Democrats catch break in Arkansas governor's race as Halter drops out (Washington Post)

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Germany's Praktiker may lose 4,000 jobs after insolvency-report

BERLIN | Sat Jul 27, 2013 11:25am BST

BERLIN (Reuters) - As many as 4,000 jobs could be lost at German home improvement retailer Praktiker (PRAG.DE) and its Max Bahr chain following insolvency filings, Bild reported on Saturday, citing the group's deputy board chairman.

"That's a shocking number," the newspaper quoted deputy supervisory board chairman Ulrich Kruse as saying.

About a dozen Praktiker stores could shortly be closed, mainly shops that were about to be converted to the Max Bahr brand which traditionally had better profit margins, Wirtschaftswoche reported, without citing the source of the information.

Praktiker said on July 25 that its Max Bahr unit would file for insolvency after a trade credit insurer, named by unions as Coface (CNAT.PA), stopped providing coverage to suppliers.

Praktiker, whose blue and yellow-branded stores selling paints, tools and gardening products are a familiar sight in Germany's out-of-town shopping centres, has been grappling with a decline in sales and profitability since it ended a "20 percent off everything" discount strategy.

(Reporting by Andreas Cremer; Editing by David Holmes)

Source: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/07/27/uk-germany-praktiker-jobs-idUKBRE96Q05H20130727?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

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Korean divide lives on 60 years after end of war

PANMUNJOM, North Korea (AP) ? Some Americans call it the "Forgotten War," a 1950s conflict fought in a far-off country and so painful that even survivors have tried to erase their memories of it.

The North Koreans, however, have not forgotten. Sixty years after the end of the Korean War, the country is marking the milestone anniversary with a massive celebration Saturday for a holiday it calls "Victory Day" ? even though the two sides only signed a truce, and have yet to negotiate a peace treaty.

Signs and banners reading "Victory" line the streets of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. The events are expected to culminate with a huge military parade and fireworks, one of the biggest extravaganzas in this impoverished country since leader Kim Jong Un took power in late 2011.

Here at the border in Panmunjom, the war never ended. Both sides of the Demilitarized Zone are heavily guarded, making it the world's most fortified border, and dividing countless families with sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, on the other side. The North Koreans consider the presence of 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea a continued occupation.

In some ways, war today is being waged outside the confines of the now-outdated armistice signed 60 years ago.

The disputed maritime border off the west coast of the Koreas is a hot spot for clashes. In 2010, a South Korean warship exploded, killing 46 sailors; Seoul blamed a North Korean torpedo. Later that year, a North Korean artillery attack on a front-line South Korean island killed four people, two of them civilians.

Earlier this year, Kim Jong Un enshrined the pursuit of nuclear weapons as a national goal, calling it a defensive measure against the U.S. military threat. In recent months, the warfare has extended into cyberspace, with both Koreas accusing the other of mounting crippling hacking attacks that have taken down government websites in the North and paralyzed online commerce in the South.

Sixty years on, as both Koreas and the United States mark the anniversary Saturday, there is still no peace on the Korean Peninsula.

___

The two sides don't even agree on who started the war.

Outside the North, historians say it was North Korean troops who charged across the border at the 38th parallel and launched an assault at 4 a.m. on June 25, 1950.

North Korea agrees that war broke out at 4 a.m. ? but says U.S. troops attacked first. A photo offered as proof at a Pyongyang war museum shows U.S. soldiers advancing, rifles cocked, as they run past the 38th parallel.

"The real history is that the U.S. started the war on June 25, 1950," Ri Su Jong, a 21-year-old guide at a flower show in Pyongyang, said Tuesday. "They first attacked our country, and we quickly counterattacked."

Ri, whose grandfathers both fought in the war, said she was taught that the North Koreans marched into Seoul three days later, "liberating" South Korea from U.S. forces. A panoramic diorama at the war museum shows soldiers hoisting the North Korean flag in a sea of fire and destruction.

As North Korean troops advanced further south, the U.S. retaliated with bombing campaigns that left both Seoul and Pyongyang in rubble.

"The U.S enemy engineered the war, boasting of the advantage of their air power, flying normally 500 or 700 flights, sometimes up to 1,000 flights a day, both on the front and in the rear," said North Korean Maj. Gen. Kim Sung Un, a war veteran who is now 84. "All the factories and workplaces ... were reduced to ashes."

Then came the counterattack.

