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Why the Stock Market Keeps Plummeting

Faced with ubiquitous signs of global economic meltdown, investors sold stocks in force on Tuesday, dragging the broad market indexes down near the lows reached last November. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index, weighed down by financials, fell 4.56%, while the Dow Industrials sank 3.8%, falling to within a fraction of its November 2008 low. Among the hardest hit sectors were bank stocks, down 10%, oil service stocks, down 8.2%, and semiconductor stocks, which fell 6.7%. Gold Mining was among the rare winners Tuesday, with the industry group rising 2.5%.

Dragging the stock market down is a near universal acceptance that this recession is going to be longer and deeper than the consensus thought just three months ago. Late last week, for example, investment firm Credit Suisse lowered the projected operating earnings for S&P 500 companies to $58. It had been expecting $70 per share. The firm now expects overall operating earnings for the S&P 500 to fall 34% in 2009. In lowering its estimate, Credit Suisse analysts added a note of caution to the grim forecast: “We worry that while financial earnings have already seen considerable weakness, non-financial earnings have further to fall.” Faced with such pessimism, the S&P finished Tuesday’s session at 789, below the 800 ‘technical support” level that analysts feel was critical to maintaining investor confidence.
Investor sentiment was shaken over the holiday weekend by news that Japan’s economy shrank at an annualized rate of almost 13% in the latest quarter. Economic news from virtually every corner of the world is reinforcing the notion that this economic storm knows no bounds, and may be gaining fury.
That perception is leading investors to take cover, even in the face of hopeful news. Indeed, as the market sank on Tuesday, President Obama not only signed the $787 billion stimulus into law, but added that there could be yet another stimulus package if needed. Moreover, recent reports from the credit markets indicate that the great credit freeze may finally be starting to thaw. Morgan Stanley says that its analysts are seeing an improved credit landscape in most of the industries they track. “With the exception of utilities, a clear majority of firms in every other sector reported that credit availability had either remained the same or become easier over the past three months,” Morgan Stanley’s February 17 report notes.

It is likely that investors will be reluctant to bet on nascent signs of improving credit so long as the housing market remains in turmoil. On Wednesday morning President Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will appear at a high school in Arizona to unveil their new plan to stem the tide of housing foreclosures. The financial community’s response to that plan will likely be writ large in the stock market averages by late morning.

See pictures of the global financial crisis.

See who’s to blame for the current financial crisis.

Leahy’s Plan to Probe Bush-Era Wrongdoings

Leahys Plan to Probe Bush-Era Wrongdoings

The Right screams that it’s a witch-hunt, the Left complains it’s a cop-out, and President Obama wishes it would just go away. But Senator Patrick Leahy isn’t about to drop his proposal for a Truth Commission to investigate wrongdoing in the Bush Administration. “We would be making bad mistake, for history’s purpose, if we walk away from this,” the Vermont Democrat told TIME.

The President has said he would look at Leahy’s proposal, but that he was “more interested in looking forward than in looking back,” as he put it at last week’s prime-time news conference . Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is not in any mood to let bygones be bygones, and he reportedly discussed his idea of the commission with White House chief counsel Gregg Craig last week. “It’s a lot easier to look forward if you know what happened in the past,” he told TIME.

As Leahy envisions it, the Truth Commission’s priorities would be to investigate the politicization of prosecution in the Justice Department under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; the wiretapping of U.S. Citizens; the flawed intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq; and the use of torture at Guantanamo and so-called black sites abroad. Leahy’s commission is to be modeled after one that investigated the apartheid regime in South Africa. The panel would have subpoena power but would not bring criminal charges. The South African commission also allowed those testifying to seek immunity from prosecution.

Bush’s harshest critics think Leahy’s controversial plan doesn’t even go far enough. They argue that a Truth Commission would amount to a get-out-of-jail pass for officials who they believe broke the law; they would prefer to see more muscular criminal investigations and prosecution of top officials, possibly Bush himself. Leahy, a 34-year Senate veteran, says he understands the sentiment. “Instinctively, I’d prefer prosecutions too, but in my experience you usually end up getting only the small guys while the top people get away,” Leahy told TIME, citing as an example the investigation into the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Besides, he added, “a thorough prosecution could take 12-15 years, and I would like to get some answers quickly.” Long, drawn-out processes like the one that led to the indictment of President Bill Clinton “usually don’t get to the bottom of things and don’t benefit the country,” he said.

