IN this recession, it is better to be old. Being young has some advantages, too.
But being in the middle of the spectrum — in your 30s or 40s — seems to be the worst place to be.
The Pew Research Center released a poll of Americans this week that found people over 65 were generally suffering less from the recession. Fewer of them reported being forced to cut back on household expenses or said they had trouble meeting rent or mortgage obligations.
“The most vivid finding to emerge from this survey is that older Americans — most of whom have already retired and downsized their lifestyles — have been far better insulated from the current storm than those who need to worry about keeping their jobs and building up diminished retirement accounts,” wrote Rich Morin and Paul Taylor of Pew Research.
The elderly benefit from a greater safety net than do other Americans. Many are collecting pensions, and Social Security and Medicare are available. Just 7 percent of those over 65 reported problems in obtaining or paying for health care, a third the proportion of younger adults.
The collapse in stock prices last year also caused less damage to those over 65. The poll found that 23 percent of elderly Americans reported losing at least 20 percent of their investments last year, well below those further from retirement.
Those over 65 presumably had more conservative investments, which fared better.
The proportion of those 18 to 29 who reported large losses was even smaller, at 15 percent. It appears that many of them lost little because they had little in the way of investments to lose.
Older Americans have also been less affected by rising unemployment. Fewer of them are working, of course, but the number of people over 65 with jobs has risen by 3.9 percent since November 2007, when the total number of people with jobs hit a peak. Since then, the younger the worker, the more likely he or she was to lose a job.
This recession differs from recent ones in that regard. While the youngest workers have always been the most vulnerable, those over 65 fared worse than those in middle age in the three previous recessions — in the early years of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the beginning of the current decade.
A rise in the number of people over 65 with jobs may not be good news, of course, since it could indicate that some retired people were being forced back into the labor market by declines in their investments. But at least many of them were able to find jobs.
The Pew poll found that the recession was having its deepest immediate impact on those in the “threshold generation,” ages 50 to 64. They were most likely to have suffered significant investment losses, and three-quarters of them said the recession would make it harder for them to afford retirement, a greater percentage than of either older or younger Americans.
But if that generation does end up working longer, workers in their 30s and 40s could find themselves facing more competition for jobs and promotions. Even if the recession does end this year, as the more optimistic economists forecast, the effects of it could be felt for years to come.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Minorities Hit Hardest by Foreclosures in New York
Turn the corner on 145th Street in Jamaica, Queens, and it is as though a cyclone has wheeled throughOne resident, Lakisha Brown, a hospital worker and mother of two, snatched her house back from foreclosure last month, if only temporarily. “We need to sell fast,” she says. “I’m just trying to save what’s left of my credit.” Across the street in this black middle-class neighborhood, Patrick Nicholas, a surgical technician in blue scrubs, shakes his dreadlocks and shrugs. He rents but is moving out. “The owner got foreclosed and told us to leave,” he says.
Six doors away, past two foreclosed and boarded-up homes, a burly man in a blue union jacket declines to give his name but his problem is evident. A foreclosure notice is pasted to the door of his house. His tone is mournful. “Tough times, man,” he says. “Tough, tough times.”
Late to arrive in the Northeast, the foreclosure crisis has swept through the New York region at an explosive pace in the past two years, destroying billions of dollars in housing wealth, according to a New York Times analysis of foreclosures filed since 2005 and federal mortgage data.
It now touches every corner of the region, from estates along the Connecticut Gold Coast to the suburban tracts of Long Island, where 6 percent of all mortgages are at least 90 days delinquent, the point at which foreclosure proceedings usually begin.
But the storm has fallen with a special ferocity on black and Latino homeowners, the analysis shows. Defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones. Eighty-five percent of the worst-hit neighborhoods — where the default rate is at least double the regional average — have a majority of black and Latino homeowners.
And the hardest blows rain down on the backbone of minority neighborhoods: the black middle class. In New York City, for example, black households making more than $68,000 a year are almost five times as likely to hold high-interest subprime mortgages as are whites of similar — or even lower — incomes.
This holds a special poignancy. Just four or five years ago, black homeownership was rising sharply, after decades in which discriminatory lending and zoning practices discouraged many blacks from buying. Now, as damage ripples outward, black families in foreclosure lose savings and credit, neighbors see the value of their homes decline, and renters are evicted.
That pattern plays out across the nation. A study released this week by the Pew Research Center also shows foreclosure taking the heaviest toll on counties that have black and Latino majorities, with the New York region among the badly hit.
On 145th Street in southeast Queens, just south of Linden Boulevard, attached brick homes with tidy, fenced-in gardens stretch into the distance. Children play tag under blooming oaks. But 8 of these roughly 50 homes face foreclosure; 4 are vacant; 2 have plywood boards nailed over punched-out windows.
“My district feels like ground zero,” said City Councilman James Sanders Jr., an African-American who represents hundreds of blocks in Queens like this one. “In military terms, we are being pillaged.”
Years ago many banks drew red lines on maps around black neighborhoods and refused to lend; more recently, some banks began taking aim at those neighborhoods for the marketing of subprime loans, say consumer advocates.
Black buyers often enter a separate lending universe: A dozen banks and mortgage companies, almost all of which turned big profits making subprime loans, accounted for half the loans given to the region’s black middle-income borrowers in 2005 and 2006, according to The Times’s analysis. The N.A.A.C.P. has filed a class-action suit against many of the nation’s largest banks, charging that such lending practices amount to reverse redlining.
“This was not only a problem of regulation on the mortgage front, but also a targeted scourge on minority communities,” said Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, in a speech this year at New York University. Roughly 33 percent of the subprime mortgages given out in New York City in 2007, Mr. Donovan said, went to borrowers with credit scores that should have qualified them for conventional prevailing-rate loans.
