Obama’s new political group to lure unlimited donations



The fledgling Organizing for Action says it will be nonpartisan and steer clear of election activity. But the line between issue disputes and electoral politics can be a fuzzy one. The first of an expected wave of ads on gun control, for example, has targeted only Republicans. And OFA board member Jim Messina, who managed Obama’s reelection campaign, has been talking with Democratic Party leaders, including those responsible for success in the 2014 midterm elections.


Over the past month, Messina and Jon Carson, a leading strategist, have traveled the country meeting with members of the Obama 2012 National Finance Committee, who are being pressed back to work to find support for the new organization.

In huddles with Hollywood studio executives, California energy investors and Chicago business titans, they have suggested $500,000 as a target level for OFA bundlers and that top donors get invitations to quarterly OFA board meetings attended by the president.

The next step in converting Obama’s election apparatus to grass-roots lobbying is a “founders summit” March 13 that includes a $50,000-per-person meeting at the Jefferson hotel in Washington led by Messina and Carson. Those planning to attend said they hope the president will be part of the day’s agenda, though the White House and OFA declined to comment on that possibility.

A one-page memo accompanying the invitation lays out the goals of the new OFA: Building grass-roots support for Obama proposals on issues ranging from climate change to immigration reform to women’s health.

In addition, the memo says, the OFA will help “strengthen the progressive movement and train our next generation of leaders.”

It also promises to engage in “state-by-state fights” over issues such as “ballot access and marriage equality.”

Advocates for campaign finance reform see the organization’s goal of raising tens of millions of dollars as a new channel to allow wealthy individuals and corporations to seek favors from the administration. And they criticize Obama for abandoning reform rhetoric in favor of a group that can raise unlimited sums with limited transparency, the very circumstances he complained about publicly in 2010 when the Supreme Court granted corporations and unions the opportunity to contribute to groups seeking to influence elections.

Unlike political parties and other organizations set up to win elections, the OFA is not subject to federal election fundraising restrictions and disclosure requirements, meaning the public will have only limited opportunities to learn about its operations, including how revenue is collected and spent.

OFA officials say they have adopted a voluntary disclosure system that goes beyond that required by law and that will provide sufficient public review.

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MPs, businesses hope Budget will address cost of living, labour crunch






SINGAPORE: Ahead of the delivery of Singapore's Budget on Monday, cost of living and labour crunch are among some issues MPs and businesses hope will be addressed.

Several MPs Channel NewsAsia spoke to said that a key concern especially amongst the sandwiched class is the cost of living in the country.

As for the elderly residents, they are concerned about healthcare costs, said the MPs.

On their part, businesses are worried about the manpower crunch and over the past month, there have been several calls to ease the tightening of the foreign worker inflow.

The government has been calling on companies to make concerted efforts to improve their productivity levels.

Zainudin Nordin, chairman of Government Parliamentary Committee (GPC) for Manpower, said: "When we look and talk about productivity, it sounds good. But how do we implement the productivity uplifting of our SMEs and companies? There needs to be a strong collaboration.

"When there is an intent on the part of the government to provide the resources in terms of consultancy and funds, there must also be a commitment and passion amongst the employers to see and understand that whenever they need to do more things, the first thing that must come to their mind is, 'how can I do more without employing more people?'. That is the direct question they have to ask themselves. Productivity is about doing more with lesser resources, that's the question.

"So, that should be the first question that comes to our mind, and when we need assistance from the government we should be able to come in and help in a much more concerted way.

"At the same time we also know the employees must also continue to ensure (they stay) relevant. So machinery, resources and employees must all be in tandem to do this. The partnership must be stronger."

Dr Lim Wee Kiak, chairman of GPC for Defence and Foreign Affairs, said: "We have received feedback as to the cost of childcare, cost of education and tuition, and these add a lot of stress to young parents. On top of that, they have to take care of their elderly parents. I think the key for that is the cost of healthcare.

"So within this Budget itself, I hope there will be some consideration for, especially the young and the old, and that will help the sandwiched class a lot."