Perhaps surprisingly, a majority of Americans polled recently by Gallup expressed their support for some kind of investigation into Bush-era wrongdoing such as the politicization of the Justice Department or torture, though much of the backing was for an independent panel, not a criminal probe. But a sampling of constitutional and legal experts polled by TIME was split on whether a Truth Commission would be the right way to investigate allegations against Bush officials.

“Truth Commissions don’t fit particularly well with our system,” says John Q. Barrett, who helped investigate the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s and in the prosecution of several Reagan Administration officials. Now a law professor at New York’s St. John’s University, Barrett argues that the Congress already has all the powers “to compel testimony and grant immunity” that Leahy wants for his Truth Commission. “Creating a whole new entity would be a huge bureaucratic exercise,” he says. It would be an “effort to shunt off something that can be done by Congress.” And indeed, Leahy told the Huffington Post that if the President doesn’t sign on to his idea, he fully expects Congress to launch its own investigation of Bush administration wrongdoing — though he acknowledged it would be much easier with Obamas’ cooperation.

Sharper criticism for Leahy’s proposal comes from political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain, who dismisses it as “preposterous.” She accuses the Senator of trying to damn the Bush Administration by association. Since the concept of a Truth Commission is associated with South Africa and Latin American countries, Leahy is “analogizing the Bush Administration to the Apartheid regime and to Argentinian juntas.”

“Truth Commissions are for societies that have gone through tremendous upheaval, and need a way to heal wounds,” says Elshtain, who teaches social and political ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. “That has nothing to do with the situation in the U.S.”

But Columbia University Law School’s Sarah Cleveland cautions against reading too much into the South African association. The process Leahy is proposing, she says, is closer to the 9/11 Commission. “It is a very important first step in helping the country to understand what happened, and making sure we don’t go down that way again,” she says.

Cleveland says it’s a good idea to separate the commission from the Hill, “to make it genuinely bipartisan, and to avoid grandstanding by Congressmen.”

But she cautions against offering immunity up-front to those testifying, pointing out that this had not worked well in the Iran-Contra investigations. Leahy’s Truth Commission, she says, “can only be an intermediate step — eventually, you’ll need to prosecute.” See Who’s Who in Barack Obama’s White House. See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

Japan’s ‘Drunk’ Finance Chief, Shoichi Nakagawa, Steps Down

Japans Drunk Finance Chief, Shoichi Nakagawa, Steps Down

Slurred speech. Long pauses. Answering questions that weren’t directed to him and blurting out others. For days, Japan’s Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa’s appearance, during which he appears to be drunk, has been painfully public on the YouTube video of a G7 press conference in Rome last week. Today, it finally cost him his job. At a press conference in Tokyo, he resigned from his cabinet post, delivering yet another blow to the administration of Prime Minister Taro Aso as he struggles to keep control of his party and deal with the country’s ever-worsening economic crisis.

The rudderless finance ministry that Nakagawa’s resignation leaves can’t help an already dismal outlook for the Japanese economy. This week’s figures show that Japan’s economy contracted last quarter at an annualized rate of nearly 13%, exports were down nearly 14%, and that more layoffs are on the books for Japan Inc. But economists and experts predict the ramifications of Nakagawa’s resignation won’t be economic, but political. In a recent poll, Aso’s support rate was 9.7% and many say he is teetering on losing control of the Liberal Democratic Party. “[The economy isn’t] going to be better or worse because he’s gone,” says Robert Dujarric, director at Temple University’s Institute of Contemporary Japanese Studies. “But this is one more nail in Aso’s coffin…It shows that he’s incompetent and so is his administration.”

