Palestinians vent frustration at brief Obama visit

By Noah Browning

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian protesters raised their hands and tried to wave away the helicopter that brought U.S. President Barack Obama to the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Thursday, accusing him of siding with Israel.

Around 150 demonstrators chanted anti-American slogans, saying they wanted weapons not presidential visits.

"We want RPGs, not collaboration with the CIA," they shouted, referring to rocket-propelled grenades.

Obama landed in the government compound of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, saying beforehand that he was coming to listen and was not bringing any new initiatives to re-launch U.S.-sponsored peace talks that broke down in 2010.

Much of the Palestinian de facto capital Ramallah was shut down for Obama's trip, which is set to last less than five hours, with hundreds of armed security men, police officers and plainclothes enforcers patrolling the streets.

While the U.S. president received a warm welcome when he arrived in Israel on Wednesday, Palestinians were much colder, clearly angered by his promise of unstinting support for Israel and repeated pledges to guarantee its security needs.

"He surprised us with his speech last night with just how much he flattered Israel, going on and on about its security," said Hussein Shujayia, 26. "What about us? There's no place for us in their arrogant pro-Israel policies."

Other Palestinians expressed indifference.

"The visit by this president is no different than all the other presidents' visits. They come, they go and no change is made," said Mohammed Mohammed, 23, watching the protesters from outside his shoe shop in Ramallah's bustling downtown.

Obama is spending three days in Israel and the occupied West Bank, with the vast majority of his appointments taking place in the Jewish state, including plans to lay a wreath on the grave of Zionist leader Theodor Herzl.

Palestinian requests for Obama to meet the family of a Palestinian in an Israeli jail and to visit the tomb of former President Yasser Arafat were turned down, local officials said.

"This is a negative decision by the American president. Yasser Arafat is the leader of the Palestinian people, and some day, the American president should visit the grave," said Batta Araar, a resident of a village near Ramallah.

Palestinians complain that Obama has not put enough pressure on Israel to halt settlement building in the West Bank and say any prospect of creating a viable, independent state is fading fast.

In the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by the Islamist group Hamas, a fierce rival of the Western-backed Abbas, Palestinian opposition to Obama's visit was more militant.

Guerrillas fired two rockets at southern Israel in the early morning, causing only slight damage, in a signal that the world should not ignore them in any discussions on regional diplomacy.

Dozens of protesters in Gaza city smacked pictures of Obama with the soles of their shoes, burned U.S. flags and chanted that the president should "get out of Palestine".

(Additional reporting By Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

IMF chief Christine Lagarde … French police have raided her Paris home. Photo: Reuters

French Police Raid IMF Chief Christine Lagarde’s Paris Home

Stephen: What, with the government of Cyrpus voting not to adhere to the ‘take it from your citizens’ saving accounts’ rules proffered by the IMF and the European banks and now this, IMF chief Christine Lagarde isn’t having a great week.

AFP reporters, The Sydney Morning herald – March 21, 2013

http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-business/french-police-raid-imf-chief-christine-lagardes-paris-home-20130321-2ggoa.html

French police have raided the Paris home of IMF chief Christine Lagarde in connection with a probe into her handling of a high-profile scandal when she was a government minister.

The investigation concerns Lagarde’s 2007 decision to ask an arbitration panel to rule on a dispute between disgraced tycoon Bernard Tapie and the collapsed bank Credit Lyonnais.

The arbitration resulted in Tapie being awarded around 400 million euros ($499 million) – an outcome that triggered outrage among critics who insisted the state should never have taken the risk of being forced to pay money to Tapie, a convicted criminal.

That view has been effectively endorsed by the CJR, a court established to assess potentially suspect actions by government ministers in office.

The CJR has deemed Lagarde’s decision to send the Tapie case to arbitration “questionable” and suggest she was personally complicit in a process characterised by “numerous anomalies and irregularities”.

Lagarde’s lawyer Yves Repiquet told AFP his client was cooperating with the investigation. “Mrs Lagarde has nothing to hide,” he said.

Lagarde herself, now 57, has defended the controversial decision to send the Tapie case to arbitration, describing it as “the best solution at the time”.

Her employers at the IMF also indicated that the ongoing investigation would have no bearing on her current role as managing director of the global body.

“As we have said before, it would not be appropriate to comment on a case that has been and is currently before the French judiciary,” IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said in Washington.

“Prior to its selection of the managing director, however, the IMF’s executive board discussed this issue and expressed its confidence that Madame Lagarde would be able to effectively carry out her duties as managing director.”

The arbitration panel appointed by Lagarde agreed to award Tapie 285 million euros (400 million euros including interest) in compensation linked to his 1993 sale of the sports group Adidas.

Tapie argued successfully that the state should compensate him following the collapse of the publicly owned Credit Lyonnais because the bank had defrauded him by consciously undervaluing Adidas at the time of the sale.