For anyone taking out a $350,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — a typical spread between conventional and subprime loans — tacks on $272,000 in additional interest over the life of a 30-year loan.
“There’s a huge worry that this will exacerbate historic disparities between the wealth of black and white families,” said Ingrid Ellen, co-director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. Not that white neighborhoods and towns in the New York region stand immune. During the past decade, buyers of all colors scrimped to buy homes in one of the nation’s most expensive housing markets.
Now mortgage delinquencies are rising sharply even in high-income, predominantly white enclaves, from Nirvana Avenue in Great Neck, N.Y., to Otter Rock Drive on a peninsula off Greenwich, Conn.
In the wealthiest ZIP codes, the median delinquency rate — although much lower than the regional rate, 5.3 percent — more than tripled from March 2005 to March 2008, then doubled again in the year since.
As a whole the region has fared better than stretches of Florida and California, where about one in every five borrowers is at least 90 days behind on payments.
Yet the pain in the New York region is considerable. The delinquency rate in Essex County, N.J., stood at 11 percent in March, more than two percentage points higher than in Genesee County, Mich., home to the battered city of Flint, which stands as a national symbol of this recession.
A World of Damage
Sitting on Long Island close by the Atlantic Ocean — salt air flares the nostrils on many days — Roosevelt is 79 percent black and has suffered grievously from segregation over the years. (Long Island, as measured by school and housing patterns, is among the most racially segregated suburban areas in the nation.) Still, as young black families sought bargains, home ownership rose.
Now subprime loans and a crippled economy have laid many of those families low. Olive M. Thompson, a 45-year-old nursing assistant, lost her $215,000, four-bedroom Cape in January, but not before she drained her 401(k) and declared bankruptcy.
A single mother of four, she recalled arriving in 2003 and seeing a home across the street with a garden so beautiful she fantasized about matching it. That house went into foreclosure.
“Next thing I know, it’s boarded up,” she said.
Foreclosure represents catastrophe on several levels. As families move to cheaper quarters, they often move their children to different schools. A rising number of foreclosures in a neighborhood is a singularly reliable predictor of an increase in violent crime, according to a recent academic study.
All these ills are magnified for black families, whose median net worth is far smaller than that of white families, and far more tied up in housing.
On Bainbridge Street in the predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, 130-year-old brownstone homes loom like grand sailing ships, seemingly impervious to the ravages of time. That solidity is illusory. Looking closer, a visitor can identify homes in jeopardy by the cracked stoops, broken windowsills and tilting chimneys.
Alexia Billiart, 33, who is black, and her husband, who is white, moved a year ago from an expensive neighborhood into a handsome row house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where they can manage their payments. Across the street, two foreclosed homes have fallen vacant, and a nearby apartment building stands broken and padlocked. At night, young men cluster on the stoops of the vacant homes.
“We figured we’d move here and participate in the rebirth of this block,” said Ms. Billiart, who works for a financial planning firm. “It seems to be going backward; it’s a little scary.”
Several black homeowners along these blocks, including well-paid professionals, confide that they pay strikingly high mortgage rates — 9, 10 or 11 percent annually. How that came to happen is a complicated story.
Over the last decade, many commercial banks, from Wells Fargo to Bank of America to HSBC, acquired subprime lenders that thrived by offering loose lending standards and high interest rates. Court records show that brokers sometimes received bonuses for steering borrowers into high-interest loans laden with extra costs.
Even many blacks and Latinos who say they sought conventional loans ended up with subprime mortgages from these lenders. One reason, many say, was a mistrust of conventional banks.
Colvin Grannum grew up in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn and became president of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, a nonprofit organization that builds and renovates housing. His father bought several properties in the 1950s and ’60s, often without turning to banks.
“I don’t want to say it’s in the cultural DNA, but a lot of us who are older than 30 have some memory of disappointment or humiliation related to banks,” Mr. Grannum said. “The white guy in the suit with the same income gets a loan and you don’t?”
“So you turn to local brokers, even if they don’t offer the best rates.”
This may help explain an unusual phenomenon: Upper-income black borrowers in the region are more likely to hold subprime mortgages than even blacks with lower incomes, who often benefit from homeownership classes and lending assistance offered by government and nonprofits
The foreclosure storm shows few signs of abating. Scam artists and deed thieves prey on the desperate as complaints flood the offices of local prosecutors. In a church meeting room in the Guyanese neighborhood of Flatlands, Brooklyn, 200 homeowners tell of paying $3,000 or $4,000 to firms to “fix” their mortgage troubles. Often, these firms disappear with the moneyIn southeast Queens, politicians have asked homeowner advocacy groups to set up shop in their offices. “My office is St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes,” Councilman Sanders said.
A few step clear of the rubble. Antoinette Coffi, 45, saw an ad on the subway, a photo of a black couple gazing at a gleaming home. She walked into that company’s office two years ago, and six weeks later she, her two children, her mother and cousin had a home in Queens. She ended up with not one but two mortgages, including a variable-rate loan that started at 11 percent.
Last year her work hours were cut and she fell behind. “The stress, oh my God,” she said, her voice thick with the juicy vowels of her native West Africa.
With the help of Changer, an advocacy group, she has kept the house. But her neighbors may not be as lucky. “Everywhere, everyone talks about being put in the street,” she said.
Foreclosure is cutting so deep as to reshape the geography. If enough homes go vacant in Queens and Newark and Roosevelt, a cycle of disinvestment could beckon.
“Some home-owning neighborhoods may turn back to rentals and some might not survive,” said Jay Brinkman, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington. “They might end up bulldozed.”
