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Morsi flees Egypt's presidential palace as – World News – MSNBC.com
Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi reportedly left the palace via the back door to avoid further confrontation, as crowds vented their fury at Morsi’s decree granting him nearly unlimited powers. NBC’s Brian Williams reports.
By NBC News wire reports
Updated at 7:58 a.m. ET: CAIRO –?Egyptian police battled thousands of protesters outside President Mohammed Morsi’s palace in Cairo on Tuesday, prompting the Islamist leader to leave the building, presidency sources said.
Officers fired tear gas at up to 10,000 demonstrators angered by Morsi’s drive to hold a referendum on a new constitution on December 15. The Associated Press reported that some protesters?broke through barbed wire around the building and hurled chairs and rocks at retreating police on Tuesday night.
The crowds had gathered in what organizers had dubbed “last warning” protests against Morsi, who infuriated opponents with a November 22 decree that expanded his powers. “The people want the downfall of the regime,” the demonstrators chanted.
“The president left the palace,” a presidential source, who declined to be named, told Reuters. A security source at the presidency also said the president had departed.
Morsi returned to work at the presidential palace on Wednesday morning, an aide later told Reuters.
The Muslim Brotherhood also called for a rally backing Morsi outside the palace on Wednesday and leftists planned a counter-demonstration, raising fears of clashes in a crisis over a disputed push for a new constitution.?
Morsi ignited a storm of unrest in his bid to prevent a judiciary still packed with appointees of ousted predecessor Hosni Mubarak from derailing a troubled political transition.
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Egyptian protesters chant slogans against the Muslim Brotherhood during a rally in front of the presidential palace in Cairo on Tuesday.
Facing the gravest crisis of his six-month-old tenure, the Islamist president has shown no sign of buckling under pressure.
On Tuesday, riot police at the palace faced off against activists chanting “leave, leave” and holding Egyptian flags with “no to the constitution” written on them. Protesters had assembled near mosques in northern Cairo before marching toward the palace.
Supporters of Islamist president push Egypt to tipping point
“Our marches are against tyranny and the void constitutional decree and we won’t retract our position until our demands are met,” said Hussein Abdel Ghany, a spokesman for an opposition coalition of liberal, leftist and other disparate factions.
Protesters later surrounded the palace, with some climbing on gates at the rear to look down into the gardens.
As protesters clashes, President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt announced a referendum on a proposed constitution. NBC’s Jim Maceda reports.
At one point, people clambered onto a police armored vehicle and waved flags, while riot police huddled nearby.
The Health Ministry said 18 people had been injured in clashes next to the palace, according to the state news agency.?
Civil disobedience
Despite the latest protests, there has been only a limited response to opposition calls for a mass campaign of civil disobedience in the Arab world’s most populous country and cultural hub, where many people yearn for a return to stability.
A few hundred protesters gathered earlier near Morsi’s house in a suburb east of Cairo, chanting slogans against his decree and against the Muslim Brotherhood, from which the president emerged to win a free election in June. Police closed the road to stop them from coming any closer, a security official said.
Mona El-Tahawy explains why President Mohammed Morsi’s recent decree is very insulting to many Egyptians who demonstrated against Former President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.
Opposition groups have accused Morsi of making a dictatorial power grab to push through a constitution drafted by an assembly dominated by his supporters, with a referendum planned for December 15.
Liberals, Christians left out as Islamists back Egypt’s draft constitution
They say the draft constitution does not reflect the interests of Egypt’s liberals and other groups, an accusation dismissed by Islamists who insist it is a balanced document.
Egypt’s most widely-read independent newspapers did not publish on Tuesday in protest at Morsi’s “dictatorship”. Banks closed early to let staff go home safely in case of trouble.
Abdelrahman Mansour in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the cradle of the anti-Mubarak revolt, said: “The presidency believes the opposition is too weak and toothless. Today is the day we show them the opposition is a force to be reckoned with.”
Analysis: Crisis tests Egyptians’ constitution
But after winning post-Mubarak elections and pushing the Egyptian military out of the political driving seat it held for decades, the Islamists sense their moment has come to shape the future of Egypt, a longtime U.S. ally whose 1979 peace treaty with Israel is a cornerstone of Washington’s Middle East policy.
The Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, who staged a huge pro-Morsi rally in Cairo on Saturday, are confident enough members of the judiciary will be available to oversee the mid-December referendum, despite calls by some judges for a boycott.
