he said, is that the law is often unclear on what constitutes a criminal offense in high finance. “Greed is not a crime,” he noted. “But the question is: where does greed lead?”
Mr. Hauksson said it was often easy to show that bankers violated their own internal rules for lending and other activities, but “as in all cases involving theft or fraud, the most difficult thing is proving intent.”
And there are the bankers themselves. Those who have been brought in for questioning often bristle at being asked to account for their actions. “They are not used to being questioned. These people are not used to finding themselves in this situation,” Mr. Hauksson said. They also hire expensive lawyers.
The special prosecutor’s office initially had only five staff members but now has more than 100 investigators, lawyers and financial experts, and it has relocated to a big new office. It has opened about 100 cases, with more than 120 people now under investigation for possible crimes relating to an Icelandic financial sector that grew so big it dwarfed the rest of the economy.
To help ease Mr. Hauksson’s task, legislators amended the law to allow investigators easy access to confidential bank information, something that previously required a court order.
Parliament also voted to put the country’s prime minister at the time of the banking debacle on trial for negligence before a special tribunal. (A proposal to try his cabinet failed.) Mr. Hauksson was not involved in the case against the former leader, Geir H. Haarde, who last year was found guilty of failing to keep ministers properly informed about the 2008 crisis but was acquitted on more serious charges that could have resulted in a prison sentence.
Concerns About A.D.H.D. Practices and Amphetamine Addiction
Label: Health
Before his addiction, Richard Fee was a popular college class president and aspiring medical student. "You keep giving Adderall to my son, you're going to kill him," said Rick Fee, Richard's father, to one of his son's doctors.
VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.
Matt Eich for The New York Times
MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC Dominion Psychiatric Associates in Virginia Beach, where Richard Fee was treated by Dr. Waldo M. Ellison. After observing Richard and hearing his complaints about concentration, Dr. Ellison diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescribed the stimulant Adderall.
It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.”
It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.
The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D., doctors and other experts said.
Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers. These efforts are facilitated by a segment of doctors who skip established diagnostic procedures, renew prescriptions reflexively and spend too little time with patients to accurately monitor side effects.
Richard Fee’s experience included it all. Conversations with friends and family members and a review of detailed medical records depict an intelligent and articulate young man lying to doctor after doctor, physicians issuing hasty diagnoses, and psychiatrists continuing to prescribe medication — even increasing dosages — despite evidence of his growing addiction and psychiatric breakdown.
Very few people who misuse stimulants devolve into psychotic or suicidal addicts. But even one of Richard’s own physicians, Dr. Charles Parker, characterized his case as a virtual textbook for ways that A.D.H.D. practices can fail patients, particularly young adults. “We have a significant travesty being done in this country with how the diagnosis is being made and the meds are being administered,” said Dr. Parker, a psychiatrist in Virginia Beach. “I think it’s an abnegation of trust. The public needs to say this is totally unacceptable and walk out.”
Young adults are by far the fastest-growing segment of people taking A.D.H.D medications. Nearly 14 million monthly prescriptions for the condition were written for Americans ages 20 to 39 in 2011, two and a half times the 5.6 million just four years before, according to the data company I.M.S. Health. While this rise is generally attributed to the maturing of adolescents who have A.D.H.D. into young adults — combined with a greater recognition of adult A.D.H.D. in general — many experts caution that savvy college graduates, freed of parental oversight, can legally and easily obtain stimulant prescriptions from obliging doctors.
“Any step along the way, someone could have helped him — they were just handing out drugs,” said Richard’s father. Emphasizing that he had no intention of bringing legal action against any of the doctors involved, Mr. Fee said: “People have to know that kids are out there getting these drugs and getting addicted to them. And doctors are helping them do it.”
“...when he was in elementary school he fidgeted, daydreamed and got A’s. he has been an A-B student until mid college when he became scattered and he wandered while reading He never had to study. Presently without medication, his mind thinks most of the time, he procrastinated, he multitasks not finishing in a timely manner.”
