4VF News – Daily News Channel – Page 2251

Daytona Drag: NASCAR Tries to Outrace the Recession

How should NASCAR rev up its popularity during a recession? Maybe Bruton Smith has the answer. Smith, the chairman and CEO of Speedway Motorsports, which owns seven racetracks on the Sprint Cup circuit, recently ruminated about three-time defending champ Jimmie Johnson at a media event. “Great guy,” he said. “He’s a neighbor. I like him a lot. I like his wife. But if Jimmie would just get out of his car and go over and slap somebody one time, that would help. He can slap me. I don’t care, but I’d just like to see these drivers get something going other than just going around. We need a fight or two.”

Johnson, who is as plain as a vanilla milk shake, swinging from the pits Not likely, and even Smith qualified his statement by saying that it’s not so much pugilism but door-to-door drama that the sport needs right now. “We need to get back a little beating and banging, a little nudging,” he said. “We need some of the numbers rubbed off the door. We need some of that.”

It just might take a sideshow to draw wallet-wary fans to the track. The economic downturn is threatening to decimate high-cost motor sports. For example Formula One, the world’s most popular auto-racing circuit, is facing its biggest crisis in 40 years, according to Max Mosley, president of the sport’s governing body. He compares F1’s status to the global housing and credit bubbles. And since Honda, which had spent about $300 million annually on Formula One, decided to pull out of the sport altogether, F1 has blown a tire.

Things aren’t as dire on the American stock-car circuit. But without question, NASCAR, which kicks off its racing season with its most prestigious race, the Daytona 500, on Feb. 15, has stalled. More than any other major pro sport, NASCAR depends on corporate sponsorships to fund its operations. Those logos splashed all over a driver’s racing suit aren’t just for show. The sponsorship has grown to the point where the more corporatized circuit has alienated a portion of the sport’s beer-drinking core. And as these companies pull back on their marketing budgets in the face of massive layoffs and losses — Sprint, NASCAR’s largest TV advertiser, will slash 8,000 jobs after losing $1.2 billion in the first three quarters of 2008 — the financial foundation of the sport is at risk. In fact, four weaker-performing teams in the Sprint Cup Series merged to try to cut costs and stay competitive: Gillett Evernham Motorsports absorbed Petty Enterprises, and Dale Earnhardt Inc. joined up with Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates. “The problem you have with NASCAR is kind of like you have in professional baseball,” says Sabates. “You have three or four teams that have all the money and can buy all the talent and have all the sponsors.” As sponsor money dries up, weaker teams and drivers can perish.

NASCAR is also tethered to the U.S. auto industry, which has required a massive bailout to save it from destruction. The Detroit Three sponsor teams and races and offer engineering support for the drivers and their crews. General Motors and Ford are among NASCAR’s biggest television advertisers. Even Toyota, which controversially entered stock-car racing two years ago, expects a nearly $3.9 billion full-year loss, its first since 1950. An auto failure would be catastrophic for the sport. “The uncertainty of it all is what keeps you up at night,” says NASCAR chairman and CEO Brian France. “You know, trying to figure out where the bottom is.”

Detroit’s woes are a concern, Smith says, “but we’ve seen that before, years ago when all the manufacturers pulled out of the sport. We’ve been down that road before. We would rather have them with us, but if they’re not, the sport continues.”

With high fuel prices deterring trips to the track last summer, NASCAR attendance dropped nearly 10% in 2008. This season, with the recession, ticket sales have lagged. In early February 2008, Daytona seats were sold out. This season, plenty of seats were still available. International Speedway, which owns 12 Sprint Cup tracks, including the Daytona International Speedway, recently announced that advance sales for all its tracks were down 17%. Eddie Gossage, president of the Texas Motor Speedway, a Speedway Motorsports track that hosts two Sprint Cup races, laments that funding for corporate hospitality tents has dropped. “All of the executives are scared to death of being used by a grandstanding Congressman or newspaper columnists who say, ‘Look at the excess,’ ” he says.

Everyone’s an Expert in the New Dating Game

Everyones an Expert in the New Dating Game

Some of them are respected scientists. Some of them are psychologists. At least one of them is a briefly married former TV-morning-show host. A surprising number of them are stand-up comedians. And they all want to give you dating advice. If you’re single and don’t wish to be, have they got a TV show/book/scientific theory for you! As if you haven’t suffered enough.

