U.S. Government Supporting DNA Sampling Upon Arrest
March 16, 2010
Wired.com
By David Kravets
Josh Gerstein over at Politico sent Threat Level his piece underscoring once again President Barack Obama is not the civil-liberties knight in shining armor many were expecting.
Gerstein posts a televised interview of Obama and John Walsh of America’s Most Wanted. The nation’s chief executive extols the virtues of mandatory DNA testing of Americans upon arrest, even absent charges or a conviction. Obama said, “It’s the right thing to do” to “tighten the grip around folks” who commit crime.
When it comes to civil liberties, the Obama administration has come under fire for often mirroring his predecessor’s practices surrounding state secrets, the Patriot Act and domestic spying. There’s also Gitmo, Jay Bybee and John Yoo.
Now there’s DNA sampling. Obama told Walsh he supported the federal government, as well as the 18 states that have varying laws requiring compulsory DNA sampling of individuals upon an arrest for crimes ranging from misdemeanors to felonies. The data is lodged in state and federal databases, and has fostered as many as 200 arrests nationwide, Walsh said.
The American Civil Liberties Union claims DNA sampling is different from mandatory, upon-arrest fingerprinting that has been standard practice in the United States for decades.
A fingerprint, the group says, reveals nothing more than a person’s identity. But much can be learned from a DNA sample, which codes a person’s family ties, some health risks, and, according to some, can predict a propensity for violence.
The ACLU is suing California to block its voter-approved measure requiring saliva sampling of people picked up on felony charges. Authorities in the Golden State are allowed to conduct so-called “familial searching” — when a genetic sample does not directly match another, authorities start investigating people with closely matched DNA in hopes of finding leads to the perpetrator.
Do you wonder whether DNA sampling is legal?
The courts have already upheld DNA sampling of convicted felons, based on the theory that the convicted have fewer privacy rights. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that when conducting intrusions of the body during an investigation, the police need so-called “exigent circumstances” or a warrant. That alcohol evaporates in the blood stream is the exigent circumstance to draw blood from a suspected drunk driver without a warrant.
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World Finances Coming to a Breaking Point
March 16, 2010
CNN
By Fareed Zakiria
As a nationwide strike highlights Greece’s painful effort to fix its finances, much of the rest of the world is confronting an equally sobering reality, says analyst Fareed Zakaria.
“You can’t spend money you don’t have forever and hope people will lend you money, which is what has been going on,” Zakaria said in an interview with CNN.
He says governments, particularly in developed countries, rushed to bail out financial institutions in the economic crisis, leading to a massive increase in public debts. Now the bill is beginning to come due.
Zakaria says Greece has had chronic budget problems, and its plight is far more severe than that of other nations. In Athens, workers struck for 24 hours and thousands marched. Transit systems, schools, banks, television news and newspapers were closed down. Greece’s government is cutting services and raising taxes to bring down its budget deficit.
Zakaria, author and host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” spoke to CNN on Thursday. Here is an edited transcript:
CNN: Is Greece’s financial crisis a sign of things to come for many more countries?
Zakaria: I tend to think that some of the panic about the lessons of Greece is overdone. Greece has been a very badly managed economy for a very long time. I read somewhere that Greece has been in some kind of state of default for about half of its existence as a nation since 1832.
To put it simply, Greece has been a basket case for a while. This recession has just dramatically exacerbated that problem and forced a crisis in Europe. We should be careful about drawing very broad analogies between Greece and other countries that are in very different situations.
That said, clearly the financial crisis has been transformed into a governmental crisis in this sense — basically the financial crisis was caused by the massive indebtedness of the financial system in many Western countries. Those debts have in effect been taken on by the government. The government had to bail out the financial industry.
All of that debt has been moved from the private sector to the public sector, and so you see in the United States that debt as a percentage of GDP [Gross Domestic Product] has gone up 20 percentage points in two years. That’s probably the fastest rise ever since World War II. It’s gone from roughly 50 percent of GDP to 70 percent in two years.
CNN: So at what level does it become unsustainable?
Zakaria: No one knows the answer to that question. At one level, it’s sustainable as long as the rest of the world has confidence in you. And clearly what happened to Greece was that the world lost confidence in Greece.
Japan has a massive debt to GDP ratio — 200 percent — but generally speaking, it’s still the second-largest economy in the world, there’s very large domestic savings so there’s a tendency to believe they’re good for their debt.