That sounds a touch apocalyptic. The Obama administration has set aside $50 billion to persuade banks to reduce monthly payments to help borrowers avoid foreclosure. Immigrants continue to flock here, and New York City officials have spent tens of billions of dollars since the 1980s to rebuild and shore up hard-pressed neighborhoods.
But few in 1965 would have predicted the South Bronx devastation of 1979. At the very least, tens of thousands of people will lose their homes, their savings and their dreams.
“Rather than helping to narrow the wealth and home ownership gap between black and white,” Mr. Grannum said, “we’ve managed in the last few years to strip a lot of equity out of black neighborhoods.”
Six doors away, past two foreclosed and boarded-up homes, a burly man in a blue union jacket declines to give his name but his problem is evident. A foreclosure notice is pasted to the door of his house. His tone is mournful. “Tough times, man,” he says. “Tough, tough times.”
Late to arrive in the Northeast, the foreclosure crisis has swept through the New York region at an explosive pace in the past two years, destroying billions of dollars in housing wealth, according to a New York Times analysis of foreclosures filed since 2005 and federal mortgage data.
It now touches every corner of the region, from estates along the Connecticut Gold Coast to the suburban tracts of Long Island, where 6 percent of all mortgages are at least 90 days delinquent, the point at which foreclosure proceedings usually begin.
But the storm has fallen with a special ferocity on black and Latino homeowners, the analysis shows. Defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones. Eighty-five percent of the worst-hit neighborhoods — where the default rate is at least double the regional average — have a majority of black and Latino homeowners.
And the hardest blows rain down on the backbone of minority neighborhoods: the black middle class. In New York City, for example, black households making more than $68,000 a year are almost five times as likely to hold high-interest subprime mortgages as are whites of similar — or even lower — incomes.
This holds a special poignancy. Just four or five years ago, black homeownership was rising sharply, after decades in which discriminatory lending and zoning practices discouraged many blacks from buying. Now, as damage ripples outward, black families in foreclosure lose savings and credit, neighbors see the value of their homes decline, and renters are evicted.
That pattern plays out across the nation. A study released this week by the Pew Research Center also shows foreclosure taking the heaviest toll on counties that have black and Latino majorities, with the New York region among the badly hit.
On 145th Street in southeast Queens, just south of Linden Boulevard, attached brick homes with tidy, fenced-in gardens stretch into the distance. Children play tag under blooming oaks. But 8 of these roughly 50 homes face foreclosure; 4 are vacant; 2 have plywood boards nailed over punched-out windows.
“My district feels like ground zero,” said City Councilman James Sanders Jr., an African-American who represents hundreds of blocks in Queens like this one. “In military terms, we are being pillaged.”
Years ago many banks drew red lines on maps around black neighborhoods and refused to lend; more recently, some banks began taking aim at those neighborhoods for the marketing of subprime loans, say consumer advocates.
Black buyers often enter a separate lending universe: A dozen banks and mortgage companies, almost all of which turned big profits making subprime loans, accounted for half the loans given to the region’s black middle-income borrowers in 2005 and 2006, according to The Times’s analysis. The N.A.A.C.P. has filed a class-action suit against many of the nation’s largest banks, charging that such lending practices amount to reverse redlining.
“This was not only a problem of regulation on the mortgage front, but also a targeted scourge on minority communities,” said Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, in a speech this year at New York University. Roughly 33 percent of the subprime mortgages given out in New York City in 2007, Mr. Donovan said, went to borrowers with credit scores that should have qualified them for conventional prevailing-rate loans.
For anyone taking out a $350,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — a typical spread between conventional and subprime loans — tacks on $272,000 in additional interest over the life of a 30-year loan.
“There’s a huge worry that this will exacerbate historic disparities between the wealth of black and white families,” said Ingrid Ellen, co-director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. Not that white neighborhoods and towns in the New York region stand immune. During the past decade, buyers of all colors scrimped to buy homes in one of the nation’s most expensive housing markets.
Now mortgage delinquencies are rising sharply even in high-income, predominantly white enclaves, from Nirvana Avenue in Great Neck, N.Y., to Otter Rock Drive on a peninsula off Greenwich, Conn.
In the wealthiest ZIP codes, the median delinquency rate — although much lower than the regional rate, 5.3 percent — more than tripled from March 2005 to March 2008, then doubled again in the year since.
As a whole the region has fared better than stretches of Florida and California, where about one in every five borrowers is at least 90 days behind on payments.
Yet the pain in the New York region is considerable. The delinquency rate in Essex County, N.J., stood at 11 percent in March, more than two percentage points higher than in Genesee County, Mich., home to the battered city of Flint, which stands as a national symbol of this recession.
A World of Damage
Sitting on Long Island close by the Atlantic Ocean — salt air flares the nostrils on many days — Roosevelt is 79 percent black and has suffered grievously from segregation over the years. (Long Island, as measured by school and housing patterns, is among the most racially segregated suburban areas in the nation.) Still, as young black families sought bargains, home ownership rose.
Now subprime loans and a crippled economy have laid many of those families low. Olive M. Thompson, a 45-year-old nursing assistant, lost her $215,000, four-bedroom Cape in January, but not before she drained her 401(k) and declared bankruptcy.
A single mother of four, she recalled arriving in 2003 and seeing a home across the street with a garden so beautiful she fantasized about matching it. That house went into foreclosure.
“Next thing I know, it’s boarded up,” she said.
Foreclosure represents catastrophe on several levels. As families move to cheaper quarters, they often move their children to different schools. A rising number of foreclosures in a neighborhood is a singularly reliable predictor of an increase in violent crime, according to a recent academic study.