Mr Baey Yam Keng, chairman of GPC for Culture, Community and Youth, said: "There has been some anticipation, because there has been a (budget) surplus. People know there is a surplus and people would look forward to investment in infrastructure. The gaps that we are seeing now in transport, housing, healthcare...people want to see their immediate frustrations being addressed...as well as the cost of living, these would be the key issues from residents.

"There is some apprehension over whether rentals will go up, if transport fares will go up.

"At the same time there are also residents operating their own businesses, the SMEs, who also have concerns about the manpower crunch, the cost of dong business and how they can continue to survive in this climate."

The Budget Statement will be delivered in Parliament by Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam.

Channel NewsAsia will carry a special Budget programme from 3pm on Monday, together with Mr Tharman's speech live.

Budget 2013 will be tabled in Parliament against the backdrop of a 1.3 percent GDP growth for the entire 2012.

For 2013, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) has forecast an economic growth of one to three percent.

MTI also revealed on Friday that labour productivity had fallen by 2.6 percent in 2012, a reversal from the growth of 1.3 per cent from the previous year.

The ministry said productivity also dropped by 2.5 per cent in the fourth quarter, the fifth consecutive quarter of decline.

It said the fall was broad-based, with manufacturing, construction and services all experiencing negative growth.

- CNA/ir



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300% rise in suspicious terror financing cases: Report

NEW DELHI: Over 1,400 instances of terror financing in country's economic channels were red-flagged by intelligence and security agencies last year, a latest report of the finance ministry says, marking a 300% jump in such suspicious transactions.

The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), which functions under the ministry, has reported that it had received 1,444 reports during 2011-12 from agencies like the intelligence bureau, the Research and Analysis Wing and those in the economic domain and affiliated to the Income Tax and Customs departments.

The figure of such reports from these agencies stood at 428 during 2010-11, the agency says.

"The FIU also supports the efforts of domestic intelligence and law enforcement agencies against terror financing by providing information specifically requested by them, either by searching its database or by calling specific information from the reporting entities," the report says.

The FIU is the national agency responsible for receiving, analyzing and disseminating suspicious transaction reports (STRs) to security and anti-money laundering and tax evasion departments of the country.

The agency also reported a more than 100 per cent rise in the number of STRs received during 2011-12 as it collected a total of 69,224 such reports during this period as compared to 20,698 STRs during 2010-11.

The instances of reportage of fake currency in Indian banking channels are also on the rise, the FIU says.

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Elderly Abandoned at World's Largest Religious Festival


Every 12 years, the northern Indian city of Allahabad plays host to a vast gathering of Hindu pilgrims called the Maha Kumbh Mela. This year, Allahabad is expected to host an estimated 80 million pilgrims between January and March. (See Kumbh Mela: Pictures From the Hindu Holy Festival)

People come to Allahabad to wash away their sins in the sacred River Ganges. For many it's the realization of their life's goal, and they emerge feeling joyful and rejuvenated. But there is also a darker side to the world's largest religious gathering, as some take advantage of the swirling crowds to abandon elderly relatives.

"They wait for this Maha Kumbh because many people are there so nobody will know," said one human rights activist who has helped people in this predicament and who wished to remain anonymous. "Old people have become useless, they don't want to look after them, so they leave them and go."

Anshu Malviya, an Allahabad-based social worker, confirmed that both men and women have been abandoned during the religious event, though it has happened more often to elderly widows. Numbers are hard to come by, since many people genuinely become separated from their groups in the crowd, and those who have been abandoned may not admit it. But Malviya estimates that dozens of people are deliberately abandoned during a Maha Kumbh Mela, at a very rough guess.

To a foreigner, it seems puzzling that these people are not capable of finding their own way home. Malviya smiles. "If you were Indian," he said, "you wouldn't be puzzled. Often they have never left their homes. They are not educated, they don't work. A lot of the time they don't even know which district their village is in."

Once the crowd disperses and the volunteer-run lost-and-found camps that provide temporary respite have packed away their tents, the abandoned elderly may have the option of entering a government-run shelter. Conditions are notoriously bad in these homes, however, and many prefer to remain on the streets, begging. Some gravitate to other holy cities such as Varanasi or Vrindavan where, if they're lucky, they are taken in by temples or charity-funded shelters.