Dr. Waldo M. Ellison
Richard Fee initial evaluation
Feb. 5, 2010
Richard began acting strangely soon after moving back home in late 2009, his parents said. He stayed up for days at a time, went from gregarious to grumpy and back, and scrawled compulsively in notebooks. His father, while trying to add Richard to his health insurance policy, learned that he was taking Vyvanse for A.D.H.D.
Richard explained to him that he had been having trouble concentrating while studying for medical school entrance exams the previous year and that he had seen a doctor and received a diagnosis. His father reacted with surprise. Richard had never shown any A.D.H.D. symptoms his entire life, from nursery school through high school, when he was awarded a full academic scholarship to Greensboro College in North Carolina. Mr. Fee also expressed concerns about the safety of his son’s taking daily amphetamines for a condition he might not have.
“The doctor wouldn’t give me anything that’s bad for me,” Mr. Fee recalled his son saying that day. “I’m not buying it on the street corner.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 3, 2013
An earlier version of a quote appearing with the home page presentation of this article misspelled the name of a medication. It is Adderall, not Aderall.
Concerns About A.D.H.D. Practices and Amphetamine Addiction
Label: LifestyleBefore his addiction, Richard Fee was a popular college class president and aspiring medical student. "You keep giving Adderall to my son, you're going to kill him," said Rick Fee, Richard's father, to one of his son's doctors.
VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.
Matt Eich for The New York Times
MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC Dominion Psychiatric Associates in Virginia Beach, where Richard Fee was treated by Dr. Waldo M. Ellison. After observing Richard and hearing his complaints about concentration, Dr. Ellison diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescribed the stimulant Adderall.
It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.”
It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.
The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D., doctors and other experts said.
Medications like Adderall can markedly improve the lives of children and others with the disorder. But the tunnel-like focus the medicines provide has led growing numbers of teenagers and young adults to fake symptoms to obtain steady prescriptions for highly addictive medications that carry serious psychological dangers. These efforts are facilitated by a segment of doctors who skip established diagnostic procedures, renew prescriptions reflexively and spend too little time with patients to accurately monitor side effects.
Richard Fee’s experience included it all. Conversations with friends and family members and a review of detailed medical records depict an intelligent and articulate young man lying to doctor after doctor, physicians issuing hasty diagnoses, and psychiatrists continuing to prescribe medication — even increasing dosages — despite evidence of his growing addiction and psychiatric breakdown.
Very few people who misuse stimulants devolve into psychotic or suicidal addicts. But even one of Richard’s own physicians, Dr. Charles Parker, characterized his case as a virtual textbook for ways that A.D.H.D. practices can fail patients, particularly young adults. “We have a significant travesty being done in this country with how the diagnosis is being made and the meds are being administered,” said Dr. Parker, a psychiatrist in Virginia Beach. “I think it’s an abnegation of trust. The public needs to say this is totally unacceptable and walk out.”
Young adults are by far the fastest-growing segment of people taking A.D.H.D medications. Nearly 14 million monthly prescriptions for the condition were written for Americans ages 20 to 39 in 2011, two and a half times the 5.6 million just four years before, according to the data company I.M.S. Health. While this rise is generally attributed to the maturing of adolescents who have A.D.H.D. into young adults — combined with a greater recognition of adult A.D.H.D. in general — many experts caution that savvy college graduates, freed of parental oversight, can legally and easily obtain stimulant prescriptions from obliging doctors.
“Any step along the way, someone could have helped him — they were just handing out drugs,” said Richard’s father. Emphasizing that he had no intention of bringing legal action against any of the doctors involved, Mr. Fee said: “People have to know that kids are out there getting these drugs and getting addicted to them. And doctors are helping them do it.”
“...when he was in elementary school he fidgeted, daydreamed and got A’s. he has been an A-B student until mid college when he became scattered and he wandered while reading He never had to study. Presently without medication, his mind thinks most of the time, he procrastinated, he multitasks not finishing in a timely manner.”
