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Friday, January 25, 2013
AP Exclusive: possible USAID bid rigging probed
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into possible contract rigging by the general counsel at the government agency that distributes foreign aid, documents obtained by The Associated Press show.
Memos from the inspector general of the U.S. Agency for International Development also reveal that the IG is investigating whether Deputy Administrator Donald Steinberg tried to interfere with an internal investigation.
Internal inspector general documents said he told the IG's office it shouldn't have investigated the alleged rigging, nor should the matter have been referred to the Justice Department.
Inspectors general are watchdogs within a federal agency and are supposed to operate independently.
The original investigation focused on whether Lisa Gomer, USAID general counsel, may have "wired" a contract last May so the winner of the solicitation would be the agency's retiring chief financial officer, David Ostermeyer.
The contract bidding for a "senior government-to-government assistance adviser" was canceled after questions were raised.
"If the solicitation was in fact designed for Ostermeyer to win, Ms. Gomer and USAID may have violated various federal laws, the Federal Acquisition Regulation and government ethics policies," according to a letter from two House members to USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah in November.
The letter was written by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the panel's national security subcommittee.
On Wednesday, the inspector general's office wrote Issa's committee saying the Justice Department authorized the inspector general to give the committee documents related to Steinberg's potential interference. The Justice Department said it would continue to investigate the original allegations. All the documents were described as "law enforcement sensitive."
One document said Steinberg told inspector general officials that Shah asked him to speak with the internal investigators about the review. Steinberg, according to another inspector general document, ripped into the independent watchdog.
"When people are slapping badges down, reading rights and monitoring who is calling who as it relates to career people, it is a mistake," Steinberg was quoted as telling his agency's investigators. Steinberg added, according to the document, "We are not that kind of agency. People are being told they need to hire lawyers and that is inappropriate."
The memo also quoted Steinberg as saying "now that Justice is involved, it is like the IG is out to get these people. Justice is going to proceed criminally. This should have come through the front office first."
The law governing inspectors general says that the internal investigators "shall report expeditiously to the attorney general whenever the inspector general has reasonable grounds to believe there has been a violation of Federal criminal law."
There was no response to a message requesting comment, left on the home answering machine of a David Ostermeyer.
Steinberg declined to comment, and Gomer could not immediately be reached for comment.
A senior USAID official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the subject, said Gomer has been reassigned from her general counsel's position and has submitted her resignation effective Feb. 9. The official said she was not ordered to resign.
The USAID spokesman, Kamyl Bazbaz said, "We take very seriously the independence of the inspector general and the importance of the agency's cooperation with IG audits and investigations."
He added, "It is the usual practice for the IG to brief the senior leadership of the agency regarding its ongoing investigations and audits."
In an inspector general's "memorandum of interview" last June, investigators described their probe into allegations that "Lisa Gomer, general counsel for USAID colluded with David Ostermeyer, chief financial officer for USAID, by working with him to write a scope of work for a personal service contract ... in the Office of General Counsel."
"Gomer planned to select Ostermeyer for the position," the memo said.
The job Ostermeyer would have received in working with foreign governments would have paid between $123,758 and $155,500, according the USAID solicitation document. The solicitation said "the work is generally sedentary and does not pose undue physical demands," an important factor in an agency where USAID workers can live in poor conditions in dangerous countries.
According to an inspector general's document from last June, Steinberg said he "had already looked into this matter thoroughly and knows there is nothing to it." Steinberg said the contract award was canceled because of issues raised about the procurement.
"He said it is a mistake to have a criminal investigation under way," the investigative document said. "To take a matter to the Department of Justice for criminal consideration without first reporting the issues to the front office is inappropriate and a judgment error on the IG's part."
According to the document the deputy assistant inspector general for investigations, Lisa McClennon, told Steinberg "the agency never has the right to instruct the inspector general's office on whether or not something is presented to Justice."
