EU Reacts on Greeks Debt Crisis

European leaders are facing a moment of truth at a Thursday summit, as markets press them to come up with a financial safety net for Greece — with help from the International Monetary Fund — to stop the euro's slide and keep debt crises from afflicting more eurozone countries.
The euro hit a 10-month low against the U.S. dollar on Wednesday as leading credit ratings agency Fitch Ratings downgraded Portugal's debt, turning up the volume on investor fears that Europe's currency union has no way to shore up members with troubled economies.
EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso called on European governments to end dithering over what to do and agree on a detailed plan of financial help for Greece. He said their response at a two-day meeting would be a test of "their commitment to European and monetary union."
But Germany has blocked efforts by European nations to come up with a bailout program, saying Greece isn't asking for help, isn't on the verge of bankruptcy and should turn to the IMF if it reaches a point where it can't borrow from markets. France and some EU officials were opposed to IMF involvement.
European diplomats said frantic negotiations Wednesday could see both France and Germany soften their views and find a solution that includes the IMF and European Union sharing the burden of a financial rescue. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said Spain's Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is heading efforts to get the 16 eurozone nations to meet separately Thursday on the crisis surrounding Greece, along with the meeting by all 27 EU member governments.
Eurozone leaders have only met once for a summit before at the height of the banking crisis in 2008. "He is pushing hard for this and we think it is going to happen," said the diplomat.
EU President Herman Van Rompuy is also asking for a eurozone summit, said another EU official. He met French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris on Wednesday, Sarkozy's office said.
Greece's debt crisis has undermined the euro by showing that the rules supporting it have not prevented governments from overspending and running up large deficits and debt loads. Athens' woes have led to fears other eurozone countries with troubled finances, such as Portugal and Spain, will also come under pressure from the bond market and find themselves unable to borrow at acceptable costs.
Investors doubts that Greece will pay its debts are leading markets to demand higher interest rates when Athens sells government bonds — rates the government says it can't go on paying.
Worries the crisis is exposing fundamental weaknesses in the euro weighed on its exchange rate, which was down 1 percent to $1.3347. It had earlier fallen to $1.3335, its lowest since May.
"The time has come to make a decision," said Jean Pisani-Ferry, an economist at the Bruegel think tank. "The eurozone doesn't have a crisis management regime ... Now it has to be done."
Germany remains reluctant to put its taxpayers' money on the line to plug debt problems Greece caused with years of overspending and faking budget figures. A senior government official in Berlin said "for us, there is no decision at this summit on aid to Greece."
He said aid "comes into question only as a last resort" when Greece has exhausted all efforts to raise money from bond markets.
The German government wants the IMF to be "significantly involved" in any bailout because it believes that it could face a legal challenge from the country's constitutional court unless it can prove that that any European or German aid is the last option left to Greece.
The European Commission's Barroso tried to sway them, saying a bailout program would be "a safety net to be used only in case all other means to avoid the crisis have been exhausted" that would protect the financial stability of the currency.
There are now "concerns" about the eurozone's stability, the EU's economy commissioner Olli Rehn said Wednesday. Eurozone nations pledge last month to help Greece if the currency's stability was in doubt, but didn't say how they would do that.
The Greek government says it isn't looking for money but a detailed plan that would "exert influence" on markets and lower crippling interest rates that are undermining Greek efforts to shave billions of euros from its budget this year.
Spanish officials said individual loans from eurozone governments would be the most likely bailout option. They said it was "increasingly clear" that the IMF will be involved in some way in a Greek rescue, in cooperation with EU nations.
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou warned he would go to the IMF if the EU can't come up with anything. That would be a serious blow for the eurozone, showing that it can neither prevent a crisis or rescue a member country that risks default.
But his main aim appears to be to put pressure on markets to get Greece's borrowing rates down, saying the country is being forced to use the billions of euros it is saving from a tough austerity program to pay extra debt costs.
Germany is not sympathetic, with officials saying Greece can't simply seek a bailout because it doesn't like the high costs markets are charging it because they see it as a bad risk.

