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Greek leaders OK austerity bill

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:29:00 EST

ATHENS, Greece – Greece’s Parliament passed an austerity and debt-relief bill on Monday as rioters in Athens looted shops and set buildings on fire. The austerity bill was supported by 199 of the 300 members of Parliament, while the coalition government expelled 43 deputies over dissent in the crucial debt vote, reducing their majority from 236 to 193. Athens must now persuade its international lenders, the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund that it has the will to implement the spending cuts and public-sector reforms required to release $171 billion in emergency loans. Thick clouds of smoke and tear gas filled the air around Parliament as the voting took place. Demonstrators torched more than 20 buildings, including apartments, shops, banks, cafes, two cinemas and a museum. Police clashed with more than 2,000 anarchists carrying clubs and gasoline bombs on dozens of fronts across the city. More than 80 people, including 30 police officers, were reported injured and 25 arrests were made, police said. Prime Minister Lucas Papademos appealed for calm as the voting began in Parliament. “The destruction taking place outside this building has no place in democracy,” Papademos said. “I call on the public to show calm – during this crucial and serious period we do not have the luxury of this type of protest.” Earlier, thousands of protesters, many of them wearing gas masks, marched to Parliament to rally against the drastic cuts, which include cutting the minimum wage by 22 per cent, pension cuts and laying off one in five civil servants. While most of the protesters were peaceful, several hundred of them fought alongside anarchists at various locations around the city center, tearing chunks of marble broken off the fronts of luxury hotels and shops. Among those who joined the campaign against Greece accepting a bailout in return for harsh measures were composer Mikis Theodorakis, 86, and veteran leftist politician Manoli Glezos, 89. (EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE) Giorgos Makris, a 44-year-old mathematics teacher, said he was not going to back-down and would continue to fight against the harsh new measures. “I am fighting for my future which they have destroyed by cutting my salary by 20 per cent,” he said. Meanwhile, Greece’s eurozone partners kept up the pressure for real reforms. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Greeks should be aware of the fact that there was a need for dramatic change. “That’s why now promises are not enough anymore,” Schaeuble said in remarks published in the newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

Arab League eyes Syria intervention

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:29:00 EST

BEIRUT, Lebanon – The Arab League on Sunday called for the creation of a joint Arab-United Nations peacekeeping mission to halt the escalating violence in Syria, as Syrian government forces sustained their assault against protest strongholds in the city of Homs and elsewhere. Syria immediately rejected the resolution adopted by a meeting of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo, and with Russia still firmly opposed to U.N. action against Syria, it seemed unlikely such a mission would be formed anytime soon. The Arab League also ended its monitoring mission, which was suspended earlier this month after it was widely condemned as ineffectual and because it was becoming too dangerous for the monitors. But Sunday’s appeal indicated the increasing frustration of at least some Arab states with the world’s failure to take action to stem the bloodshed. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, told those at the meeting that “the Syrian leadership has chosen chaos, and is killing people and destroying the nation only to maintain its authority.” The Arab League asked member states to provide “all forms of political and financial support” to the Syrian opposition and to cease “diplomatic cooperation” with the Syrian regime. But the resolution stopped short of recognizing the Syrian National Council, the main opposition group, as the legitimate representative of Syria, which had been proposed by some states before the meeting. The resolution did not spell out exactly what the mission of the proposed U.N.-Arab force would be, and Security Council diplomats in New York said they were still unclear about the specifics of the request.

Weston, modernist architect, dies at 87

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:26:00 EST

Modernist architect Eugene Weston III was in his early 30s when he declared that “the house is the last of the handcrafted objects” in an industrial age. The year was 1956, and he argued in the Los Angeles Times that even a modest house could be “more beautiful and meaningful” if it was built with post-and-beam construction that opens up interiors and invites the outdoors in through walls of glass. A third-generation Los Angeles architect, Weston built a string of midcentury homes here before spending three decades with a San Diego firm known for such large-scale commissions as the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego Wild Animal Park and several major buildings at the University of California, San Diego. Weston died Jan. 31 in Santa Barbara, said Ron Adler, a son-in-law. He was 87. Through their work for local clients, Weston and such well-known architects as Richard Neutra and John Lautner introduced experimental designs that influenced “countless imitators,” according to “Foothill Moderns,” a 2007 exhibit at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga. After completing his studies in 1947 at what is now the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Weston worked at the Hollywood firm of his father, Eugene Weston Jr., known for designing the temple-like American Legion building on Highland Avenue. With another architect, Douglas Byles, Weston formed a partnership, and they became general contractors who built their first post-and-beam home on speculation in 1949 in Pasadena. The widely published design sold for about $12,000. Weston’s “designs are simple, elegant and to the scale of how many people desired to live, then and now,” Keith York, an authority on Southern California modernism, told The Times in 2006. The architect built a number of homes in and around Pasadena but only one in Eagle Rock, in 1953, for Norman Bilderback, then a director of design at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. After art dealer Scott Nadeau bought the hillside home in 2003, he compared it to a treehouse for the summer light that streams through both sides of the living room: “I kept thinking about this 28-year-old designer, Eugene Weston.