Dick Bonelli was a 19-year-old from the Bronx, a self-professed troublemaker, who was shipped off with the U.S. Marines to fight in a country he never knew existed. He arrived in September 1950 with the amphibious assault known in as the "Inchon Landing," the surprise attack that helped the U.S.-led U.N. forces push the North Koreans back.

Bonelli later took part in one of the most costly fights of the Korean War: the 17-day winter campaign in the mountainous region of the North then known by its Japanese name, the Chosin Reservoir. Several thousand were killed in combat, and thousands more died of frostbite.

"I tried for 30 to 40 years to forget it all," Bonelli said in Pyongyang on Thursday, an American flag pinned to his blazer. "Who wants to remember that? It's war. It was terrible."

In all, the fighting took more than 1.2 million lives. More than 500,000 North Korean troops died, along with 183,000 Chinese who fought alongside them. On the other side, 138,000 South Koreans were killed, and 40,670 more from the U.N.-led force, including 36,900 Americans. Civilian deaths totaled almost 374,000 in South Korea and are unknown in the North.

Bonelli is back in North Korea for the first time since 1950. His hope is to revisit Fox Hill, the remote spot that he guarded that first cold winter of the war. Tears in his eyes, he called it an emotional journey to a place that he tried for decades to forget.

___

How the main players in the war will mark Saturday's anniversary is a telling indication of how each country considers the conflict.

North Korea is treating it as a celebration, an occasion to rally support for the country's leader and draw attention to the division of the Korean Peninsula.

In South Korea, it's a day of remembrance. For the government, it's a day of thanks to the 16 U.N. nations that came to South Korea's defense during the 1950-53 war. For many, it's also a day of sorrow as they remember family members left behind in the North, forever divided from their loved ones.

Park Jong-seon doesn't know what happened to his older brother and sister, lost in the tumult of war. "To this day, I still have not heard from them," he said, eyes glistening. "I wonder where they are, and whether they're still alive."

In Washington, President Barack Obama on Thursday declared July 27 National Korean War Veterans Armistice Day. He paid tribute in his proclamation to the veterans who fought to "defend a country they never knew and a people they never met." He is to speak Saturday at the Korean War Veterans Memorial.

___

Back in 1953, the architects of the armistice that took two years to negotiate were so sure the truce would be temporary that they cobbled together corrugated sheds to serve as conference halls in just a handful of days.

Sixty years later, those once-temporary buildings are still standing. On the North Korean side, the drafty building that served as the venue for armistice talks is now the "peace pagoda," a popular stop on a fledgling tourist trail from Pyongyang. A tattered version of the armistice agreement and the U.N. flag are displayed.

The sheds straddling the border where the two sides sometimes meet are still called T1, T2 and T3: the "T'' stands for "temporary."

Peace is up to Washington, North Korean Lt. Col. Nam Dong Ho told The Associated Press recently.

"The division of the Korean Peninsula is less an issue between the North and South and more of an issue between North Korea and the U.S," he said. "Last time, we negotiated an armistice agreement. But next time, we will bring the U.S. to its knees to sign a letter of surrender."

Ri, the flower show guide, also blames the U.S.: "Of course we want peace. ... But the American imperialists keep provoking us with their hostile policy."

The visiting U.S. veteran, Bonelli, says simply that a peace treaty is long overdue.

"It's ridiculous to have an armistice this long and not to sit down, break bread and make peace," he said. "The future is about the children. Let's stop it."

___

Associated Press writer Elizabeth Shim contributed to this report from Seoul, South Korea. Follow AP's Korea bureau chief at www.twitter.com/newsjean.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/korean-divide-lives-60-years-end-war-092932888.html

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Cayuga Community College's budget approved

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CAYUGA COUNTY, N.Y. ? On Tuesday, the budget for Cayuga Community College was up for approval.

Legislators signed off on the plan, which will raise tuition by $140 a year, while cutting spending by more than six percent.

The college board of trustees faced a difficult task, having to deal with a $1.5 million deficit due to low enrollment. Even with furloughs, salary cuts and other reductions, there is still a gap of approximately $400,000.

The board did recently pass a resolution that will allow them to make even deeper cuts moving forward, however, they say they will honor the agreements reached during the budget negotiation process.

Source: http://centralny.ynn.com/content/top_stories/674608/cayuga-community-college-s-budget-approved

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Democratic Governors Steering the Party Leftward

As a procession of Republican governors cracked down on abortion in recent months, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York tried to lift the state's longstanding restrictions after 24 weeks of pregnancy. Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, granted a temporary reprieve to a murderer on death row and signed laws limiting rounds in gun magazines and allowing illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses. So did Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley in Maryland, who also banned capital punishment and legalized medical marijuana.