David Mikael Taclino
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US forces Israel into Peace Loving Nation

 The United States on Wednesday sought goodwill gestures from Israel to persuade Palestinians to return to peace talks even as new settlement expansion plans threatened further strains between Washington and its close ally.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who held a low-key meeting at the White House on Tuesday with President Barack Obama, was engaged in an all-day effort to ease the dispute with Washington before he was to leave for Israel.
Palestinians have demanded a complete settlement freeze in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Netanyahu has cautioned that accepting their terms for reviving negotiations, in the format of U.S.-mediated, indirect talks, could put peace efforts on hold for another year.
"The president asked the prime minister to take steps to build confidence for proximity talks so that progress can be made toward comprehensive peace," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters, without elaborating. "There are areas of agreement and there are areas of disagreement."
As U.S. and Israeli officials continued negotiations apparently aimed at reaching a deal before Netanyahu was due to fly home, Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell held talks with the prime minister at his hotel.
U.S. officials have tried to get Israel to agree to suspend further Jewish home construction in East Jerusalem and to consent to discuss core issues such as borders and the status of Jerusalem in the U.S.-sponsored "proximity" negotiations.
Undeterred by turbulence in U.S.-Israeli relations, Israel earlier on Wednesday confirmed plans for a further expansion of the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem, with more building approved.
Gibbs said U.S. officials were seeking clarification after a Jerusalem city official, in a move that angered Palestinians, said final approval was given to develop a flashpoint neighborhood from which Palestinians were evicted last year.
GETTING RELATIONS BACK ON TRACK
American and Israeli officials have sought to get relations back on track after a separate plan to build 1,600 homes for Jews in Ramat Shlomo, a settlement on West Bank land that Israel annexed to Jerusalem after a 1967 war, was announced two weeks ago during a visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.
The housing dispute touched off the worst diplomatic rift between Washington and Israel since Obama took office last year.
Netanyahu, who heads a coalition that contains pro-settler parties, including his own, said he was blindsided by bureaucrats. But he also made clear he had no intention of curbing Jewish construction anywhere in a holy city Israel claims as its capital.
Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem as the capital of the state they hope to establish in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, have called Netanyahu and his settlement policy obstacles to peace.
In a sign of lingering tensions, the Obama administration withheld from Netanyahu some of the usual trappings of a White House visit on Tuesday. Press coverage of the Oval Office talks was barred, and the leaders made no public statements afterward.
As part of the housing project that made headlines on Wednesday, 20 units are due to be built at the site of a defunct hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, an area where a U.S. millionaire has been buying property for settlers.
Nir Hefez, a spokesman for Netanyahu, said in a statement the decision to issue building permits was first made last year and that "Jews and Arabs can buy and sell freely private property and homes in all the city."

David Mikael Taclino
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Obama on Abortion