All these ills are magnified for black families, whose median net worth is far smaller than that of white families, and far more tied up in housing.
On Bainbridge Street in the predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, 130-year-old brownstone homes loom like grand sailing ships, seemingly impervious to the ravages of time. That solidity is illusory. Looking closer, a visitor can identify homes in jeopardy by the cracked stoops, broken windowsills and tilting chimneys.
Alexia Billiart, 33, who is black, and her husband, who is white, moved a year ago from an expensive neighborhood into a handsome row house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where they can manage their payments. Across the street, two foreclosed homes have fallen vacant, and a nearby apartment building stands broken and padlocked. At night, young men cluster on the stoops of the vacant homes.
“We figured we’d move here and participate in the rebirth of this block,” said Ms. Billiart, who works for a financial planning firm. “It seems to be going backward; it’s a little scary.”
Several black homeowners along these blocks, including well-paid professionals, confide that they pay strikingly high mortgage rates — 9, 10 or 11 percent annually. How that came to happen is a complicated story.
Over the last decade, many commercial banks, from Wells Fargo to Bank of America to HSBC, acquired subprime lenders that thrived by offering loose lending standards and high interest rates. Court records show that brokers sometimes received bonuses for steering borrowers into high-interest loans laden with extra costs.
Even many blacks and Latinos who say they sought conventional loans ended up with subprime mortgages from these lenders. One reason, many say, was a mistrust of conventional banks.
Colvin Grannum grew up in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn and became president of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, a nonprofit organization that builds and renovates housing. His father bought several properties in the 1950s and ’60s, often without turning to banks.
“I don’t want to say it’s in the cultural DNA, but a lot of us who are older than 30 have some memory of disappointment or humiliation related to banks,” Mr. Grannum said. “The white guy in the suit with the same income gets a loan and you don’t?”
“So you turn to local brokers, even if they don’t offer the best rates.”
This may help explain an unusual phenomenon: Upper-income black borrowers in the region are more likely to hold subprime mortgages than even blacks with lower incomes, who often benefit from homeownership classes and lending assistance offered by government and nonprofits
The foreclosure storm shows few signs of abating. Scam artists and deed thieves prey on the desperate as complaints flood the offices of local prosecutors. In a church meeting room in the Guyanese neighborhood of Flatlands, Brooklyn, 200 homeowners tell of paying $3,000 or $4,000 to firms to “fix” their mortgage troubles. Often, these firms disappear with the moneyIn southeast Queens, politicians have asked homeowner advocacy groups to set up shop in their offices. “My office is St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes,” Councilman Sanders said.
A few step clear of the rubble. Antoinette Coffi, 45, saw an ad on the subway, a photo of a black couple gazing at a gleaming home. She walked into that company’s office two years ago, and six weeks later she, her two children, her mother and cousin had a home in Queens. She ended up with not one but two mortgages, including a variable-rate loan that started at 11 percent.
Last year her work hours were cut and she fell behind. “The stress, oh my God,” she said, her voice thick with the juicy vowels of her native West Africa.
With the help of Changer, an advocacy group, she has kept the house. But her neighbors may not be as lucky. “Everywhere, everyone talks about being put in the street,” she said.
Foreclosure is cutting so deep as to reshape the geography. If enough homes go vacant in Queens and Newark and Roosevelt, a cycle of disinvestment could beckon.
“Some home-owning neighborhoods may turn back to rentals and some might not survive,” said Jay Brinkman, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington. “They might end up bulldozed.”
That sounds a touch apocalyptic. The Obama administration has set aside $50 billion to persuade banks to reduce monthly payments to help borrowers avoid foreclosure. Immigrants continue to flock here, and New York City officials have spent tens of billions of dollars since the 1980s to rebuild and shore up hard-pressed neighborhoods.
But few in 1965 would have predicted the South Bronx devastation of 1979. At the very least, tens of thousands of people will lose their homes, their savings and their dreams.
“Rather than helping to narrow the wealth and home ownership gap between black and white,” Mr. Grannum said, “we’ve managed in the last few years to strip a lot of equity out of black neighborhoods.”
Pregnant woman, 66, set to be oldest woman to give birth in Britain
A 66-year-old is set to become the oldest woman to give birth in Britain, it was reported last night.
Elizabeth Adeney is reported to be eight months pregnant after having had IVF treatment abroad.
She is four years older than the previous record holder, Patricia Rashbrook, who gave birth in 2006, aged 62.
A friend of Adeney told the Daily Mail she was still working a five-day week, in perfect health and looking forward to what is thought to be her first child. Adeney, a divorcee from Lidgate near Newmarket, Suffolk, runs her own textile company. She had been desperate to conceive for years, the unnamed friend said.
Most British clinics will not treat women over 50 and most NHS primary care trusts do not consider anyone over 40.
Adeney travelled to a Ukrainian clinic last year. "She was desperate for a child. She was over the moon when she learned last year that she was pregnant and has been quite open about it. It's not the sort of thing she can hide," the friend said.
"Elizabeth has had a pretty good pregnancy. She has been very well, considering her age. I'm amazed how she keeps going.
"She does get up a little later in the mornings than she used to and sometimes spends an hour or two at home before going to work but she is still at her business Monday to Friday."
Last night Adeney declined to discuss her condition in any detail. "I am a private person and while I appreciate there may be some publicity I will just ignore it," she told the Mail. "This has been a very personal decision and I do not feel I have to give interviews or talk to anyone in the media about what I have decided to do and where I have done it."
The world's oldest woman to give birth was Omkari Panwar, 70, from India, who gave birth to a twin boy and girl last year.