In these cities, they join a much larger population, predominantly women, whose families no longer wish to support them, and who have been brought there because, in the Hindu religion, to die in these holy cities is to achieve moksha or Nirvana. Mohini Giri, a Delhi-based campaigner for women's rights and former chair of India's National Commission for Women, estimates that there are 10,000 such women in Varanasi and 16,000 in Vrindavan.

But even these women are just the tip of the iceberg, says economist Jean Drèze of the University of Allahabad, who has campaigned on social issues in India since 1979. "For one woman who has been explicitly parked in Vrindavan or Varanasi, there are a thousand or ten thousand who are living next door to their sons and are as good as abandoned, literally kept on a starvation diet," he said.

According to the Hindu ideal, a woman should be looked after until the end of her life by her male relatives—with responsibility for her shifting from her father to her husband to her son. But Martha Chen, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University who published a study of widows in India in 2001, found that the reality was often very different.

Chen's survey of 562 widows of different ages revealed that about half of them were supporting themselves in households that did not include an adult male—either living alone, or with young children or other single women. Many of those who did live with their families reported harassment or even violence.

According to Drèze, the situation hasn't changed since Chen's study, despite the economic growth that has taken place in India, because widows remain vulnerable due to their lack of education and employment. In 2010, the World Bank reported that only 29 percent of the Indian workforce was female. Moreover, despite changes in the law designed to protect women's rights to property, in practice sons predominantly inherit from their parents—leaving women eternally dependent on men. In a country where 37 percent of the population still lives below the poverty line, elderly dependent relatives fall low on many people's lists of priorities.

This bleak picture is all too familiar to Devshran Singh, who oversees the Durga Kund old people's home in Varanasi. People don't pay toward the upkeep of their relatives, he said, and they rarely visit. In one case, a doctor brought an old woman to Durga Kund claiming she had been abandoned. After he had gone, the woman revealed that the doctor was her son. "In modern life," said Singh, "people don't have time for their elderly."

Drèze is currently campaigning for pensions for the elderly, including widows. Giri is working to make more women aware of their rights. And most experts agree that education, which is increasingly accessible to girls in India, will help improve women's plight. "Education is a big force of social change," said Drèze. "There's no doubt about that."


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Las Vegas Strip Shooting Suspect ID'd












Las Vegas police identified a suspect today in a shooting on the strip that caused a Maserati to hit a taxi and burst into flames, killing three people.


Ammar Harris, 26, has been named a suspect in the Thursday skirmish that killed three people, including rapper Kenny Clutch.


The altercation between Harris and Clutch, 27, whose legal name was Kenneth Cherry Jr., is believed to have originated in the valet area of a Las Vegas hotel, police said.


Police said Harris fired several rounds into a Maserati that was being driven by Cherry as both vehicles continued northbound on glitzy Las Vegas Boulevard.


The rapper's expensive sports car careened out of control after he was shot, slamming into several cars, including a taxi. The impact caused the cab to burst into flames, killing the driver, Michael Boldon and a female passenger. Witnesses said it looked like the car exploded.


"He was a number one guy," Carolyn Jean Trimble, Boldon's sister, told ABC News.








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"I looked out my window and I could see one vehicle down here on the corner of the intersection totally engulfed in flames," witness John Lamb told ABC News.


Boldon, 62, and his passenger, who has not yet been identified, were both killed, as was Clutch.


Timble said her brother loved driving his taxi around Vegas.


"He came to live with me in Las Vegas last year to help take care of our mother, and the first day he got here he said, 'I have to get a job.' The second day, I came home from work, and he said he got a job," she recalled.


"He says, 'You'll never guess what it is,' and I said, 'what,' and he said, 'taxi cab driver,' and we both fell out laughing," Trimble said. "He loved that job. He never complained. He'd come home and tell me stories about what happened, who he picked up."


