DebateGate

 Global Stocks, Dollar Tumble as Auto Bailout Fails; GM Slumps


By Chen Shiyin and Adam Haigh

Dec. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Stocks tumbled around the world and the dollar slumped after the Senate rejected a bailout for American automakers, threatening to deepen the global recession. Treasuries rallied and yields fell to record lows.

The MSCI World Index lost 1.3 percent to 880.41 as of 9:43 a.m. in London after senators voted down a bill to provide $14 billion of emergency funds for General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC. GM plunged 28 percent in Germany, while Honda Motor Co. and Daimler AG sank more than 6 percent. The dollar fell to a 13-year low against the yen, while the cost of protecting corporate bonds against default soared. Metals and crude oil slumped.

“The markets are still guided by fear,” said Robert Drijkoningen, The Hague-based head of the multi-asset group at ING Investment Management, which has $488 billion under management. “The markets are in a very dire situation and are in a very risk- averse situation. The short-term is bleak,” he said on Bloomberg Television.

Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures sank 3.9 percent, indicating the benchmark for U.S. equities will extend yesterday’s 2.9 percent drop. Europe’s Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index lost 3.3 percent, while the MSCI Asia Pacific Index fell 3.9 percent.

“It’s over with,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on the Senate floor in Washington last night. “I dread looking at Wall Street tomorrow. It’s not going to be a pleasant sight.”

‘Betrayed Again’

The MSCI Emerging Markets Index lost 3.2 percent, extending its 2008 drop to 56 percent. China’s CSI 300 Index sank 4.2 percent after a government official said growth will slow more sharply next quarter.

The MSCI World Index of 23 developed markets has lost 45 percent this year, its worst annual retreat on record, as writedowns and credit losses neared $1 trillion amid the worsening financial crisis. Spending plans by governments from the U.S. to Australia spurred a 14 percent rally in the index since Nov. 20.

The S&P 500 earlier this week had marked a technical end to a 14-month bear market, extending its rebound from an 11-year low last month to as much as 21 percent, as President-elect Barack Obama stepped up efforts to pull the economy out of a recession.

“Investors have been betrayed again by U.S. politicians,” said Yasuhiro Miyata, who helps manage about $109 billion at DIAM Co. in Tokyo. “Even with the knowledge that we are in the midst of a crisis, they were unable to come to an agreement and investors have decided to abandon ship.”

GM, Ford, BMW

GM slid 28 percent to $2.98, while Ford Motor Co. lost 9.3 percent to $2.63. Daimler sank 6.5 percent to 23.49 euros and Bayerische Motoren Werke AG fell 4.4 percent to 21.46 euros.

The U.S. is the No. 1 market for BMW and the second-biggest for Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz. Both carmakers have factories there, and while they and other German brands control about 7 percent of the American market, they compete more with each other than with GM and Ford.

Honda, Japan’s second-largest automaker, tumbled 12 percent to 1,921 yen, the largest drop since Oct. 31. Hyundai Motor Co., South Korea’s No. 1 automaker, dropped 9.3 percent to 42,000 won.

“A potential failure in U.S. automakers will have immediate reverberations throughout the U.S. economy, which will affect demand for Asian products and add to recessionary pressures,” said Shane Oliver, Sydney-based head of investment strategy at AMP Capital Investors, which has $81 billion.

Denso Corp., the world’s biggest listed auto-parts maker, plunged 12 percent to 1,430 yen. Aisin Seiki Co., Japan’s largest maker of car transmissions, sank 13 percent to 1,116 yen.

Dollar, Platinum

The U.S. dollar weakened to 88.53 against the yen, the lowest since Aug. 2, 1995, before trading at 89.65 in London. Credit- default swaps, contracts conceived to protect bondholders against default, on the Markit iTraxx Europe index of 125 companies with investment-grade ratings increased 12.5 basis points to 212, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. prices in London. That’s up from about 50 basis points at the start of the year.

Platinum, used to make catalytic converters for car and truck exhaust systems, fell as much as 3.4 percent in London, while gold slipped from its highest in more than two weeks. Crude oil dropped as much as 5.9 percent, trimming yesterday’s 10 percent rally.

Yields on 10-year Treasury notes fell to 2.48 percent, the lowest level since 1954.

“Treasuries are clearly showing signs of flight to quality as people generally expected the bailout to succeed,” said Kevin Yang, who helps oversee about $1 billion of U.S. bonds in Taipei at Shinkong Life Insurance Co. “Yields will go lower in the very short-term as stocks test new lows.”