According to the most recent census figures, about 84 million Americans ages 20 to 75 are unmarried or separated. Even if only half of them want to find a spouse, that’s a nice fat target for the media to aim at in a market where such uniformity of desire is rare. So while dating and mating instructions are probably as old as Australopithecus , right now the advice-o-meter is running hot. When a coupling manual turned movie–He’s Just Not That Into You–is a box-office hit, something’s up. How bad is the dating scene Bad enough that a production company believes it can find four adults willing to have spouses chosen for them by their friends and family, marry them and allow their subsequent domestic life to be broadcast on CBS. Other lonely hearts have already submitted to having their mate-finding woes aired on cable. Yes, there have been dating shows before, but none quite so DIY as three offered by FLN, the network formerly known for fancy cooking and curtain-choosing. Wingman, in which comedian Michael Somerville acts as a dating sidekick, premiered Feb. 10. How to Find a Husband, a British import, arrives in April. The network is also developing Love Taxi, in which a cab driver plays matchmaker. Dating, camera, New York City taxi–the discomfort trifecta. Oddly enough, Wingman’s Somerville is not the nation’s premier comedian turned love guru. That would be Steve Harvey, whose Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man is the best-selling nonfiction book in the nation, according to the Wall Street Journal. Harvey’s advice is old-fashioned and frank: Women are single because they have lowered their expectations of men and because they have not understood the three things men need–support, loyalty and “the Cookie,” the author’s euphemism for … oh, you know what it’s for. “I told the publishers I could have said everything I had to say in about 35 pages,” the twice-divorced Harvey notes. “Because we’re guys. We’re that simple.” Straightforward as it is, Harvey’s book reads like Jacques Derrida compared with Whitney Casey’s The Man Plan. A former host of Great Day Houston, Casey is blond, divorced and telegenic enough to get a blurb for her book from Lance Armstrong, the champion bad boyfriend. She polled 250 men to come up with such insights as, Men get confused by shiny jewelry and big handbags, don’t like it when hair smells of fajita and are impressed by TV sets hung on the wall. Has it come to this Is dating really that hard Sociologists have long agreed that the two key factors of mate choice are proximity and timing. We choose from those around us, generally two to five years after we finish our education. But at least one of those pillars is eroding. Online dating has meant that our pool of potential mates is much bigger. The opportunity cost of giving up on a potential suitor is lower. And it’s more work to find the wheat in all that chaff.

Saving the Real Estate Market by Paying the Neighbor’s Mortgage

Saving the Real Estate Market by Paying the Neighbors Mortgage

The quickest way to help the auto industry would be to make sure that no one in the U.S. defaults on a car loan. Certainly the government could make sure that people who are employed and do not have a history of being deadbeats get a portion of their car loans paid. When cars are repossessed and go onto the market to be sold as “used,” that drives down the entire market for similar vehicles. A surfeit of well-maintained cars available at prices well below new ones undermines the ability of Detroit to get its sales back up without having to offer incentives.

Like all government-assistance programs, a car-owner-assistance program would eventually cost taxpayers money. An agency, probably part of the Treasury, could give banks the money to help qualified car buyers keep their vehicles. A man sitting in his house looking out the window could see a car he is helping to pay for sitting in the next-door neighbor’s driveway. A really clever car-loan bailout program would allow the taxpayer to use his neighbor’s car as compensation for his higher taxes.

Word has leaked out, or has been leaked, that the Administration will propose a very large program to help homeowners who have good intentions and strong moral character make their mortgage payments if they reach the precipice of default. Reuters reports that “under the evolving plan, homes would undergo a standardized reappraisal and homeowners would face a uniform eligibility test.”

It is not hard to imagine that taxpayers will end up helping to pay for the mortgages of people who live in their counties, towns or neighborhoods. One homeowner might have part of his taxes paying a part of the mortgage for the house across the street.

This program has powerful underlying economic logic, even though it might initially seem to be the creation of lunatics. When a home goes into foreclosure, it lowers the value of all the nearby homes. The sharp drop in home prices over the past two years has, as a root cause, the abandonment of properties, which adds to housing supply in a disorderly manner. After a foreclosure, a house is not sold based on economic logic but on the desire of banks to stay out of the business of owning residences. The National Association of Realtors said the average value of a home in the U.S. dropped 12% and that foreclosures were a root cause.

If there is a tax worth paying, many people would probably say that one that helps build a foundation under the value of their own homes is high on the list. The process may create an atmosphere that looks and feels like socialism, but if the net effect is that the drop in housing prices is reversed in short order, even free-market advocates may tolerate this plan rather than watch the world burn.

If the mortgage program does work, the road to perdition will have been paved all the way to its end. But people may not mind taking this road, if the destination is one where housing prices will not be down an additional 15% or 20% over the next year.

— Douglas A. McIntyre

See the worst business deals of 2008.
For constant business updates, go to 24/7wallst.com.

Is China Making Its Bird-Flu Outbreak Worse?