As word — and video — of the embarrassing incident got out, Nakagawa also stole positive attention away from this week’s historic visit from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Japan. Nakagawa’s press conference Tuesday nearly coincided with the briefing that announced the invitation that Clinton extended to Aso to be the first foreign leader to visit the White House under President Barack Obama’s administration. “The opposition party is looking to make an opportunity out of this big mistake,” says Credit Suisse chief economist Hiromichi Shirakawa. Shirakawa says that if there were economic implications of Nakagawa’s resignation, they might be that the DPJ would “push the reset button” on Aso’s pending budget proposal, which includes an unpopular hand out of $21.7 billion to the Japanese public. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan, he says, “can now argue that the government has already lost their ability to get back on a path to recovery.”

Nakagawa, for his part, has denied that he was drunk in the first place, saying that he was tired, under the influence of cold medicines, and had only “a sip” of wine during the lunch before the G7 press conference. The outraged public, for better or for worse, was not having it. “Japanese are often concerned about negative reactions by other countries,” says Shirakawa. “It’s a kind of shame.” The fact that the press conference was broadcast globally didn’t help. “It’s not like some tourism minister at some conference in Bermuda getting smashed,” says Dujarric. “The economy is tanking and he’s supposed to go to help the Japanese people deal with this. This was the public humiliation of the country. He had to go.”

Aso has already named Minister of the Economy Kaoru Yosano, 70, as Nakagawa’s replacement. Yosano, who claims he taught DPJ leader Ichiro Ozawa to play the chess-like game of Go, will now wear three hats in Aso’s government, running the ministries of economy and finance and the Financial Services Agency, which oversees banking. A fiscal conservative, Yosano was runner-up to Aso in the LDP elections last September. If things get much worse for the Prime Minister, there is even talk that Yosano could become the new head of the party and lead it into upcoming general elections. How well this bodes for the struggling LDP remains to be seen; the last time that Yosano and Ozawa played Go, Ozawa won.
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The Revival of Beaujolais

After decades of good times, the Beaujolais winemaking region has been suffering a killer hangover. In the ’80s and ’90s, Beaujolais Nouveau was a global phenomenon, but abuses in overproduction and dubious vinification practices by some growers sullied the brand. These days Beaujolais is often seen as a mediocre, industrial product, rushed to bottle for release every November.

But a new generation of artisan winemakers is intent on fixing Beaujolais’ bruised reputation. Three years ago, Marie-Elodie Zighera invested everything in her old family vineyard, Clos de Mez in Fleurie, determined “to change the image of the wines of Beaujolais.” Her belief in the region’s fare stems from a “sumptuous” 1911 Beaujolais Cru Morgon she once sampled. “I’ve tasted what they could do back then, and that’s the style I’m searching for,” she says. Zighera patiently vinifies in tiny volumes with the Gamay grapes’ natural yeasts to create her elegant, structured Fleurie La Dot.

Driven by more humble if no less admirable ambitions, Karim Vionnet launched his Villié-Morgon vineyard to “make a wine that was simple and natural.” That meant rejecting the common thermovinification technique in favor of a cold carbonic maceration that preserves freshness without added sulfites. His Beaujolais-Villages, with their ample red fruit flavors and light, tickling tannins, epitomize the French word for silky gulpability — gouleyant.

Vionnet credits his techniques to a group of Villié-Morgon-based winemakers dubbed the Morgon Gang of Four. In the ’80s, Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Guy Breton and Jean-Paul Thévenet gathered in opposition to “industrial wine” to make pesticide-free, nonsulfured, nonfiltered wines. Marcel’s son Mathieu is heartened by the new crop of feisty purists. “The trend with many of the young winemakers today is to practice vinification and agriculture respectful of the region’s identity,” he says. The results are far more exciting than the cookie-cutter Beaujolais Nouveau of old. “We have different styles,” says Zighera. “But we’re all trying to make beautiful wines.” Reason enough to give Beaujolais another try.
Wine Country: A Day in Beaujolais
With its medieval villages, rolling hills and lanes of lush Gamay vines, Beaujolais — which wine writer Rudolph Chelminski likens to a “Hollywood set for an ideal vineyard region” — is well worth the two-hour train ride from Paris. Visit Domaine Lapierre and the vineyards of the other members of the Morgon Gang of Four in Villié-Morgon, where you can sip and sleep at Domaine Jean Foillard’s bed and breakfast, tel: 4 74 04 24 97, overlooking the vine-covered Côte de Py hills.