Boldon was a single father who raised a 36-year-old son and was a new grandfather. His grandson was named after him, Trimble said.


"Of all the people to take from this earth," she said. "But I guess the Lord needed him."


A passenger in the Maserati was hit and sustained only a minor injury to his arm. Clutch died at University Medical Center.


His father, Kenneth Cherry Sr., expressed his grief for the loss of his son while speaking with ABC News.


"This is something you never really, really ever want to experience as a parent, to lose a child before you go," he said.


Harris is described as 5-foot-11 and 180 pounds. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Las Vegas Metro Police Department's homicide division.



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White House warns of flight delays if sequester is not averted





Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood vowed that airline security would not be compromised, but he emphasized that the Federal Aviation Administration would have no alternative but to furlough thousands of employees as it seeks to slash $600 million.


LaHood’s surprise appearance in the White House briefing room aimed to put a spotlight on the real-world consequences of the political standoff over the across-the-board spending cuts, known as the sequester that will take effect next Friday.

Even as LaHood painted a dire picture, a Pew Research Center/USA Today poll released Thursday shows that most Americans have heard little to nothing about the potential cuts. Only 27 percent said they had heard “a lot” about them.

The White House has sought to change that this week with a public relations campaign that included President Obama’s appearance Tuesday with emergency medical workers and an announcement by the Pentagon that it would furlough up to 800,000 civilian employees one day a week.

But it was the specter of widespread travel delays — up to 90 minutes during peak flight periods — that the White House hoped would rally public opinion and put pressure on Republican lawmakers.

“Your phones are going to start ringing off the hook when these people are delayed at airports,” said LaHood, a former GOP congressman from Illinois. “Nobody likes a delay. Nobody likes waiting in line.”

The sequester was put into motion by the August 2011 debt-ceiling deal, and there have been few signs of progress in negotiations to avert them. Obama has proposed a mix of budget cuts and new revenue through closing corporate loopholes, but Republicans have said they will not raise taxes and instead have pushed to cut federal health spending.

During a photo op in the Oval Office after a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the president said Friday that the impact of the budget cuts would slow growth in an already soft economy.

“It also means that we are not going to be driving down unemployment as quickly as we should,” Obama said. He added that his fellow world leaders understand that drastic budget cuts are the “wrong prescription” for the U.S. economy.

“I don’t need to persuade world leaders of that,” Obama said. “I’ve got to persuade member of Congress, and that can be harder sometimes.”

House Republicans continued to blame Obama for the sequester, which the White House proposed in 2011 and Congress approved.

Several Republicans who serve as leaders on transportation policy released a statement Friday accusing the administration of exaggerating the impact of the scheduled cuts on air travel.

“We are disappointed by the Administration creating alarm about sequestration’s impact on aviation,” said the statement from Sen. John Thune (S.D.) and Reps. Bill Shuster (Pa.) and Frank A. LoBiondo (N.J.). “Before jumping to the conclusion that furloughs must be implemented, the Administration and the agency need to sharpen their pencils and consider all the options. Prematurely outlining the potential impacts before identifying other savings is not helpful.”

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China reports second fatal case of bird flu this year






BEIJING: A man in southwestern China has died of bird flu, health authorities said Saturday, becoming the second fatality from the H5N1 virus this year.

The 31-year-old died in hospital in the city of Guiyang on Friday, the Guizhou province health department said in a statement, adding that no other human cases of avian flu had been reported in the province.

Another city resident, a 21-year-old woman, died from the virus earlier this month.

The Xinhua news agency said both of them had come into close contact with birds but it was not known if the cases were related.

The H5N1 virus typically spreads from birds to humans through direct contact, but experts fear it could mutate into a form transmissible between humans with the potential to trigger a pandemic.

More than 365 people have died of bird flu globally since the virus re-emerged in 2003, according to the World Health Organization.

Its figures show that China saw 25 deadly cases of the virus between 2003 and 2009 before numbers tailed off to one fatality in each of the three following years. The deadliest year of the past decade in China saw eight deaths in 2006.

