cryptogon.com

Although at least two of the family members suffered gunshot wounds, the investigation has not revealed how the family died.

The badly decomposed bodies were identified through fingerprints as Manas Ucar, 58; his wife, Margrit, 49; their twin daughters, Grace and Margo, 21; and Margrit Ucar’s mother, Fransuhi Kesisoglu, 72.

Manas and Margrit Ucar were shot, but autopsies have not determined how they died, said Lt. Erin Giudice. Two handguns were found near their bodies, she said. One pistol was registered to Margrit Ucar. Giudice declined to comment about the other weapon.

There were no obvious signs of trauma to the bodies of the daughters and their grandmother, and toxicology tests are underway to help investigators determine what killed them.

“The bodies were very decomposed. It will take a few weeks before we know the cause of death for any of them,” Giudice said.

She said there were no signs of a struggle inside the home, which is on a bluff overlooking the ocean in the gated Sea Pointe Estates neighborhood.

There is no record of domestic violence calls to the Ucar’s home on Campanilla, Giudice said. Neighbors said the family members were close-knit and kept to themselves.

It was a neighbor who first became concerned after the family had not been seen for a few days.

Giudice said a the neighbor asked the Sheriff’s Department to do a welfare check at the home on May 14. A deputy knocked on the door, got no response and walked around the house looking for anything amiss.

“There was nothing unusual or out of the ordinary,” she said.

Ten days later, brothers of the husband and wife asked the department to do another welfare check when they had not heard from their siblings. But Giudice said the family asked the deputies not to break into the house, believing the Ucars might be on vacation.

The couple’s brothers went to the San Clemente house the following day , Margrit Ucar’s 49th birthday, and discovered the bodies in a bottom-floor bedroom. Manas and Margrit Ucar were found near a closet.

Kevin Morrow, a spokesman for Syracuse University in New York, said Manas Ucar earned a masters and a doctoral degree in engineering from the school and was an assistant professor before leaving in the 1980s. He said Ucar’s specialty was thermal engineering systems.

Ucar is listed as a consulting engineer on an website of accident investigation and reconstruction experts in California.

Morris Talansky told an Israeli court he did not know how the money was spent, but linked it to Ehud Olmert’s “love” of “expensive” luxury goods.

Police are investigating whether the PM took up to $500,000 (£250,000) in bribes or illegal campaign donations.

Mr Olmert says sums from Mr Talansky were legal campaign contributions.

Mr Talansky made his claim during testimony under oath at the request of prosecutors, before his expected return to the United States.

“I gave [Mr Olmert] cash in envelopes,” the millionaire campaign fundraiser said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

“I asked him why I couldn’t write a cheque and he said it’s because of the way the money is channelled.”

When asked how the money was spent by Mr Olmert, Mr Talansky said: “I only know that he loved expensive cigars. I know he loved pens, watches. I found it strange.”

Criticism

Mr Talansky has already said that he gave Mr Olmert money for more than 10 years before he became Israeli prime minister.

Correspondents say the revelations are likely to damage further Mr Olmert’s already low standing.

This is the fifth investigation that police have launched into the financial affairs of Mr Olmert, who also faced criticism about the handling of the 2006 war in Lebanon.

Mr Talansky told the hearing that the bulk of the money was raised in New York “parlour meetings”, where Mr Olmert would address US donors who would then leave contributions on their chairs.

“He was articulate, he was intelligent. I felt that he would be a leader that I would have hoped to be if I had the talent,” Mr Talansky said.

He also said that he had given Mr Olmert loans of tens of thousands of dollars for foreign trips, but the money was not repaid.

“I had a very close relationship with him, but… I never expected anything personally. I never had any personal benefits from this relationship whatsoever.”

Mr Olmert has twice been questioned by police in recent weeks, but he has not been charged with any wrongdoing. He says he will resign if indicted.

Mr Talansky’s testimony is not part of a trial but was taken as a precaution in the event of a future legal case, as he resides in the US and might not return to Israel.

Supervising lettuce pickers in central Mexico, Martinez earns just half of the $1,100 a week he made in the U.S. But the job has its advantages, including working without fear of immigration raids.

Martinez, now a legal employee of U.S.-owned VegPacker de Mexico, is exactly the kind of worker more American farm companies are seeking. Many have moved their fields to Mexico, where they can find qualified people, often with U.S. experience, who can’t be deported.

“Because I never moved my family to the U.S., I was always alone there,” said Martinez, 45, who could never get a work permit, even after 16 years in agriculture in California and Arizona. “When I got the opportunity to be close to my family, doing similar work, I didn’t even have to think about it.”

American companies now farm more than 45,000 acres of land in three Mexican states, employing about 11,000 people, a 2007 survey by the U.S. farm group Western Growers shows.

There were no earlier studies to document how much the acreage has grown. But U.S. direct investment in Mexican agriculture, which includes both American companies moving their operations to Mexico and setting up Mexican partnerships, has swelled sevenfold to $60 million since 2000, Mexico’s Economy Department told The Associated Press.