One thing is certain about avian influenza: it’s deadly. All three people who contracted the H5N1 strain of the virus in China last year died. In the first six weeks of 2009, eight people have come down with bird flu, and five have died. Another thing is that while the disease has yet to go pandemic, as many doctors fear it could, it remains worrisomely persistent. Every year since 2003, about 100 people in Asia, the Middle East and Africa contract the disease. Last year, in a rare exception, the number dropped below 50.

But bird flu, it seems, is back. Last month’s five deaths — one of the highest tallies of bird-flu deaths China has ever recorded in a month — were in locations as far removed from one another as Beijing in the north, Xinjiang in the west, Guangxi in the south, Hunan in the center and Shandong in the east. “From a disease-control perspective, the increase in cases in China is notable, as is the wide geographic spread,” says Dr. Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization’s representative in China. There is still no evidence that the virus has mutated to spread easily between humans, he says. But while such a nightmare scenario, which could set off a global flu pandemic that could kill millions, has shown no signs of being an immediate threat, serious concerns remain. “The fact that this is the highest number for a single month in China reminds us that the virus is entrenched and circulating in the environment,” Troedsson says.

On Feb. 10, authorities in the far-Western region of Xinjiang culled more than 13,000 chickens in the city of Hotan after 519 died in a bird-flu outbreak. But until this week, China had reported no widespread outbreaks of the virus among bird populations, prompting concerns among some public-health experts that mainland health and veterinary authorities could be missing — or even concealing — the spread of the disease through poultry and wild birds. Hong Kong, where the first human cases of H5N1 infection were found in 1997, reported finding a dozen birds with the deadly strain of the virus
earlier this year — a strong indication that the virus is very likely present in adjacent Guangdong province. But so far, Guangdong has reported no bird cases. Equally unusual is that after such a busy month of infections in China, reports of human cases have gone silent. “It’s a surprise for me, since in January, the human cases, you have so many, but in February it suddenly stops,” says Dr. Guan Yi, a virologist from the University of Hong Kong.

The human deaths in China, plus new outbreaks among poultry in neighboring Vietnam and northeast India, indicate the likelihood of a firm presence of the virus on the mainland. Some experts worry that China could be missing the disease’s deadly progression. Last week Dr. Lo Wing-Lok, an adviser to the Hong Kong government on communicable diseases, said the mainland had not been forthright about the spread of bird flu in poultry. “There’s no doubt of an outbreak of bird flu in China, though the government hasn’t admitted it,” he told Bloomberg. Yu Kangzhen, the Ministry of Agriculture’s chief veterinarian, responded in an interview with the state-run Xinhua news service that human bird-flu cases are not necessarily linked with animal cases.

If mainland investigators are missing the virus, it may be because efforts to block it are inadvertently hiding it. China developed an avian-influenza vaccine for poultry in
2005 and inoculates millions of birds annually. But not everyone agrees it’s a panacea. In 2005 Robert Webster, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., suggested that China may have been using substandard vaccines that stopped symptoms of bird flu in poultry but allowed the virus to continue to spread. Recently, Guangzhou-based expert Zhong Nanshan also said there is a danger that China’s widespread vaccinations could conceal the virus. “Special attention should be paid to such animals, including those that have been vaccinated,” the Xinhua news service quoted him as saying on Feb. 6. “The existing vaccines can only reduce the amount of virus rather than totally inactivating it.”

Mainland controls may be lacking another layer of more basic prevention in the way that live-chicken markets, prevalent throughout Asia, are inspected. Some worry that Chinese monitors may be calling for culls only when a large number of poultry become sick, as in Hotan this week, when 519 birds died. In contrast, last year Hong Kong culled thousands of birds after a regular inspection found only infected chickens in a wet market. The infected birds, experts say, showed no external signs of disease and could have been missed if inspectors were screening only birds that were dead or visibly ill.

Ramping up preventive measures may increasingly be a matter of life and death. Since bird flu re-emerged in 2003, 254 people in 15 countries have died of it. Researchers fear that other crises like global warming and the global recession have crowded the virus out of the news. But the disease survives — in the limelight or out of it. “The point is, this virus has not disappeared at all,” says Malik Peiris, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. “It kind of dropped off the radar screen of media attention, but the virus itself has increased its spread. It’s not only entrenched in Asia, the Middle East, in Egypt, Africa, parts of India and Bangladesh. It’s really a problem.”

Watch a video about restoring China’s grasslands.

Read the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2007, including the bird-flu vaccine.

Why Portugal Is Offering to Take in Gitmo Inmates

France and Finland are thinking it over. Spain has balked because of legal ramifications. Belgium and Austria have curtly concluded that America should clean up its own mess.

Europe was united during the Bush years in pushing for the closure of the controversial military prison in Guantanamo. But now that there’s a president in the White House who wants to close the prison, most European countries are making themselves scarce.

