The European Football Championships kick off tomorrow with two games: Switzerland v Czech Republic in Basel and Portugal v Turkey in Geneva.

The full tourney schedule is here: Matches.

News from the tournment being held in Austria and Switzerland from June 7 to June 29 can be found at: Euro2008.

(more…)

C’est La Vie! Fitting giving this week’s political events. The DNC decides to disenfranchise voters in Michigan and Florida. C’est La Vie! Hillary Clinton finished ahead of Barack Obama in the popular vote but behind in the pledged delegate count, only in America! C’est La Vie! Hillary’s campaign was shackled by the DNC and was she forced out of the race. C’est La Vie! Twenty-years of being a member of Democratic Party came to an end. C’est La Vie! John McCain will be President. C’est La Vie!

French & Saunders do Abba. C’est La Vie!

Return to Main

This will be an irregular feature of By The Fault going forward entitled O Canada, news about the other half of North America. All future posts will be filed under a new category entitled suprisingly enough Canada. If you live in Canada and want to write about Canada, please let me know.

Canadian Unemployment Now Less Than the United States
I was chafe when people say the United States is the greatest country in the world. Yes, it is a great country but the greatest? Well statistically speaking it seems that the United States is not even the greatest country in North America. I give you Canada’s Jobs Report:

Canada’s unemployment rate has fallen below U.S. levels for the first time in more than 26 years – another sign that the North American slowdown is less painful in Canada than in the United States, at least for now.

Canadian employers barely created any jobs to speak of in May, Statistics Canada said Friday. Employment grew by just 8,400 positions, with part-time jobs rising by 40,600 positions, offsetting a big decline of 32,200 in full-time work.

More below the fold: (more…)

This week the By The Fault Weekend Reader looks at the global airline industry and how it is faring.

You Think You Have It Bad
My daily transportation costs for me are pretty much fixed, $45.00 a month or $1.50 per day. I also belong to a automobile co-operative through my business which technically I don’t pay for since that expense is fully tax-deductible. I can rent a vehicle at a moment’s notice for an hour at a time. So my transportation costs are a pittance compared to what it must be costing most people to fill up their tanks. My luck is really borne of a decision I made back in 1998 when I decided to live in San Francisco in part because I did not want to ever own a car. I do drive and enjoy it but I never want to own a car. It’s not a prudent investment vehicle. Now consider what it costs an airliner to fill their tank for a trans-Atlantic flight, $68,948 for Air Canada to fly Toronto-Pearson to London-Heathrow. Here is a story on Air Canada’s fuel woes.

Why Is Singapore Airlines The Only Way to Fly
I am a member of the Star Alliance network. In San Francisco, United has half the gates and thus a bit more than half of daily flights in and out of San Francisco International Airport. I travel to South East Asia fairly frequently and it is always a joy to take Singapore Airlines. It’s a 17-hour flight-time haul from San Francisco to Singapore so comfort is paramount and Singapore Airlines never disappoints. Here is a report on How Does Singapore Airlines Fly So High?

Inside a Singapore Airlines A-380

Airlines in a Post-Carbon World
It doesn’t look good but can they survive? Certainly airline stocks are not something I would be buying for a retirement investment portfolio. The pessimistic view: Saying Good-Bye to Air Travel. The optimistic view: The Future of Travel.

Global Climatic Change and Tourism
In the near-term, there should be a boom as people rush to see things before they disappear, like Florida for instance. Just kidding, but the Maldives for instance, a low-lying archipelago of coral islands off the coast of India. It’s on my to do list as I enjoy scuba. Here’s a short piece on climatic change and tourism: Climate Change Will Alter Tourism Trade.

Aviation News Podcast for Week June 6, 2008

The Best Airline Commercial from Virgin Atlantic Airlines

This is a must-see!

Enjoy the weekend!

Return to Main

In a post on 4 June 2008 on Fuel Subsidies Around the World, I noted how both India and Malaysia moved to cut fuel subsidies. Here are the relevant parts of that post plus an undate thereafter:

India
India’s government subsidizes kerosene and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) directly. It keeps other fuels, such as diesel, artificially cheap by the simple expedient of stopping state oil companies from raising their prices. These firms keep themselves afloat with “oil bonds”, which the government guarantees but does not enter on its books. In October 2007, for example, the government announced it would issue bonds worth 235 billion rupees this fiscal year, which will compensate oil-market companies for about 43% of their losses. All told, India’s fuel subsidies might cost as much as $17.5 billion this year, according to Lombard Street Research, a British firm of economists. That amounts to as much as 2% of the country’s GDP. The subsidy of kerosene is vital for India as the majority of India’s one billion people use kerosene to cook their daily meals.

On June 4th, 2008, India succumbed to the inevitable:

With inflation soaring, the Indian government Wednesday announced the highest ever increase in retail fuel prices, triggering bitter political criticism and angry street protests.

After weeks of nervous caution, the petroleum minister said at a news conference that gasoline prices would rise by the equivalent of 55 cents per gallon, about 11 percent, and diesel by 32 cents, almost 10 percent, effective at midnight. The price of cooking gas cylinders is to rise by a little over a dollar, or about 16 percent. Fuel has traditionally been heavily subsidized by the government, which regulates prices to ease the impact on India’s millions of poor.

In a televised address, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that the decision was inevitable and that Indians must “learn to adjust” to international economic conditions.

More from the Washington Post.

Update on India
Protests and strikes over fuel price rises spread across India on Friday despite moves to take the sting out of the hikes. India’s left-wing parties strike in three states over the federal government’s decision to increase the price of petrol. Strikes shut down transport, businesses and schools in three communist-run Indian states after a rise in fuel prices. Protesters said the government should have done more to insulate consumers from high global oil prices, even though it only passed on a fraction of surging crude costs when it raised heavily subsidised prices of petrol by 17% and diesel by about 10%.