Major corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Bunge have invested across Latin America for decades, particularly in countries like Brazil, where agribusiness is booming.

Some small farmers have cultivated parts of Mexico for much longer, seeking to secure year-round supplies of fruits and vegetables, while taking advantage of cheap labor and proximity to the U.S.

But the latest move south has been fueled by something new, farmers say: a way to continue to deliver cheap, fresh farm goods amid the current U.S. political standoff over an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants, the majority from Mexico.

Recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have targeted major agricultural producers, including Del Monte Fresh Produce in Portland, Oregon, and several large packing plants across the nation _ scaring away immigrants and persuading many agricultural employers to clean up their hiring practices.

“Employers can’t find legal workers to replace this huge number of illegal workers,” said James Holt, an agricultural labor economist and independent consultant based in Washington. “Their only option is to go where the workers are.”

Many of the growers, once based in California’s Salinas Valley, are also heading south to escape high land prices and water shortages. Mexico is closer to eastern U.S. markets than California, they say. Shipping times to Atlanta are a day shorter from Mexico’s central Guanajuato state.

Not everyone in Mexico has welcomed U.S. companies. Mexican farmers complain that they have driven up land rental prices. Many local growers worry they can’t compete against big, foreign firms, said Felipe Sanchez, president of a farmers group in Guanajuato state.

“How can a ranch that farms 70 acres compete with a company that came to farm 10,000 acres?” Sanchez said. “We’ll become laborers on our own ranches.”

Farm workers at U.S. companies in Mexico make two or three times Mexico’s minimum wage of $4.80 a day. But they still earn far less than the average $9.60 an hour that field workers in the United States made in January 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Juan Antonio Linarez, 19, makes a tenth of his U.S. roofing income at Taylor Farms de Mexico’s vegetable cooling plant in Guanajuato. But he has health insurance and can live nearby with his family _ without the dangerous and expensive trek across the border.

Some experts argue that farmers simply refuse to raise U.S. wages to compete with other industries, something they say would help ease the labor crunch.

As the United States heads into a recession, more native-born workers might consider agricultural work if wages were high enough, said Harley Shaiken, director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies.

“Labor shortage always is a question of at what pay rate,” Shaiken said. “Very often, if the wages are artificially low, it will be very difficult to find a work force.”

But Steve Scaroni said he did offer higher wages and still couldn’t find a steady work force in the U.S. Scaroni owns VegPacker, a California and Guanajuato-based company that grows lettuce, celery, cauliflower and other vegetables. VegPacker has struggled after forking out millions of dollars to launch its Mexico division two years ago.

The problem is that cheaper labor in Mexico often is offset by lower productivity and high training costs, especially when it comes to enforcing U.S. food-safety standards.

The influential Environmental Audit Committee says a personal carbon trading scheme is the best and fairest way of cutting Britain’s CO2 emissions without penalising the poor.

Under the scheme, everyone would be given an annual carbon allowance to use when buying oil, gas, electricity and flights.

Anyone who exceeds their entitlement would have to buy top-up credits from individuals who haven’t used up their allowance. The amount paid would be driven by market forces and the deal done through a specialist company.

MPs, led by Tory Tim Yeo, say the scheme could be more effective at cutting greenhouse gas emissions than green taxes.

But critics say the idea is costly, bureaucratic, intrusive and unworkable.

The Government says it supports the scheme in principle, but warns it is ‘ahead of its time’.

The idea of personal carbon trading is increasingly being promoted by environmentalists. In theory it could be used to cover all purchases – from petrol to food.

For the scheme to work, the Government would need to give out 45million carbon cards – each one linked to a personal carbon account. Every year, the account would be credited with a notional amount of CO2 in kilograms.

By David Rothkopf

Reviewed by Anne-Marie Slaughter

Go to www.theyrule.net. A white page appears with a deliberately shadowy image of a boardroom table and chairs. Sentences materialize: “They sit on the boards of the largest companies in America.” “Many sit on government committees.” “They make decisions that affect our lives.” Finally, “They rule.” The site allows visitors to trace the connections between individuals who serve on the boards of top corporations, universities, think thanks, foundations and other elite institutions. Created by the presumably pseudonymous Josh On, “They Rule” can be dismissed as classic conspiracy theory. Or it can be viewed, along with David Rothkopf’s Superclass, as a map of how the world really works.

In Superclass, Rothkopf, a former managing director of Kissinger Associates and an international trade official in the Clinton Administration, has identified roughly 6,000 individuals who have “the ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide.” They are the “superclass” of the 21st century, spreading across borders in an ever thickening web, with a growing allegiance, Rothkopf argues, to each other rather than to any particular nation.