Anything but jubilant, President Barack Obama awkwardly kept a promise Wednesday he made to assure passage of historic health care legislation, pledging his administration would not allow the use of federal funds to pay for elective abortions covered by private insurance.
Unlike Tuesday, when a beaming Obama signed the health care law in a nationally televised ceremony interrupted repeatedly by applause, the White House refused to permit coverage of the event. It occurred in the Oval Office in the presence of a small group of anti-abortion Democratic lawmakers who had extracted the commitment over the weekend.
Obama, a supporter of abortion rights, issued the executive order as Senate Democrats drove toward final passage of a second health care bill, drafted to supplement the first by sweetening benefits for seniors with high prescription drug costs and for lower-to-middle income families who cannot afford the cost of insurance.
The same measure includes a second triumph for the administration on domestic policy. It generally strips banks and other private insurers of their ability to originate loans to students, in favor of direct government lending.
The government's savings would raise the maximum amount needy students could receive in Pell Grants, and pump about $2.6 billion over a decade into historically black and Hispanic colleges. The changes would mean the loss of billions of dollars for student lending giant Sallie Mae as well as large financial institutions such as Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.
The bill passed the House on Sunday and it appeared Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had as many as 57 votes in hand for its approval, far more than needed. Among 59 Senate Democrats, only Sens. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska announced in advance they would oppose it.
Far outnumbered, Senate Republicans sought votes on politically-charged proposals that, while potentially troublesome for Democrats, were doomed to defeat.
Among them was a call by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, to make sure none of the bill's tax increases would fall on an individual with annual income of less than $200,000 or a couple with wages of less than $250,000 combined — taxpayers whom the president has vowed to shield.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, offered an amendment to force Obama and others in the government to obtain insurance coverage through new purchasing exchanges created by the law, something the law already stipulates for members of Congress and some staff. The White House responded by issuing a statement saying Obama would enter the exchange voluntarily so Grassley's amendment was unnecessary.
Obama's participation as president would be contingent on his getting re-elected in 2012, since the exchanges won't be up and running until 2014.
Taken together, the day's events amounted to mop-up actions by the White House and Senate Democrats, one day after Obama signed into law far-reaching changes in the nation's health care system that had eluded presidents and lawmakers for a century.
At its core, the new law would expand health care to 32 million who lack it while cracking down on the insurance industry and cutting federal deficits by an estimated $138 billion over a decade. Most of the estimated $940 billion cost of the bill would pay for assistance to help families with annual incomes of up to $88,000 pay for insurance, although small businesses would also receive subsidies as in incentive to offer coverage to their employees.
The two bills combined call for nearly $1 trillion in higher taxes and Medicare cuts over 10 years, provisions that sparked strong opposition from congressional Republicans, all of whom voted against the bill's passage.
For the first time, millions of Americans would be required to purchase insurance, and face penalties if they refused.
That requirement was at the heart of much of the opposition to the legislation by Republicans, conservatives activists and others, and 13 attorneys generals have already filed suit to try to invalidate the law.
The Democrats' drive to enact sweeping health care changes had appeared doomed as recently as two months ago, when Obama took personal command of a revival effort, working in concert with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Reid.
Passage wasn't assured until Sunday, a few hours before the final vote, when Obama agreed to issue an executive order specifying that he would not permit the use of federal funds to pay for abortions except in the cases of rape, incest or if the life of the mother was in danger.
The commitment, backed up by a draft of the order that circulated, was enough to secure the votes of Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich. and a few other holdouts.
As signed into law, the health care bill says individuals who receive federal subsidies to purchase insurance may purchase abortion coverage, but must do so by writing a separate check from personal funds. Obama's executive order commits the administration to issuing regulations making sure that personal and federal funds are kept separate.

David Mikael Taclino
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Kick Off College yet now Billionaire

Few events arouse more teenage angst than the springtime arrival of college rejection letters. With next fall's college freshman class expected to approach a record 2.9 million students, hundreds of thousands of applicants will soon be receiving the dreaded letters.
Teenagers who face rejection will be joining good company, including Nobel laureates, billionaire philanthropists, university presidents, constitutional scholars, best-selling authors and other leaders of business, media and the arts who once received college or graduate-school rejection letters of their own.

Both Warren Buffett and "Today" show host Meredith Vieira say that while being rejected by the school of their dreams was devastating, it launched them on a path to meeting life-changing mentors. Harold Varmus, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, says getting rejected twice by Harvard Medical School, where a dean advised him to enlist in the military, was soon forgotten as he plunged into his studies at Columbia University's med school. For other college rejects, from Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy and entrepreneur Ted Turner to broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw, the turndowns were minor footnotes, just ones they still remember and will talk about.
Rejections aren't uncommon. Harvard accepts only a little more than 7% of the 29,000 undergraduate applications it receives each year, and Stanford's acceptance rate is about the same.