‘Lose Your Job’

Canon Inc., the world’s biggest digital-camera maker, declined 5.8 percent to 2,590 yen. The number of Americans filing first-time claims for unemployment benefits surged to the highest level since November 1982, a report showed yesterday.

“If you lose your job, you don’t spend. If you see others lose their jobs, you don’t spend either,” said Daphne Roth, the Singapore-based head of equity research at ABN Amro Private Bank, which manages about $27 billion of Asian assets.

China’s growth will slow more sharply in the first quarter of 2009 before stabilizing and then recovering, Liu He, vice minister of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs said in Beijing today. Retail sales rose 20.8 percent in November, the slowest pace in nine months, the National Bureau of Statistics also said today. China Mobile, the world’s biggest phone company by value, lost 4.7 percent to HK$78.50.

To contact the reporters for this story: Chen Shiyin in Singapore at schen37@bloomberg.net; Adam Haigh in London at ahaigh1@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: December 12, 2008 04:46 EST

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aC_bejd4WGqI&refer=home

Good
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE4BA0UV20081211

Executions at 14-year low as costs rise
Thu Dec 11, 2008 6:55am EST

By Ed Stoddard

DALLAS (Reuters) - The number of executions in the United States fell to a 14-year low of 37 in 2008 as social concerns about the death penalty and its financial costs rise, the Death Penalty Information Center said on Thursday.

It was the third straight year of declining executions and the trend looked set to continue as the number of death sentences handed down fall, the non-partisan group said.

"Courts, legislatures and the public are increasingly skeptical about the death penalty, whether those concerns are based on innocence, inadequate legal representation, costs, or a general feeling that the system isn't fair," said Richard Dieter, Executive Director of the Washington-based group.

No further executions are scheduled this year.

The declines in 2007 and 2008 had widely been attributed to a seven-month moratorium on executions imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court as it heard a challenge to the three-drug cocktail used in lethal injections, the most common method of execution. That challenge was rejected in April.

But Dieter said, "We were surprised that the surge in executions that we expected after (the lifting of the moratorium) did not happen."

High legal and security costs are a key factor behind a rethink of the death penalty in many of the 36 U.S. states that still sanction it -- especially with the United States gripped by a deepening recession.

The report said by one estimate each of the five executions in Maryland in the past three decades cost about $37 million.

"Both New York and New Jersey recently abandoned the death penalty after weighing the merits of a system in which tens of millions of dollars were being spent with virtually nothing to show for it," the report said.

Condemned prisoners in America spend an average of over 12 years on death row between sentencing and execution, a lengthy period that drives up legal costs amid repeated appeals.

EXPENSIVE "LUXURY" IN TOUGH TIMES

The long drawn-out appeals process can also take a toll on the families of victims and there are growing concerns about fairness, the possibility of wrongful convictions, and racial bias in sentencing.

Many studies have shown that a black person convicted of murdering a white person is more likely to be condemned to death than a white person who killed someone who is black.

Four death row inmates were exonerated this year, bringing to 130 the number of people who have been sentenced to death and later cleared. However, no court has found that an innocent person was wrongfully executed in the past three decades.

Two other trends were noted which are not simply explained by falling rates of violent crime: a sharp drop in the number of death sentences being handed down in favor of life jail terms and capital punishment's skewed regional distribution.

Ohio was the only state outside of the South this year to carry out an execution and almost half of all U.S. executions in 2008 were carried out in Texas.

Texas is in a death penalty league of its own with 423 executions since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a temporary ban on the practice. Virginia is second at 102 followed by Oklahoma at 88.

But even in Texas Dieter said only 11 death sentences were handed down in 2008 compared to 37 in 2002.

"DPIC estimates that the number of people sentenced to death in 2008 will be 111, the lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976," the report said.

Most polls consistently show a majority of Americans in favor of capital punishment though the numbers tend to be below the peaks of close to 80 percent reached in the mid-1990s.

The United States is one of only a handful of democracies which still carries out the death penalty. Amnesty International in April ranked the United States fifth in the world in the number of executions in 2007, behind China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

(Editing by David Storey)

© Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/29/MN5C147QAB.DTL&type=health


Internet searching stimulates brain, study says

Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer


Can Googling delay the onset of dementia?

A new UCLA study, part of the growing research into the effects of technology on the brain, shows that searching the Internet may keep older brains agile - it's like taking your brain for a walk.