Dr. Waldo M. Ellison
Richard Fee initial evaluation
Feb. 5, 2010
Richard began acting strangely soon after moving back home in late 2009, his parents said. He stayed up for days at a time, went from gregarious to grumpy and back, and scrawled compulsively in notebooks. His father, while trying to add Richard to his health insurance policy, learned that he was taking Vyvanse for A.D.H.D.
Richard explained to him that he had been having trouble concentrating while studying for medical school entrance exams the previous year and that he had seen a doctor and received a diagnosis. His father reacted with surprise. Richard had never shown any A.D.H.D. symptoms his entire life, from nursery school through high school, when he was awarded a full academic scholarship to Greensboro College in North Carolina. Mr. Fee also expressed concerns about the safety of his son’s taking daily amphetamines for a condition he might not have.
“The doctor wouldn’t give me anything that’s bad for me,” Mr. Fee recalled his son saying that day. “I’m not buying it on the street corner.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 3, 2013
An earlier version of a quote appearing with the home page presentation of this article misspelled the name of a medication. It is Adderall, not Aderall.
Slipstream: Consumer Data Protection Laws, an Ocean Apart
Label: Technology
OVER the years, the United States and Europe have taken different approaches toward protecting people’s personal information. Now the two sides are struggling to bridge that divide.
On this side of the Atlantic, Congress has enacted a patchwork quilt of privacy laws that separately limit the use of Americans’ medical records, credit reports, video rental records and so on. On the other side, the European Union has instituted more of a blanket regulatory system; it has a common directive that gives its citizens certain fundamental rights — like the right to obtain copies of records held about them by companies and institutions — that Americans now lack.
Even so, United States officials maintain that the divergent approaches are equal. “The sum of the parts of U.S. privacy protection is equal to or greater than the single whole of Europe,” says Cameron F. Kerry, general counsel of the Commerce Department. He is overseeing an agency effort to help develop voluntary, enforceable codes of conduct for industry groups, like app developers, whose collection and use of consumer data are now unregulated.
Europe begs to differ.
“Yes, we share the basic idea of privacy,” says Peter Hustinx, Europe’s data protection supervisor. “But there is a huge deficit on the U.S. side.”
Alas, the data-control divide appears to be widening.
A year ago, the European Commission proposed comprehensive reforms to strengthen online privacy rights — changes that could have big repercussions for American technology companies and marketers that operate in the European Union. American officials, trade groups and tech executives have responded by taking frequent treks to Brussels and other cities, where they have urged regulators and legislators to reconsider the one-regulation-fits-all-data approach. What’s at stake, American industry representatives say, is nothing less than a free and commerce-friendly Internet.
“The ecosystem of the Internet is very delicate,” says Kevin Richards, senior vice president of federal government affairs at TechAmerica, a trade group that represents companies like Google and Microsoft. “It’s not wise to have an overly broad, prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach that would hinder or undermine the ability of companies to innovate in a global economy.”
European Union members already have data protection laws in place, based on a directive from 1995 that laid out principles for the collection of personal information. The proposed new rules would strengthen some existing provisions. They would standardize data protections across the 27 member states. They would also provide some new rights, such as “data portability” — the right of consumers to easily transfer their text files, photographs and videos from one social network, or e-mail or cloud storage service, to another. And they would subject companies that violate the rules to penalties of up to 2 percent of their annual global revenue.
Asked for comment, Viviane Reding, the vice president of the European Commission and the architect of the proposed regulation, said in a statement: “The main problem is that our rules predate the digital age and it became increasingly clear in recent years that they needed an update.” She continued: “That is why I have proposed a root-and-branch reform of the E.U.’s data protection rules — currently under discussion in the European Parliament and the Council of the E.U. — that will both protect citizens’ rights and facilitate business in the digital age.”
BUT some provisions seem too rigid to United States officials and trade groups. They argue that the American approach — sector-specific privacy laws, in addition to industry self-regulation and enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission — is more nimble.
“We hope that Europe will move in the direction of those multistakeholder standards, and not standards which are not flexible and don’t move at Internet speed,” says Mr. Kerry, who has taken at least four trips to European cities in the last year to discuss these issues.