Issa said in a statement, "This interference by the top USAID official and his deputy in a corruption investigation of other top officials is disturbing and outrageous. Inspectors general can only be effective if they are independent. Efforts to intimidate or chastise an inspector general for investigating agency corruption and submitting findings to the Justice Department are simply incompatible with honest government."
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Thursday, January 24, 2013
How Much Will Tar Sands Oil Add to Global Warming?
James Hansen has been publicly speaking about climate change since 1988. The NASA climatologist testified to Congress that year and he's been testifying ever since to crowds large and small, most recently to a small gathering of religious leaders outside the White House last week. The grandfatherly scientist has the long face of a man used to seeing bad news in the numbers and speaks with the thick, even cadence of the northern Midwest, where he grew up, a trait that also helps ensure that his sometimes convoluted science gets across.
This cautious man has also been arrested multiple times.
His acts of civil disobedience started in 2009, and he was first arrested in 2011 for protesting the development of Canada's tar sands and, especially, the Keystone XL pipeline proposal that would serve to open the spigot for such oil even wider. "To avoid passing tipping points, such as initiation of the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, we need to limit the climate forcing severely. It's still possible to do that, if we phase down carbon emissions rapidly, but that means moving expeditiously to clean energies of the future," he explains. "Moving to tar sands, one of the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuels on the planet, is a step in exactly the opposite direction, indicating either that governments don't understand the situation or that they just don't give a damn."
He adds: "People who care should draw the line."
Hansen is not alone in caring. In addition to a groundswell of opposition to the 2,700-kilometer-long Keystone pipeline, 17 of his fellow climate scientists joined him in signing a letter urging Pres. Barack Obama to reject the project last week. Simply put, building the pipeline?and enabling more tar sands production?runs "counter to both national and planetary interests," the researchers wrote. "The year of review that you asked for on the project made it clear exactly how pressing the climate issue really is." Obama seemed to agree in his second inaugural address this week, noting "we will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations."
At the same time, the U.S. imports nearly nine million barrels of oil per day and burns nearly a billion metric tons of coal annually. China's coal burning is even larger and continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Partially as a result, global emissions of greenhouse gases continue to grow by leaps and bounds too?and China is one alternative customer eager for the oil from Canada's tar sands. Neither developed nor developing nations will break the fossil-fuel addiction overnight, and there are still more than a billion people who would benefit from more fossil-fuel burning to help lift them out of energy poverty. The question lurking behind the fight in North America over Keystone, the tar sands and climate change generally is: How much of the planet's remaining fossil fuels can we burn?
The trillion-tonne question
To begin to estimate how much fossil fuels can be burned, one has to begin with a guess about how sensitive the global climate really is to additional carbon dioxide. If you think the climate is vulnerable to even small changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases?as Hansen and others do?then we have already gone too far. Global concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached 394 parts per million, up from 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution and the highest levels seen in at least 800,000 years. Hansen's math suggests 350 ppm would be a safer level, given that with less than a degree Celsius of warming from present greenhouse gas concentrations, the world is already losing ice at an alarming rate, among other faster-than-expected climate changes.
International governments have determined that 450 ppm is a number more to their liking, which, it is argued, will keep the globe's average temperatures from warming more than 2 degrees C. Regardless, the world is presently on track to achieve concentrations well above that number. Scientists since chemist Svante Arrhenius of Sweden in 1896 have noted that reaching concentrations of roughly 560 ppm would likely result in a world with average temperatures roughly 3 degrees C warmer?and subsequent estimates continue to bear his laborious, hand-written calculations out. Of course, rolling back greenhouse gas concentrations to Hansen's preferred 350 ppm?or any other number for that matter?is a profoundly unnatural idea. Stasis is not often found in the natural world.
Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may not be the best metric for combating climate change anyway. "What matters is our total emission rate," notes climate modeler Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, another signee of the anti-Keystone letter. "From the perspective of the climate system, a CO2 molecule is a CO2 molecule and it doesn't matter if it came from coal versus natural gas."