It's too early to conclude that technology will help vanquish Alzheimer's disease, but "our study shows that when your brain is on Google, your neural circuitry changes extensively," said psychiatrist Gary Small, director of UCLA's Memory & Aging Research Center.

The new study, which will be published next month in the Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, comes at a time when medical experts are forecasting that Alzheimer's cases will quadruple by 2050. In response to such projections, "brain-gyms" and memory-building computer programs have proliferated.

The subjects in Small's nine-month study were 24 neurologically normal volunteers ages 55 to 76, with similar education levels. They were assigned two tasks: to read book-like text on computer screens and to perform Internet searches.

While doing so, their brains were scanned inside a specially equipped magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. Half the group was familiar with Internet searching; the other half was not.

Subjects viewed simulated Web pages through goggles, then, using a finger pad to approximate an online search, pressed one of three response buttons to control the cursor. For the book reading task, they pressed a button to advance text pages.

To increase their motivation, subjects were told in advance that they would be assessed for their knowledge of the topics they researched. Topics included the benefits of eating chocolate, planning a trip to the Galapagos and how to choose a car.

The MRI results showed that both text reading and Internet searching stimulated the regions of the brain controlling language, reading, memory and vision. But the Internet search lit up more areas of the brain, additionally activating the regions controlling complex reasoning and decision making. The increased brain activity, which is probably due to the many rapid choices such searches involve, suggests that subjects had a richer sensory experience and heightened attention.

By focusing on older users, Small said, he aimed to fill a gap in brain research. Few studies have looked at the effects of technology on these "digital immigrants," who began using computers later in life than their younger counterparts, the "digital natives." Small's study was started as part of the research for his latest book, "iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind."

"Our findings point to an association between routine Internet searching and neural circuitry activation in middle-aged and older adults," the study said. "Further study will elucidate both the potential positive and negative influences of these technologies on the aging brain."

The implications are provocative, particularly because it is well known that developments in technology affect human behavior.

"People who are more adept with the technology will be more successful in society, and their offspring will be more likely to excel," Small told The Chronicle.

Some researchers, including Kevin Lee, deputy executive director of the Ellison Medical Foundation, which funds research on aging, say such statements go too far.

"The printed book and typewriters may change our brains, individually, over a lifetime," Lee said. "But whether using computers would change our genetic makeup is something that would only happen over thousands of years."

Small acknowledges that our increasing dependence on technology is controversial.

"It's not all good," he said. "We know that a teenager does not have the empathy skills of a middle-ager. What will happen if they play video games endlessly?"

The study, he hopes, will be a steppingstone.

"The brain is complicated, and the technology is complicated - it's not all good, it's not all bad, but it definitely has an impact on our lives," Small said.

"We need to acknowledge that and be thoughtful about our relationship with technology so it enhances our lives and our relationships with other people."

She was working and someone came in and stabbed her. It's work-related.

I've tried, hasn't worked for me.

I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq
By Matthew Alexander
Sunday, November 30, 2008; B01

I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.

I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.

Violence was at its peak during my five-month tour in Iraq. In February 2006, the month before I arrived, Zarqawi's forces (members of Iraq's Sunni minority) blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq's majority Shiites, and unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Reprisal killings became a daily occurrence, and suicide bombings were as common as car accidents. It felt as if the whole country was being blown to bits.

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

But Zarqawi's death wasn't enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there's the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material -- including passages copied verbatim from the Army's unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army's own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don't even want the public to hear them.

My experiences have landed me in the middle of another war -- one even more important than the Iraq conflict. The war after the war is a fight about who we are as Americans. Murderers like Zarqawi can kill us, but they can't force us to change who we are. We can only do that to ourselves. One day, when my grandkids sit on my knee and ask me about the war, I'll say to them, "Which one?"

Americans, including officers like myself, must fight to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them. Other interrogators are also speaking out, including some former members of the military, the FBI and the CIA who met last summer to condemn torture and have spoken before Congress -- at considerable personal risk.

We're told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations -- and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.

I'm actually quite optimistic these days, in no small measure because President-elect Barack Obama has promised to outlaw the practice of torture throughout our government. But until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning. Zarqawi is dead, but he has still forced us to show the world that we do not adhere to the principles we say we cherish. We're better than that. We're smarter, too.


Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of "How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq." He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802242_pf.html

I love that story, Henny, thanks!