Nearby in Fleurie, minutes from Zighera’s vineyard , eat at the legendary Michelin-starred restaurant Le Cep, tel: 4 74 04 24 97, where owner Chantal Chagny serves herb-crusted frogs’ legs and other traditional country dishes with the best wines of the Beaujolais.

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Chimp attack 911 call: ‘He’s ripping her apart’

Police say Travis, seen here as a younger chimp, was like a child to his owner, Sandra Herold.
A Connecticut woman pleaded for police to "please hurry" to save a friend from an attack by a pet chimpanzee, according to emotional 911 recordings released Tuesday by Stamford police.

“He’s ripping her apart,” Sandra Herold, 70, tells dispatchers about her pet, Travis. With the chimp squealing in the background, Herold cries out, “He’s killed my friend!” The victim, Charla Nash, 55, remains hospitalized with life-threatening injuries after the chimp, once featured in television commercials for Coca-Cola and Old Navy, attacked her Monday afternoon, police said. Nash had just arrived at Herold’s house when Travis jumped on her and began biting and mauling her, causing serious injuries to her face, neck and hands, according to Stamford Police Capt. Rich Conklin. Conklin said the attack was unprovoked, but he described it as “brutal and lengthy.” Herold had called Nash to her house to help get 14-year-old Travis back inside after he used a key to escape. Wildlife biologist Jeff Corwin talks about the dangers of chimps » While her friend was being attacked, Herold was unable to pull the primate off. She then called 911 before stabbing the chimp with a butcher knife and hitting him with a shovel. Neither fazed Travis, who police said had been like a child to Herold.

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A Stamford police officer later shot the chimp multiple times after the primate went after him inside a police cruiser, Conklin said. Travis returned to the house, where police found him dead. Conklin estimated that Travis weighed close to 200 pounds. Conklin couldn’t confirm media reports that the chimp had Lyme disease, though he did say investigators were taking their time with the case to determine what may have provoked Travis to attack Nash. Animals often do not exhibit symptoms of Lyme disease, caused by the bite of certain types of ticks, although aggression is a possible symptom, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Conklin said Nash had recently gotten a haircut that changed her appearance significantly. Conklin said the chimp had been acting “rambunctious” earlier, prompting Herold to put Xanax in a cup of tea for him to drink. He did not know if the animal had been prescribed the medicine or if Herold had ever given her pet such a mixture before. Conklin added that his department is not used to dealing with cases such as this, and they were trying to familiarize themselves with laws and regulations before deciding if charges will be filed. Conklin said this isn’t the first interaction his officers have had with Travis. The chimp, who was well known and liked in the community, escaped in 2003 and “wreaked havoc” on the streets of Stamford for a couple of hours, Conklin said.

Travis’ body was removed from the home and taken to two locations: His head was taken to the state lab for a rabies test and the body was taken to the University of Connecticut for an animal autopsy. Conklin said this is standard procedure. The chimp, who was known to walk around town, sometimes without a leash, also liked to surf on the Internet and was able to change the TV channel with a remote, according to a Stamford Advocate article. The paper also reported that Travis watered plants, was able to feed hay to his owner’s horses, ate at a table with the rest of the family and sometimes drank wine from a stemmed glass.

King moved, as father was, on trip to Gandhi’s memorial

Martin Luther King III, center, reflects at the site of Mahatma Gandhi's memorial.
In 1959, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to India to further understand Mahatma Gandhi’s tactics of passive resistance.

Gandhi’s methods of nonviolent protests had worked a decade earlier to bring independence to a nation. In ’59, King was in the midst of formulating and carrying out his own plan to help bring freedom and equality to the oppressed in the United States. Both leaders paid a heavy price. Although their methods were ones of nonviolence, they both died violent deaths, assassinated by gunmen. Their legacies were forever linked by the lessons King applied when he returned to America after his monthlong trip to India with his wife, Coretta. Andrew Young, a top aide to King, says the civil rights leader “found great strength in Gandhi and in Gandhi’s writings, his life, his tactics.” On the 50th anniversary of King’s visit to India, his oldest son, Martin Luther King III, and a delegation of congressmen and leaders like Young went to India to commemorate the historical trip. At a time when war and terrorism are raging in many nations, the younger King said, the notion of a nonviolent means to an end is needed as much now as it ever was. “My dad used to say that violence is the language of the unheard,” King said as he stood in New Delhi looking at pictures of his father in India. “For so long, we in the world community disallowed people to express the other points of view. I think we have to learn how to disagree without being disagreeable.” King, who was 2 when his father came to India, visited several sites including the place where Gandhi was cremated, his memorial and an exhibition of pictures put on by the American Embassy in Delhi.