Physicist Myles Allen of the University of Oxford in England and colleagues estimated that the world could afford to put one trillion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere by 2050 to have any chance of restraining global warming below 2 degrees C. To date, fossil fuel burning, deforestation and other actions have put nearly 570 billion metric tons of carbon in the atmosphere?and Allen estimates the trillionth metric ton of carbon will be emitted around the summer of 2041 at present rates. "Tons of carbon is fundamental," adds Hansen, who has argued that burning all available fossil fuels would result in global warming of more than 10 degrees C. "It does not matter much how fast you burn it."
Alberta's oil sands represent a significant tonnage of carbon. With today's technology there are roughly 170 billion barrels of oil to be recovered in the tar sands, and an additional 1.63 trillion barrels worth underground if every last bit of bitumen could be separated from sand. "The amount of CO2 locked up in Alberta tar sands is enormous," notes mechanical engineer John Abraham of the University of Saint Thomas in Minnesota, another signer of the Keystone protest letter from scientists. "If we burn all the tar sand oil, the temperature rise, just from burning that tar sand, will be half of what we've already seen"?an estimated additional nearly 0.4 degree C from Alberta alone.
As it stands, the oil sands industry has greenhouse gas emissions greater than New Zealand and Kenya?combined. If all the bitumen in those sands could be burned, another 240 billion metric tons of carbon would be added to the atmosphere and, even if just the oil sands recoverable with today's technology get burned, 22 billion metric tons of carbon would reach the sky. And reserves usually expand over time as technology develops, otherwise the world would have run out of recoverable oil long ago.
The greenhouse gas emissions of mining and upgrading tar sands is roughly 79 kilograms per barrel of oil presently, whereas melting out the bitumen in place requires burning a lot of natural gas?boosting emissions to more than 116 kilograms per barrel, according to oil industry consultants IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. All told, producing and processing tar sands oil results in roughly 14 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than the average oil used in the U.S. And greenhouse gas emissions per barrel have stopped improving and started increasing slightly, thanks to increasing development of greenhouse gas?intensive melting-in-place projects. "Emissions have doubled since 1990 and will double again by 2020," says Jennifer Grant, director of oil sands research at environmental group Pembina Institute in Canada.
Just one mine expansion, Shell's Jackpine mine, currently under consideration for the Albian mega-mine site, would increase greenhouse gas emissions by 1.18 million metric tons per year. "If Keystone is approved then we're locking in a several more decades of dependence on fossil fuels," says climate modeler Daniel Harvey of the University of Toronto. "That means higher CO2 emissions, higher concentrations [in the atmosphere] and greater warming that our children and grandchildren have to deal with."
And then there's all the carbon that has to come out of the bitumen to turn it into a usable crude oil.
Hidden carbon
In the U.S. State Department's review of the potential environmental impacts of the Keystone project, consultants EnSys Energy suggested that building the pipeline would not have "any significant impact" on greenhouse gas emissions, largely because Canada's tar sands would likely be developed anyway. But the Keystone pipeline represents the ability to carry away an additional 830,000 barrels per day?and the Albertan tar sands are already bumping up against constraints in the ability to move their product. That has led some to begin shipping the oil by train, truck and barge?further increasing the greenhouse gas emissions?and there is a proposal to build a new rail line, capable of carrying five million barrels of oil per year from Fort McMurray to Alaska's Valdez oil terminal.
Then there's the carbon hidden in the bitumen itself. Either near oil sands mines in the mini-refineries known as upgraders or farther south after the bitumen has reached Midwestern or Gulf Coast refineries, its long, tarry hydrocarbon chains are cracked into the shorter, lighter hydrocarbons used as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. The residue of this process is a nearly pure black carbon known as petroleum (pet) coke that, if it builds up, has to be blasted loose, as if mining for coal in industrial equipment. The coke is, in fact, a kind of coal and is often burned in the dirtiest fossil fuel's stead. Canadian tar sands upgraders produce roughly 10 million metric tons of the stuff annually, whereas U.S. refineries pump out more than 61 million metric tons per year.