CNN: What’s the risk if countries do lose faith in the U.S.?
Zakaria: If people lose faith in a country, it means that you have to raise your interest rates to sell your debt. The only way people will lend you money is at very high interest rates.
If you can only borrow money at very high interest rates, the only thing you can do to get money is to kill your economy. If you raise interest rates, it kills economic activity in your own country.
CNN: The government made a choice during the financial crisis to take on debt to stimulate the economy, but at a certain point, do governments have to turn away from stimulating the economy and turn their focus to fighting inflation?
Zakaria: They certainly have to turn their attention away from stimulating the economy and toward having stable finances. I’m not sure inflation is the great danger, but you can’t run huge deficits forever, you can’t have your debt-to-GDP ratio keep going up.
This crisis has exacerbated a problem that existed within the Western world, which is very large structural deficits, which exist because we’re basically been unwilling to cut spending or raise taxes. So the result is you have these big gaps between what we want from our government in terms of services and what we’re willing to pay … the United States has a particularly bad case of this. The deficit is now 10 percent of GDP.
The basic problem is that we want more government than we are willing to pay for. Either we have to accept the reality of higher taxes or we have to accept the reality of significant cuts in spending.
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Big Pharma To Spend Millions To Pass Heathcare Bill
March 16, 2010
Politico Pulse
By Chris Frates
The drug industry, which has held off running ads until officials sign off on the final reconciliation bill, is growing more comfortable with the emerging legislation and is preparing a substantial pro-reform ad buy in 43 Democratic districts, according to a senior industry source. The amount and timing of the buy have not yet been set and hinge largely on action in the House. Still, the development is a substantial step forward from Monday morning, when industry officials, coming off a tough weekend of negotiating with Democratic staffers, said there were no ads in the works. The movement should also help appease the White House, which has been leaning on the industry to provide Democrats air cover, according to industry sources.
ANTI-ABORTION GROUPS MOUNT FINAL PUSH – Two of the nation’s most prominent pro-life groups will launch separate efforts today to push Democratic House lawmakers to support the House-passed restrictions on federal funding for abortions. Americans United for Life, the nation’s oldest pro-life advocacy organization, will roll out a $350,000 print, online and grassroots campaign initially aimed at eight Democratic lawmakers, who supported Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak’s amendment to the House health care reform bill. Beginning today and running through Friday, AUL will run newspaper ads in the districts of eight Democrats who voted for the Stupak language: Reps. Jerry Costello, Joe Donnelly, Baron Hill, Marcy Kaptur, Alan Mollohan, Earl Pomeroy, Nick Rahall and Charles Wilson. The group is soliciting contributions with plans to target as many of the 63 Democrats who voted for the Stupak amendment as possible. And to demonstrate how unpopular taxpayer funding for abortion is, The Susan B. Anthony List is releasing poll results that show voters in seven Democratic districts oppose it. With this newest poll, the group has surveyed a total of 19 districts. This round includes: Reps. Joe Donnelly, Dale Kildee, James Oberstar, Allen Boyd, Earl Pomeroy, Richard Neal and John Barrow.
–The progressive groups HCAN, SEIU, AFSCME, Catholics United and MoveOn are spending $1.7 million to run ads in 17 House districts between today and Friday. The ads both support members who voted “yes” on the House bill in November and urge “no” votes to flip. A technical note, because MoveOn spends PAC money, its commercials will air separately. WATCH
– AFSCME and Americans United for Change go up with a $200,000 buy Wednesday through Friday on Fox, CNN and MSNBC in Washington, aimed at opinion leaders and lawmakers. The ad, which calls on lawmakers to hold insurers accountable, is running on CBS during the NCAA tournament on Thursday and Friday.
–MoveOn went up with a six-figure national cable buy Monday asking lawmakers if they’ll side with insurers or reform supporters on this historic vote.
–AHIP is running a full-page ad in the WSJ today and USAT tomorrow, which is an open letter warning Americans that without more cost controls the health care system could face a crises on par with the financial meltdown.
Click here for the full report.
Bacterial Trail May be Next Forensic Clue
March 16, 2010
Breitbart
Forensic scientists could soon use hand germs to help identify criminals and victims, a study said Monday.