"The truth is, everything that has happened in my life...that I thought was a crushing event at the time, has turned out for the better," Mr. Buffett says. With the exception of health problems, he says, setbacks teach "lessons that carry you along. You learn that a temporary defeat is not a permanent one. In the end, it can be an opportunity."
Mr. Buffett regards his rejection at age 19 by Harvard Business School as a pivotal episode in his life. Looking back, he says Harvard wouldn't have been a good fit. But at the time, he "had this feeling of dread" after being rejected in an admissions interview in Chicago, and a fear of disappointing his father.
As it turned out, his father responded with "only this unconditional love...an unconditional belief in me," Mr. Buffett says. Exploring other options, he realized that two investing experts he admired, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, were teaching at Columbia's graduate business school. He dashed off a late application, where by a stroke of luck it was fielded and accepted by Mr. Dodd. From these mentors, Mr. Buffett says he learned core principles that guided his investing. The Harvard rejection also benefited his alma mater; the family gave more than $12 million to Columbia in 2008 through the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, based on tax filings.
The lesson of negatives becoming positives has proved true repeatedly, Mr. Buffett says. He was terrified of public speaking—so much so that when he was young he sometimes threw up before giving an address. So he enrolled in a Dale Carnegie public speaking course and says the skills he learned there enabled him to woo his future wife, Susan Thompson, a "champion debater," he says. "I even proposed to my wife during the course," he says. "If I had been only a mediocre speaker I might not have taken it."

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger was rejected as a teenager when he applied to Harvard. He says the experience cemented his belief that it was up to him alone to define his talents and potential. His family had moved to a small, isolated town in rural Oregon, where educational opportunities were sparse. As a kid, he did menial jobs around the newspaper office, like sweeping the floor.
Mr. Bollinger recalls thinking at the time, "I need to work extra hard and teach myself a lot of things that I need to know," to measure up to other students who were "going to prep schools, and having assignments that I'm not." When the rejection letter arrived, he accepted a scholarship to University of Oregon and later graduated from Columbia Law School. His advice: Don't let rejections control your life. To "allow other people's assessment of you to determine your own self-assessment is a very big mistake," says Mr. Bollinger, a First Amendment author and scholar. "The question really is, who at the end of the day is going to make the determination about what your talents are, and what your interests are? That has to be you."

Others who received Harvard rejections include "Today" show host Meredith Vieira, who was turned down in 1971 as a high-school senior. At the time, she was crushed. "In fact, I was so devastated that when I went to Tufts [University] my freshman year, every Saturday I'd hitchhike to Harvard," she says in an email. But Ms. Vieira went on to meet a mentor at Tufts who sparked her interest in journalism by offering her an internship. Had she not been rejected, she doubts that she would have entered the field, she says.
And broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw, also rejected as a teenager by Harvard, says it was one of a series of setbacks that eventually led him to settle down, stop partying and commit to finishing college and working in broadcast journalism. "The initial stumble was critical in getting me launched," he says.
Dr. Varmus, the Nobel laureate and president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, was daunted by the first of his two turndowns by Harvard's med school. He enrolled instead in grad studies in literature at Harvard, but was uninspired by thoughts of a career in that field.
After a year, he applied again to Harvard's med school and was rejected, by a dean who chastised him in an interview for being "inconstant and immature" and advised him to enlist in the military. Officials at Columbia's medical school, however, seemed to value his "competence in two cultures," science and literature, he says.
If rejected by the school you love, Dr. Varmus advises in an email, immerse yourself in life at a college that welcomes you. "The differences between colleges that seem so important before you get there will seem a lot less important once you arrive at one that offered you a place."