Pet coke is possibly the dirtiest fossil fuel available, emitting at least 30 percent more CO2 per ton than an equivalent amount of the lowest quality mined coals. According to multiple reports from independent analysts, the production (and eventual burning) of such petroleum coke is not included in industry estimates of tar sands greenhouse gas emissions because it is a co-product. Even without it, the Congressional Research Service estimates that tar sands oil results in at least 14 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than do more conventional crude oils.
Although tar sands may be among the least climate-friendly oil produced at present?edging out alternatives such as fracking for oil trapped in shale deposits in North Dakota and flaring the gas?the industry has made attempts to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, unlike in other oil-producing regions. For example, there are alternatives to cracking bitumen and making pet coke, albeit more expensive ones, such as adding hydrogen to the cracked bitumen, a process that leaves little carbon behind that is employed by Shell, among others.
More recently, Shell has begun adding carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) technology to capture the emissions from a few of its own upgraders, a project known as Quest. The program, when completed in 2015, will aim to capture and store one million metric tons of CO2 per year, or a little more than a third of the CO2 emissions of Shell's operation at that site. And tar sands producers do face a price on carbon?$15 per metric ton by Alberta provincial regulation?for any emissions above a goal of reducing by 12 percent the total amount of greenhouse gas emitted per total number of barrels produced.
The funds collected?some $312 million to date?are then used to invest in clean technology, but more than 75 percent of the projects are focused on reducing emissions from oil sands, unconventional oils and other fossil fuels. And to drive more companies to implement CCS in the oil sands would require a carbon price of $100 per metric ton or more. "We don't have a price on carbon in the province that is compelling companies to pursue CCS," Pembina's Grant argues.
In fact, Alberta's carbon price may be little more than political cover. "It gives us some ammunition when people attack us for our carbon footprint, if nothing else," former Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert told Scientific American in September 2011. Adds Beverly Yee, assistant deputy minister at Alberta's Environment and Sustainable Resource Development agency, more recently, "Greenhouse gases? We don't see that as a regional issue." From the individual driver in the U.S. to oil sands workers and on up to the highest echelons of government in North America, everyone dodges responsibility.
Price of carbon
A true price on carbon, one that incorporates all the damages that could be inflicted by catastrophic climate change, is exactly what Hansen believes is needed to ensure that more fossil fuels, like the tar sands, stay buried. In his preferred scheme, a price on carbon that slowly ratcheted up would be collected either where the fossil fuel comes out of the ground or enters a given country, such as at a port. But instead of that tax filling government coffers, the collected revenue should be rebated in full to all legal residents in equal amounts?an approach he calls fee and dividend. "Not one penny to reducing the national debt or off-setting some other tax," the government scientist argues. "Those are euphemisms for giving the money to government, allowing them to spend more."
Such a carbon tax would make fossil fuels more expensive than alternatives, whether renewable resources such as wind and sun or low-carbon nuclear power. As a result, these latter technologies might begin to displace things like coal-burning power plants or halt major investments in oil infrastructure like the Keystone XL pipeline.
As it stands, producing 1.8 million barrels per day of tar sands oil resulted in the emissions of some 47.1 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent in 2011, up nearly 2 percent from the year before and still growing, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. In the same year coal-fired power plants in the U.S. emitted more than two billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent. "If you think that using other petroleum sources is much better [than tar sands], then you're delusional," says chemical engineer Murray Gray, scientific director of the Center for Oil Sands Innovation at the University of Alberta.
In other words, tar sands are just a part of the fossil-fuel addiction?but still an important part. Projects either approved or under construction would expand tar sands production to over five million barrels per day by 2030. "Any expansion of an energy system that relies on the atmosphere to be its waste dump is bad news, whereas expansion of safe, affordable and environmentally acceptable energy technologies is good news," Carnegie's Caldeira says.