Rothkopf’s archetypal member of the superclass is Blackstone Group executive Stephen Schwarzman, who is not only fabulously wealthy, but also chairman of the Kennedy Center, a board member of the New York Public Library, the New York City Ballet, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the New York City Partnership. These boards, along with the over 100 businesses Blackstone has invested in, the other business councils and advisory boards he sits on, and his Yale and Harvard education, mean that Schwarzman is only one or two affiliations away from any center of power in the world. Rothkopf actually traces the “daisy chain” of Schwarzman’s connections through his board memberships — linking him to Ratan Tata, one of India’s richest men, former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo and many others. It is these links that create access that translates to influence and determines how the levers of power are pulled.

Fame alone doesn’t get you into the global power elite: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are out while Angelina Jolie and Bono are in. High office is generally enough for politicians and even their spouses, but membership in the superclass can be fleeting — Mikhail Gorbachev and Cherie Blair are now out, while Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton are still in. Rothkopf harps on the Pareto principle of distribution, or the “80/20 rule,” whereby 20 percent of the causes of anything are responsible for 80 percent of the consequences. That means 20 percent of the money-makers make 80 percent of the money and 20 percent of the politicians make 80 percent of the important decisions. That 20 percent belongs to the superclass.

On closer inspection, however, Rothkopf has no actual methodology for determining who is in and who is out. Each chapter identifies individuals who are said to count in a field, conclusions backed up by trendspotting and anecdotes about Rothkopf’s encounters at Davos and New York dinner parties that make the reader feel vaguely voyeuristic. When Rothkopf ventures away from his core expertise in politics and finance, and into such subjects as asymmetrical warfare, mega-churches and freemasonry, the pastiche-like quality of his research becomes evident.

Still, Superclass is often thought-provoking. For one thing, it is as much about who is not part of the superclass as who is. As I read Rothkopf’s chronicles of elite gatherings — Davos, Bilderberg, the Bohemian Grove (all male), Fathers and Sons (all male) — I was repeatedly struck by the near absence of women. Fortune magazine’s annual Most Powerful Women Summit, the only elite gathering I know of that is restricted to women, didn’t even rate a mention. And indeed, when Rothkopf summarizes “how to become a member of the superclass,” his first rule is “be born a man.” Only 6 percent of the superclass is female.

Superclass is written in part as a consciousness-raising exercise for members of the superclass themselves. Rothkopf worries that “the world they are making” is deeply unequal and ultimately unstable. He hopes that the current global elite will use their power to do more than egg each other on to high-profile philanthropy. Elites in radically unequal countries such as Chile, for instance, might decide to open their cozy circles of power to allow the emergence of a genuine middle class. New York bankers might realize that they can no longer peddle loans to developing countries in good times but then pressure the U.S. Treasury and the International Monetary Fund to bail out those same governments when they suddenly default on their debts (ensuring, of course, that the bankers get paid). The agribusinesses that reap billions from domestic subsidies in developed countries might consider the longer-term value of trade rather than aid for countries at the bottom of the global food chain.

But Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is a U.S. resident being held in a South Carolina military brig; he is the only enemy combatant held on U.S. soil. That makes his case very different.

Al-Marri’s capture six years ago might be the Bush administration’s biggest domestic counterterrorism success story. Authorities say he was an al-Qaida sleeper agent living in middle America, researching poisonous gasses and plotting a cyberattack.

To justify holding him, the government claimed a broad interpretation of the president’s wartime powers, one that goes beyond warrantless wiretapping or monitoring banking transactions. Government lawyers told federal judges that the president can send the military into any U.S. neighborhood, capture a citizen and hold him in prison without charge, indefinitely.

Among the 98 held are former employees of Pinochet’s notorious Dina intelligence service, which ran a series of secret prisons where leftwingers and other opponents were tortured and killed, Reuters said, citing unnamed judicial sources.

Judge Victor Montiglio ordered the arrests for alleged abuses during Pinochet’s 1973-1990 dictatorship. Montiglio is examining the kidnapping and murder of 42 people during Operation Colombo, a campaign against opponents of the regime in its early days.

“This is excellent news, because Operation Colombo was also a case in which General Pinochet’s immunity from prosecution was stripped, and given the number of victims, is an emblematic case,” Sergio Laurenti, the head of Amnesty International in Chile, told Reuters.

It was now important that Chile’s security forces cooperate with the investigation as there had been a “lack of cooperation” from the police and military before, he added.

The Department of Transportation said figures from March show the steepest decrease in driving ever recorded.

Compared with March a year earlier, Americans drove an estimated 4.3 percent less — that’s 11 billion fewer miles, the DOT’s Federal Highway Administration said Monday, calling it “the sharpest yearly drop for any month in FHWA history.” Records have been kept since 1942.

The 1,000-acre plant uses concentrated sunlight to generate power for as many as 112,500 homes in Southern California. Rising natural gas prices and emissions limits may make solar thermal the fastest-growing energy source in the next decade, say backers including Vinod Khosla, the founder of computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc.

Costs for the technology will fall below coal as soon as 2020, the U.S. government estimates. JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. invested last year in the biggest solar plant built in a generation; Chevron and Google are funding research; and Goldman Sachs is seeking land to lease as demand outpaces wind turbines and geothermal.