Except Portugal. The Portuguese government was the first to suggest that Europe take in Guantanamo prisoners as a practical way to help close the hated symbol of what many Europeans see as America’s post-9/11 moral failure. And little Portugal, home to just 10 million people, remains the idea’s most vocal backer.

For many Portuguese, and especially its politicians, the desire to close the camp is deeply personal. That’s because Portugal’s former dictatorship, in power between 1932 and 1974, used to torture its political opponents. Members of the current government include victims of that torture; Portuguese society is also dotted with its perpetrators. “The collective subconscious of the Portuguese is full of guilt,” says Lisbon lawyer Francisco Teixeira da Mota, a human rights activist.

Former President Mario Soares, who was tortured and eventually exiled for his anti-fascist activities, remembers the interrogations and torture only too well. “I was made to go three days and three nights without sleep,” he says of the kind of sleep deprivation tactics that have taken place at Guantanamo. Soares, now 83, has called Guantanamo “the scandal of all scandals” of the Bush administration, and says Europe must now help Obama close it. “Other countries must not be so egocentric,” he says.

Domingos Santos a longstanding leader of Portugal’s Communist party, also knows what’s at stake. He was a victim of secret police beatings during the junta’s rule. Deprived of sleep and forced to spend days in a tiny windowless cell without a bed, Santos remains an outspoken critic of the U.S. base at Guantanamo. Terrorists need to be punished, he says, but torture is never justified. “We could take some [prisoners in Portugal] on grounds of human rights because of Guantanamo is a cancer which is afflicting society,” he told TIME. “I condemn terrorism. It is barbaric. But there are some [in Guantanamo] who cannot get a fair trial if returned to their own countries, or who would be in danger being tortured or even killed. Even the worst criminal has the right to a fair trial.”

The hesitation by the rest of Europe centers on unanswered questions about which former prisoners might end up walking the streets and who would be responsible for monitoring their activities, providing jobs and health care, and potentially prosecuting and imprisoning them. There’s also the issue of Europe’s open borders: if an ex-prisoner is given full liberty in one European country he could eventually wind up in any other.

E.U. foreign ministers continue to debate the issue, and thus far it appears that the only Guantanamo detainees that could eventually end up in Europe are those who have not been charged with a crime, but who risk persecution if returned to their country of origin. Some 60 of the 260 current prisoners on the US military base in southeastern Cuba fit that description.

Ana Gomes, Vice-Chairwoman of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Security and Defense, and the spearhead behind Lisbon’s effort to lead the way on the issue, says resolving Guantanamo is in Europe’s own interests. “It is important strategically to improve transatlantic relations,” she says. “With Obama the attitude has changed so the allies now can get together. It is also important politically for the West to be championing human rights.” And there’s perhaps no country better to do that than one which understands what it means when human rights are trampled.

See pictures inside Guantanamo.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

Love, Erica Jong Style

Erica Jong knows something about love, especially its sexy side.
Her first novel, Fear of Flying, electrified the literary community
in 1971 with its frank sexuality and passion. The public was seduced: the
book has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, and was translated into
37 languages. Many books later, and now the grandmother of three, Jong has
returned to her original calling, poetry, in her compelling new volume of
poems, Love Comes First. TIME senior reporter Andrea Sachs reached
the author at her Manhattan home:

Fear of Flying was a international phenomenon. What was
that like at age 31

It was unimaginable what happens to you when you get known for a book
that everybody reads, or that everybody has heard of. If the book is said
to be sexy, the crazies come out of the woodwork. It’s unbelievable. So you
have to really get used to that, and you have to get used to protecting
yourself, which I knew absolutely nothing about.
Protecting yourself in what way

Protecting yourself from strangers. I mean, I was a graduate student at
Columbia. I was teaching at City College. I was an academic. It never
occurred to me that I had to take my name out of the phone book and hide a
little bit. And then came Fear of Flying and every crazy lunatic
gets your number and has some proposition to make. They want to move in
with you, they want you to save their lives, they want you as a lover. I
mean, mostly they want salvation and they believe that a writer can deliver
it.

What were the critics like

Some of them were vicious and horrified, and some in love with the book,
like John Updike and Henry Miller. There was no gray area. They either were
outraged or ecstatic. Nothing in-between, which I suppose is good.
Some people thought you were condoning promiscuity.

Right. It became a cause celebre. I remember the New York Times
magazine ran an article called “Who’s Afraid of Erica Jong” That was
typical. Over the years it settled in and became a classic, but initially
the feelings that people had were extremely violent. And living through
that was an interesting experience.
There was a TV incident, too, wasn’t there

It was on a talk show. I can’t remember who the host was, but he said,
all you women’s libbers want to pee standing up. I mean, that was the level
of the discourse. People just didn’t get it. They didn’t understand that
women’s rights are human rights, that women were given really no
quarter.