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“This was truly a mountain-top type of experience for me,” King said. “I remember my mother, sharing this very special experience with us children in the family of how moving this experience was for her. … Now I truly understand that it’s one thing for a parent to share the experience, it’s another thing for you to be physically at the site and experience it for oneself. ” The U.S. delegation also brought a rare treat to India to commemorate the historic visit in ’59. The delegation included some celebrated American musicians who put on a concert. Grammy Award-winning singers and musicians Chaka Khan, Herbie Hancock, George Duke, tabla player Ustad Kazir Hussein and Dee Dee Bridgewater were among those who brought a special sound to India for the occasion. “Music brings people together,” King said at the celebratory concert. “In our tradition, the freedom tradition, perhaps if Mohandas K. Gandhi were here and Martin Luther King Jr. were here, they might be telling us not only that we shall overcome but maybe to some degree we have overcome.” Grammy-winner Herbie Hancock said music has a special purpose. “We’re here to celebrate peace.” Hancock said. “Music has always celebrated peace. It has also been used for war, but we all know that is not the best use for it. The best use for it is for something that is constructive.” Watch as Chaka Khan sings “Night in New Delhi” with Herbie Hancock on keyboards »

Pooja Bansal, an Indian student who attended one of the ceremonies, was proud that King had learned from one of India’s greatest heroes. “His father is to America what Gandhi is to India,” he said. “He came here 50 years ago to hear Gandhi himself and had a great impact on the way he led a similar movement. What do you think about that, he actually learned from Gandhi’s teachings”

Solar-power firm fired up about stimulus

AVA Solar CEO Pascal Noronha holds one of the solar panels his company produces.
A Colorado solar-energy company has high hopes for the economic stimulus bill that President Barack Obama will sign Tuesday in Denver.

Obama touts that the stimulus bill will help create up to a half a million so-called “green” jobs in the field of alternative energy. Colorado has a growing green energy industry. Executives of AVA Solar, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, are among green energy industry representatives invited to the bill signing. AVA Solar has its plant in Longmont, about 30 minutes north of Denver. The plant, set to begin production in the spring, will construct solar panels for solar power plants. Once production is up to speed, CEO Pascal Noronha says, the plant should create enough solar panels a year to power 40,000 U.S. homes. Noronha says AVA Solar needs two things: Government loans to expand its factory, and more government assistance to help power companies commit to building large solar power plants in the United States. iReport.com: What would you fix first Noronha says those two moves would help AVA Solar create 1,000 to 2,000 new jobs in its factory, plus added employment for its suppliers. The company, founded in 2007, currently has 175 employees. Without the stimulus, Noronha said, AVA Solar is on track to create 420 new jobs by the end of this year.

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AVA Solar currently operates on $175 million in U.S.-based private venture capital. In 2007 the company also received $3 million in seed money from the U.S. Department of Energy. Noronha says Obama is on the right track in terms of the stimulus bill. “What everybody needs is a little seed money because five years from now there’s no question [that] solar has to replace the oil that we import,” Noronha says. “What the government needs to do is provide the traction that is needed to get the first few projects on the ground.” “We need money from the federal government … to facilitate production immediately,” the CEO adds. “Otherwise, we will be sitting and waiting for projects in the U.S., and if we have to wait one year or two years — when we’re able to produce a solution for this country today — that is a really good reason for the government to say, ‘Here it is, let’s go.’ ” Noronha says his company’s biggest customer base is in Germany, a country that is far ahead of the United States in embracing solar energy. Obtaining U.S. customers is a priority, he explains. “As a company we would very much like to have customers here in the U.S.,” Noronha says. “The government needs to be able to facilitate these customers by making it possible for them to put large-scale power plants up.” Noronha is optimistic about the stimulus bill and the direction of the Obama administration. “If you look at the vision of the president, you know he is looking out in the future and saying we’ve got to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Noronha says. “Well, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, there is only renewable energy. And there are two forms that are promising — one is wind and the other is solar. And solar, you’ve got the sun’s resources all over the world.”