There's a lot of bad news these days then, from fracking shale for gas and oil in the U.S. to new coal mines in China. Oxford's Allen calculates that the world needs to begin reducing emissions by roughly 2.5 percent per year, starting now, in order to hit the trillion metric ton target by 2050. Instead emissions hit a new record this past year, increasing 3 percent to 34.7 billion metric tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Stopping even more bad news is why Hansen expects to be arrested again, whether at a protest against mountaintop removal mining for coal in West Virginia or a sit-in outside the White House to convince the Obama administration to say no to Keystone XL and any expansion of the tar sands industry. The Obama administration has already approved the southern half of the pipeline proposal?and if the northern link is approved, a decision expected after March of this year, environmental group Oil Change International estimates that tar sands refined on the Gulf Coast would produce 16.6 million metric tons of CO2 annually, along with enough petroleum coke to fuel five coal-fired power plants for a year. All told, the increased tar sands production as a result of opening Keystone would be equal to opening six new coal-fired power plants, according to Pembina Institute calculations.
Even as increased oil production in the U.S. diminishes the demand for tar sands-derived fuel domestically, if Keystone reaches the Gulf Coast, that oil will still be refined and exported. At the same time, Obama pledged to respond to climate change and argued for U.S. leadership in the transition to "sustainable energy sources" during his second inaugural address; approving Keystone might lead in the opposite direction.
For the tar sands "the climate forcing per unit energy is higher than most fossil fuels," argues Hansen, who believes he is fighting for the global climate his five grandchildren will endure?or enjoy. After all, none of his grandchildren have lived through a month with colder than average daily temperatures. There has not been one in the U.S. since February 1985, before even Hansen started testifying on global warming. As he says: "Going after tar sands?incredibly dirty, destroying the local environment for a very carbon-intensive fuel?is the sign of a terribly crazed addict."
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=82b099f8912c5051e83457151e040113
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The Conservative Left
President Obama's second inaugural addressPhoto by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.
I disagree. I think the president?s speech will be remembered for its reframing of history. Obama isn?t just trying to shape the future. He?s trying to reshape the past. He?s challenging the foundations of conservatism. And conservatives, in turn, must rethink what they stand for.
Obama infuriated the right with his invocations of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Founding Fathers. But what made his account potent is that it didn?t end there:
Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together. Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce, schools and colleges to train our workers.?Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play. Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life?s worst hazards and misfortune.
This is the key to Obama?s story: History is progress, and progress is history. Ideas that were once progressive?regulation, entitlements, federal management of education and the economy?are now rooted in our past. They?re conservative.
This argument is a mortal threat to the right. Smart conservatives recognize the threat. ?Obama?s larger political project,? writes Rich Lowry, is ?to reorient the American mainstream and locate conservatives outside it. He wants to take the Founders from the Right and baptize the unreconstructed entitlement state and the progressive agenda in the American creed.? In this telling of history, Lowry observes, Obama?s critics ?represent a break with the American tradition.? To defeat this account, Republicans must make a case against decades of what is now the nation?s history. As Charles Krauthammer puts it, they must block Obama?s attempt ?to restore us to the liberal ascendency of 60 years? that predated Ronald Reagan.
The problem for conservatives is that they don?t agree on which parts of our history to accept. Obama asserted, for example, that the founders? affirmation of equality ?guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.? Pat Buchanan, among others, rejects this extension of equality to homosexual relationships. ?When I was a kid,? says Buchanan, presidents talked about ?Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill. What was he talking about? Stonewall. That's a barroom brawl in Greenwich Village in 1969, when cops were hassling gays and their bar, and the gays fought back and threw them all out. Does that belong in a presidential inaugural?? Similarly, in his Weekly Standard critique of the speech, Jeffrey Anderson argues that marriage has ?been defined throughout American history as the monogamous and complementary union of man and woman.?