But why do you think so many women refuse to identify themselves
as feminists

It’s a mother/daughter thing. Their mothers called themselves feminists,
so the daughters, in an attempt to distinguish themselves, have to call
themselves something else. I think it’s mostly terminology, that any
terminology associated with women sooner or later becomes degraded. An
executrix is laughable, an executor is not. An aviatrix is not as strong as
an aviator. It has to do with the sexism that is in our society and often
is unconscious.

It’s rare for a writer to be so defined by one book. You’ve
written eight novels, seven books of poetry, a significant amount of
nonfiction, and yet you’re so known by this one book. Is that
frustrating

Of course it’s frustrating. But one realizes it’s also blessing to have
a book that is so widely known — even if misinterpreted — and a book
that makes your name. It’s rare. You have to feel that it’s a blessing and
a curse because it is. Whoever promised us we’d be understood anyway

Your new book is a poetry collection. You began as a poet, didn’t
you

Yes. I guess the thing that I’m most proud of is that I kept on writing

poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do.
It’s the source of my creativity. I go on using it as a way into my deeper
mind. Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own
writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is
the most intense expression of feeling that we have. I’ve never given up
writing it because it’s essential to me. And poems don’t come over time.
Sometimes poems don’t come to you at all. But when they come, you have to
sit down and write them.

What can you do in poetry that you can’t do in prose

In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express
the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when
someone they love dies, when they fall in love. So poetry is what we
reserve for the most intense human emotion.

This poetry is serious. The love that you describe here is sober;
these are serious reflections on mortality.

There’s an awful lot of that. I think you reach a certain age and friends
begin dying around you, and it’s impossible not to contemplate that. I
think that’s a stage of life where you have to make your peace with the fact
that some of the people who have been the most important to you are going or
are gone. Sometimes you look through your database and you think, half the
people in here are dead. Do I take them out or not And I think that’s a
profoundly human need, to make peace with mortality.
You write that love is never enough to save us. Why

The experience of love — yes, it’s mind-expanding and soul-expanding,
but it cannot save us from loneliness or mortality. That’s a paradox
because we hope it will.

How many years have you been married to your current
husband

20 years. We got married in 1989.

And you’d been divorced three times before that.

Yes. My first marriage was really a starter marriage of one year to
somebody who was quite mad. Brilliant and mad. And the marriage came apart
when he had a breakdown. So it seems like not a marriage at all because we
were both so young. My marriage to Allan Jong and to Jonathan Fast were
more real marriages, but we outgrew each other. Ken and I have a good
marriage, I think, in that we allow each other complete freedom and space.
Nobody is trying to imprison the other.See pictures of people who have been married for 50 years.
See the All-TIME top 100 novels.

Hillary Clinton warns, woos North Korea

North Korea’s nuclear program is "the most acute challenge to stability in northeast Asia," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Friday.

But, Clinton said in a 45-minute address to the New York-based Asia Society, the Obama administration is prepared to seek a permanent, stable peace with Pyongyang as long as its government pursues disarmament and does not engage in aggression against neighboring South Korea. “If North Korea is genuinely prepared to completely and verifiably eliminate their nuclear weapons program, the Obama administration will be willing to normalize bilateral relations, replace the peninsula’s long-standing armistice agreements with a permanent peace treaty and assist in meeting the energy and other economic needs of the North Korean people,” she said. The United States wants to move forward with the six-party talks, working with China, South Korea, Japan, Russia and North Korea to address North Korea’s nuclear program, she said. However, keeping in line with the Obama administration’s approach of “engaging” its enemies, Clinton said the United States would consider bilateral contacts with Pyongyang. Despite the olive branch, Clinton warned Pyongyang “to avoid any provocative action or unhelpful rhetoric toward South Korea.” Tension between Pyongyang and its neighbor South Korea has increased in recent weeks, with North Korea announcing it would scrap peace agreements with the South, warning of a war on the Korean peninsula and threatening to test a missile capable of hitting the western United States.