Researchers led by Noah Fierer of the University of Colorado at Boulder swabbed individual keys on three personal computer keyboards, extracted bacterial DNA from the swabs and compared the results with bacteria on the fingertips of the keyboards’ users.
They also lifted germs from an unspecified number of other private and public computer keyboards that the three individuals did not use to see if there was a cross-over between the bacteria on an individual’s hands and bacteria on keyboards that had never been touched by that individual.
The bacteria on each person’s fingers were “personal” and gave a much closer match to the germs on the keyboard they used than to bacteria found on keyboards they had never touched, the researchers said.
The researchers also swabbed nine personal computer mice that had not been touched for at least 12 hours and took bacteria samples from the palms of their owners.
The bacteria on each mouse were “significantly more similar” to those found on the owner’s hand than to bacteria taken from 270 other hands, which were on record from previous studies.
“Each one of us leaves a unique trail of bugs behind as we travel through our daily lives,” said Fierer, a professor at the University of Colorado’s ecology and evolutionary biology department, adding that hand bugs could “become a valuable new item in the toolbox of forensic scientists.”
Hand germs are abundant, can be lifted from small areas and are remarkably hardy. The researchers found that colonies of hand bacteria remain essentially unchanged after two weeks at room temperature, and recovered within hours of handwashing.
Fingerprints, however, can be smudged or impossible to obtain, such as on fabric.
And unless there is blood, tissue, semen or saliva on an object, it is often difficult to obtain enough human DNA for forensic identification, said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“Given the abundance of bacterial cells on the skin surface… it may be easier to recover bacterial DNA than human DNA from touched surfaces although additional studies are needed to confirm that this is actually true,” the study said.
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Government Keeping MORE Secrets
March 16, 2010
Associated Press
By Sharon Theimer
Federal agencies haven’t lived up to President Barack Obama’s promise of a more open government, increasing their use of legal exemptions to keep records secret during his first year in office.
An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law’s nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October.
Among the most frequently used exemptions: one that lets the government hide records that detail its internal decision-making. Obama specifically directed agencies to stop using that exemption so frequently, but that directive appears to have been widely ignored.
Major agencies cited that exemption at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, up from 47,395 times during President George W. Bush’s final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies. Obama was president for nine months in the 2009 period.
Departments used the exemption more even though Obama’s Justice Department told agencies to that disclosing such records was “fully consistent with the purpose of the FOIA,” a law intended to keep government accountable to the public.
For example, the Federal Aviation Administration cited the exemption in refusing the AP’s FOIA request for internal memos on its decisions about a database showing incidents in which airplanes and birds collided. The FAA initially tried to withhold the bird-strike database from the public, but later released it under pressure.
The FAA claimed the same exemption to hold back nearly all records on its approval of an Air Force One flyover of New York City for publicity shots – a flight that prompted fears in the city of a Sept. 11-style attack. It also withheld internal communications during the aftermath of the public relations gaffe.
In all, major agencies cited that or other FOIA exemptions to refuse information at least 466,872 times in budget year 2009, compared with 312,683 times the previous year, the review found. Agencies often cite more than one exemption when withholding part or all of the material sought in an open-records request.
The AP examined the 2008 and 2009 budget year FOIA reports from the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans Affairs; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the Federal Reserve Board.
Other FOIA exemptions cover information on national defense and foreign relations, internal agency rules and practices, trade secrets, personal privacy, law enforcement proceedings, supervision of financial institutions and geological information on wells.
One, known as Exemption 3, covers dozens of types of information that Congress shielded from disclosure when passing other laws.
In sentences that are often vaguely worded and buried deep in legislation, Congress has granted a wide array of information special protection over the years: information related to grand jury investigations, the additives in cigarettes, juvenile arrest records, the identities of people applying restricted-use pesticides to their crops, and the locations of historically significant caves are a sampling of the broad range of information the public cannot get under FOIA.
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was so concerned about what he called “exemption creep” that last year he successfully pressed for a new law that requires FOIA exemptions to be “clear and unambiguous.”
The federal government cited Exemption 3 protections to withhold information at least 14,442 times in the last budget year, compared with at least 13,599 in the previous one, agency FOIA reports show.
The prolific use of FOIA exemptions is one measure of how far the federal government has yet to go to carry out Obama’s promise of openness. His first full day in office, Obama told agencies the Freedom of Information Act, “which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government.”