From the perspective of some European legislators, however, United States representatives seem more interested in protecting commerce than consumers. The full-court American effort may have backfired, they say, pushing some European officials toward even broader measures. Last month, Jan Philipp Albrecht, a representative of the European Parliament who reviewed the draft regulation, proposed additional rights for citizens — like the right not to be subject to consumer profiling.
“My impression is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Commerce Department are mostly just following the interests of Silicon Valley,” he says. “This leads to heavy pressure on the European regulator, I can say.”
But Mr. Kerry says the United States must make its views known if the systems are to work in concert.
“I know that some people have raised eyebrows at our involvement; I make no apologies,” Mr. Kerry says. “We in the United States and countries and businesses around the world are stakeholders in this process. This has an important impact on the global economy.”
The solution to this trans-Atlantic clash may simply be American ingenuity.
Last year, President Barack Obama proposed a “Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” that would give Americans many of the same baseline protections that the draft European rule proposes to reinforce. These include the right of access to records that companies hold about them, the right to correct those records and the right to have limits on the personal data that companies collect and keep. Administration officials said they would work with Congress on legislation based on those rights and to extend oversight to industries not currently covered by federal privacy laws.
A coalition of more than a dozen American advocacy groups said it would send a letter on Monday to senior Obama administration officials, seeking a meeting to ensure that American policy makers’ efforts in Europe “are not averse to the views expressed by the president.” The coalition includes the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy.
“Does the Obama administration really want to be on the opposite side of the European effort to upgrade and modernize its privacy law which is at its core about the protection of a fundamental freedom?” asks Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
European officials hold out hope that Congress will enact baseline consumer privacy protections for Americans.
“This development — which is much welcomed in Europe — shows that we have much in common,” Ms. Reding of the European Commission said in her statement, speaking of the privacy bill of rights. “Convergence is springing up and synergies are possible.”
Letter From Washington: A Rocky Road to Reforming Immigration
Label: World
WASHINGTON — Immigration reform is having a “Kumbaya” moment, with support from the White House, a bipartisan contingent in Congress, business and labor.
The Republicans are petrified after their dismal showing among the fastest-growing slices of the electorate, Hispanics and Asians; President Barack Obama wants to reward the loyalty of those voters. Business and labor, as well as many politicians, want to fix a totally dysfunctional system. There are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants, 5 percent of the work force. Many of these people live in fear of discovery, while jobs go unfilled in some areas.
Hold the Champagne. When it comes to immigration laws, the concept is always easier than the reality. Change failed to happen six years ago, despite the push from the high-powered coalition led by President George W. Bush and Senators John McCain and Edward M. Kennedy. The dynamics are more favorable today. Still, the same obstacles persist; the powerful countervailing considerations include these issues:
A predicament on citizenship There’s a fairly broad consensus for ending the illegal status of the undocumented. The White House, Hispanic groups and most Senate supporters insist that any overhaul must lead to a pathway to citizenship.
That approach, however, faces great resistance. Some lawmakers demand that any move toward citizenship must come second to solving the border-security problem, at a minimum. For some, this is a political cover; under the Obama administration, resources for border security have been increased sharply, including the use of drones. And deportations of undocumented immigrants are at a record high.
A border-security trigger is realistic if it includes quantifiable goals, like the number of new Border Patrol agents, the amount of resources allocated and the new technologies utilized. It isn’t reasonable if it requires meeting an amorphous standard like “operational control” of a border that is always changing.
Hispanic groups assert that the real motive for such demands is to unreasonably stretch out any possibility of granting citizenship.
“There would be a backlash if citizenship is delayed for 15 or 20 years,” warns Gary M. Segura, a Stanford University professor and co-founder of Latino Decisions, the leading research organization on Hispanic public opinion.
The future of immigration policy Equally contentious is the question of future flows of immigrants. One proposal would link the number of legal immigrants to economic conditions: More would be let in when times are good, fewer in tougher times. That sounds easier than it is. There will be clashes over how great a priority should be given to those with high-tech skills or to agriculture workers or to family reunification. Small businesses will rebel against any costly verification plan.