While Republican governors elected during the party's historic wave in 2010 have drawn criticism for their unabashedly conservative agendas to restrict abortion, rein in labor unions and slash state spending, a number of Democratic governors are just as aggressively pushing liberal policies like gay marriage and gun control. Emboldened by President Obama's re-election, a younger and more diverse electorate, and an increasing number of state governments under one-party control, these Democratic governors are crusading on issues the party steered clear of until recently. It's happening not just in solidly-Democratic states like New York, Maryland, Delaware and Connecticut but also in more competitive battlegrounds like Colorado, where new gun laws are fueling two recall elections and threats of secession from some rural counties.

As potential presidential candidates and rivals to Hillary Clinton, governors like Cuomo and O'Malley are leading the Democratic Party down its most socially liberal path in decades.

"Especially on social issues, the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has moved in the more liberal direction," said Bill Galston, a former Clinton administration official and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "There's a new generation of Democrats who see lots of gain and very little pain in stronger gun safety legislation and gay marriage."

Polling suggests the Democratic governors are on solid ground on some of these issues. Gay marriage ? or in the case of Colorado, same-sex civil unions -- is widely accepted in Democratic-led states and by a narrow majority in national polls. So is allowing illegal immigrants to earn citizenship. Expanding background checks on gun buyers received support from 91 percent in a nationwide Quinnipiac University poll in April frequently cited by Democrats.

The growing support for gun control ? an issue Democrats had studiously avoided for more than a decade -- followed a shocking string of mass murders, most notably the shooting deaths of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. in December. On other social issues, the trends are more demographic. The fast-growing Hispanic and Asian-American communities favor immigration reform, while young people overwhelmingly back gay marriage. President Obama built a winning coalition in part by turning out this younger and more diverse electorate.

"After two Obama electoral victories, liberal interest groups are emboldened and demanding party leaders get in line," said Tim Miller of America Rising, a Republican super PAC leading an anti-Clinton effort. "As a result you are seeing Democrats with national ambitions tack far left and losing touch with mainstream voters."

Colorado, a perennial presidential battleground, is home to a fierce backlash over the state's adoption of liberal policies. The state is facing its first recall elections for a pair of Democratic lawmakers who backed stricter gun control laws spurred by the Newtown murders and the slayings of 12 people in an Aurora movie theater one year ago. In northern Colorado, several rural counties are threatening to secede over the new gun restrictions, driving privileges for illegal immigrants and a renewable energy mandate.

"The most recent legislative session in Colorado was the most liberal I've seen in decades," said Democrat-turned-independent pollster Floyd Ciruli of Denver. "Colorado is not New York, so of course there is going to be a reaction. I don't know if the governor is endangered, but he's dealing with a narrative of a Democratic Party that went too far."

While Hickenlooper has public opinion on his side on most of these social issues, taken together, they could fuel Republican attacks that the Democratic Party has become too radical and push away moderate voters. Amid declining approval ratings, Hickenlooper has also endorsed a controversial $1 billion tax hike for public schools. The latest Quinnipiac poll shows 67 percent of voters disagree with his decision to postpone the execution of Nathan Dunlap, convicted of killing four people in a Chuck E. Cheese's restaurant in 1993.

"Democrats have been talking a lot about Republicans being [pushed] into the extremes, and some Democrats here are anxious about a parallel situation," Ciruli said.

Colorado is among 38 states where the governor's mansion and both chambers of the legislature are controlled by one party, allowing Democrat-led and Republican-led states to enact equally ambitious agendas. In other words, the same unified political climate that allowed Democrats in Colorado and Maryland to pass a slew of progressive laws this year also allowed Republican-controlled states like Texas, Wisconsin, Ohio and North Carolina to ratify tough abortion restrictions.

In this increasingly polarized political landscape, Republican and Democratic states are moving in opposite directions in reaction to developments in Washington -- the failure of Congress to pass gun control, the ongoing talks over immigration reform, and the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the federal ban on same-sex marriage.