Obama told agencies they shouldn’t hide information merely because it might make them look bad. “The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA,” Obama wrote.
Following up on Obama’s words, the Justice Department advised agencies against withholding records sought under FOIA “merely because an exemption legally applies.” Most recently, the White House encouraged agency officials to hold contests, complete with prizes, to encourage employees to promote open government.
Describing the Justice Department’s actions on FOIA on Monday at the start of Sunshine Week, when news organizations promote open government and freedom of information, Attorney General Eric Holder said his agency is making progress. He noted that Justice provided everything sought in a FOIA request in more than 1,000 more cases than it had the previous year.
“Put simply, I asked that we make openness the default, not the exception. Today, I’m pleased to report that the disturbing 2008 trend – a reduction in this department’s rate of disclosures – has been completely reversed,” Holder said. “While we aren’t where we need to be just yet, we’re certainly on the right path.”
Much of the Obama administration’s early effort on FOIA seems to have been aimed at clearing out a backlog of old cases: The number of requests still sitting around past the time limits spelled out in the open-records law fell from 124,019 in budget year 2008 to 67,764 at the end of the most recent budget year over the 17 agencies, the AP’s review found. There is no way to tell whether those whose old cases that were closed ultimately received the information they sought.
Click here for the full report.
Citizens of Greece Protesting Government
March 15, 2010
Mail Online
Street clashes broke out between rioting youths and police in central Athens today as tens of thousands demonstrated during a nationwide strike against the cash-strapped government.
Hundreds of masked and hooded youths punched and kicked motorcycle police, knocking several off their bikes, as police responded with volleys of tear gas and stun grenades.
The violence spread after the end of the march to a nearby square, where police faced off with stone-throwing anarchists and suffocating clouds of tear gas sent patrons scurrying from open-air cafes.
Police say 16 suspected rioters were detained and two officers were injured.
Rioters used sledge hammers to smash the glass fronts of more than a dozen shops, banks, jewelers and a cinema.
Youths also set fire to rubbish bins and a car, smashed bus stops, and chopped blocks off marble balustrades and building facades to use as projectiles.
Organisers said some 60,000 people took part in the protest. But an unofficial police estimate set the crowd at around 20,000 – including those that took part in a separate, peaceful march earlier Thursday. Police do not issue official crowd estimates for demonstrations.
Thursday’s strike – the second in a week – brought the country to a virtual standstill, grounding all flights and bringing public transport to a halt.
State hospitals were left with emergency staff only and all news broadcasts were suspended as workers walked off the job for 24 hours to protest spending cuts and tax hikes designed to tackle the country’s debt crisis.
Riot police made heavy use of tear gas during the start-and-stop clashes throughout the demonstration, including outside Parliament.
Strikers and protesters banged drums and chanted slogans such as ‘no sacrifice for plutocracy,’ and ‘real jobs, higher pay.’
People draped banners from apartment buildings reading: ‘No more sacrifices, war against war.
The demonstrators included hundreds of black-clad anarchists in crash helmets and ski masks, who repeatedly taunted and attacked riot police with stones and petrol bombs, at one point spraying officers with brown paint.
Shopkeepers along the demonstration route hastily rolled down their shutters, while a few blocks away, people sat at outdoor restaurants, nonchalantly continuing their meals.
Tear gas wafted through the city center’s streets, sending businessmen in suits scurrying for cover, their eyes streaming.
Minor clashes also broke out in the northern city of Thessaloniki, where about 14,000 people marched through the center.
Fears of a Greek default have undermined the euro for all 16 countries that share it, putting the Greek government under intense European Union pressure to quickly show fiscal improvement.
It has announced a raft of savings through public sector salary cuts, hiring and pension freezes and consumer tax hikes to deal with its ballooning deficit, but the measures have led to a new wave of labor discontent.
The cutbacks, added to a previous austerity plan, seek to reduce the country’s budget deficit from 12.7 percent of annual output to 8.7 percent this year. The long-term target is to bring overspending below the EU ceiling of 3 percent of GDP in 2012.
The new plan sparked a wave of strikes and protests from labour unions whose reaction to the initial austerity measures had been muted.
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IRS Visits Sacramento Carwash in Pursuit of 4 Cents!
March 15, 2010
The Sacramento Bee
By Bob Schallit
It was every businessperson’s nightmare.
