Al Jazeera Blogs

Eurozone Crisis Live Blog

Al Jazeera Staff

Al Jazeera gives you the latest developments affecting the eurozone, as European leaders fight to battle economic turmoil.

America's long-term fiscal challenges

Kimberly Halkett

US fiscal policy leaders are watching the European debt crisis closely.

They know that in a global economy European economic woes could have an impact here, spreading like a contagion to US banks, trade, the stock market and, quite possibly, the US election in November.

As the third annual Washington Fiscal Summit, convened by the Peterson Foundation, takes place in Washington, top Obama administration and congressional leaders are meeting to discuss America’s own long-term fiscal challenges.

The nation is facing a series of critical fiscal deadlines by the end of this year.

Tax cuts - sometimes called Bush-era tax cuts - are set to expire and automatic spending cuts to entitlement and defence spending are due take effect in 2013.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans want that to happen and are now arguing, mostly along party lines, on how best to reduce America’s debt and deficit.

Congress is, and has been for months, in a standoff. Republicans are adamant there must be no tax increases.

Democrats are vowing to stop any cuts to social programs that will hurt America’s poor and middle classes.

Sustainable path

Speaking at the Washington Fiscal Summit on Tuesday, Timothy Geithner, US treasury secretary, said: "It’s not that complicated."

He told fellow policymakers that both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have the ability and responsibility to work together to put the country back on a sustainable path.

The treasury secretary said the failure of politicians to address America’s debt and deficit is something that can’t be put off.

"We can’t run the country on the assumption that the world is always going to have confidence in the ability of the American political system to act," Geithner said.

"We have to earn that confidence over time to justify that confidence. That’s going to require us to do more in the near term to make some progress on this challenge."

Still, the top congressional Republican in the US House of Representatives has already set the stage for another tense standoff with Democrats over America’s rising debt.

House Speaker John Boehner said he’s planning for deep cuts in government spending in exchange for raising the federal debt ceiling which is likely to hit its new limit of $16.4 trillion by the new year.

In prepared remarks, Boehner told policy leaders: "This is the only avenue I see right now to force the elected leadership of this country to solve our structural fiscal imbalance ... we shouldn’t dread the debt limit. We should welcome it. It’s an action-forcing event in a town that has become infamous for inaction."

Deficit-reduction plan

Former President Bill Clinton, speaking at the policy summit thinks there is a solution to the congressional standoff and called for more balance.

He favours US politicians passing a deficit-reduction plan that would take effect when the US economy meets certain growth benchmarks.

“If you impose austerity,” Clinton said, “and interest rates are zero and private demand is virtually non-existent, then what will happen is revenues will drop more than you can cut spending.

"We should pass a plan as soon as possible, but do what Simpson-Bowles said [a bipartisan deficit reduction plan issued in December 2010], do it when certain growth projections are met and you won’t have to convince anybody because interest rates will start to rise dramatically."

Regardless of which path American lawmakers choose to take, Clinton is a realist about the decision making timeline of Capitol Hill.

He told his audience he is doubtful anything will happen quickly given that America’s politicians are eyeing the political calendar.

Clinton says he expects few decisions to be made regarding how to solve America’s deficit and rising debt until US voters go to the polls, to choose their president and congress on November 6.

Syria Live Blog

Al Jazeera Staff

Protests in Syria have escalated into what some are calling a burgeoning civil war, and the United Nations says more than 9,000 people have been killed since the uprising began in March last year. The government blames "terrorists" and "armed gangs" for the unrest and says more than 2,500 members of its security forces have been killed.

We bring you the latest news from various sources.

Al Jazeera is not responsible for content derived from external sites.

For more news and in-depth coverage, visit our Syria Spotlight page and watch Al Jazeera's weekly programme Inside Syria.

Nakba Day Live blog

Al Jazeera Staff

Latest developments as Palestinians mark "Nakba Day", or the "day of catastrophe", commemorating Israel's declaration of statehood in 1948 and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Al Jazeera is not responsible for content derived from external sites.

Turbulent times for Air India

Prerna Suri

All Gertrude Ingerberg wants is to go back home. The 60-year-old German national came to India a few days ago on what she calls a "trip of a lifetime".

She saw the greatest tribute to love, the Taj Mahal in Agra, danced with famed musicians in Rajasthan's Thar Desert and braved the Delhi heat.

But nothing prepared her for a plane strike. And since May 15, Air India pilots grounded not just their planes but also her.

"I've been at the airport since Tuesday night and since then haven't received much information from Air India staff. They did offer to put me up in a hotel but right now all I want is a flight back home”, she tells me.