Most of the huge award to Tapie went to clearing his debts and tax liabilities but he reportedly retained up to 20 to 40 million euros which he has used to relaunch his business career.

He recently purchased a newspaper group in the south of France and there has been speculation about him re-entering politics as a candidate for mayor of Marseille in 2014.

Tapie was a minister under Socialist president Francois Mitterand but he backed right-winger Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 and 2012 presidential elections.

His support for Sarkozy has been put forward as a possible explanation for the allegedly favourable treatment he received from Lagarde, who was Sarkozy’s finance minister at the time.

Tapie is best known as the former owner of France’s best-supported football club, Olympique Marseille, and his role in a 1993 match-fixing scandal for which he was sent to prison.

Lagarde has been the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since 2011, having taken over from her compatriot Dominique Strauss-Kahn who resigned after an alleged sexual assault on a New York hotel maid.

She is the first woman to head the organisation and her appointment was seen as the culmination of a glittering career in law and politics.

Ex-officials convicted in Calif. corruption case

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The jurors who convicted five former city councilors of stealing taxpayer dollars from a struggling Los Angeles suburb that became a national symbol of political greed were told repeatedly that the scheme's real villain was a man not even in court.

The defendants, their lawyers and even some prosecution witnesses said the true mastermind who put in place the scheme that bilked the city of Bell out of $5.5 million was disgraced former City Manager Robert Rizzo. He is expected to face his own trial on similar charges later this year.

In the end, legal experts said, making Rizzo the villain may have had some impact on Wednesday's mixed verdict in which Bell's former mayor and four former City Council members were convicted of 21 counts of misappropriating public funds but found not guilty of 21 other counts. A sixth former council member was acquitted of all charges.

Jurors, meanwhile, deadlocked on about half of the more than 80 counts prosecutors filed. They were to continue deliberations on those charges Thursday.

"It's a lot easier to point the finger at Rizzo who received the most ill-gotten gains," said Rebecca Lonergan, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at the University of Southern California. "It gave them a bigger bad guy who wasn't sitting next to them."

Mark Werksman, a defense attorney not involved in the case, agreed.

"People lower on the rung always have the opportunity to deflect blame to try and attribute it to people higher up," he said. "That seems to be what happened here."

Still, Werksman said the mixed verdict was clearly a victory for prosecutors.

"There is no way to characterize this as anything but a serious loss for the defendants," he said.

The convictions were the first to come after revelations more than a year ago that Bell's leadership had illegally raised taxes, business license fees and other sources of income to pay huge salaries to the city manager, police chief, City Council members and others.

City records revealed that Rizzo had an annual salary and compensation package worth $1.5 million, making him one of the highest paid administrators in the country.

His salary alone was about $800,000 a year — double that of the president of the United States.

The six former City Council members were each paid about $100,000 a year.

Former Bell Mayor Oscar Hernandez and former Council members Teresa Jacobo and George Mirabal were each convicted of five counts of misapprorpriating public funds. Former Councilman Victor Bello was convicted of four counts and former Councilman George Cole of two.

Prosecutors declined to say what sentences they may face until the other charges are resolved.

Former Councilman Luis Artiga was acquitted of all charges. The pastor of Bell Community Church broke down in tears and pointed heavenward as the not guilty verdicts were read.

"I said, 'Thank you, Lord,'" a beaming Artiga, surrounded by his wife and four children, said outside court. "I never lost faith. I knew it, I just knew it."

The convictions all related to the defendants being paid for sitting on Bell's Solid Waste and Recycling Authority, an entity they could not prove had been legally established or did any work. Artiga was not on the City Council when it was created.

Records show the authority met only one time between 2006 and 2010 and there was no evidence any waste was ever collected or recycled.

Many of the still unresolved charges relate to the council members' work on other agencies that prosecutors also say were created only to boost their salaries.

The defendants, many of whom took the witness stand during the trial, insisted they earned those salaries by working around the clock to help residents. They and their lawyers blamed Rizzo for creating the fiscal mess Bell was left in.

The city of 36,000 residents, where one in four people live below the poverty line, was threatened with bankruptcy after the state controller ordered that the illegally collected taxes, license fees and other revenue be repaid.

Witnesses at the trial depicted Rizzo as a micro-manager who put all those misdeeds in motion while convincing the city's elected officials they deserved their huge salaries.

He was said to have manipulated council members into signing major financial documents, particularly Hernandez who does not read English and, according to his lawyer, was often unaware of what he was signing.

Jacobo testified that when Rizzo told her that he was increasing her salary enough that she could quit her job selling real estate, she asked the former city attorney if that was legal and he assured her it was.

After the scandal was disclosed, thousands of Bell residents protested at City Council meetings and staged a successful recall election to throw out the entire council and elect new leaders.

Current Mayor Ali Saleh, a leader of the recall, hailed the guilty verdicts on Wednesday but said residents won't be truly satisfied until Rizzo and Spaccia are tried.