“The crisis we have suffered for two weeks is on its way to an end, and very soon, God willing,” Saad al-Katatni, leader of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Networks project Obama wins the election
Supporters cheer after networks project an Obama victory. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
President Barack Obama handily defeated Gov. Mitt Romney and won himself a second term Tuesday after a bitter and historically expensive race that was primarily fought in just a handful of battleground states. Networks project that Obama beat Romney after nabbing the crucial state of Ohio.
The Romney campaign’s last-ditch attempt to put blue-leaning Midwestern swing states in play failed as Obama’s Midwestern firewall sent the president back to the White House for four more years. Obama picked up the swing states of New Hampshire, Michigan, New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Ohio. Florida and Virginia are still too close to call, but even if he won them, they would not give Romney enough Electoral College votes to put him over the top. The popular vote will most likely be much narrower than the president’s Electoral College victory.
The Obama victory marks an end to a years-long campaign that saw historic advertisement spending levels, countless rallies and speeches, and three much-watched debates.
The Romney campaign cast the election as a referendum on Obama’s economic policies, frequently comparing him to former President Jimmy Carter and asking voters the Reagan-esque question of whether they are better off than they were four years ago. But the Obama campaign pushed back on the referendum framing, blanketing key states such as Ohio early on with ads painting him as a multimillionaire more concerned with profits than people. The Obama campaign also aggressively attacked Romney on reproductive rights issues, tying Romney to a handful of Republican candidates who made controversial comments about rape and abortion.
These ads were one reason Romney faced a steep likeability problem for most of the race, until his expert performance at the first presidential debate in Denver in October. After that debate, and a near universal panning of Obama’s performance, Romney caught up with Obama in national polls, and almost closed his favoribility gap with the president. In polls, voters consistently gave him an edge over Obama on who would handle the economy better and create more jobs, even as they rated Obama higher on caring about the middle class.
But the president’s Midwestern firewall–and the campaign’s impressive grassroots operation–carried him through.?Ohio tends to vote a bit more Republican than the nation as a whole, but Obama was able to stave off that trend and hold an edge there over Romney, perhaps due to the president’s support of the auto bailout three years ago. Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan all but moved to Ohio in the last weeks of the campaign, trying and ultimately failing to erase Obama’s lead there.
A shrinking electoral battleground this year meant that only 14 states were really seen as in play, and both candidates spent most of their time and money there. Though national polls showed the two candidates in a dead heat, Obama consistently held a lead in the states that mattered. That, and his campaign’s much-touted get out the vote efforts and overall ground game, may be what pushed Obama over the finish line.
Now, Obama heads back to office facing what will most likely be bitterly partisan negotiations over whether the Bush tax cuts should expire. The House will still be majority Republican, with Democrats maintaining their majority in the Senate.
The loss may provoke some soul searching in the Republican Party. This election was seen as a prime opportunity to unseat Obama, as polls showed Americans were unhappy with a sluggish economy, sky-high unemployment, and a health care reform bill that remained widely unpopular. Romney took hardline positions on immigration, federal spending, and taxes during the long Republican primary when he faced multiple challenges from the right. He later shifted to the center in tone on many of those issues, but it’s possible the primary painted him into a too-conservative corner to appeal to moderates during the general election. The candidate also at times seemed unable to effectively counter Democratic attacks on his business experience and personal wealth.
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GOP reviews turning negative on Romney’s campaign
WASHINGTON (AP) ? On the eve of the first presidential debate, the early autumn Republican reviews are in for Mitt Romney‘s presidential campaign, and they are not pretty.
In some states, candidates who share the Nov. 6 ballot with the former Massachusetts governor already have taken steps to establish independence from him. Party strategists predict more will follow, perhaps as soon as next week, unless Romney can dispel fears that he is headed for defeat despite the weak economy that works against President Barack Obama‘s prospects.
Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who headed the Republican Party when it won control of Congress in the 1990s, said disapprovingly over the weekend that Romney’s campaign has been focusing on polling, political process and campaign management. “It’s about everything but the issues. It’s about everything but Obama‘s policies and the failures of those policies,” he said.
A prominent party strategist, Matthew Dowd, says the Romney campaign was almost guilty of political malpractice over the summer and during the two political conventions. It “left the playing field totally to Barack Obama and the Obama campaign” and “‘basically set the tone for the final 60 days of this campaign, which put them behind after the conventions,” Dowd said. He and Barbour both spoke on ABC.
Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Romney, defended the campaign in a conference call with reporters on Monday. “Our message is very clear, which is we cannot afford four more years like the last four years. And we need a real recovery, we need policies that are going to help,” he said.
Republicans say there is time for Romney to steady his campaign but only if he acts quickly.
It is unclear how long congressional candidates are willing to wait for a turnaround. Several Republican strategists point to this week, which includes the debate and Friday’s release of September unemployment figures.
Some Republicans who are in periodic contact with the campaign say Romney’s strategists have concluded that a recent uptick in public optimism, coming on top of Obama‘s success to date, complicates the attempt to defeat the president solely on the basis of pocketbook issues.
In recent days, Romney has emphasized criticism of the president’s foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, where a terrorist attack at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, left Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans dead.
Barbour, echoing what others say privately, was dismissive of the suggestion that Romney should spread his campaign focus. The public is “concerned about how backwards the Middle East has gone during the last year. But they’re much more concerned about their children having jobs, about them being able to pay for their health insurance, for $3.85 gasoline,” he said.
Privately, GOP strategists also agreed with Barbour’s public statement that Romney’s campaign has been unable so far to settle on a single, overarching theme to tie together its advertising, the rhetoric of its candidate and appearances by surrogates.
Many of the Republicans who commented on the race declined to be identified by name, saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about strategy.
In one statement emailed on Monday, the campaign quoted Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan as telling WTJM in Milwaukee: “This election is a clear choice between different paths.”
That was close to what the Obama campaign wants, and considerably different from Romney’s earlier insistence that the race is a referendum on the president’s performance in office.
Already, there are examples of concern from Republican candidates in other races, some subtle, others less so.
In Arizona, Rep. Jeff Flake recently began airing a commercial that accuses Democrat Richard Carmona of being Obama’s “rubber stamp,” a candidate whom the president recruited to run for the Senate to “help push his agenda.” The ad doesn’t say so, but Obama would need support in the next Congress only if he defeats Romney this November and wins four more years in the White House.
In North Dakota, Rep. Rick Berg, also running for the Senate, promises in an ad he will “serve as a check on Obama‘s failed policies” by fighting to repeal Obamacare, reduce government regulation and scale back the debt.
Both men are favored to win their races, taking place in states that Romney is expected to carry.
Nervousness first surfaced publicly among Republican Senate candidates two weeks ago, with the disclosure of a video of Romney saying 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes and a like percentage view themselves as victims who are entitled to government benefits. As a candidate, he said, “my job is not to worry” about them.
Linda McMahon, making a second try for a Senate seat from Connecticut, quickly expressed a different opinion. “I disagree with Governor Romney‘s insinuation that 47 percent of Americans believe they are victims who must depend on the government for their care,” she said in a statement released by her campaign.
Appointed Sen. Dean Heller, in a competitive race in Nevada, said, “My mom was a school cafeteria cook, so I have a very different view of the world than the one Romney expressed.”
Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, running for the Senate, said, “The presidential thing is bound to have an impact on every election.” His remark produced a rebuttal from former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, a top Romney surrogate, who said: “My good friend Tommy Thompson sounds like Barack Obama, blaming it on somebody else.”
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gop-reviews-turning-negative-romneys-campaign-165237654–election.html
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Former Italian president Scalfaro dies at 93 (AP)
MILAN, Italy ? Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, a past president of Italy who held the post during the sweeping corruption scandal of the early 1990s that reshaped the country’s post-war political landscape, died Sunday in Rome. He was 93.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano paid tribute to his predecessor as “a protagonist in the democratic political life” and an example of “moral integrity.”
“As president of the republic, he firmly and steadfastly confronted one of the most difficult periods of our history,” Napolitano said in a statement.
Pope Benedict XVI remembered Scalfaro as “a distinguished” Catholic man of state, who “helped to promote the common good and the perennial ethical and religious values.”
Scalfaro was a key figure in postwar Italian politics, helping to write the constitution and to found the former Christian Democrats. He held numerous prominent government posts before becoming Italy’s ninth post-war president, a position that is largely ceremonial but carries the significant role of moral compass for the country.
As president from 1992-1999, Scalfaro was often called upon to resolve Italy’s recurrent political crises, either choosing a new premier or calling early elections. He once called Italy’s volatile political situation “pathological.”