Don’t Miss
Bucking tradition, Clinton heads first to Asia

U.S.: North Korea might be making missile preparations

North Korea claims to have weaponized plutonium

Special report: North Korea

Clinton also sought to reassure Japan, the top U.S. ally in the region, about its key concern, promising to meet with the families of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s. Calling the 50-year-old United States security alliance with Japan “unshakable,” Clinton said she will sign an agreement to move 8,000 U.S. troops from Okinawa to the island of Guam. She delivered a sharp rebuke of the former Bush administration’s foreign policy Friday, saying that the U.S. government in recent years had too often acted “reflexively” without “hearing the facts” or “listening to others.” The Obama administration’s foreign policy will value the opinions of other nations, she said, and the United States will “hold ourselves and others accountable,” and acknowledge American contributions to global problems. The United States can no longer afford to conduct foreign policy strictly on a “country-by-country” basis or by splitting the world into regions, she said. As both a trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific power, she said, America will instead begin to press for stronger bilateral, regional and global cooperation. Clinton also outlined a sweeping agenda of engagement with Asia, ranging from mutual economic recovery and trade to the prevention of nuclear weapons proliferation and reversing the trend of global warming. Clinton is scheduled to depart Sunday for her first overseas trip as secretary of state. She is slated to travel to China, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia. The trip represents a departure from a diplomatic tradition under which the first overseas trip by the secretary of state in a new administration is to Europe. But she said the Obama administration wants to “develop a broader and deeper” relationship with Asia, a region that has felt overlooked by the United States despite its growing global importance. “It demonstrates clearly that our new administration wants to focus a lot of time and energy in working with Asian partners and all the nations in the Pacific region,” she said, “because we know that so much of our future depends upon our relationships there.” Much of Clinton’s conversations will be dominated by the global financial meltdown. She said despite the financial crisis, the United States hopes to expand trade with countries in the region. She called for an improved relationship with China, where she said the United States would shortly renew military-to-military contacts. She will also try to establish closer cooperation on climate change with China, which has surpassed America as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Todd Stern, her new envoy for climate change, will be accompanying Clinton on the trip.

Officials said Clinton had hoped to name a special envoy for North Korea before leaving for Asia to signal the Obama administration’s commitment to addressing North Korea’s nuclear program, but that the timing and specifics of the job were still being worked out. Clinton told reporters she hoped to name the envoy soon. Stephen Bosworth, the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and a former State Department official, has been offered the job to replace Assistant Secretary Christopher Hill, who is expected to replace Ryan Crocker as U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Google tests home energy-use tracker

This graphic shows how much energy is being consumed by household devices in real time.
You can manage your bank balance and social life on the Internet and very soon you will be able to manage your electricity consumption online.

The development could be welcome for consumers as the recession and high energy prices put pressure on household budgets. And environmental concerns have sparked a growing demand for devices that read energy usage, or misusage. About 40 million trackers are in use worldwide and Internet giant Google says it believes another 100 million will be sold in the next few years. Google says it is testing one such software tool, the PowerMeter, that shows consumers their home energy usage almost in real time on their computers. You simply set the rate of your electricity cost and plug your appliance into the device, and a monitor calculates its energy cost. Another device is the Electric monitor, which is fitted to the electricity meter and calculates the cost of your power as you consume it. Studies have shown that access to home energy information can save the consumer 5 to 15 percent on their monthly electricity bills. If half of America’s households cut their energy consumption by 10 percent it would be the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road, says Google. Google PowerMeter will receive information from smart meters and energy management devices and this information will be provided to anyone who signs up access to their home electricity consumption on the iGoogle homepage. PowerMeter has yet to be made available to consumers, but it could spell an end to shocking energy bills.

Brown casts final vote; Senate approves stimulus package

Sen. Sherrod Brown speaks to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at right on the Senate floor Friday.
The U.S. Senate has given final approval to a $787 billion economic-stimulus package backed by President Obama, with Democratic Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown returning to the Capitol from his mother’s wake to cast the 60th and deciding vote in favor of it.

The voting was held open for Brown, who cast his vote at 10:45 p.m. The final vote was 60-38. Voting began Friday night on the stimulus package that passed the House of Representatives earlier in the day by a 246-183 vote. Brown flew back to Washington on a plane provided by the White House, Brown’s office said, because the vote is “official business” and there are not commercial flights available that would allow him to cast his vote and then return to Ohio for his mother’s funeral Saturday morning. He will fly back to Ohio immediately after he votes. On Friday afternoon, no House Republicans voted in favor of the bill, and seven Democrats voted against it. In the House’s original bill, 11 Democrats and all of the Republicans voted against it. The Democrats hold a large enough majority in the House that they were still able to pass the legislation. Watch the stimulus pass without GOP support » The House and Senate originally passed different versions of the bill. The votes Friday are on the compromise version of the measure. The differences were reconciled Wednesday after a furious day of negotiations on Capitol Hill involving House and Senate leaders, administration officials and the three moderate Republican senators. But the written version of the legislation wasn’t available for lawmakers to view until around 11 p.m. Thursday. Some representatives expressed frustration over how little time they had to read the 1,000-plus-page bill.