The situation in Malaysia is below the fold. (more…)

With a worse than expected US Jobs Report for April which showed that the number of Americans out of work had risen at the fastest rate in 22 years., it was a brutal day in US financial markets. The Dow Jones industrial average suffered one of its worst trading days this year, closing down 394.60 points – a 3.13 per cent slide – to close at 12209.80. The decline on the New York stock market sparked a sharp increase in the price of oil – up $10.75 to $138.70 a barrel for light sweet crude on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The cost of sweet light crude oil shot up to this new record cloisng price after Morgan Stanley told its clients that the price would hit $150 a barrel within a month. The bank predicted that investors would continue to buy oil to offset the impact of the weakening US dollar on their portfolios. Oil prices have doubled in the last 12 months, and are up 42% since the beginning of the year. The record rise brought a two-day jump of over $16 a barrel, after Thursday’s 5.5% gain. Today’s spike was the largest ever since contracts began trading in 1983.

(more…)

It’s not as easy as you think. Some states don’t allow it. In 1992, the United States Supreme Court held the state of Hawaii in a case BURDICK v. TAKUSHI, DIRECTOR OF ELECTIONS OF HAWAII, et al that Hawaii’s prohibition on write in voting does not unreasonably infringe upon its citizens’ rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. So in Hawaii, it’s not legal. Same in Arkansas.

If writing in Hillary is your goal, then here is your resource: Write Hillary In. This website will tell you what the laws are and what your options are. The link has been added to Election Resources and Monitoring section of the blogroll in case you need it for further reference.

I will also continue to provide updates on efforts around the United States on groups that may be sponsoring these efforts as well as provide information on how to make your vote count as a protest. Bookmark the site and check back frequently. The DNC will hear our voices one way or another and they will rue the day, May 31, 2008. The day they killed the party.

You may also want to rent this documentary and see how the President of the Board Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco Tom Ammiano started a write-in campaign in his bid to unseat then Mayor Willie Brown. Mily Morse’s See How They Run documents the hard-fought election of 1999 between San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and Tom Ammiano who mounted a more forceful and compelling campaign than Brown initially expected. It might inspire you.

Here’s some background from Salon on the Brown v. Ammiano race below the fold: (more…)

To this we have come. It is another sad notch on our poor custodianship of this planet and our callous indifference to the plight of wildlife with whom we share this planet. A polar bear that had swam at least two hundred miles reached the northern shore of Iceland, just south of the Artic Circle. It was shot for its efforts. The story in the UK Guardian.

A polar bear that swam more than 200 miles in near-freezing waters to reach Iceland was shot on arrival in case it posed a threat to humans.

The bear, thought to be the first to reach the country in at least 15 years, was killed after local police claimed it was a danger to humans, triggering an outcry from animal lovers. Police claimed it was not possible to sedate the bear. The operation to kill the animal was captured on film.

The adult male, weighing 250kg, was presumed to have swum some 200 miles from Greenland, or from a distant chunk of Arctic ice, to Skagafjordur in northern Iceland.

A spokesman for PolarWorld, a German group dedicated to the preservation of the polar regions and the creatures which inhabit it, called the bear’s death “an avoidable tragedy … another great day for mankind”.

It is a sad day.

Return to Main

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the May 2008 US Jobs Report this morning. The US unemployment rate posted its sharpest one-month increase in 22 years last month, a 50 basis point rise to 5.5% from 5.0% in April. An across-the-board decline in non-farm payrolls of 49,000 jobs is now the fifth straight month of a decline in the number of jobs. From the Wall Street Journal:

The data, which included a fifth-straight drop in nonfarm employment, should take financial-market expectations of Federal Reserve rate increases as soon as this fall off the table.

Nonfarm payrolls, which are calculated by a survey of establishments, declined 49,000 in May, the Labor Department said. The decline was broad based, including manufacturing, construction, retail trade and business services. Payrolls fell 28,000 in April and 88,000 in March. Both were revised to show slightly larger drops.

The unemployment rate, which is calculated using a separate survey of households, jumped 0.5 percentage point to 5.5%, its highest level since October 2004. According to the household survey, employment fell by 285,000 while unemployment rose by 861,000.

“The over-the-month jump in unemployment reflected additional workers who had lost their jobs as well as an upsurge in new and returning jobseekers,” said Philip Jones, deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He cautioned that the household survey tends to be volatile between April and July due to an inflow of young people into the workforce.

True, the transition to the Summer work season is often volatile but there are two forces at work. Companies are shedding jobs and more people are trying to enter the work force. That combination caused the dramatic increase. And for those with jobs, real wages are stagnant. Salaries continued to shrink in May, after adjusting for inflation. Workers’ wages grew in May but at an anemic pace, with rank-and-file employees earning just $17.94 an hour, on average. That was a 5 cent increase — or 0.3% — from April.

In the last 12 months, hourly earnings have risen 3.5%, below the pace of inflation, which is running at about 4% a year.

Return to Main

Didn’t Rashid Khalidi teach you anything? Don’t you serve on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee? Haven’t you ever gotten a briefing from the State Department or read a newspaper in the last twenty years?

In Washington on Wednesday, Obama told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobby group, that if elected president in November, he would work for peace with a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Fair enough but then he added this:

“Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided,” Obama told the AIPAC lobby group.

The United States does not regard Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — the U.S. and other world embassies are in Tel Aviv — nor does the United States recognize Israel’s annexation of Arab East Jerusalem following its capture in the 1967 Six Day War. Obama just in a whiff of a statement changed a long-standing US foreign policy position had he been President. Thankfully, he is not.

(more…)