Eideard

Sigmar Gabriel, Social Democrats + Joachim Gauck + Angela Merkel, Christian Democrats
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Germany’s government and the two major opposition parties have said they will jointly nominate Joachim Gauck, a human rights activist originally from East Germany, to be the country’s next president.

Angela Merkel said her coalition government, and the centre-left opposition had rallied behind Gauck, 72, who was initially proposed by the opposition Social Democrats and Greens.

He is not a member of a political party.

“What moves me the most, is that a man who was still born during the gloomy, dark war, who grew up and lived 50 years in a dictatorship … is now called to become the head of state,” Gauck said. “This is of course a very special day in my life.”

Christian Wulff, 52, resigned as president on Friday after two months of allegations about receiving loans on favourable terms and hotel stays from friends when he was state governor of Lower Saxony. He was Merkel’s candidate when elected less than two years ago…

When Wulff resigned, Merkel immediately said she would work with the Social Democrats and Greens to find a consensus candidate to succeed him…

The chancellor said that clergymen such as Gauck – a former Lutheran priest – were at the forefront of the protests that eventually brought down the east German regime.

Claudia Roth, the Greens’ leader, said “Gauck will restore the respect for the office, will restore dignity,” to the presidency, which had become tainted by Wulff’s actions.

Isn’t it interesting how a nation which parallels so many of our circumstances in the United States figures out how to take different directions, grow and even prosper in hard times.

Anyone even imagine this happening in the United States with the clown show we have in Congress?

President Fernandez’ supporters reacting to the good news
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez never had cancer despite being diagnosed with the disease last month and having her thyroid gland removed on January 4…

The government announced just after Christmas that the recently re-elected leader had thyroid cancer. The operation to remove the gland went well, but when it was later analyzed it turned out to have never contained cancerous cells, said spokesman Alfredo Scoccimaro…

Fernandez was originally diagnosed with papillary carcinoma.

Buenos Aires-based thyroid cancer expert Eduardo Faure, who is not on the president’s medical team, said a small number of such cases turn out to be “false positives,” meaning that no cancer is present. “The cells may originally appear to be cancer but in 2 percent of cases, after the operation, when a more thorough examination can be performed, it turns out they are not,” the doctor said in an interview.

“This result was always within the realm of possibility. It does not mean that the original diagnosis was mistaken.”

Several hundred Fernandez supporters had camped out near the hospital where she was treated, carrying banners that said “Strength Cristina.” A cheer went up from the crowd when Scoccimaro made the announcement…

Vice President Amado Boudou, the former economy minister and a loyal Fernandez ally, assumed the presidency this week during Fernandez’s scheduled 20-day leave of absence.

OK – I was ready to bust some chops in the medical profession over this one. The fact is – this result is always within the realm of possibility.

One of those checkups led me to a bit of skin surgery for something that looked more advanced than pre-cancerous – and the drill was to remove it altogether – and check it afterwards more thoroughly. It came out non-cancerous and I was happy. Happy also to have had the walk-in surgery.

Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown as president of Guatemala in a CIA-backed coup in 1954, a seminal event that historians say set the Central American country on a path of dictatorships and civil war that would last for decades.

Even though he was democratically elected and popular at the time, after Arbenz was deposed, his reputation was ruined and he was written out of Guatemala’s history books. He died in exile in 1971.

This week, 57 years later, current President Alvaro Colom made a public apology to the Arbenz family, a large gesture in Guatemala. There is also a larger rehabilitation of the image of Arbenz under way. Textbooks are being rewritten and a new biography will soon be published.

But this clearing of Arbenz’s reputation does not console everyone. Some ask: When will the United States, which was behind the coup, apologize for its meddling..?

The apology “doesn’t have a lot of resonance in the United States — though it should,” said Stephen Schlesinger, an Adjunct Fellow at the Century Foundation and co-author of a book on the 1954 coup.

The United States, after all, was the power behind the event.

I figure the US government will apologize for the Guatemalan coup about 3 years before never – which is just before they apologize for for overthrowing Iran’s first democratically-elected government and reinstating the Shah on behalf of Big Oil.

The rest of the world has a clear recollection of what we have done.

Michael D Higgins and his wife Sabina Coyne
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The poet, peace campaigner and president of Galway United football club Michael D Higgins is poised to become Ireland’s next president after rivals conceded defeat in the most fractious campaign in the country’s history.

The Irish Labour party candidate was on course to win at least 40% of the first preference vote. Of the first eight constituencies to declare, Higgins was leading in seven of them.

The 70-year-old enjoyed a late surge of support, putting him well ahead of the former frontrunner Seán Gallagher. Martin McGuinness, whose candidacy turned the spotlight on his past as the IRA’s chief of staff and his role in many prominent atrocities during the Troubles, was almost certain to come third.