China is considered one of the nations most at risk from bird flu epidemics because it has the world's biggest poultry population and many chickens in rural areas are kept close to humans.

China has in the past been accused of covering up the extent of bird flu outbreaks, exacerbating fears when new cases are reported.

Separate outbreaks among birds were reported last year in the northern region of Ningxia and the remote northwestern region of Xinjiang, prompting massive culls of chickens.

- AFP/ir



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Polling begins in Meghalaya

SHILLONG: Polling began to elect 60 members to the ninth Meghalaya Assembly from among 345 candidates today with an electorate of 15.3 lakh.

Banned Khasi organisation, Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council, has called a 36-hour bandh from 6 PM yesterday till today in the seven districts of Khasi and Jaintia Hills region.

Prominent candidates in the fray are Chief Minister Mukul Sangma, Home Minister H D R Lyngdoh, Education Minister R C Laloo, Congress president D D Lapang, UDP president Don Kupar Roy, former Leader of Opposition and son of P A Sangma Conrad K Sangma and his brother James Sangma.

The Congress has put up candidates in all 60 seats, and ally United Democratic Party in 50.

Of the 15 parties in the fray, the P A Sangma-led National Peoples' Party is contesting at 32 seats, the NCP at 21 and the BJP in 13.

Among the candidates are 25 women. Of the 2,845 polling stations, 900 have been declared 'hyper-sensitive'.

Booths along the international border and the inter-state border with Assam have also been categorised as 'hyper-sensitive'.

The BSF, which has been put on maximum alert along the 498-km border, has deployed 10,000 personnel.

Ninety-one companies of central paramilitary forces have been deployed in the state to maintain law and order and 44 companies in the militant-hit Garo Hills region.

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Cyberattacks Bring Attention to Security Reform











Recent accusations of a large-scale cyber crime effort by the Chinese government left many wondering what immediate steps the president and Congress are taking to prevent these attacks from happening again.


On Wednesday, the White House released the administration's Strategy on Mitigating the Theft of U.S. Trade Secrets as a follow-up to the president's executive order. The strategy did not outwardly mention China, but it implied U.S. government awareness of the problem.


"We are taking a whole of government approach to stop the theft of trade secrets by foreign competitors or foreign governments by any means -- cyber or otherwise," U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel said in a White House statement.


As of now, the administration's strategy is the first direct step in addressing cybersecurity, but in order for change to happen Congress needs to be involved. So far, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is the most notable Congressional legislation addressing the problem, despite its past controversy.


Last April, CISPA was introduced by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md. The act would allow private companies with consumer information to voluntarily share those details with the NSA and the DOD in order to combat cyber attacks.






Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images







The companies would be protected from any liabilities if the information was somehow mishandled. This portion of the act sounded alarm bells for CISPA's opponents, like the ACLU, which worried that this provision would incentivize companies to share individuals' information with disregard.


CISPA passed in the House of Representatives, despite a veto threat from the White House stemming from similar privacy concerns. The bill then died in the Senate.


This year, CISPA was reintroduced the day after the State of the Union address during which the president declared an executive order targeting similar security concerns from a government standpoint.


In contrast to CISPA, the executive order would be initiated on the end of the government, and federal agencies would share relevant information regarding threats with private industries, rather than asking businesses to supply data details. All information shared by the government would be unclassified.


At the core of both the executive order and CISPA, U.S. businesses and the government would be encouraged to work together to combat cyber threats. However, each option would clearly take a different route to collaboration. The difference seems minimal, but has been the subject of legislative debates between the president and Congress for almost a year, until now.


"My response to the president's executive order is very positive," Ruppersberger told ABC News. "[The president] brought up how important information sharing is [and] by addressing critical infrastructure, he took care of another hurdle that we do not have to deal with."


Addressing privacy roadblocks, CISPA backers said the sharing of private customer information with the government, as long as personal details are stripped, is not unprecedented.


"Think of what we do with HIPAA in the medical professions; [doctors do not need to know] the individual person, just the symptoms to diagnose a disease," Michigan Gov. John Engler testified at a House Intelligence Committee hearing in an attempt to put the problem into context.






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