Similarly, John Schlifske, president of insurance company Northwestern Mutual, was discouraged as a teenager when he received a rejection letter from Yale University. An aspiring college football player, "I wanted to go to Yale so badly," he says. He recalls coming home from school the day the letter arrived. "Mom was all excited and gave it to me," he says. His heart fell when he saw "the classic thin envelope," he says. "It was crushing."
Yet he believes he had a deeper, richer experience at Carleton College in Minnesota. He says he received a "phenomenal" education and became a starter on the football team rather than a bench-warmer as he might have been at Yale. "Being wanted is a good thing," he says.
He had a chance to pass on that wisdom to his son Dan, who was rejected in 2006 by one of his top choices, Duke University. Drawing on his own experience, the elder Mr. Schlifske told his son, "Just because somebody says no, doesn't mean there's not another school out there you're going to enjoy, and where you are going to get a good education." Dan ended up at his other top choice, Washington University in St. Louis, where he is currently a senior. Mr. Schlifske says, "he loves it."
Rejected once, and then again, by business schools at Stanford and Harvard, Scott McNealy practiced the perseverance that would characterize his career. A brash economics graduate of Harvard, he was annoyed that "they wouldn't take a chance on me right out of college," he says. He kept trying, taking a job as a plant foreman for a manufacturer and working his way up in sales. "By my third year out of school, it was clear I was going to be a successful executive. I blew the doors off my numbers," he says. Granted admission to Stanford's business school, he met Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla and went on to head Sun for 22 years.

Paul Purcell, who heads one of the few investment-advisory companies to emerge unscathed from the recession, Robert W. Baird & Co., says he interpreted his rejection years ago by Stanford University as evidence that he had to work harder. "I took it as a signal that, 'Look, the world is really competitive, and I'll just try harder next time,'" he says. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and got an MBA from the University of Chicago, and in 2009, as chairman, president and chief executive of Baird, won the University of Chicago Booth School of Business distinguished corporate alumnus award. Baird has remained profitable through the recession and expanded client assets to $75 billion.
Time puts rejection letters in perspective, says Ted Turner. He received dual rejections as a teenager, by Princeton and Harvard, he says in an interview. The future America's Cup winner attended Brown University, where he became captain of the sailing team. He left college after his father cut off financial support, and joined his father's billboard company, which he built into the media empire that spawned CNN. Brown has since awarded him a bachelor's degree.
Tragedies later had a greater impact on his life, he says, including the loss of his father to suicide and his teenage sister to illness. "A rejection letter doesn't even come close to losing loved ones in your family. That is the hard stuff to survive," Mr. Turner says. "I want to be sure to make this point: I did everything I did without a college degree," he says. While it is better to have one, "you can be successful without it."

David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
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Island Disappears

For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island's gone.
New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said.
"What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Hazra.
Scientists at the School of Oceanographic Studies at the university have noted an alarming increase in the rate at which sea levels have risen over the past decade in the Bay of Bengal.
Until 2000, the sea levels rose about 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) a year, but over the last decade they have been rising about 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) annually, he said.
Another nearby island, Lohachara, was submerged in 1996, forcing its inhabitants to move to the mainland, while almost half the land of Ghoramara island was underwater, he said. At least 10 other islands in the area were at risk as well, Hazra said.
"We will have ever larger numbers of people displaced from the Sunderbans as more island areas come under water," he said.
Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation of 150 million people, is one of the countries worst-affected by global warming. Officials estimate 18 percent of Bangladesh's coastal area will be underwater and 20 million people will be displaced if sea levels rise 1 meter (3.3 feet) by 2050 as projected by some climate models.
India and Bangladesh both claimed the empty New Moore Island, which is about 3.5 kilometers (2 miles) long and 3 kilometers (1.5 miles) wide. Bangladesh referred to the island as South Talpatti.
There were no permanent structures on New Moore, but India sent some paramilitary soldiers to its rocky shores in 1981 to hoist its national flag.
The demarcation of the maritime boundary — and who controls the remaining islands — remains an open issue between the two South Asian neighbors, despite the disappearance of New Moore, said an official in India's foreign ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on international disputes.
Bangladesh officials were not available for comment Wednesday.

David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
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