Monday, May 23, 2011
Europe's Obamaphilia says more about its own weakness than the US president
In his book Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama described himself as a Rorschach test – the famous psychological experiment where people are shown a series of ink blots and asked to identify what they see in them. There is no right answer. But each response in its own way, is thought to reveal the patient's obsessions and anxieties.
So it is with Obama. In the last week he has been disparaged as the "most successful food stamp president in history" by Newt Gingrich and a spineless "black mascot" of Wall Street by the prominent black academic Cornel West.
"I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views," he said. "As such I am bound to disappoint some if not all of them."
But one of the most curious things about those who support him most is not their disappointments – given their high hopes for him, that's to be expected – but their enduring devotion in the face of those disappointments. It's as though each single disillusionment is consumed as its own discrete letdown. String them together and you have not a narrative of failing to deliver on promises, but a litany of isolated, separate chapters – each with its own caveats, exceptions and explanations.
This has long been true of black voters in the US, who somehow manage to feel more optimistic about America than ever, even as they are doing worse in it. Unemployment, poverty and foreclosure rates have risen to rates far higher than under George Bush, and the gap in opportunities between blacks and whites increases. Nonetheless, black Americans remain Obama's most loyal base. They are suffering from 16% unemployment, but they continue to give him 80% approval.
The same apparent contradictions underpin European attitudes to Obama, which have barely changed since his emergence as a credible presidential candidate. A Pew research poll published in July 2008, before the elections, revealed that Obama was more popular in Europe than any other continent, including North America.
116 killed by Missouri tornado, tying it for deadliest on record
On CNN tonight at 9 ET, Piers Morgan has more on the recovery effort. At 10 ET on "AC360ยบ," Anderson Cooper reports live from Joplin and has firsthand accounts of surviving the tornado.
Read more about this story from CNN affiliates KOTV, KSHB andKODE. Share your stories, photos and video with iReport.
Joplin, Missouri (CNN) -- The toll in the tornado that ripped through Joplin soared to 116 on Monday, a city official said, tying it for the single deadliest twister to ever hit American soil since the National Weather Service began keeping records 61 years ago.
City Manager Mark Rohr told reporters that people from more than 40 agencies are on the ground in the southwest Missouri city, braving relentless rain and devastating wreckage looking for survivors. They found seven people alive Monday, he said, though the number of fatalities rose to a level unmatched since a tornado struck Flint, Michigan, on June 8, 1953.
"We're going to cover every foot of this town," Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon said from the National Guard Armory in Joplin. "We are ... optimistic that there are still lives to be saved. But (first responders) have seen a tremendous amount of pain already."
The Sunday-evening tornado chewed through a densely populated area of the city, causing hundreds of injuries as it tore apart homes and businesses, ripped into a high school and caused severe damage to one of the two hospitals in the city. Based on preliminary estimates, the twister ranked as an EF4 with winds between 190 and 198 mph, National Weather Service director Jack Hayes said.
Why is America the 'no-vacation nation'?
(CNN) -- Let's be blunt: If you like to take lots of vacation, the United States is not the place to work.
Besides a handful of national holidays, the typical American worker bee gets two or three precious weeks off out of a whole year to relax and see the world -- much less than what people in many other countries receive.
And even that amount of vacation often comes with strings attached.
Some U.S. companies don't like employees taking off more than one week at a time. Others expect them to be on call or check their e-mail even when they're lounging on the beach or taking a hike in the mountains.
"I really would like to take a real, decent vacation and travel somewhere, but it's almost impossible to take a long vacation and to be out of contact," said Don Brock, a software engineer who lives in suburban Washington.
"I dream of taking a cruise or a trip to Europe, but I can't imagine getting away for so long."
The running joke at Brock's company is that a vacation just means you work from somewhere else. So he takes one or two days off at a time and loses some vacation each year. Only 57% of U.S. workers use up all of the days they're entitled to, compared with 89% of workers in France, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Brock's last long holiday was more than 10 years ago, when he took a two-week drive across the country.
'Americans work like robots'
It's a totally different story in other parts of the world.
Nancy Schimkat, an American who lives in Weinheim, Germany, said her German husband, an engineer, gets six weeks of paid vacation a year, plus national holidays -- the norm. His company makes sure he takes all of it.
It's typical for Germans to take off three consecutive weeks in August when "most of the country kind of closes down," Schimkat said. That's the time for big trips, perhaps to other parts of Europe, or to Australia or North America. Germans might also book a ski holiday in the winter and take a week off during Easter.
Schimkat's family back in the United States teases her that she's spoiled. But when she tells Germans that workers in the U.S. usually get two weeks of vacation a year, they cringe.
"They kind of have this idea that Americans work like robots and if that's the way they want to be, that's up to them. But they don't want to be like that," Schimkat said.
Saif al-Adel, Al Qaeda Leader, Linked To Murder Of Daniel Pearl: Study
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian militant recently appointed interim leader of al Qaeda operations, has been linked to the killing of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002, U.S. investigators said in a report.
A Wall Street Journal reporter, Pearl was kidnapped in Pakistan's biggest city of Karachi in January 2002 while researching a story on Islamist militants, and was later beheaded.
The findings by investigators of the Pearl Project revealed al-Adel had discussed Pearl's abduction with Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, also known as KSM, the accused mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
"KSM told the FBI that he was pulled into the kidnapping by a high-level leader in al Qaeda circles, an Egyptian named Saif al-Adel, who told him to make the kidnapping an al Qaeda operation," said the investigators in their report which was published in January.
Journalism academics and students set up the Pearl Project at Georgetown University in the United States to investigate Pearl's kidnapping and murder.
The linkage of al-Adel to Pearl's murder shows the long-standing ties between al Qaeda and Pakistan militancy, which flourishes not only in the lawless northwest along the Afghan border but in Karachi and other urban centers.
Barack Obama agrees to form joint national security body with UK
Source: Guardian
Barack Obama will announce during his first state visit to Britain this week that the White House is to open up its highly secretive national security council to Downing Street in a move that appears to show the US still values the transatlantic “special relationship”.
A joint National Security Strategy Board will be established to ensure that senior officials on both sides of the Atlantic confront long-term challenges rather than just hold emergency talks from the “situation room” in the White House and the Cobra room in the Cabinet Office.
Obama will arrive in London on Tuesday from Dublin on the second leg of a European tour that will also take him to Warsaw and the G8 summit in Deauville in France on Thursday and Friday. The president, who will stay at Buckingham Palace with his wife, Michelle, will hold separate meetings with David Cameron and Ed Miliband.
The main talks between Cameron and Obama on Wednesday will cover Afghanistan, Libya and counter-terrorism. The two leaders, who will serve the food at a barbecue hosted by their wives in the Downing Street garden for US and UK military veterans, will make two major announcements:
• Tom Donilon, the US national security adviser, will work more closely with his British counterpart, Sir Peter Ricketts, to examine longer-term issues on the new National Security Strategy Board. Ricketts is to be replaced in the summer by Kim Darroch, currently Britain’s permanent representative to the EU.
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