Gertrude will have to wait. Not only are the pilots still on strike, but there hasn't been much progress in talks between management and them. It's a scene being played out across airports in India.

Thousands of anxious passengers are complaining they’re not getting adequate notice from the airlines and many like Gaurav Dayal have just switched over to other flights.

Dayal was all set to travel to Toronto with his family this summer. Like any diligent traveler, he booked his tickets well in advance beating the skyrocketing prices one usually gets during peak seasons.

His plans seemed watertight, that is , until the strike happened.

"I heard about the strike and decided to cancel the tickets on my own. But when I tried doing that, Air India demanded I pay them a penalty of INR 16,000 ($350). This is insane.

I've had to re-book my family's flights and had to change my entire holiday plans," he complains.

Losses

Air India isn't just losing face with this latest strike, it also losing a lot of money. The dispute is costing the debt-laden airline $2 million a day, at a time when the government announced a $6 billion bailout package just last month.

The airline owes millions of dollars to airports and oil companies and is mired in a $1 billion lawsuit with Boeing over a delayed delivery of jets.

So, the once-smiling 'Maharajah' of India isn't just sick, he's dying.

If one were to trace the airlines downfall, 2007 would be a memorable year. Back then, Air India merged with another domestic airline, the Indian Airlines to form an entirely new entity.

Both airlines were making profits until then but those numbers started declining as soon as the merger took place. Air india made a profit of $32 million in 2004, but the new entity lost roughly $1.6 billion this year.

"The merger hasn't worked out as planned. Maybe some benefits were foreseen out of this move like synergy and economies of scale, but those did not happen" India’s federal civil aviation minister Ajit Singh told media persons earlier this week.

Many aviation analysts feel the government shouldn't have merged the two airlines. But undoing the merger isn't an option. Nor is shutting down the airlines. What Air India needs to do is skim it’s fat. So shutting down unprofitable routes is one way out.

Then there are the pilots. In the latest strike, Air India pilots are demanding that they hold exclusive rights to train on the latest Boeing jet, the 'Dream liner'.

They say their erstwhile colleague from Indian Airlines shouldn't hold the same training rights as it's going to affect their career prospects. In response, 71 pilots have been sacked; and management is trying to cancel the flying licenses of 11 pilots spearheading the strike.

Will this work? So far, it hasn't.

Meanwhile, like Samuel Beccket's fabled character Godot, Gertrude keeps waiting. All she wants is a little bit of home.

When non-lethal weapons become deadly

Rob Reynolds

One afternoon in May, Al Jazeera accompanied police sergeant Joseph Paul on patrol in San Jose, California, a city of just under a million people. As Paul wheeled his cruiser down the highways and streets of his city, he said his daily routine is full of potential dangers.

“On patrol you have absolutely no idea who you're dealing with, what their story is, why they're where they are, why they're doing what they're doing,” Paul said. “So you have to always be alert.”

On this particular patrol, Sgnt Paul did not encounter any dangerous situations. But the conditions of police work - the unpredictability, and the way that even a routine traffic stop can suddenly turn violent, are what police departments around the US often cite in support of arming officers with Tasers. In 2004, the San Jose department became one of the first law enforcement agencies to equip each of its patrol officers with a Taser.

The Taser is a battery-operated device shaped roughly like a pistol. When fired, it expels darts trailed by thin wires. When the darts hit a person's flesh, tens of thousands of volts of electricity begin coursing through the person's body. The Taser can also be pressed directly onto a person and activated by a trigger.

When hit with a Taser, people suffer excruciating pain, often lost control of their muscles, and fall to the ground in temporary paralysis.

Tasers are supposed to be a non-lethal alternative to police use of firearms. But sometimes, people who are tasered die. Over the past dozen years or so the death toll has risen alarmingly.

In San Jose, six people have died after being tasered by police - one of the highest number of fatalities of any city in the country.

In May of 2008, Steven Salinas was drunk, naked and holed up in Room 119 of a cheap hotel called the Vagabond Inn. Salinas, who was unarmed, had committed no apparent crime when San Jose police burst in, clubbing and tasering him repeatedly. Salinas died of cardiac arrest.

Unarmed 20-year-old student Phoung Ho did not die after being tasered and clubbed by police as he lay handcuffed on the floor of his home. But the city was forced to pay him an undisclosed sum after Phuong took it to court.

I spoke to Rina Chakraborty, Western regional director of Amnesty International, about a study her organisation recently completed.