Leaders of other parties and rival candidates conceded on Friday afternoon that Higgins was on course to win the presidential contest. Micheál Martin, the leader of the main opposition party, Fianna Fáil, congratulated Higgins on his performance “which will see him elected the ninth president of Ireland”…

Sinn Féin appeared to acknowledge the damage that his IRA legacy had inflicted on McGuinness’s bid. He had hoped to achieve about 20% but may only get around 15% – the same as the party polled in February’s general election…

The main party in the current government, Fine Gael, had a disastrous election. In Roscommon, the early morning tallies reported that in some ballot boxes there were only four votes for its candidate, the Euro MEP Gay Mitchell. The party also appeared likely to suffer another loss in the Dublin West byelection, caused by the death of Ireland’s former finance minister Brian Lenihan. The Irish Labour party appeared poised to win the seat.

Bravo. In a land with many political currents represented in a democratic election, Higgins’ victory is significant in size and breadth.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is permitted to include people on the government’s terrorist watch list even if they have been acquitted of terrorism-related offenses or the charges are dropped, according to newly released documents.

The files, released by the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, disclose how the police are instructed to react if they encounter a person on the list. They lay out, for the first time in public view, the legal standard that national security officials must meet in order to add a name to the list. And they shed new light on how names are vetted for possible removal from the list.

Inclusion on the watch list can keep terrorism suspects off planes, block noncitizens from entering the country and subject people to delays and greater scrutiny at airports, border crossings and traffic stops.

The database now has about 420,000 names, including about 8,000 Americans, according to the statistics released in connection with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. About 16,000 people, including about 500 Americans, are barred from flying.

Timothy J. Healy, the director of the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Center, which vets requests to add or remove names from the list, said the documents showed that the government was balancing civil liberties with a careful, multilayered process for vetting who goes on it — and for making sure that names that no longer need to be on it came off…

Mr. Healey, true to the standards of the F.B.I., is a liar.

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Where does Jimmy Carter live? Well, close your eyes and imagine the kind of house an ex-president of the United States might live in. The sort of residence befitting the former leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Got it? Right, now scrub that clean from your mind and instead imagine the sort of house where a moderately successful junior accountant and his family might live.

It’s what in America is called a “ranch house”, or, as we’d say, “a bungalow”. There are no porticoes. No columns. No sweeping lawns. There’s just a small brick single-storey structure that Jimmy and his wife, Rosalynn, built on Woodland Drive back in 1961 when he was a peanut farmer and she was a peanut farmer’s wife, right in the heart of the town in which they grew up. Though Plains, Georgia is barely a town. A street, might be a more accurate description. A single road going nowhere much…

Strictly speaking, he’s still Mr President, but it’s hard to give the office its true gravitas in what looks like my mum’s living room. And there’s a plain, homespun quality about him that’s reminiscent of that other great Jimmy, the patron saint of small-town American life: Jimmy Stewart. He’ll turn 87 in October, and is recovering from having both his knees replaced this summer, but the dazzling smile that once captivated America is still there. Though it’s a terrible cliché, not to mention patronising and ageist, to describe any octogenarian as “twinkly”, he undeniably is.

He leads me slowly into the family room at the back of the house. Photographs of the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren line the walls, and an old throw covers an even older sofa. Mary, the housekeeper who’s been with the family for 40-odd years, brings Carter coffee in an ancient plastic cup, so old that the “Royal Caribbean” logo on it has faded nearly clean away. (Mary first came to work at the governor’s mansion as a convicted murderer on day release, and – how’s this for living your liberal beliefs? – the Carters asked her to look after their three-year-old daughter, Amy.)…

Jimmy’s early years on the family farm just outside Plains coloured his entire life. As a boy during the Great Depression, he recalls, “streams of tramps, or we called them hobos, walked back and forth in front of our house, along the railroad”. Even more influentially, it was a mostly black community. “I learned at first hand the deprivation of both white and black people living in a segregated community, which was then not challenged at all.” Except by his own mother; thanks to her liberalism all his earliest playmates were black.

RTFA. Long, detailed, even though I never voted for Carter [and didn't vote for that corporate pimp, Reagan, who followed] my respect continues to grow for the man who stands better by his principles year after year since he left office. Criticisms of foreign alliances that he wouldn’t have made in office – that still stand as rote in the Democratic Party – grow and change, altered by events and more understanding.

Commitment to the needs of ordinary working people worldwide guides his life and style. Again, more than it did when he was constrained by representing one of our two corrupt political parties. That headline up top is not something that gets you elected to office – just the respect of a nation that wearies time and again of lying politicians who take advantage of nationalism and patriotism in the game of pillage and profit.

Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles & Elizabeth Kautz, Burnsville, MN

Acknowledging it is out of the ordinary for city mayors to take a stand on military policy, the U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a resolution Monday calling for an early end to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“This is not a war resolution,” said the newly elected president of the group, Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

“What we wanted to make clear,” he told reporters afterward, is that “the best way to support and honor those troops is to give them a job when they come back home…”

The Conference of Mayors last addressed American military policy when it called for an end to the U.S. war in Vietnam, and some mayors expressed concern that the current resolution could be taken badly by the troops now deployed…

Other mayors pushed ahead, saying there are economic problems in the United States with a more pressing priority than the massive spending on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq…

Mayors then proposed and approved amendments changing the wording to express support for U.S. troops and acknowledging what was called the need for a strategic, stable pullout of American forces. With those changes, the mayors then approved their resolution with a call to “bring these U.S. war dollars home.”

Still – it ain’t too bad for local politicians some of whom probably were elected to bring change and aid to their cities – and expected [silly people] to be backed up by Congress.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Former Israeli president Moshe Katsav has been sentenced to seven years in prison for rape and other sexual offences following a year-long trial which ended with his conviction in December.

Katsav, president from 2000 to 2007, said he was innocent and was being persecuted by the courts and Israeli society at large. He is expected to appeal.

Katsav was convicted of two counts of rape of an employee at the tourism ministry, where he was minister from 1996-1999. He was also convicted of the indecent assault and sexual harassment of two other employees at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem during his presidency.

The president was given the chance of a plea bargain in which he could admit lesser charges but chose to fight all charges in a trial which, although conducted in private, was accompanied by leaks from both sides in the media.

The judges told the court: “The crime of rape damages and destroys a person’s soul … Due to the severity of the crime, the punishment must be clear and precise. The defendant committed the crime and like every other person, he must bear the consequences. No man is above the law…”

The former president was also ordered to pay 100,000 shekels ($28,000) to the rape victim and 25,000 shekels to each of the other victims.

He isn’t the first president – nor will he be the last – to end up in prison. There is an endless supply of politicians seeking the highest office in their land – who think they are above the law.

Former Republican Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., the Obama administration’s ambassador to China, hinted in an interview with Newsweek that he is considering running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.

Sources close to Huntsman said he met with political advisors last month on a home visit to discuss the possibility of leaving the administration to join the crowded GOP 2012 field, the magazine said.

When asked directly whether he planned to mount a challenge, Huntsman declined to comment, the magazine said in an article posted on its website Saturday…

Huntsman, 50, is a moderate, pro-business Republican who has been considered a rising star in his party. When Obama appointed him ambassador to China in 2009, a gesture that underscored the president’s oft-stated commitment to bipartisanship, some speculated that the president was removing a potential political rival.

In an interview last month on “Charlie Rose,” Huntsman said it was his sense of duty that led him to accept Obama’s offer, which came six months after he was reelected governor in a landslide.

“I accepted because the president asked,” Huntsman said. “I am a traditionalist in that sense…. If you can make a unique contribution in that particular job, hardship though it might be, you stand up and serve.”

Huntsman, who has lived in Asia four times, speaks Mandarin fluently. “You cannot understand the complexity and color and richness of the Chinese culture unless you are able to speak the language,” he told Rose.

Let’s see: A bright, well-educated moderate conservative. Supports bipartisan politics on behalf of the needs of the whole United States. An understanding participant in global economic matters, capable of negotiating from a position of experience, understanding and competence in Asia.

Har! It is to laugh.

Demonstrators supporting the women Katsav assaulted
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Israel’s former president Moshe Katsav has been found guilty of rape and sexual harassment following a year-long trial, largely held behind closed doors to respect the privacy of the three complainants, all former subordinates.

Political leaders and analysts praised the ruling, saying it showed that the law applied to everyone, including the president. But many expressed shame and embarrassment that a former head of state had been found guilty of such serious offences…

The sexual offences took place during Katsav’s terms as president and as minister of tourism. Complainant A accused him of raping her on two occasions, while complainants H and L accused him of sexual harassment. The verdict confirmed all the three accusations. Katsav was acquitted only of charges that he had harassed a witness…

The rightwing former president has portrayed himself as a victim of ethnic discrimination. Israeli political life has long been dominated by Jews of European origin, while Katsav and many of his supporters are of Middle Eastern origin.

Katsav became the eighth president of Israel in 2000 and was forced to resign in disgrace in July 2007, after the accusations emerged in 2006…

Outside court, women’s rights groups cheered…

The White House, Congress and the State Department ignored the event – as they do with anything negative about the government of Israel.