Don’t Miss
CNN/Money: How stimulus may affect your wallet

iReport.com: Your thoughts on the stimulus

Stimulus bill: Part one

Stimulus bill: Part two

“You can’t be serious. This would be humorous if it wasn’t so sad,” said Rep. Tom Price, R-Georgia. “What’s in it Have you read it” Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tennessee, encouraged his colleagues to vote no. “Just because Republicans spent too much money after September 11 and lost our way on financial matters doesn’t mean the Democratic party should be allowed to wreck our ship of state. This is taking us quickly down the wrong road. Vote no,” Wamp said. Watch the GOP say ‘Americans deserve better’ » Other lawmakers, however, said they were hopeful the stimulus plan would get the economy back on track. “We know this bill alone will not solve all of our economic woes overnight. We know that the road back to economic stability and prosperity will require hard work over time,” said Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colorado. “But this bill is the right size and scope necessary to truly help us turn things around.” Watch Speaker Pelosi tout the stimulus bill » Despite direct lobbying by the Obama administration in the past couple of weeks, the bill received no Republican support in the House. Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao of Louisiana indicated earlier Friday that he was “leaning yes” on the bill, but he ended up voting against it. The Senate version that passed Tuesday got the support of three moderate Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania — after a bipartisan group worked out an agreement that trimmed billions from the bill. In the lead-up to Friday’s vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was calling on other Republican centrists in an attempt to convince more of them to vote for the measure, an aide said. The Senate’s version of the bill narrowly passed by a 61-37 vote — one more than needed. Reid was looking for additional votes out of an abundance of caution, the aide said, after learning that Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, who returned to Capitol Hill for votes this week, will not be present for the final vote because he returned to Florida to continue his recovery from brain cancer. Reid was concerned that if a Democratic senator gets sick or has some other unforeseen obligation, he could have trouble getting the bill passed, the aide said. Reid also was concerned because the three GOP moderates suggested that they did not want to provide the decisive 60th vote for passage, the aide said. Obama made an impassioned final plea earlier Friday for passage of the plan, arguing that it is a critical first step on the road to economic recovery. “I don’t need to tell you that we are in tough economic times,” Obama said to a group of business leaders at the White House hours before the most important congressional vote of his young administration. The stimulus package is likely to land on Obama’s desk by the Democratic leadership’s self-imposed deadline of Presidents Day on Monday. Taking no chances, the Democratic National Committee and Obama’s Organizing for America also are using Obama’s vast e-mail list to contact the president’s political supporters and point them to a new Web page for stories of people affected by the economic downturn. The goal is to drum up public support for the measure as Congress votes on it. CNNMoney: How the stimulus may affect your wallet The stories were collected last weekend from Obama supporters who attended one of 3,600 meetings held across the country to discuss the situation, according to the DNC. In all, 31,030 stories were submitted to the DNC and Organizing for America, a grassroots movement that grew out of the campaign. Read the stories The House, which had planned to vote on the package Thursday, was forced to wait until Friday after many rank-and-file Democrats who were unhappy with some spending cuts demanded time to read the compromise measure. iReport: Your thoughts on the stimulus Despite the grumblings of some House Democrats unhappy with the spending measures, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said Thursday that she was pleased with the outcome of the negotiations. Read the compromise: Part 1 | Part 2 Here’s how the compromise bill is expected to affect individuals: Most individuals will get a $400 tax credit, and most couples will get an $800 credit. That amounts to an extra $13 a week in a person’s paycheck, starting in June. That’s less than what Obama campaigned on: $500 for individuals and $1,000 per couple. Many students will get $2,500 tuition tax credit. First-time home buyers may qualify for a tax credit of up to $8,000.

People who receive Social Security will get a one-time payment of $250. The overall package is estimated to be 35 percent tax cuts and 65 percent spending, Democratic sources said.

Talking to Iran: What Are Washington’s Options?

Talking to Iran: What Are Washingtons Options?

President Obama says he’ll talk to Iran if Tehran “unclenches its fist”; President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says Iran is open to negotiations but only on a basis of “fairness and mutual respect.” Both men’s coded conditionals are a reminder that after three decades of mutual hostility, talking won’t be easy. TIME tapped a number of Iran experts for perspective on some of the key questions facing U.S.-Iran diplomacy.

When should talks begin
Conventional wisdom holds that Obama should wait until after the Iranian presidential election in June before making an approach. With any luck, Ahmadinejad will lose — perhaps to his more moderate predecessor, Mohammed Khatami, who has a history of reaching out to the West. Even if Ahmadinejad is re-elected, Khatami’s mere entry into the fray may force him to open up, says Ali Ansari, an Iran expert at London’s Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank. “The one thing Khatami can deliver is better relations with the U.S. Ahmadinejad will want to cancel that out by saying, ‘I can do that too.’ ”

But other experts say it’s pointless to wait for the June vote, not least because its outcome is entirely unpredictable. “American attempts to game out Iranian politics, to try and determine who is on top, [are] doomed to fail,” says Hillary Mann Leverett, a former Iran expert at the State Department and the National Security Council. She argues that U.S.-Iran talks should not be linked to personalities, saying they’ll only be meaningful “if they are about issues, about substantive things.”