“Our concern with Tasers are that they are unsafe, unregulated and prone to use and abuse,” Chakraborty said. “What we have found is that since 2001, at least 500 individuals in the US have died after being shocked with Tasers by police either while being arrested or in jails.”

Amnesty is particularly concerned by the inappropriate use of Tasers by police against people who are unarmed, not acting aggressively, and may in fact have committed no crime.

“We are finding Tasers are being used when there has been no serious threat posed to police,” Chakraborty said. “We found cases where an 82-year-old woman has been shocked with a Taser for waving around a hammer, or cases where schoolchildren as young as 10 or 11 are being shocked with Tasers by police.”

What Amnesty International has found is that in 90 per cent of the cases investigated, individuals were unarmed.

In many cases, people who die after being shot with Tasers have underlying medical conditions such as irregular heart rhythms. A large number of people who are shot with Tasers are mentally ill, developmentally impaired, drunk or on drugs.

Amnesty calls for strict national guidelines on Taser use, and better training of police officers, to prevent more deaths.

San Jose Police Department spokesman Sergeant Jason Dwyer said Tasers are simply a useful tool for police.

“A taser gives us another option that we can use,” Dwyer said. “If you give officers a tool like a Taser, one more tool in their tool box so that they can use something that's less than lethal force, you may save both the officer's life and the suspect's life.

Dwyer admitted that “sometimes a suspect will expire after the use of a Taser”. But he said it is always up to prosecutors and police supervisors to decide whether officers acted without justification or used excessive force. Dwyer said that so far, no San Jose police officer has been disciplined for using his or her Taser in an unauthorised manner.

Egypt Live Blog

Al Jazeera Staff

Al Jazeera staff and correspondents update you on important developments in Egypt.

Al Jazeera is not responsible for content derived from external sites.

Strike at Tripoli airport brings things to a boil

D. Parvaz

A fact of life in Libya is that things are resting on a fragile balance, and at any moment, the slightest nudge can tip things over into chaos.

The strike by the air traffic controllers pushed things firmly into chaos territory on Saturday night, with shouting matches that stretched from the check-in desks to boarding gates and beyond.

Booked on a flight to Benghazi, my fixer, Asaad, and I were told that our flight would be delayed by two hours. Then four and a half. We got a boarding pass for a 10:30pm flight and waited in the lounge, mostly with men with angry looks cemented on their faces.

“If they’d told us there was a strike, I would have made other arrangements – we have jobs to do,” said a man going only as Taher.

At 11:30 Asaad took a stroll and came back telling me that he’d been walking around on the tarmac.

“Wait. What? You were just wandering around?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” he replied.

“There are people who have been waiting on the bus to get on the plane this entire time.”

Opting for fresh air and maybe a more interesting scene, we headed out on to the tarmac to find passengers – mostly women and children, including an infant - waiting on a bus with no driver. Another woman was strolling around under the wing of an airplane, talking on her mobile phone. Men anxiously paced around and compared how long they’d been waiting.

“The whole crew is gone. The manager does nothing,” shouted Sadeeq Shawish.

“This is very hard,” said Taher Mofta, 75.

“No WC, no milk for the babies, no water.”

He said the man sitting next to him, Nasser Omar Khalifa, 71, was in ill health and dealing with injuries of having been detained and beaten by government forces during the uprising. Frail and with a cane, Khalifa pulled a neck brace out of his bag to prove his point.

But just a short distance away, a tense scene was brewing.

We’d been taken there, just down the tarmac, by an angry man wearing a shiny jacket. After waiting for hours he’d been allowed to board a flight, only to be told by airline staff that this wasn’t the right plane and that he and all passengers should get off and get back on the bus in order to be taken to the right plane.

There was no other plane, and the man had reached the end of his tether.

“Follow me, quickly, quickly,” he said, leading us to a plane. The boarding stairwell, packed with shouting passengers, was parked a few metres away from the aircraft. There was some sort of tussle between them and some soldiers.

A few metres away from the stairs, another fight. Noticing my small camera (which I’d been holding the whole time) time, soldiers and security staff surrounded us.

They walked toward us, and we walked backwards. They didn’t want us there and did not want me to take photos (at this point, I was wearing my press ID). I found it odd that they were focusing on me rather than the fighting and the angry mob of passengers.

“OK. No problem. What’s happening?” I asked.

No answers. We were firmly, very politely, encouraged to move along.

The man in the shiny blazer positioned himself between us and the soldiers, shouting that Libya is now free, that they can’t stop a journalist from reporting, and that they should just tell people to go home instead of taking them off planes, etc.