Alleged $8 Billion CD Fraud Latest in Rash of Ponzi Busts

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed charges today against high-flying Houston-based financier R. Allen Stanford for orchestrating what it calls a multibillion-dollar investment fraud of “shocking magnitude.”

The complaint says Stanford perpetrated a “massive fraud based on false promises and fabricated historical return data to prey on investors.” The alleged fraud centers on an $8 billion certificate-of-deposit program.

In the past few weeks, Stanford, who operates Antigua-based Stanford International Bank, and his companies had fallen under the eye of the FBI, the SEC and other regulatory bodies.

The complaint says Stanford Bank has more than 30,000 clients in 131 countries and $7.2 billion in assets. It says the company’s larger group, Stanford Financial Group, is a privately held entity with $50 billion “under advisement.”

The SEC action also charged the bank’s chief financial officer, James Davis, as well as Laura Pendergest-Holt, chief investment officer of Stanford Financial Group. A temporary restraining order entered by U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor froze Stanford’s assets, and a receiver has been appointed to marshal them.

The SEC’s outgoing enforcement chief, Linda Thomsen, said Stanford promised “improbable and unsubstantiated high interest rates” allegedly earned through a unique investment strategy. The bank purportedly achieved double-digit returns on its investments during the past 15 years.

“Stanford, and the close circle of family and friends with whom he runs his businesses, perpetrated a massive fraud based on false promises and fabricated historical return data to prey on investors,” said Thomsen. “We are moving quickly and decisively in this enforcement action to stop this fraudulent conduct and preserve assets for investors.”

The SEC’s regional director in Fort Worth, Rose Romero, said, “We are alleging a fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world.”

Hedge-fund and Ponzi scams continue as frauds du jour. Not counting Stanford’s alleged crime, seven new hedge-fund or Ponzi scams have been busted since Jan. 1, totaling some $814 million lost by more than 2,100 investors, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission . This does not include financial transgressions such as penny-stock swindles, insider trading, foreign bribery or general market manipulation.

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Anti-Semitic attacks rising, UK watchdog reports

Michael Bookatz as he looked when first responders arrived after he was attacked.
Michael Bookatz, 32, was walking home one night in January when he noticed a man walking toward him.

“Then he just suddenly ran up to me and punched me in the face,” he said. “He started stamping on me, kicking me. A friend of his came from the other side of the road and started stamping and kicking on me. And they said: ‘This is because of what happened to the Palestinians in Gaza.'” The attack on Bookatz — a Jew who wears a skullcap and lives in a particularly Jewish neighborhood of London — is one of more than 250 assaults on Jewish targets in the United Kingdom since the beginning of the year, according to the Community Security Trust, a non-governmental organization which monitors anti-Semitism in Britain. The group recorded more than 200 incidents in the month of January alone, the highest monthly total it has seen since it began keeping records in 1984. London’s Metropolitan Police “report that since December, there have been four times as many anti-Semitic attacks as attacks on Muslims, even though there are seven or eight times the number of British Muslims as there are Jews,” said British lawmaker Denis MacShane, who chaired the country’s first parliamentary inquiry into anti-Semitism. Against this backdrop, London hosted a two-day international conference on combating anti-Semitism Monday and Tuesday. Watch what Bookatz says of the attack on him » MacShane called it the “first conference of its type,” bringing together lawmakers from at least 35 different countries. “Parliaments now have to acknowledge that anti-Semitism is back. It’s a potent ideological force, causing fears to Jews in many different countries, and it has to be combated by all people that care about democracy,” MacShane said. It is not only a problem for Jews to tackle, the lawmaker said. “I’m not Jewish. Most people at the conference are not Jewish,” he said. The rise in attacks on Jewish targets comes amid heightened tension in the Middle East, the Community Security Trust noted. The incidents include arson and graffiti attacks on synagogues, verbal and physical abuse of Jews, and hate mail. Similar events were reported across Europe during Israel’s three-week military assault on Hamas in Gaza in December and January, the CST said in a statement. But Bookatz is not convinced Gaza is the real reason for the assaults on Jews. “Anti-Semitism is around,” he said. “It has always been around. Throughout my life, I have experienced anti-Semitic attacks. “Gaza was probably a focal point, something that triggered it: ‘OK, now that Gaza is happening, we can use it as an excuse to attack people,'” Bookatz said. MacShane said lawmakers around the world needed to take a stand against anti-Semitism. “We would like to get the police to take anti-Semitism seriously, to take Internet anti-Semitism seriously,” he said. “We need to say to countries that promote anti-Semitism: ‘Drop that hate of Jews.'”