Libertarians and moderate Republicans, however, don?t see it this way. ?I, too, would celebrate Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall,? writes David Brooks. Nick Gillespie agrees: ?What links Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall is the?removal?of governmentally sanctioned inequality, not the creation of a new entitlement or protected status.?
If conservatives can?t agree on which parts of our history to conserve, maybe they?re better off talking about which parts of ?progress? have become regressive. Maybe they should be the party not of reaction, but of reform. In the best critiques of Obama?s speech, you can find strong threads for such an argument. Stephen Hayes, rebutting Obama?s assumption that debates over the role of government have ?been settled,? rebukes the president for resisting ?structural reforms to the country?s entitlement programs.? Gillespie accuses Obama of ?defending programs that fail to achieve anything more than the dispossession of the young and powerless. That's not a progressive message.? Brooks, noting that Obama?s history left out Wall Street and Silicon Valley, argues for a national identity based on enterprise, innovation, and decentralization. ?We are bogged down with a bloated political system, a tangled tax code, a byzantine legal code,? he writes. What we face in this century is ?the task of reinvigorating a mature nation.?
Isn?t that a more appealing Republican message for the 21st century? In the wake of the New Deal, the Great Society, and the ballooning national debt, what the GOP needs is less worship of American history, and more talk about fixing its mistakes.
William Saletan's latest short takes on the news, via Twitter:
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=d8e82b9885e97d1156c5dadf675990dc
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Netanyahu reaches left after Israeli elections surprise
Nir Elias / Reuters
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaves the Likud-Yisrael Beitenu headquarters in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.
By Amy Teibel, The Associated Press
A badly weakened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scrambled Wednesday to keep his job by extending his hand to a new centrist party that advocates a more earnest push on peacemaking with the Palestinians after Israel's parliamentary election produced a stunning deadlock.
The results defied forecasts that Israel's next government would veer sharply to the right at a time when the country faces mounting international isolation, growing economic problems and regional turbulence. While that opens the door to unexpected movement on peace efforts, a coalition joining parties with dramatically divergent views on peacemaking, the economy and the military draft could just as easily be headed for gridlock ? and perhaps a short life.
Israeli media said that with nearly all votes counted, each bloc had 60 of parliament's 120 seats. Commentators said Netanyahu, who called early elections three months ago expecting easy victory, would be tapped to form the next government because the rival camp drew 12 of its 60 seats from Arab parties that traditionally are excluded from coalition building.
Ammar Awad / Reuters
Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party, addresses supporters at his party's headquarters in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. The surprise star of Israel's election is a former television news anchor whose centrist party soared to second place in the balloting.
A surprising, strong showing by a political newcomer, the centrist Yesh Atid, or There is a Future, party, in Tuesday's vote turned pre-election forecasts on their heads and dealt a setback to Netanyahu. Yesh Atid's leader, Yair Lapid, has said he would join a government only if it were committed to sweeping economic changes and a serious push to resume peace talks with the Palestinians, which have languished throughout Netanyahu's four-year tenure.
The results were not official, and the final bloc breakdowns could shift before the central elections committee finishes its tally early Thursday. With the blocs so evenly divided, there remains a remote possibility that Netanyahu would not form the next government, even though both he and Lapid have called for the creation of a broad coalition.
How Israeli elections work
Under Israel's parliamentary system, voters cast ballots for parties, not individual candidates. Because no party throughout Israel's 64-year history has ever won an outright majority of parliamentary seats, the country has always been governed by coalitions.
Traditionally, the party that wins the largest number of seats is given the first chance to form a governing alliance in negotiations that center around promising Cabinet posts and policy concessions. If those negotiations are successful, the leader of that party becomes prime minister. If not, the task falls to a smaller faction. President Shimon Peres has until mid-February to set that process in motion.