The “Clean Hands” investigations launched in the early 1990s uncovered a broad system of bribes that wiped out much of Italy’s political class, including key members of the conservative Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats. The scandals deeply eroded Italians’ trust in politicians and led to the demise of the two parties that had formed the pillars of post-war Italian politics.
Premier Mario Monti said Scalfaro “consistently defended the values” enshrined in the constitution “bearing witness with his actions and his rigor to all Italians, in particular the young.”
A devout Roman Catholic with a law degree from the Catholic University of Milan, Scalfaro spent the World War II years working to help imprisoned anti-Fascists and their families.
Then, in 1946, he won a seat in the assembly that wrote the constitution for the Italian Republic, declared in late 1947 after a popular referendum abolished the monarchy.
Scalfaro, a native of the northern city of Novara, was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the Italian republic’s first general election in 1948 and remained a deputy until he was elected president in 1992.
Scalfaro held junior posts at various ministries through the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1966, he gained his first Cabinet position when Premier Aldo Moro appointed him transportation minister.
In subsequent governments, Scalfaro served two more stints as transport minister and was education minister and interior minister. He was vice president of the Chamber of Deputies from 1976 to 1983.
He became a senator for life after completing his term as president.
He is survived by a daughter, Marianna. A funeral is set for Monday afternoon in Rome.
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Obama takes on big government: ‘It has to change’
President Barack Obama delivers remarks on government reform, Friday, Jan. 13, 2012, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)
President Barack Obama delivers remarks on government reform, Friday, Jan. 13, 2012, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)
President Barack Obama waves after delivering remarks on government reform, Friday, Jan. 13, 2012, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)
President Barack Obama delivers remarks on government reform, Friday, Jan. 13, 2012, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)
President Barack Obama delivers remarks on government reform, Friday, Jan. 13, 2012, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama suggested Friday that six economic government agencies be meshed into one, an election-year idea intended to halt bureaucratic nightmares and force Republicans to support him on one of their own favorite issues.
“The government we have is not the government we need,” Obama told business owners he’d gathered at the White House.
In an election year and a political atmosphere of tighter spending, Obama’s motivation is about improving a giant bureaucracy, but that is hardly all of it.
To voters sick of dysfunction, Obama wants to show some action toward making Washington work better. Politically, his plan would allow him to do so by putting the onus on Congress and in particular his Republican critics in the House of Representatives and the Senate, to show why they would be against the pursuit of a leaner government.
Obama asked Congress to give him a kind of reorganization power that no president has had since Ronald Reagan, a Republican icon. It would guarantee Obama a vote, within 90 days, on any idea he should offer to consolidate agencies, provided the idea would save money and reduce the size of government.
It would be up to lawmakers, therefore, to grant Obama this fast-track authority and then decide whether to approve any of his specific ideas.
Politically, Obama is seeking advantage on the turf often owned by Republicans: Smaller government. He is attempting to directly counter Republican arguments that accuse him of presiding over the kind of regulation, spending and debt that can undermine the economy: a dominant theme of this year’s debate and one often cited by his potential re-election rival, Republican Mitt Romney.
His first target would be to merge six major trade and commerce agencies into a one-stop-shopping department for American businesses. The Commerce Department would be among those that would cease to exist.
Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Republican House Speaker John Boehner said streamlining government was always a potentially good idea but expressed suspicion about whether the plan by Obama would really help business. Don Stewart, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, pledged Obama’s plan would get a careful review.
But he added: “It’s interesting to see the president finally acknowledge that Washington is out of control.”
Associated Press
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IBM Names Sales Chief Virginia Rometty As CEO, Samuel Palmisano Will Remain As Chairman
IBM’s board of directors has just named Virginia M. Rometty as the company’s new CEO and president, replacing Samuel J. Palmisano, who currently is IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Palmisano will remain chairman of the board. Rometty will become CEO effective January 1, 2012. Rometty was previously senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy. Rometty joined IBM in 1981 as a systems engineer. She was previously senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, and then was promoted to global sales leader. In her most recent role with Big Blue, She is accountable for revenue, profit, and client satisfaction in the 170 global markets and for the company’s worldwide sales results, which exceeded $99 billion in 2010.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/lCQ3Ebn1JDU/
Venezuelans ponder life without Chavez (AP)
CARACAS, Venezuela ? Since Hugo Chavez became Venezuela’s president more than 12 years ago, he’s been a constant presence in the lives of Rosiri de Blanco and her family.