Elizabeth Adeney is reported to be eight months pregnant after having had IVF treatment abroad.
She is four years older than the previous record holder, Patricia Rashbrook, who gave birth in 2006, aged 62.
A friend of Adeney told the Daily Mail she was still working a five-day week, in perfect health and looking forward to what is thought to be her first child. Adeney, a divorcee from Lidgate near Newmarket, Suffolk, runs her own textile company. She had been desperate to conceive for years, the unnamed friend said.
Most British clinics will not treat women over 50 and most NHS primary care trusts do not consider anyone over 40.
Adeney travelled to a Ukrainian clinic last year. "She was desperate for a child. She was over the moon when she learned last year that she was pregnant and has been quite open about it. It's not the sort of thing she can hide," the friend said.
"Elizabeth has had a pretty good pregnancy. She has been very well, considering her age. I'm amazed how she keeps going.
"She does get up a little later in the mornings than she used to and sometimes spends an hour or two at home before going to work but she is still at her business Monday to Friday."
Last night Adeney declined to discuss her condition in any detail. "I am a private person and while I appreciate there may be some publicity I will just ignore it," she told the Mail. "This has been a very personal decision and I do not feel I have to give interviews or talk to anyone in the media about what I have decided to do and where I have done it."
The world's oldest woman to give birth was Omkari Panwar, 70, from India, who gave birth to a twin boy and girl last year.
Sri Lankan army 'encircling' last refuge of Tamil rebels
The Sri Lankan military today tightened its grip on the last refuge held by Tamil rebels, ignoring calls to end an offensive that aid officials say has unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe. Two army units little more than a mile apart were fighting their way down the coast from the north and up from the south in a pincer movement to encircle the rebels, a military spokesman, Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, said.
"Troops are coming along the coastal line, and closing in," Nanayakkara said. "We want to rescue the civilians in 48 hours."
Despite their apparently hopeless position, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have vowed not to surrender in their 25-year fight for a separate nation for Sri Lanka's minority Tamils.
As fighting raged, another 1,000 civilians managed to flee rebel-held territory, joining more than 3,700 who had waded across a lagoon to escape the previous day. The rebels fired on those leaving yesterday, killing four and wounding 14 others, according to the brigadier. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said heavy fighting meant no help could reach people trapped in a sandy spit on the island's north-eastern coast, where the Sri Lankan government has cornered the Tamil Tigers.
A Red Cross ferry sent to deliver desperately needed food aid and evacuate the wounded had to turn back for the third day yesterday.
The Red Cross said civilians trapped inside the war zone were taking cover in bunkers they had dug in the ground and were finding it even more difficult to get water and food.
"Our staff are witnessing an unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe," the ICRC operations director, Pierre Krahenbuhl, said. "No humanitarian organisation can help them in the current circumstances. People are left to their own devices."
Britain's secretary of state for international development, Douglas Alexander, said he was appalled that the ICRC was unable to continue its operations.
"Since September last year, the ICRC has been the only humanitarian agency allowed to work in the conflict zone, and now even this lifeline has been denied to more than 50,000 people," Alexander said. "Over the last four months alone, the ICRC has evacuated by ship over 14,000 sick and wounded people. Denying this life-saving evacuation and medical treatment is a fundamental violation of international humanitarian law."
The rebels have denied accusations that they are holding civilians as human shields and shooting at those trying to escape the tiny enclave.
Reports that hundreds of civilians were killed in attacks on a makeshift clinic in rebel territory, for which both sides blamed the other, spurred Barack Obama and the UN security council to make their first formal statements on Sri Lanka since the war intensified this year. Government doctors said constant shelling had prompted them to stop working at the clinic yesterday.
About 200,000 civilians have escaped the war zone in recent months and are being held in displacement camps, guarded by the Sri Lankan army. Those that reach the camps are not allowed to leave. Relief groups say children are arriving at the camp in a severely malnourished state, but no therapeutic feeding has started yet. The food ration for adults is not adequate either and there is insufficient space for communal cooking. Christian Aid said that community kitchens designed for 500 people were providing food for between 1,200 and 1,700.
According to a leaked UN document, 7,000 civilians were killed and 16,700 wounded in the fighting from 20 January to 7 May.
The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, has sent his chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, to Sri Lanka for a second time amid a growing clamour over the carnage. Nambiar is expected to meet top government officials after he arrives tomorrow and push for ways "to secure the safety of the 50,000 to 100,000 civilians remaining inside the combat zone", a UN spokesman, Gordon Weiss, said.
Meanwhile, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said that the US had raised questions about Sri Lanka's application for a $1.9bn (£1.2bn) IMF loan that the government desperately needs.
"We think that it is not an appropriate time to consider that until there is a resolution," she said in Washington.
"Troops are coming along the coastal line, and closing in," Nanayakkara said. "We want to rescue the civilians in 48 hours."
Despite their apparently hopeless position, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have vowed not to surrender in their 25-year fight for a separate nation for Sri Lanka's minority Tamils.
As fighting raged, another 1,000 civilians managed to flee rebel-held territory, joining more than 3,700 who had waded across a lagoon to escape the previous day. The rebels fired on those leaving yesterday, killing four and wounding 14 others, according to the brigadier. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said heavy fighting meant no help could reach people trapped in a sandy spit on the island's north-eastern coast, where the Sri Lankan government has cornered the Tamil Tigers.
A Red Cross ferry sent to deliver desperately needed food aid and evacuate the wounded had to turn back for the third day yesterday.
The Red Cross said civilians trapped inside the war zone were taking cover in bunkers they had dug in the ground and were finding it even more difficult to get water and food.