Arriving at Harv’s Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. “They were deadly serious, very aggressive, very condescending,” says Harv’s owner, Aaron Zeff.
The really odd part of this: The letter that was hand-delivered to Zeff’s on-site manager showed the amount of money owed to the feds was … 4 cents.
Inexplicably, penalties and taxes accruing on the debt – stemming from the 2006 tax year – were listed as $202.31, leaving Harv’s with an obligation of $202.35.
Zeff, who also owns local parking lots and is the president of the Midtown Business Association, finds the situation a bit comical.
“It’s hilarious,” he says, “that two people hopped in a car and came down here for just 4 cents. I think (the IRS) may have a problem with priorities.”
Now he’s trying to figure out how penalties and interest could climb so high on such a small debt. He says he’s never been told he owes any taxes or that he’s ever incurred any late-payment penalties in the four years he’s owned Harv’s.
In fact, he provided us with an Oct. 22, 2009, letter from the IRS that states Harv’s “has filed all required returns and addressed any balances due.”
IRS spokesman Jesse Weller isn’t commenting “due to privacy and disclosure laws.”
Zeff says he’s as offended as much as anything else by what he considers rude behavior by the IRS guys. While at Harv’s, he sniffs, “they didn’t even get a car wash.”
Testing the market
One of the region’s best-regarded business sites could soon have a new owner.
Lowe Enterprises in February solicited bids for its five-building Prospect Green complex and the nearby stand-alone One Capital Center building in Rancho Cordova.
Asking price: About $75 million for the 640,000 square feet of space – a significant discount on the $103 million Los Angeles-based Lowe and its partner, JP Morgan, paid in 2005.
The bids were due Friday. We’ll hear shortly if any came close to what Lowe and its partner are seeking.
Why are they selling now in a depressed market?
Institutional money is redeploying assets to “first-tier markets,” like San Francisco and L.A, where price appreciation is likely to be swiftest when the market improves, says Nico Coulouras, Lowe’s head of NorCal operations.
Retail wrangler
Wanted: a “champion” for downtown retail development.
That’s the short job description for a retail recruiter now being sought by the Downtown Sacramento Partnership.
“We’ve talked retail recruitment for a long time,” says DSP exec Michael Ault. But now his group is putting some money behind the task by hiring an expert who can work full time with property owners, brokers and city economic development folks to lure trendy retailers to the 66-block downtown district.
Hiring such a person was one of the top recommendations of consulting firm Downtown Works, which last year helped develop a strategy to reinvigorate the downtown area.
Ault says the DSP hopes to have somebody onboard by the end of April.
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NYC Pols Attempt to put an End to City’s Stop and Frisk Policy
March 12, 2010
Daily News
By Rocco Parascandola and John Lauinger
Two influential City Council members took dead aim at the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy on Wednesday, saying there is “serious concern” privacy rights are being violated.
In a letter to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) and City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Queens) criticized the NYPD’s policy of saving personal information of people who are stopped and questioned but not charged with any wrongdoing.
Compiling such information in a database “raises significant privacy-right concerns and suggests that these innocent people are more likely to be targeted in future criminal investigations,” they wrote.
Quinn and Vallone, who is chairman of the Council’s Public Safety Committee and whose father is former Speaker Peter Vallone, asked Kelly to explain when cops are allowed to search the database. They also asked for specific examples of when information from the database was helpful in cracking a case.
“They make some interesting points that Commissioner Kelly is considering,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said in an e-mail.
Browne said the database is not made public and is used by detectives for investigations.
The NYPD announced last month that it stopped and questioned more people last year – 575,304 – than in any year since a 2001 law forced it to report the data.
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US Mulls Placing Black Boxes in All Cars
March 12, 2010
Reuters
By Kevin Krolicki and John Crawley
Unprecedented discounts after a series of damaging recalls boosted Toyota Motor Corp’s (7203.T: Quote, Profile, Research) (TM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) U.S. sales in early March, as U.S. regulators weighed new auto safety measures.
Toyota’s U.S. sales surged by nearly 50 percent in the first eight days of March compared with the year-ago period due to zero-percent financing offers and other incentives, industry tracking service Edmunds.com and dealers said on Thursday.
Edmunds, which analyzes U.S. auto sales trends, also estimated that Toyota’s U.S. retail market share in early March had jumped to 16.8 percent, up sharply from 12.8 percent a month earlier when safety problems had sent sales tumbling.