The 41-year-old mother of four has loyally watched Chavez’s weekly TV program “Hello, President” and received subsidized food from the popular markets his government set up. When her hillside slum home was damaged in a mudslide in November, she and her neighbors moved into a public housing complex covered with posters of the charismatic leader.
Then, without warning nearly four weeks ago, the ever-present “comandante” disappeared from public sight.
De Blanco and her fellow evacuees in the Conde housing complex are now discussing what would have been unthinkable just a month ago: the possibility of a Venezuela without Chavez.
“Without Chavez, there’s nothing,” de Blanco said as she and her neighbors prepared to hold a small Mass for the president’s recovery in their building’s courtyard. “It’s necessary to think about him, but it’s necessary to have a positive attitude. We are asking God that Chavez leave all this behind him.”
Despite the president’s return from Cuba on Monday, his health and political future remain very much in doubt as he recovers from a June 20 surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pelvic region.
The 56-year-old leader appeared fatigued during his speech to thousands of supporters Monday afternoon from a balcony of the presidential palace. He himself admitted during the address, “No one should believe that my presence here … means that we’ve won the battle. No, we’ve begun to climb the hill. We’ve begun to beat the illness that was incubated inside my body.”
Talk about Chavez’s future is buzzing across this bustling capital city, as newspapers, radio programs and conversations on the street weigh questions of succession and the fate of Chavez’s socialist-inspired Bolivarian Revolution.
De Blanco said she wept the night of June 30 when she watched a thinner, weakened Chavez reveal his medical state for the first time.
For much of the past month, Venezuelans had the unusual experience of seeing very little of Chavez publicly. He arrived in Cuba on June 8 for what his government said was a scheduled visit.
In the following weeks, there were no broadcasts of “Hello President” or the usual hourslong televised speeches by the famously loquacious leader. Until his June 30 revelation, Venezuelans received scant communication from the president, such as a June 12 phone interview with state television and short videos of him convalescing in a track suit.
Chavez stunned the nation with his announcement of the cancer. He didn’t say what type of the disease he was fighting or reveal his prognosis for the future.
With tongue in cheek, Venezuelan comedian Andres Schmucke wrote in the newspaper El Universal that he found himself starting to miss Chavez, despite all the problems his government had left unsolved.
“It’s been 13 years seeing you every day, hearing you every day, reading news about you every day,” Schmucke wrote. “I miss your televised speeches. I miss ‘Hello, President.’”
Chavez supporters in Caracas have tried to keep the president in the spotlight by holding daily rallies wishing him a quick recovery. Over the weekend, hundreds of children and their parents marched through the center of town waving signs printed with slogans such as “We’ll have Chavez for a while” and “You are my inspiration.” They finished in a park and wrote notes to their president on a wall topped with the words “A Rainbow of Love for Chavez.”
Government news media have joined in by running ads blaring an administration slogan: “Onward, Commander.”
Computer programmer Carlos Rivas, 38, said he’s enjoyed the break from his ever-present leader.
“I feel more peaceful without Chavez talking everyday,” Rivas said. “He’s mortal like anyone else. A Venezuela without Chavez is possible.”
Rivas and his wife were leaving a park in of one of Caracas’ affluent neighborhoods, where thousands of people were enjoying their four-day weekend celebrating the country’s bicentennial. Not far away was a manicured square that has long been a gathering spot for Chavez opponents.
His wife Rosa Lopez, a 32-year-old electrical engineer, said she believed the country was ready for a change. Many young professionals like herself have left Venezuela, she said, due to low salaries and annual inflation rates that have hovered around 30 percent over the past three years.
“It’s healthy for the country to have another leader,” Lopez said. “People are happy. They aren’t worried about Chavez or his health.”
For de Blanco and her fellow evacuees, the uncertain fate of Chavez’s government has sparked worries that they could lose benefits such as government-subsidized food and shelter.
Chavez’s administration has housed storm refugees all over the capital city, some in an unfinished downtown shopping mall expropriated by the government.
Andres Avelino, who also was forced from his home during last year’s torrential rains, credited the Chavez administration with providing his government pension.
“These are benefits that we have never had before,” said the 60-year-old retired construction worker. Many in his working-class neighborhood, San Agustin, wore the bright red shirts that have become the norm for Chavez supporters. Avelino’s shirt touted Chavez’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela, while another man’s shirt read: “Chavez is the Winner.”
Avelino said he believes deeply in Chavez and prefers not to imagine a future without him. Without Chavez, he said, “it would get ugly in Venezuela.”
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