"Our community will rest when the legal process has come full circle and justice has been served," he said.

Denisse Rodarte, 31, a longtime Bell resident who was also involved in launching the recall, stood outside Bell City Hall after the verdict holding up a sign. It read, "Rizzo is next."

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Chicago to close 54 schools to address $1B deficit

CHICAGO (AP) — Tens of thousands of Chicago students, parents and teachers learned Thursday their schools were on a long-feared list of 54 the city plans to close in an effort to stabilize an educational system facing a huge budget shortfall.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel says the closures are necessary because too many Chicago Public School buildings are half-empty, with 403,000 students in a system that has seats for more than 500,000. But opponents say the closures will further erode troubled neighborhoods and endanger students who may have to cross gang boundaries to attend school. The schools slated for closure are all elementary schools and are overwhelmingly black and in low-income neighborhoods.

CPS officials say money being spent to keep underutilized schools open could be better used to educate students elsewhere as the district deals with a $1 billion budget deficit. About 30,000 students will be affected by the plan, with about half that number moving into new schools.

"Every child in every neighborhood in Chicago deserves access to a high quality education that prepares them to succeed in life, but for too long children in certain parts of Chicago have been cheated out of the resources they need to succeed because they are in underutilized, under-resourced schools," said district CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett. "As a former teacher and a principal, I've lived through school closings and I know that this will not be easy, but I also know that in the end this will benefit our children."

As word of the closures trickled out, parents and teachers reacted with anger and shock, some even crying. Sandra Leon said she got a tearful call from her grandchildren's kindergarten teacher saying the school was on the list to be closed. Her two grown children also attended the school, and Leon wiped her eyes as she waited outside for her grandchildren.

"It's been so good for our kids," Leon said. "This school is everything."

Chicago officials have moved to close schools in the past, but never anywhere near the number designated at one time by the Emanuel administration. Former Mayor Richard M. Daley's administration spread school closings over a number of years. CPS, the nation's third-largest school district, now has 681 schools.

Chicago is among several major U.S. cities, including Philadelphia, Washington and Detroit to use mass school closures to reduce costs and offset declining enrollment. Detroit has closed more than 130 schools since 2005, including more than 40 in 2010 alone.

The issue has again pitted Emanuel against the Chicago Teachers Union, whose 26,000 members went on strike early in the school year, idling students for seven days. It has also put Emanuel and Byrd-Bennett at odds with parents, civic leaders and lawmakers, who have blasted the pair during highly charged community meetings throughout the city and at a legislative hearing earlier this week.

Union President Karen Lewis criticized Emanuel, who is out of town with his family, for being on vacation on the day of the announcement. She called the closings "an abomination."

"This is cowardly and it is the ultimate bullying job," Lewis said. "Our mayor should be ashamed of himself."

The vast majority of the 54 schools are in overwhelmingly black neighborhoods that have lost residents in recent years. Chicago's black population dropped 17 percent in the last census as African-Americans moved out to the suburbs and elsewhere. The other few schools are majority Hispanic or mixed black and Hispanic. Overall, 91 percent of Chicago public school students are minorities.

Many of the schools identified for closure are in high-crime areas where gang violence contributed to a marked increase in Chicago's homicide rate last year. The district plans to have community groups help students get to their new locations safely.

Among the critics is Eular Hatchett, who lives in the violence-plagued neighborhood of North Lawndale and walks her 13-year-old nephew DaVontay Horace to school.

"Our parents know about this area," she said. "They don't know about those other areas. If they send him way north or way south, I'm not going to do that. It's too dangerous."

Because some schools have more than one building, a total of 61 structures will be closed. In addition to the closures, students at 11 other schools will be "co-located" with existing schools. Six schools have been targeted for academic interventions known as "turnaround."

CPS says the plan will save the district $560 million over 10 years in capital costs and an additional $43 million per year in operating costs.

The district plans to invest $233 million into what it calls the "welcoming" schools, or the buildings that students in closed schools will be moving to. Those funds will be used for air conditioning, upgraded technology and security and to ensure every school has a library.

District officials said they couldn't calculate how many teachers will be laid off as a result of the cuts because school leaders will make decisions about their own budgets.

Many teachers and parents expressed anger and frustration at how the news of the closures trickled out, leaving some to agonize over rumor and conjecture.

"In a word, the approach was brutal. It's certainly not deserved by these parents and these kids," said Mary Visconti, the director of the Better Boys Foundation, a youth organization in the Lawndale neighborhood.

At Lafayette Elementary, where 95 percent of its 483 students come from low-income families, teacher Rosemary Maurello said the principal read teachers a letter from the district Thursday morning saying the school is among those it plans to close. The letter said a final decision would be made in May after more community meetings are held and budget plans are reviewed.

But Maurello said letters and information packets were already being sent to parents and the district's message to teachers included a mention of specific plans to move the Lafayette students to another school about 10 blocks away.

"It sounds like a done deal to me," Maurello said.

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