The election, in fact, does not even decide who ultimately rules Iran: executive power rests not with the President but with the clerical Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Since his personal clout won’t be affected by the elections, the best time to start talking is now, the argument goes. And speedy talks would also allow Obama to use some of the political capital from his election to persuade the American public that a rapprochement with Iran is a good idea.

To whom should the U.S. talk
A direct conversation with the Supreme Leader may not be feasible in the short term, but one expert who has advised the Obama Administration on Iran policy argues that the U.S. can still talk over Ahmadinejad’s head to Khamenei. “We should aim our rhetoric at Khamenei,” says the expert, who asked not to be named. “He will decide whom to appoint [to talk with the U.S.].”

Mann Leverett, who conducted secret negotiations with the Iranians on behalf of the Bush Administration between 2001 and 2003, says her Iranian counterparts made sure to report to Khamenei or his trusted advisers before and after every conversation with U.S. officials. She points out that two former Foreign Ministers — Ali Akbar Velayati and Kamal Kharraji — are among those advisers. Both men have had some experience in dealing with the West.

Who should do the talking for the U.S.
This could be a problem area. Obama’s planned point man on Iran is Dennis Ross, who served as Middle East envoy to both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Ross takes a hawkish view of dealing with Iran, emphasizing the coercive diplomacy of sanctions. Ross himself was not available for interviews, but his position on Iran is well known. He has long argued for ramping up economic pressure on Tehran, telling TIME in 2007 that “if Iran thinks it is actually going to be cut off economically, which has not been the case in the sanctions so far, then you have a chance to change their behavior.”

Ross has also said the U.S. has just 18 months to avoid a scenario in which Israel attacks Iran to stop its nuclear program. Such views would make his appointment anathema to Tehran, not least because of Ross’s own long-established connections to Israel. In Arab capitals, he was generally regarded as biased toward Israel throughout the Oslo peace process, and his central role in bodies such as the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute and the advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran will hardly endear him to the Iranians.

Iran experts say their contacts in Tehran have conveyed alarm at the prospect of Ross’s appointment. But if Obama appoints him, the Iranians will have no options. “The best we can hope is that Ross’s negatives, in Iranian eyes, will be canceled by the fact that he is a power player,” says one Iran expert.

What should they talk about
The big-ticket topics are clear enough. The U.S. wants Iran to drop its nuclear program and to stop backing radical groups like Hamas and Hizballah. Iran insists on its right to a nuclear-energy program and wants an end to economic and financial sanctions, as well as guarantees that the U.S. will not seek regime change in Tehran.

But some Iran experts say it’s best to start small, building confidence and a more positive dynamic by seeking cooperation in areas of overlapping interest. Afghanistan, says Karim Sajadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “is the perfect [issue on which] to commence the dialogue.” Like the U.S., Iran doesn’t want to see a resurgence of the Taliban or al-Qaeda; both of those groups subscribe to a radical Sunni view that regards Iran’s Shi’ism as an abomination.

Iran also shares the concern of Western governments about the vast quantities of opium traveling across the porous border with Afghanistan; drug addiction has grown steeply among Iranians.

And there’s certainly a recent precedent for such cooperation: Iran and the U.S. collaborated to bring down the Taliban after 9/11 and continued to quietly work together for more than a year afterward on efforts to stabilize the Karzai government in Kabul.

Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, is reported to favor enlisting Tehran’s help in the war against Afghan drug lords and their supply routes. That would be a smart call, says Sajadpour. Once fruitful dialogue and cooperation have been established on the issue of drugs, he says, “then you can gradually expand the scope [of talks] to include nuclear issues, Hamas and Hizballah.”

Not all Iran experts agree, though, that such small-bore cooperation will lead to meaningful discussion on the big issues: nukes and terrorism. Mann Leverett warns that such cooperation will fail unless accompanied by talks with “a comprehensive agenda, leading to a rapprochement and a strategic understanding between Iran and the U.S.”

Leslie H. Gelb, of the Council on Foreign Relations, believes the Iranians won’t be interested in small accommodations and will probably hold out for more substantive discussion. That’s because the Iranians have been down the road of small-bore cooperation with the U.S. before, most recently on Afghanistan, and have invariably been left with nothing to show for their efforts. “They’ll wait for a [broader] conversation,” he says. Only after comprehensive talks begin, Gelb says,”can there be individual acts of cooperation by each side, to show good faith.”