He warned anti-Semitism was an indicator of other problems. “Whenever anti-Semitism sinks roots, the world is heading in a disastrously wrong direction,” he said. “That is a lesson from history. If we don’t tackle anti-Semitism in the early stage, then it devours democracy.”

Grand Theft Auto’s Extreme Storytelling

Grand Theft Autos Extreme Storytelling

When Grand Theft Auto IV: Liberty City came out on April 29 last year, it sold 3.6 million copies in one day. By the end of the week, sales were up to 6 million, for a total take of about $500 million. Which means, if you go by that number , that Grand Theft Auto IV owns the biggest opening of any entertainment property in history. In comparison, Pirates of the Caribbean 3 took in a paltry $400 million during its first week.

And Grand Theft Auto IV wasn’t even the most commercial entertainment option on the bill. As Dan Houser, one of the prime movers behind the Grand Theft Auto series, points out, the game opened opposite Speed Racer and Iron Man. “I thought that was an interesting moment,” says Houser, an affable, shaved-headed Londoner who talks so quickly that he’s almost untranscribable. “You have a video game about an immigrant discovering himself and losing himself in America — and that’s the video game — and then the movies are about a superhero in a metal suit and a car based on a cartoon.” He’s right: it is interesting. It’s one of the enduring paradoxes of the Grand Theft Auto games — or maybe the paradox lies in the culture around them — that people who don’t play them think of them as the epitome of mindless virtual violence, whereas in fact they are, with each installment, more and more radical and sophisticated experiments in storytelling. Depending on whether or not you’re a gamer, this statement is either preposterous or so staggeringly obvious that it’s almost not worth making. Grand Theft Auto IV tells the story of Niko, a haunted veteran of an unspecified, nameless East European conflict who washes up in Liberty City looking for a new life. Over the course of the game, Niko slugs, shoots and carjacks his way up the ladder of the criminal underworld. As he does so, he gradually realizes that his new life is no less senseless and violent than his old one — turns out the Old World and New World aren’t that different. The New World just has better marketing. America was Niko’s last illusion, and you watch it shatter at high speed and in high definition. One of the challenges of telling stories in video games is that the entire medium is subject to technological upgrades on a regular basis. Mastering it requires surfing a learning curve that is steep and, so far, infinite. With the previous generation of hardware, for example, characters’ faces were too flat to sustain real closeups, and there just wasn’t enough horsepower to support a lot of Stoppardian banter. “We simply couldn’t stream in much dialogue, ’cause it was so hard to stream the world in on PlayStation 2,” Houser explains, “whereas now we can have the characters constantly talking to you. The emotions on PS2 had to be quite black and white. Now we can get a little bit more gray in there.” That world has become so complex that Houser and his team have to use diagramming software to keep its various components straight. “It’s an absolute bastard, because you’re trying to track 50 characters,” he says. “And the thing that makes it more complicated than, say, a TV show or a novel is that you as the player have choice. You can always do any of five or six things at once.” Imagine Victor Hugo trying to write Les MisÃ©rables with Jean Valjean under the reader’s control and you’ll get some idea of what Houser is up against. The player is both the audience and the ghost — a mischievous poltergeist — in the machine.
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