"Our staff are witnessing an unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe," the ICRC operations director, Pierre Krahenbuhl, said. "No humanitarian organisation can help them in the current circumstances. People are left to their own devices."
Britain's secretary of state for international development, Douglas Alexander, said he was appalled that the ICRC was unable to continue its operations.
"Since September last year, the ICRC has been the only humanitarian agency allowed to work in the conflict zone, and now even this lifeline has been denied to more than 50,000 people," Alexander said. "Over the last four months alone, the ICRC has evacuated by ship over 14,000 sick and wounded people. Denying this life-saving evacuation and medical treatment is a fundamental violation of international humanitarian law."
The rebels have denied accusations that they are holding civilians as human shields and shooting at those trying to escape the tiny enclave.
Reports that hundreds of civilians were killed in attacks on a makeshift clinic in rebel territory, for which both sides blamed the other, spurred Barack Obama and the UN security council to make their first formal statements on Sri Lanka since the war intensified this year. Government doctors said constant shelling had prompted them to stop working at the clinic yesterday.
About 200,000 civilians have escaped the war zone in recent months and are being held in displacement camps, guarded by the Sri Lankan army. Those that reach the camps are not allowed to leave. Relief groups say children are arriving at the camp in a severely malnourished state, but no therapeutic feeding has started yet. The food ration for adults is not adequate either and there is insufficient space for communal cooking. Christian Aid said that community kitchens designed for 500 people were providing food for between 1,200 and 1,700.
According to a leaked UN document, 7,000 civilians were killed and 16,700 wounded in the fighting from 20 January to 7 May.
The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, has sent his chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, to Sri Lanka for a second time amid a growing clamour over the carnage. Nambiar is expected to meet top government officials after he arrives tomorrow and push for ways "to secure the safety of the 50,000 to 100,000 civilians remaining inside the combat zone", a UN spokesman, Gordon Weiss, said.
Meanwhile, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said that the US had raised questions about Sri Lanka's application for a $1.9bn (£1.2bn) IMF loan that the government desperately needs.
"We think that it is not an appropriate time to consider that until there is a resolution," she said in Washington.
Labour MPs who cheat on expenses will be deselected
Any Labour MP found to have made improper expenses claims will be automatically deselected and barred from standing at the next general election as the party desperately tries to overcome the constitutional crisis facing parliament.
The Guardian has learned that the radical proposal is expected to be agreed next week by Labour's national executive, a move that acknowledges the deep anger among voters to the escalating scandal over MPs' claims.
Gordon Brown has also given ministers a Monday night deadline to ensure their expenses claims for the past five years are lodged with the parliamentary authorities and ready for publication.
Any deselection would happen after the parliamentary commissioner for standards had ruled that an MP had been found clearly guilty of improperly claiming.
The prime minister, who is expected to give a major TV interview on Sunday, is to resist a more sweeping grassroots proposal from leftwing NEC members that would compel every sitting Labour MP to go though a fresh selection process so the public can be reassured all candidates are "fit and proper persons" to stand at the election. Labour officials met and said such a move would be unfair.
In another rollercoaster day which saw the first ministerial casualty of the affair and signs of simmering public anger, Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service announced they were setting up a joint panel to consider multiple allegations that MPs have broken the law in their expenses claims. The police said they were acting because they had received so many complaints from the public.
In other key developments:
• A second Labour backbencher, David Chaytor, was forced to concede tonight that he had claimed £13,000 in expenses to cover mortgage interest payments on his London flat after the mortgage had been paid off. Downing Street said Chaytor was likely to be interviewed by Nick Brown, the chief whip, and face suspension from the parliamentary party along with a similar backbench offender Elliot Morley. Chaytor said he had made an unforgivable error and would repay the money.
• Lord Foulkes, a close friend of the Speaker, Michael Martin, gave a broad hint that Martin had decided to resign before the election, saying it was logical for him to do so by then.
• Shahid Malik, the justice minister, was forced to stand down from his post by Brown pending an investigation into whether an allegedly subsidised rental of a home in his Dewsbury constituency represented a breach of the ministerial code. He is the first minister to be disciplined since the allegations started, but last night won the support of his local party.
• William Hague, the Tory deputy leader, revealed he was going to divest himself of the vast bulk of his outside interests, a decision that will put pressure on the other shadow cabinet members.
• David Cameron, battling to keep abreast of public anger over the allegations of sleaze, told his Scottish Tory party that this was a time of "great danger" for democracy in the UK.
• The deputy leader of the house, Chris Bryant, was forced to deny stories that he had flipped his second home.
• The former father of the house, Tam Dalyell, was accused of attempting to charge £18,000 for two bookcases two months before he stood down as an MP in 2005.
The furore surrounding Malik forced Brown to act early yesterday. It was alleged Malik should have declared on the ministerial register that the rent on his constituency home was below the market rate, so making him potentially beholden to the landlord. The prime minister told him to step down after discussions with the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, and the justice secretary, Jack Straw. The true market value of the rent of the home was a matter of dispute, and some ministers said Malik had been made a sacrificial lamb. He said he would return to the government with his head held high.
Morley, the former minister suspended from the parliamentary Labour party on Thursday, said he might quit as the MP for Scunthorpe over the issue. He said: "What matters to me is the view of my local people and my local party. I need to talk this through with them."
Similar signs of a grassroots rebellion were emerging in the Tory party, with two-thirds of those polled on the Conservative Home website urging the Tory MP Andrew Mackay, to quit over his expenses claims.
The Guardian has learned that the radical proposal is expected to be agreed next week by Labour's national executive, a move that acknowledges the deep anger among voters to the escalating scandal over MPs' claims.