“If I’m wrong, slap me now!” he screamed, hoarse by now.

Asaad and I were escorted back to the bus by a security guard, who seemed only keen on making sure that I did not take any photos of the chaos.

Later, the same man pulled Asaad aside and in the presence of a member of security and a solder, asked that we not report the fighting. I didn’t say I’d agree to do so, and when I asked why, the only answer he gave was, “Please, it’s my responsibility, it’s my fault.” What it felt like was theatre.

We bumped into him again in Benghazi airport at 3:30am. Asaad asked him if he was OK.

“Yeah, you just have to scare them a bit,” he said, waving away any worry.

Welcome to the new Libya.

What the soldiers were doing was reverting to the old way of thinking and what so many Libyans reject these days – asking that something not get reported – and what the man was doing was using someone with a press ID to let them know that this simply would not fly.

Follow D.Parvaz on Twitter: @Dparvaz

Closing in on Joseph Kony?

Malcolm Webb

Major General Ceasar Achellam, a key commander of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, has been captured by Ugandan forces in the Central African Republic. But the big question remains: does this mean the Ugandan army and its allies are, after 25 years, finally closing in on the LRA’s leader Joseph Kony?

LRA movements suggest Kony called a meeting of all LRA units in the Central African Republic around September or October 2011. After that, it seems they all dispersed in small units – some to DR Congo, others in CAR and a few in South Sudan, plus unconfirmed rumours of some in Sudan.

Small groups of people are hard to spot from the air in thick bush or forest, and there is plenty of cover for LRA fighters to run to if they ever hear aircraft coming. The LRA used to communicate using satellite phones, but stopped after 2008 when they were attacked by Uganda’s air force in Operation Lightening Thunder, for fear of being traced, and so hi-tech electronic spying equipment has proved ineffective.

Both the Ugandan army, and the US Special Forces assisting them, say their main sources of intelligence are LRA escapees, defectors and captured fighters – simply asked about who was where, and when.

In that sense, a high-ranking officer like Achellam could be an intelligence goldmine, if he divulges what he knows.

On the other hand, since the LRA have been communicating largely by sending messengers with hand-written notes, walking sometimes for weeks, information exchanged between the many small units must be slow and sparse. As they are always on the move, it’s possible that very few of them know exactly where Kony is, or even where he was weeks before, when the last messenger was dispatched.

Following the attention drawn to Kony and the LRA by Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 YouTube video, that attracted over 100 million views, it is certainly a good time for the Ugandan army, the US and all other parties involved to publicly display their efforts and successes. The LRA appears to be on the back foot, but whether or not Kony’s killing or capture is close is hard to say.

Also don't forget that Kony is no spring chicken. He is in his fifties, has lived in the bush for over 20 years and no longer has the same access to supplies – including medicines – that the LRA had when supported by Khartoum, or during the Juba Peace Talks. If the hunt for Kony takes a lot more time, then one day it could be over, without him ever having been caught.

Muscovites on the march

Robin Forestier-Walker

Moscow poets and writers led a "controlled walk" on Sunday across the centre of the capital to exercise their right to march without harassment. True to their word the police held back. To avoid a confrontation, nobody carried any placards or shouted much in the way of slogans.

A Mexican wave of applause rippled along the road from Pushkin Square to Chistiye Prudy as the walkers realised with a frisson of excitement just how many of them were in step.

Contrary to official police figures of 2,000, the actual number was likely far greater because at one point along Petrovsky and Rozhdestvensky Boulevards, the crowd stretched as far as my eyes could see.

"I'm overwhelmed completely. A writer's job is a solitary profession. But when you walk out on to the street and you see how many people are worried, are anxious about the same problems that worry you it's a shock".

The daily street actions since President Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin have angered his supporters, who have sought to portray participants of the anti-Putin movement as troublemakers.

In an article, United Russia deputy Vladimir Burmatov said the marchers were "legal nihilists" clogging up the traffic.

"Who is responsible? Who is responsible for the gathering on Chistye Prudy, which has turned into a site for homeless people"? Who can guarantee riots will not be provoked once again?

"The actions of the opposition are a threat to both citizens and their own representatives."

One Kremlin-watcher I spoke to said that President Putin was watching the street movement closely. For now the protesters "wouldn't be touched, as long as they don't break the law", but that eventually he would be compelled to move against them.

The Kremlin may be hoping that Muscovites' newfound enthusiasm for mass gatherings will wear off. Because the longer it continues it's hard to imagine how confrontation can be avoided.