Most independent studies show that immigration is a decided economic plus, bringing in revenue and increasing productivity and innovation.
Yet the arguments of the populist right may resonate more as the debate heats up. NumbersUSA, a leading anti-immigration group, is reviving charges that an immigration overhaul would drive down wages for middle- and low- income workers. Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who authored anti-immigration measures in several states and the Republican Party’s platform position on the issue last summer, charges that taxpayers would be hit with $2.6 trillion in added food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, which are government health care programs, and in welfare costs. That estimate is refuted by reliable studies; it still cuts.
The House Republican leadership J. Dennis Hastert, a former Republican speaker of the House, decreed that any bill must command majority support among majority party members. Last month, the House speaker, John A. Boehner, waived the rule twice to pass measures, one avoiding the so-called fiscal cliff and another providing aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy.
The speaker, along with most party leaders, understands his party’s serious difficulties with Hispanic voters and fears making matters worse by blocking an overhaul. Two of the most virulent anti-immigration Republicans in the House, Lamar Smith of Texas and Steve King of Iowa, no longer hold important committee chairmanships.
Yet with anti-immigration sentiment still running high among many Republican rank-and-file voters, it’s tough to imagine a majority of the party’s House members backing a comprehensive bill, even if, as is certain, the Senate goes first. Mr. Boehner’s only option might be to let a bill pass primarily with Democratic votes.
To do that, he would need the support of the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, and the whip, Kevin McCarthy; there’s no shrewder politician than Mr. McCarthy, who is always attuned to the party’s base. He’s also from California, where, since Governor Pete Wilson played the anti-immigration card in 1994, the Democrats completely dominate politics.
The lack of a skilled deal maker The successful, if flawed, passage of Mr. Obama’s health care measure probably wouldn’t have been possible without the savvy hand of Rahm Emanuel, who was the White House chief of staff. Congressional Democrats and some outside advocates see no Emanuel counterpart in the current White House; privately, some say they would like the White House to enlist a special envoy — perhaps Henry G. Cisneros, former housing secretary and former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, or Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader — to shepherd legislation.
Egos and tensions already are surfacing among supporters of an overhaul; Republicans don’t trust the White House, and some Democrats worry that Marco Rubio, the ambitious young Republican senator from Florida, will look for a reason to peel off as he comes under pressure from his party’s right wing. There is no senator today who possesses Mr. Kennedy’s skill for navigating these shoals.
It’s still a slightly better bet that a big immigration bill will be enacted in this Congress. Getting there will be ugly, and the measure will seem to die more than once as it battles these cross-pressures.
Strategies: World Economy Is Far From Safe, a Canadian Economist Says
Label: Business
WHEN you see a car being driven firmly within its lane and well under the speed limit, there’s nothing to worry about.
Or is there?
If you’re David A. Rosenberg, the glass-half-empty economist, there most certainly is. He says the world economy is like that car. And where others see stability and recovery, he sees “a car being driven by a drunk, lurching from side to side on the road, narrowly avoiding the ditches each time.”
At this particular moment, he says, the car happens to be in the middle of the road. But he can’t help but ask, “Is that because the driver has sobered up, or is it because the car is just passing through the middle on its way to the ditch on the other side?”
Mr. Rosenberg isn’t certain of the answer. But despite the cheer pervading the stock market and the relatively upbeat perspective of most economists, he says he isn’t convinced that the car will remain safely out of those ditches.
Formerly the chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch, and now proudly back in his native Canada as chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff in Toronto, Mr. Rosenberg writes a market newsletter that is always provocative, often cantankerous and frequently out of step with the Wall Street consensus. He has been called a “permabear,” a label that he says is exaggerated but not entirely without merit.
“I’d say I’m as pragmatic as possible and not locked into one position,” he says, “but I do understand that I have a much better record forecasting rain than in predicting the return of sunshine.”