Gordon Brown has also given ministers a Monday night deadline to ensure their expenses claims for the past five years are lodged with the parliamentary authorities and ready for publication.
Any deselection would happen after the parliamentary commissioner for standards had ruled that an MP had been found clearly guilty of improperly claiming.
The prime minister, who is expected to give a major TV interview on Sunday, is to resist a more sweeping grassroots proposal from leftwing NEC members that would compel every sitting Labour MP to go though a fresh selection process so the public can be reassured all candidates are "fit and proper persons" to stand at the election. Labour officials met and said such a move would be unfair.
In another rollercoaster day which saw the first ministerial casualty of the affair and signs of simmering public anger, Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service announced they were setting up a joint panel to consider multiple allegations that MPs have broken the law in their expenses claims. The police said they were acting because they had received so many complaints from the public.
In other key developments:
• A second Labour backbencher, David Chaytor, was forced to concede tonight that he had claimed £13,000 in expenses to cover mortgage interest payments on his London flat after the mortgage had been paid off. Downing Street said Chaytor was likely to be interviewed by Nick Brown, the chief whip, and face suspension from the parliamentary party along with a similar backbench offender Elliot Morley. Chaytor said he had made an unforgivable error and would repay the money.
• Lord Foulkes, a close friend of the Speaker, Michael Martin, gave a broad hint that Martin had decided to resign before the election, saying it was logical for him to do so by then.
• Shahid Malik, the justice minister, was forced to stand down from his post by Brown pending an investigation into whether an allegedly subsidised rental of a home in his Dewsbury constituency represented a breach of the ministerial code. He is the first minister to be disciplined since the allegations started, but last night won the support of his local party.
• William Hague, the Tory deputy leader, revealed he was going to divest himself of the vast bulk of his outside interests, a decision that will put pressure on the other shadow cabinet members.
• David Cameron, battling to keep abreast of public anger over the allegations of sleaze, told his Scottish Tory party that this was a time of "great danger" for democracy in the UK.
• The deputy leader of the house, Chris Bryant, was forced to deny stories that he had flipped his second home.
• The former father of the house, Tam Dalyell, was accused of attempting to charge £18,000 for two bookcases two months before he stood down as an MP in 2005.
The furore surrounding Malik forced Brown to act early yesterday. It was alleged Malik should have declared on the ministerial register that the rent on his constituency home was below the market rate, so making him potentially beholden to the landlord. The prime minister told him to step down after discussions with the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, and the justice secretary, Jack Straw. The true market value of the rent of the home was a matter of dispute, and some ministers said Malik had been made a sacrificial lamb. He said he would return to the government with his head held high.
Morley, the former minister suspended from the parliamentary Labour party on Thursday, said he might quit as the MP for Scunthorpe over the issue. He said: "What matters to me is the view of my local people and my local party. I need to talk this through with them."
Similar signs of a grassroots rebellion were emerging in the Tory party, with two-thirds of those polled on the Conservative Home website urging the Tory MP Andrew Mackay, to quit over his expenses claims.
GM to close up to 1,100 dealer
General Motors (GM) has announced plans to close up to 1,100 of its dealerships in the US as it desperately tries to cut costs and stave off bankruptcy.
It also plans to cut ties with another 470 Saturn, Hummer and Saab dealers.
Closures announced today represent one quarter of the dealership network. GM plans to cut the total number of dealers by 42% by the end of 2010.
On Thursday, rival Chrysler said it would be closing 789 US dealers as part of a massive restructuring programme.
GM is also in negotiations with unions to reduce wage costs.
Cutting costs
The carmaker said the 1,100 "underperforming and very small sales volume US dealers...will be advised that GM does not see them as part of its dealer network on a long-term basis."
"It is obvious that almost all parts of GM, including the dealer body, must get smaller and more efficient," explained Mark LaNeve, vice president of North American sales for the carmaker.
GM currently has 6,246 dealers in the US and plans to cut the number to 3,605 by the end of next year.
The car firm says the move will reduce costs, but others argue that dealerships, as franchises, are not a cost to the company and generate much needed revenue.
Mr LaNeve said many dealers were selling 35 or fewer vehicles annually.
But there are concerns that the closures will flood the market with cut-price cars, pushing prices down.
"A concern of all dealers would be if the market value of vehicles were to decline because terminated dealers would be desperate to sell," said Jim Eagan at consultancy Plante & Moran in Michigan.
Cutting costs
GM is facing a deadline of 1 June to agree reorganisation plans with the US government or face bankruptcy.
Earlier this week, the company's new chief executive Fritz Henderson said going into bankruptcy protection was looking more likely.
GM had already warned it would probably need to enter protection if it could not get additional funding from the government.
It has already taken billions of dollars in emergency state aid in a desperate attempt to stay afloat in the face of plummeting sales.
Indeed, closing dealerships is just the latest in a long line of cost cutting measures.
Last month, the carmaker confirmed it would be cutting 21,000 jobs worldwide and shutting a number of factories in an effort to stay in business.
GM is also selling its Hummer and Saturn brands and scrapping Pontiac entirely.
And it is in talks to sell its GM Europe business, which comprises Opel, Vauxhall and Saab.
Shares in the car company ended 6 cents, or 5.2% lower at $1.09.
It also plans to cut ties with another 470 Saturn, Hummer and Saab dealers.
Closures announced today represent one quarter of the dealership network. GM plans to cut the total number of dealers by 42% by the end of 2010.
On Thursday, rival Chrysler said it would be closing 789 US dealers as part of a massive restructuring programme.
GM is also in negotiations with unions to reduce wage costs.
Cutting costs
The carmaker said the 1,100 "underperforming and very small sales volume US dealers...will be advised that GM does not see them as part of its dealer network on a long-term basis."
