| Subcribe via RSS
Obama ridicules idea of second spot on a Clinton ticket … McCain aims to ignite campaign with money, bio and issues tours … New Philadelphia mayor, who is black, sticks with early endorsement of Clinton
“Girls Gone Wild” founder Joe Francis is being released from a Nevada jail so he can return to Florida to face charges related to the filming of underage girls.
Dwyane Wade’s season with the Miami Heat is over. Heat coach Pat Riley announced Monday that Wade, the All-Star guard and 2006 NBA finals MVP who has battled left knee pain throughout the season, will not play in Miami’s final 21 games this year. “I think it’s time,” Riley said.
Al-Qaeda may be shifting tactics back to the big, headline grabbing attacks in Iraq that helped plunge the country into chaos, a senior US commander said Monday.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the crusading politician who built his career on rooting out corruption, apologized Monday after he was accused of involvement in a prostitution ring. He did not elaborate on the scandal, which drew calls for his resignation.
Gasoline prices were poised Monday to set a new record at the pump, having surged to within half a cent of their record high of $3.227 a gallon. Oil prices, meanwhile, surged above $108 to a new inflation-adjusted record and their fifth new high in the last six sessions on an upbeat report on wholesale inventories.
Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero won re-election Sunday in a clear endorsement of a record of social change including the legalization of gay marriage and on-demand divorce, reforms once unthinkable in overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Spain.
Zapatero also shifted Spanish foreign policy by pulling troops from Iraq in his first term, which he won three days after Islamic militants killed 191 people in a string of bombings against commuter trains.
Voters handed Zapatero his second term despite worries about a slumping economy, immigration and resurgent Basque separatists, blamed for gunning down a member of the prime minister’s party on Friday — timing that recalled the March 11, 2004 Madrid attacks.
With 99.4 percent of the vote counted, Zapatero’s Socialist party had 43.7 percent, versus 40.1 percent for the conservative Popular Party, according to the Interior Ministry.
In his next term, Zapatero’s main task will be to reboot the once booming but now slowing economy, shaken by the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the U.S. and a cooling construction sector.
“The Spanish people have spoken clearly and decided to start a new era,” Zapatero told euphoric supporters outside the party’s headquarters in Madrid. “I will govern with a firm but open hand … I will govern for all, but do so thinking most of all of those in need.”
While Zapatero’s Socialist party picked up seats in the lower house, it fell short of a majority and will have to form some sort of an alliance with smaller regional parties in order to govern.
The opposition conservatives conceded defeat, but took solace from the fact their party also picked up seats, with both parties gaining at the expense of smaller leftist and regional groups.
“I called the candidate of the Socialist party and wished him luck for the good of Spain,” conservative candidate Mariano Rajoy told supporters in Madrid. A large crowd of flag-waving supporters cheered loudly, making it difficult for him to speak.
Zapatero paid tribute to the slain politician, Isaias Carrasco, saying he should have been celebrating the victory with his family. Carrasco’s killing, blamed on the Basque group ETA, jolted Spaniards and prompted both parties to cancel final campaign appearances.
Some in Spain had predicted the killing might prompt a wave of sympathy and a boost at the polls for Zapatero’s party, especially after the Socialist politician’s 20-year-old daughter Sandra made an emotional appeal Saturday for people to defy ETA by turning out to vote en masse.
For Rajoy, his rival in Sunday’s vote and in 2004, it was the second consecutive defeat, one likely to increase pressure on him to step down as party chief.
“I thought Rajoy would do better, he speaks with such conviction. I’m surprised he fell behind,” said Jose Eguren, a 29-year-old security guard in the Basque city of Bilbao.
Many conservatives consider Zapatero’s 2004 victory a fluke, and saw Sunday’s vote as their chance to correct it. The prime minister’s victory was seen as finally giving him a legitimacy that critics say he has lacked.
He won in 2004 amid a wave of voter outrage at the ruling conservatives, who blamed the attacks on ETA even as evidence of Islamic involvement mounted. The tactics were widely seen as a bid to deflect perceptions that the killings were al-Qaida’s revenge for the government’s deeply unpopular support of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Sunday’s results showed the Socialists on their way to winning 169 seats in the 350-seat lower house, up from the current 164 but shy of the 176 seats needed for an outright majority. The Popular Party was also shown picking up seats, raising its total from 148 to 154.
Although he made a dramatic entrance with the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, Zapatero has since taken a back seat on the international stage. Some say his reticence to make a bigger impression has weakened Spain’s standing abroad. Others believe he may tend to foreign affairs with more emphasis this time round.
The campaign was marked by acrimony, with Rajoy hammering Zapatero on everything from immigration to the economy.