"The parties are essentially doubling down, retrenching and going back to their corners and saying, 'This is who we are, and this what we are going to do," said Democratic strategist Maria Cardona, who worked on Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. "The problem for Republicans and what this past election made very clear is that on the issues the president was pushing like abortion rights, the majority of Americans are with him. In the states where Democrats are pushing the envelope, growth is on their side."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/democratic-governors-steering-party-leftward-065201677.html

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In pictures: The Motorola Droid Maxx

The Droid MAXX promises two-days of battery life in a slim design

Verizon's latest battery champ, the Droid MAXX offers an improvement from last years RAZR MAXX's 32-hours of battery life, cranking things up to a full 48-hours. It also brings along a new style and checks in thinner than previous models.

You've still get the Kevlar construction, but things like wireless charging and Motorola's new 10MP camera have been added, and to go with the new look there are some new accessories.

You can see what we're talking about after the break, where we've got a slew of photos to look through.

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WBO President is Critical of Plan For Pros in Olympics

By Ronnie Nathanielsz
?
The president of the World Boxing Organization has joined a growing number of the world professional boxing organizations and outstanding promoters and criticized the plan of the International Amateur Boxing Association or AIBA headed by its president Dr. Ching-Kuo Wu to include select pro boxers in the Olympic Games beginning in Brazil in 2016.
?
Francisco ?Paco? Valcarcel, in answer to a query from this columnist on the AIBA plan noted that many of the? greatest WBO Champions were Olympic Boxers and they benefited greatly from their Olympic experiences.

Valcarcel said ?Professional Boxing has had a great resurgence of popularity over the last 25 years, with countless new venues worldwide where Professional Boxing Championships are contested and numerous new media outlets competing for Boxing?s ever increasing television audience.?? During this same period AIBA has presided over a decline in popularity and fairness of amateur boxing.?
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The WBO president said ?We have all recognized for many years how unfair it is that Communist Countries have permanent professional teams competing against true amateurs.?? 30 year old Cuban professionals have competed against 16 to 18 year old free world amateurs.? One Gold Medal is a glorious accomplishment for any athlete.? 3 Gold Medals for a Boxer only happens through gross exploitation of the Boxer by the National Association.?
?
Valcarcel indicated that every Olympic Medalist ?should be able to profit from his success and glory and attain his or her fair share of the value that the Boxer?s skills and talents generate.? Professional Boxing, whether it is conducted by AIBA or through the traditional structure, is not physical education.?? It is a professional sport conducted for the entertainment of the fans, by athletes motivated by the revenue they can earn.?? They make great sacrifices to reach the pinnacle of the sport.?? They deserve to receive the fair reward for the sacrifices they make and the risks they take.?

He said AIBA ?now wants to structure permanent National Team that competes as professionals until they miraculously reemerge as amateurs every four years at the Olympics.? They have recognized the unpopularity of the sports style they have advocated and their answer is to copy the professional style, but compete as national teams of indentured, underpaid house fighters.? ?
?
?
Valcarcel insisted ?No one seriously believes any of the AIBA boxers would be competitive against WBO Champions.? This is because WBO Champions are formed through free and open competition to determine the best boxers in the world.? It is tragic that AIBA is advocating that countries with many millions of people and many thousands of athletes should restrict the opportunity for its citizens to compete professionally to its National Team in AIBA structure where they are paid not like Professional Boxing Champions based on the amount of revenue that a free market will determine, but based on a set structure determined by the National Team. ?
?
The WBO president expressed the hope that ?colonialism and exploitation should be diminishing as the World progresses? even as he criticized? AIBA's concept as? ?an exploitive and foolish step backward from democracy and free markets to collective determination of opportunities and economic colonialism. ?
?
Valcarcel referred to the April 13 WBO super bantamweight championship between Nonito ?The Filipino Flash? Donaire and former Cuban two-time Olympic gold medalist Guillermo Rigondeaux as ? A great example of the gross distortion of market dynamics that AIBA is perpetrating on its participants.? He pointed out that Rigondeaux ?earned more in that one evening than the entire Cuban AIBA team will be paid by Cuba in their lifetimes.?
?
He accused AIBA under of wanting to ?create a monopoly in the name of the International Olympic movement through government fiats, and there doing diminish the popularity of the sport of Boxing and the opportunities of athletes to compete and benefit from professional boxing.? Boxing is too hard a sport to ask its competitors to endure closed shops, suppressed earning and diminished opportunities.? AIBA should be reformed to return Olympic Boxing to its prior excellence and popularity.? It has no business in Professional Boxing and approaches it with the same imperious and feckless manner that it has abused amateur boxing.?

Tags: Amateur Boxing

Source: http://www.boxingscene.com/wbo-president-critical-plan-pros-olympics--67885

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