"It is obvious that almost all parts of GM, including the dealer body, must get smaller and more efficient," explained Mark LaNeve, vice president of North American sales for the carmaker.
GM currently has 6,246 dealers in the US and plans to cut the number to 3,605 by the end of next year.
The car firm says the move will reduce costs, but others argue that dealerships, as franchises, are not a cost to the company and generate much needed revenue.
Mr LaNeve said many dealers were selling 35 or fewer vehicles annually.
But there are concerns that the closures will flood the market with cut-price cars, pushing prices down.
"A concern of all dealers would be if the market value of vehicles were to decline because terminated dealers would be desperate to sell," said Jim Eagan at consultancy Plante & Moran in Michigan.
Cutting costs
GM is facing a deadline of 1 June to agree reorganisation plans with the US government or face bankruptcy.
Earlier this week, the company's new chief executive Fritz Henderson said going into bankruptcy protection was looking more likely.
GM had already warned it would probably need to enter protection if it could not get additional funding from the government.
It has already taken billions of dollars in emergency state aid in a desperate attempt to stay afloat in the face of plummeting sales.
Indeed, closing dealerships is just the latest in a long line of cost cutting measures.
Last month, the carmaker confirmed it would be cutting 21,000 jobs worldwide and shutting a number of factories in an effort to stay in business.
GM is also selling its Hummer and Saturn brands and scrapping Pontiac entirely.
And it is in talks to sell its GM Europe business, which comprises Opel, Vauxhall and Saab.
Shares in the car company ended 6 cents, or 5.2% lower at $1.09.
Hubble spacewalk hits gyro glitch
Astronauts have struggled to complete the most critical repair to the Hubble Space Telescope in a second spacewalk.
Mission specialists Mike Good and Mike Massimino put a refurbished pair of gyroscopes into the telescope after a new set refused to go in.
Besides the gyroscopes - to orient it precisely - Hubble got fresh batteries to ensure five more years of life.
Despite the setbacks, scientists said Hubble would function well, pointing to ever distant objects in the cosmos.
Friday's troubled spacewalk was the longest yet, lasting eight hours.
"At times, I felt like I was wrestling a bear," Mike Massimino was quoted as saying by AFP news agency, as he and Mike Good struggled to install the gyroscopes, or "rate sensing units" (RSUs).
Previously, only three of the six gyroscopes worked. But after today's marathon spacewalk, Hubble has four brand new sets and two refurbished ones. Only two are needed to orient the telescope properly.
Troubled mission
The spacewalk was the 20th undertaken in the service of Hubble, but was Mike Good's first.
"Welcome to the wonderful world of working in a vacuum," Mike Massimino told him as he exited the airlock
The first part of the spacewalk was to replace the three RSUs, each of which contains two gyroscopes.
While the first RSU went in as planned, the second one did not seat properly on its plate. The crew opted to place the third RSU in the slot of the second.
The same problem occurred when the RSU meant for the second slot was placed into the third, so the crew opted to install a refurbished unit instead.
But Hubble's deputy senior project scientist, Mal Niedner, said he was not concerned that the astronauts had to resort to refurbished gyroscopes, which lack the latest anticorrosive wiring.
"It's the difference between an A and an A-plus," he was quoted as saying by AP news agency.
The three batteries that were replaced were the original equipment installed on Hubble 19 years ago, intended to have just a five-year lifespan.
On Thursday, the telescope's Wide Field Camera was replaced, giving the telescope an even deeper view into space - and thus into the history of the Universe.
A data processing unit that failed in 2008 was also replaced.
In three further spacewalks to be undertaken in the next three days, two spectrographs will be installed and the remaining three of Hubble's batteries will be replaced
Mission specialists Mike Good and Mike Massimino put a refurbished pair of gyroscopes into the telescope after a new set refused to go in.
Besides the gyroscopes - to orient it precisely - Hubble got fresh batteries to ensure five more years of life.
Despite the setbacks, scientists said Hubble would function well, pointing to ever distant objects in the cosmos.
Friday's troubled spacewalk was the longest yet, lasting eight hours.
"At times, I felt like I was wrestling a bear," Mike Massimino was quoted as saying by AFP news agency, as he and Mike Good struggled to install the gyroscopes, or "rate sensing units" (RSUs).
Previously, only three of the six gyroscopes worked. But after today's marathon spacewalk, Hubble has four brand new sets and two refurbished ones. Only two are needed to orient the telescope properly.
Troubled mission
The spacewalk was the 20th undertaken in the service of Hubble, but was Mike Good's first.
"Welcome to the wonderful world of working in a vacuum," Mike Massimino told him as he exited the airlock
The first part of the spacewalk was to replace the three RSUs, each of which contains two gyroscopes.
While the first RSU went in as planned, the second one did not seat properly on its plate. The crew opted to place the third RSU in the slot of the second.
The same problem occurred when the RSU meant for the second slot was placed into the third, so the crew opted to install a refurbished unit instead.
But Hubble's deputy senior project scientist, Mal Niedner, said he was not concerned that the astronauts had to resort to refurbished gyroscopes, which lack the latest anticorrosive wiring.
"It's the difference between an A and an A-plus," he was quoted as saying by AP news agency.
The three batteries that were replaced were the original equipment installed on Hubble 19 years ago, intended to have just a five-year lifespan.
On Thursday, the telescope's Wide Field Camera was replaced, giving the telescope an even deeper view into space - and thus into the history of the Universe.
A data processing unit that failed in 2008 was also replaced.
In three further spacewalks to be undertaken in the next three days, two spectrographs will be installed and the remaining three of Hubble's batteries will be replaced
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