The greening of Guantanamo Bay

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:00:25 EST

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – Solar-powered lights serve as sentries where U.S. Marines once faced-off along the Cuban frontier. A team of Navy cops now rides bikes rather than gas-guzzling patrol cars in the searing Caribbean sunshine. In this remote corner of Cuba that is better known as a lab for Pentagon justice and interrogation, the U.S. Navy has been quietly engaging in more low-profile offshore experimentation – seeking environmentally friendly alternatives to reduce its whopping $100,000 a day fossil fuel dependence. It’s a Navy-wide goal to halve dependence on fossil fuels by 2020.

Romney’s good day: Wins conservatives, Maine caucus

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 23:00:19 EST

WASHINGTON – Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney got a much-needed boost Saturday, winning a key symbolic vote over former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania among some of the nation’s most active Republican voters and besting the field in the Maine caucuses. Romney’s 38-31 percent defeat of Santorum in a straw presidential vote among thousands of activists at the annual convention of the Conservative Political Action Committee bolstered his claim that he can consolidate support among the Republican base. “I think it will give people a little more feeling that in the upcoming primaries, Romney can appeal to the conservative wing of the Republican Party,” said Michael McLaughlin, a retired foreign-service officer from McLean, Va., who attended the three-day conference in Washington. In a separate nationwide survey of conservatives conducted by conference organizers, Romney also bested Santorum, though by a narrower margin of 27-25 percent. The two results, announced shortly before the news that Romney also won the Maine caucuses, were a setback for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and provided fresh evidence that he’s losing ground to Santorum as the strongest alternative to Romney in the GOP White House race. In Maine, Romney took slightly more than 39 percent of the 5,585 votes cast statewide. Rep.

Scots likely to get vote on splitting from Britain

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:02:20 EST

STIRLING, Scotland – This castled city where highlands and lowlands meet has been fought over many times by the Scots and the English, never more bloodily than in the 13th century battle depicted in the Oscar-winning film “Braveheart.” Now Alasdair MacPherson hopes to see this former capital of the kingdom of Scotland back in his countrymen’s hands without a single shot fired. In the biggest test of British unity in decades, Scotland is on the verge of being granted the right to hold a referendum on whether to secede from the United Kingdom, putting asunder more than 300 years of marriage to England and Wales. MacPherson, 49, has been pining all his life for a divorce. “I’ve always been convinced that Scotland would have the opportunity to make up her own mind. ... We know we can run our own country,” he said. But like many a practical Scot, MacPherson is a realist as well as an idealist. If independence can’t win enough votes at the ballot box, he’ll gladly take a consolation prize: an extensive form of self-rule that stops short of secession but would give Scotland the power to tax and spend. Led by Alex Salmond, one of the canniest politicians in the British Isles, Scottish nationalists are now fighting to put the alternative option, known as “maximum devolution,” on the referendum in the hope that it’ll become a back door to eventual independence. His foes in London insist that the plebiscite be held as quickly and cleanly as possible. Prime Minister David Cameron, who doesn’t want to be remembered as the man who presided over the United Kingdom’s demise, is urging that the historic referendum take place next year and that it ask one question and one question only: Should Scotland be independent? “It must be clear, it must be legal, it must be decisive and it must be fair,” Cameron told the House of Commons recently.

Top US general meets Egyptian leader amid strained relations

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:02:13 EST

CAIRO, Egypt – The Pentagon’s top general met Saturday with the head of Egypt’s ruling military council amid the fraying of bilateral relations over a criminal case against 16 American civil society workers. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey spoke with Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and other members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has ruled Egypt since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year. Official statements on the meeting gave no details on their talks about the grim backdrop of the visit – Egypt’s crackdown on American nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. Egypt is prosecuting 43 NGO workers from such U.S.-funded groups as the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. At least 16 Americans, including the son of U.S.