In two televised debates between the men, Rajoy used a form of the word “liar” to describe Zapatero more than 30 times; he blamed Zapatero for not doing enough to spur the economy, which is cooling amid rising unemployment and an end to a boom in the construction sector.
Rajoy vowed to make immigrants sign a contract obliging them to respect Spanish customs and learn the language, a position Zapatero’s party called xenophobic. The candidates also clashed on Zapatero’s willingness to grant more self-rule to Spain’s semiautonomous regions. Conservatives warn that will tear the nation apart.
Under the Socialists Spain became the third country to legalize gay marriage and thousands of same-sex couples have wed since the law took effect in July 2005, according to the Justice Ministry.
The government also pushed through laws including fast-track divorce and easier terms for medically assisted fertilization.
All of these issues have left Spain deeply polarized and these divisions will not go away soon, said Enrique Monreal, 35, a publishing company employee.
“It will take several years for things to calm down. Right now it is so tense you are nervous even talking to your neighbor,” Monreal said outside a polling station in Madrid.
___
AP correspondents Daniel Woolls and Ciaran Giles in Madrid, and Harold Heckle in Bilbao contributed to this report.
The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show. In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the “burn” rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.
Beyond 2008, working with “best-case” and “realistic-moderate” scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion — or more — by 2017.
Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs.
Variations in such estimates stem from the sliding scales of assumptions, scenarios and budget items that are counted. But whatever the estimate, the cost will be huge, the auditors of the Government Accountability Office say.
In a Jan. 30 report to Congress, the GAO observed that the U.S. will be committing “significant” future resources to the wars, “requiring decision makers to consider difficult trade-offs as the nation faces an increasing long-range fiscal challenge.”
These numbers don’t include the war’s cost to the rest of the world. In Iraq itself, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion — with its devastating air bombardments — and the looting and arson that followed, severely damaged electricity and other utilities, the oil industry, countless factories, hospitals, schools and other underpinnings of an economy.
No one has tried to calculate the economic damage done to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.
In their book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” Stiglitz, of Columbia University, and Bilmes, of Harvard, report the two wars will have cost the U.S. budget $845 billion in 2007 dollars by next Sept. 30, end of fiscal year 2008, assuming Congress fully funds Bush administration requests. That counts not just military operations, but embassy costs, reconstruction and other war-related expenses.
That total far surpasses the $670 billion in 2007 dollars the Congressional Research Service says was the U.S. price tag for the 12-year Vietnam War.
Although American military and Iraqi civilian casualties have declined in recent months, the rate of spending has shot up. A fully funded 2008 war budget will be 155 percent higher than 2004’s, the CBO reports.
The reasons are numerous: the “surge” of additional U.S. units into Iraq; rising fuel costs; fattened bonuses to attract re-enlistments; and particularly the need to “reset,” that is, repair or replace worn-out, destroyed or damaged military equipment. Almost $17 billion is appropriated this year for advanced armored vehicles to protect troops against roadside bombs.
Looking ahead, both the CBO and Stiglitz-Bilmes construct two scenarios, one in which U.S. troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan drop sharply and early — to 30,000 by late 2009 for the CBO, and to 55,000 by 2012 for Stiglitz-Bilmes — and a second in which the drawdown is more gradual.
Significantly, the two studies view different time frames, the CBO calculating possible costs met in the next 10 years, while Stiglitz and Bilmes also include costs incurred during that period but paid for later, such as equipment replaced in post-2017 budgets.
This factor figures most in the category of veterans’ medical care and disability payments, where the CBO foresees $9 billion to $13 billion in costs by 2017. Stiglitz and Bilmes, meanwhile, project $422 billion to $717 billion in costs over the lifetime of soldiers who by 2017 are wounded or otherwise mentally or physically disabled by the wars.
“The CBO is only looking 10 years out on everything,” Bilmes noted in an interview.
For its part, a CBO critique suggested that Bilmes and Stiglitz might be overstating the expense of treating veterans’ brain injuries, a costly category.
The two economists say their calculations are conservative, because they don’t encompass many “hidden” items in the U.S. budget. Their basic projections also exclude the potentially huge debt-service cost — on which CBO approximately agrees — and the cost to the U.S. economy of global oil prices that have quadrupled since 2003, an increase analysts blame partly on the Iraq upheaval.
Estimating all economic and social costs might push the U.S. war bill up toward $5 trillion by 2017, they say.
Their book already figures in the stay-or-leave debate over Iraq.
When Stiglitz testified on Feb. 28 before the congressional Joint Economic Committee, the ranking Republican, New Jersey’s Rep. Jim Saxton, complained that such projections are too imprecise to help determine relative costs and benefits of the Iraq war.
Saxton said a rapid U.S. pullout could lead to full-scale civil war and Iranian domination of Iraq, “enormous costs” that he said should be weighed in any calculation.