Netanyahu's Likud-Yisrael Beitenu alliance polled strongest in Tuesday's election, winning 31 parliamentary seats. But that is 11 fewer than the 42 it held in the outgoing parliament and below the forecasts of 32 to 37 in recent polls. Yesh Atid had been projected to capture about a dozen seats but won 19, making it the second-largest in the legislature.
Addressing his supporters early Wednesday, when an earlier vote count gave his bloc a shaky, one-seat parliamentary margin, Netanyahu vowed to form as broad a coalition as possible. Lapid also called for the formation of a broad government.
The goal will not be an easy one, however, and will force Netanyahu to make some difficult decisions. In an interview last week with The Associated Press, Lapid said he would not be a "fig leaf" for a hard-line agenda on peacemaking.
That stance could force Netanyahu to promise overtures to get peace negotiations moving again.
But a harder line taken by traditional and future hawkish allies could present formidable obstacles to coalition building.
Tensions with the United States, Israel's most important ally, also may have factored into the shift to Lapid. President Barack Obama was quoted last week as saying that Netanyahu was undermining Israel's own interests by continuing to build Jewish settlements on occupied lands the Palestinians want for a future state.
Related:
Charismatic ex-commando pressures Netanyahu from the right as Israel prepares to vote
Avast! Israel's Pirate Party angles for 2 percent of electoral booty
Israelis head to polls as shift to right is expected
?
? 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Car Repair Deductible | Latuff Brothers Auto Body
Do you know what your collision insurance car repair deductible is? Is it $250, $500, $1000, or more? In recent years we have noticed a trend of deductibles on the rise. With the recession many people have been searching for ways to cut costs. One popular way seems to be to increase your collision insurance deductible in order to decrease annual premiums paid. Nationally the average collision repair cost is about $2500. So on average if you had a $1000 deductible your insurance would cover the $1500. Also, with a $1000 deductible, if the repair is slightly over that amount people tend to consider not filing a claim with their insurance company and just paying out of pocket to maintain their claims free status. Since every insurance company handles claims a little differently we recommend you consult with your insurance agent. We also recommend when you have damage to have it looked at by your trusted auto body shop. Most auto body shops will provide you with a free initial estimate. Under Minnesota law you have the right to choose the auto body shop of your choice. Your insurance company may recommend a shop, but they are not allowed to require you to go to a particular shop. If you have a high deductible or want to pay for the repairs out of pocket, Latuff Brothers has a program where you may qualify for financing. You could potentially pay off the repair over 6 months with 0% interest. For more information, stop by for a free consultation. At Latuff Brothers, we know you are dealing with an inconvenient situation and want to help however we can. Our financing program is just another way that Latuff Brothers is better for you, your vehicle, and the environment.
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Source: http://www.latuffbrothers.com/blog/2013/01/23/car-repair-deductible/
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Thursday, January 17, 2013
?Google users not bothered by search giant?s tax controversy?, says UK Chief
The search giant has come under fire from politicians and lobby groups after it emerged that the web search giant paid just six million pounds corporation tax, despite notching up 2.5 billion pounds of sales in the UK.
According to the Telegraph, Dan Cobley, managing director in the UK and Ireland, told a conference in London that the recent furor over the minimal amount of tax the company pays in Britain has done little to deter people from using its services.Cobley added that the company paid all the taxes it is required to in the UK, and makes a `massive contribution in many other ways'.
He said that but Google has an obligation to its shareholders not to pay more tax than is "appropriate for our business", the report said.The company managed to halve its global tax bill by funelling 9.8 billion dollars of revenues from its international subsidiaries through Bermuda, the report added.
Margaret Hodge, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, accused Google of behaving `immorally' by not paying more tax.However, the business, whose motto is "Don't be evil", has vehemently denied any wrongdoing, the report added. (ANI)
Source: http://topnews.in/google-users-not-bothered-search-giant-s-tax-controversy-says-uk-chief-2370365
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