“What they’re doing right now is they are picking low-hanging fruit,” said Chester Schriesheim, professor at the University of Miami School of Business Administration.
“These are the people who are undecided about the brand but given the lower price, now that provides incentives to go ahead and purchase,” he said. “But they’re going to exhaust that pool of individuals and then they’ll find it harder in the longer term to raise the prices backward.”
The early sales estimate comes a week after Toyota launched the most aggressive discounts in its history to win over U.S. consumers and recover from an embarrassing slew of product safety problems that have tarnished its reputation and cut into sales and financial results.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration chief David Strickland told a congressional hearing on Thursday that the regulator is considering whether to make “black boxes” mandatory for all new vehicles. [ID:nN11246251]
The devices can capture data on speed, braking effort and other details which can be vital in reconstructing accidents.
Toyota has recalled more than 8 million vehicles globally to address the risk that accelerator pedals on a range of its vehicles could become stuck because of a loose floor mat or a glitch in the pedal assembly.
Unintended acceleration in the company’s Toyota and Lexus vehicles has been linked to at least five U.S. crash deaths since 2007. Authorities are investigating 47 other Toyota crash deaths over the past decade.
TOYOTA, GM BOOST MARCH INDUSTRY SALES
Edmunds.com said that industrywide U.S. auto sales are tracking to hit a rate of 12.5 million vehicles in March because of the steep discounts on Toyota vehicles and a competitive campaign launched by General Motors Co [GM.UL].
GM is offering car shoppers rebates of up to $3,000 on vehicles including the Malibu mid-size sedan, or zero-percent financing.
Toyota, which has traditionally spurned such discount programs in order to protect resale values, has offered up to $3,000 in rebates and dealer incentives on a range of vehicles, including its top-selling Camry, or cut-rate financing.
Both manufacturers are offering steeper discounts on their competing full-size pickup trucks, GM’s Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra and the Toyota Tundra.
Edmunds said GM’s sales incentives lifted Chevy’s retail market share to 12.9 percent, up from 11.4 percent a month earlier.
Several major Toyota dealers said their own sales were running slightly higher than the Edmunds estimate through Tuesday. That would mark a sharp reversal from sales declines in January and February tied to the automaker’s recall crisis.
Paul Atkinson, president of the Toyota national dealers’ council and a Toyota dealer in Texas, said he expected that the March sales boost from incentives would mirror what the automaker saw during the 2009 “cash for clunkers” program.
Toyota was the big winner from that U.S. government-funded scrappage program, which offered tax credits of up to $4,500 to swap out of older and less fuel-efficient vehicles.
Toyota had a 19.4 percent share of vehicles sold under the “clunkers” program which ran from late July through the third week of August 2009. Toyota’s share was the highest in the industry.
“I truly believe that March could rival cash for clunkers,” Atkinson said.
Sales at his own dealership in early March were running at three times the level of January and February, he said. Customers shopping for the bargains do not appear concerned by Toyota’s recalls, he said.
“Honestly, I think the public has had enough,” he said.
Just this week, as Toyota sought to shift attention away from the safety problems, at least three U.S. drivers reported new cases of driving Prius or Lexus vehicles that appeared to surge out of control.
Atkinson has encouraged Toyota dealers to protest GM’s incentives in March, saying they amounted to a taxpayer-funded program of discounts because the U.S. government funded GM’s restructuring in bankruptcy with $50 billion in aid.
“We just want a level playing field,” he told Reuters. “These GM incentives are kind of like using tax dollars to encourage my fellow citizens to not do business with me.”
GM has defended its use of incentives, saying such discounts are a well-established part of the way cars are sold in the U.S. market.
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Twitter is Watching You.
March 12, 2010
Metro
By Joanne McCabe
A new feature rolled out this week means Twitter users have the option of including their location when they tweet via a tracking tool they can turn on or off.
When the tool is activated, tweets will link to a Google map of the area the user is in.
The growing trend for web services to broadcast people’s whereabouts – already picked up by Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt – is expected to be followed by Facebook soon too.
Avid Twitter users have been warned to be careful about how and when they harness the power of the new technology, which works by shadowing people through their web browsers.
The brains behind the microblogging mecca reckon the tool will make Twitter more useful for anyone looking for real-time information.
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