His record bears that out. Mr. Rosenberg correctly called the start of the last two recessions. But he was late in recognizing the strength of what has become a long bull market. In May 2009, when the stock market was in an early stage of its climb, his worries about the economy made him resolutely bearish on stocks. “I’d lock in my gains right now,” he told me then.
But his clients have generally done very well if they’ve followed his cautious advice, which called for buying fixed-income securities early in the bond market’s long boom. His mantra is “safety and income at a reasonable price.”
For a gimlet-eyed perspective on the current stock market joy, I called him last week and asked him what, exactly, has been propelling shares higher.
His answer, in two words, was “the Fed” — the Federal Reserve and its monthly $85 billion purchases of bonds and mortgage-backed securities, which are being piled on top of a balance sheet that swelled to a gargantuan $3 trillion last week.
Other analysts have pointed to a recent surge in stock mutual fund purchases by individuals, as opposed to the big institutional investors like pension funds, endowments and other money managers. The earnings season has been reasonably strong, and, at least in recent weeks, there has been no outright global economic disaster emanating from Washington, the euro zone, Tokyo or the oil fields of the Middle East.
These factors are all relevant, he allows, but they pale next to the direct and powerful relationship between the growth of the Fed’s balance sheet and the stock market.
The Fed’s control of short-term interest rates has always had a major impact on the markets, and the adage “Don’t fight the Fed” is a bit of Wall Street wisdom that has stood up for decades. But since the Fed lowered its benchmark Fed funds rate to near zero in December 2008, short-term rates have ceased to be a meaningful indicator because they cannot be lowered any further.
Instead, to provide further monetary stimulus to the economy, the Fed has embarked on a series of quantitative-easing measures — direct purchases of financial assets.
Mr. Rosenberg says his calculations show that there is now an 85 percent correlation between the growth of that Fed balance sheet and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. If that relationship continues — and he’s not certain that it will — the market could keep rallying, though he says he believes it’s due for a correction. On Wednesday, the Fed reiterated its pledge to keep interest rates low and to keep making asset purchases for what effectively will be many months to come.
The Fed’s expansionary policies are contingent on weakness in the labor market and the overall economy. Well, the unemployment rate in January rose to 7.9 percent, the Labor Department announced on Friday. And the Fed says that as long as inflation is below 2.5 percent — and it is well below that level now — and unemployment is above 6.5 percent, it will keep rates ultralow. In addition, the gross domestic product declined at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the last quarter of 2012, the first decline recorded since 2009.
MR. ROSENBERG says he does not believe that we are in a recession now but that we are very close to one. “Anemic growth is my baseline scenario,” he says. A shock could undermine the economy. And there is no assurance, of course, that the Fed can keep propping up equity asset prices.
So he advises that for diversification alone, investors should keep holding onto bonds and other carefully selected fixed-income instruments; in addition, there is a great likelihood that inflation will stay low and longer-term rates will be constrained, which would be beneficial for fixed-income prices.
He recommends playing the equity markets cautiously by seeking high-dividend-paying stocks of well-managed companies. At the moment, he says, those include Blackstone, the asset manager; Merck, the drug maker; and Yahoo, the Internet portal, among United States stocks. And he suggests that United States citizens hedge their bets by keeping 20 percent of their assets in Canada, which, he says, is fiscally sound and is likely to have higher growth and lower inflation than its southern neighbor. He advises holding Brookfield Infrastructure, which owns and manages utilities, energy and timber assets, and Crescent Point Energy, an oil and gas exploration company.
Above all else, he says, preserve your assets and your safety. Watch out for reckless behavior in the economy as well as on the roads. You never know what is about to come hurtling your way.
Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90
Label: Health
Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Lafayette, Ga. He was 90.
The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”
“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”
Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.
When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.
“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”
In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”
He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”
Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.
Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.
Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.
“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”
Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90
Label: Lifestyle
Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Lafayette, Ga. He was 90.
The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”
“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”
Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.
When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.
“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”
In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”
He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”
Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.
Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.
Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.
“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Copyright © second news. All rights reserved.
Design 
And Business Directories
