Democrats in Senate warming to tax deal - Washington Post

Senate leaders are planning to begin debate on a far-reaching tax package as soon as Thursday as rank-and-file Democrats warm to an agreement between the White House and Republicans to extend a host of expiring tax cuts and pump fresh cash into the economy.

Democrats were still angry Wednesday about what they viewed as President Obama's capitulation to GOP demands to preserve tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, particularly a deal to exempt estates worth as much as $10 million from a revived inheritance tax. But lawmakers said the magnitude of the concessions Obama won came into sharper focus Wednesday as the White House highlighted independent forecasts predicting that the package could create as many as 2.2 million jobs next year.

For a second day in a row, White House officials made the rounds on Capitol Hill, stressing the economic significance of their deal with Republican leaders to preserve tax cuts that are set to expire on New Year's Eve, extend long-term unemployment benefits through next year, and create major new tax breaks for businesses and individuals aimed at spurring investment and consumer spending.

While Vice President Biden and House Democrats met into the evening, White House budget director Jacob Lew and senior Treasury adviser Gene Sperling held an afternoon session to field questions from Senate Democrats, who were more accepting of the package than they were a day earlier in a meeting with Biden, participants said.

"Members are more open today as they read the analyses of this package," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (Ill.), the chamber's No. 2 Democrat. Citing prominent liberals such as John Podesta, head of the Center for American Progress, and Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who endorsed the White House plan, Durbin said, "These are people that progressives respect and go to, and they've said positive things."

Durbin added that "I just loathe" parts of the deal, such as the provision on the estate tax. But he said: "I understand the predicament that we're in."

Biden faced a far tougher crowd in the House, where a fractious caucus dominated by angry liberals is emerging as the bigger legislative obstacle to the tax plan. During a two-hour meeting, dozens of lawmakers lined up to interrogate the vice president about the deal - almost all of them speaking in opposition, participants said.

"There remain very serious reservations on the House side. I think that there's still a very serious question whether this package can pass in the form it's in now," Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.) said afterward. Van Hollen represented House Democrats in bipartisan talks about the tax cuts that were rendered moot when the White House began dealing directly with Republican leaders, a slight that rankled nearly as much as Obama's decision to abandon the long-held Democratic position of opposing tax breaks for the wealthy.

Many Democrats, including Rep. James E. Clyburn (S.C.), the third-ranking House leader, emerged from the meeting saying they could not support the package unless major elements were changed, particularly the estate tax provision.

Most Democrats would prefer to renew the tax, which lapsed last year, with a 45 percent rate on estates worth more than $3.5 million for individuals and $7 million for couples. The Obama-GOP deal would impose a 35 percent tax on estates larger than $5 million for individuals and $10 million for couples for the next two years. If that change were made permanent, it would add $100 billion to deficits over the next decade, Democrats said.

In a forceful presentation, however, Biden made it clear that big changes are not in the cards. "The vice president said: 'This is the deal. Take it or leave it,' " an irritated Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.) said, paraphrasing Biden.

The tax debate is a central piece of a broader strategy to wrap up the legislative session by Dec. 17. The House and the Senate are scrambling to complete unfinished business. This includes a major resolution to continue funding the federal government through Sept. 30, 2011, approved by the House on Wednesday, as well as smaller measures, such as a plan to protect doctors from a sharp cut in Medicare payments, which cleared the Senate by voice vote Wednesday night.

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Rape claims, WikiLeaks and internet freedom - The Guardian

Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations (Report, 8 December). Women in Sweden don't fare better than we do in Britain when it comes to rape. Though Sweden has the highest per capita number of reported rapes in Europe and these have quadrupled in the last 20 years, conviction rates have decreased. On 23 April 2010 Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs-Posten that "up to 90% of all reported rapes never get to court. In 2006 six people were convicted of rape though almost 4,000 people were reported". They endorsed Amnesty International's call for an independent inquiry to examine the rape cases that had been closed and the quality of the original investigations.

Assange, who it seems has no criminal convictions, was refused bail in England despite sureties of more than £120,000. Yet bail following rape allegations is routine. For two years we have been supporting a woman who suffered rape and domestic violence from a man previously convicted after attempting to murder an ex-partner and her children – he was granted bail while police investigated.

There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's safety. In the south of the US, the lynching of black men was often justified on grounds that they had raped or even looked at a white woman. Women don't take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.

Katrin Axelsson

Women Against Rape

• The heading of John Naughton's article (Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It's your choice, 7 December) does more than introduce a rather unpleasant new adjective. In criticising governments and agencies that are trying to limit or close down the WikiLeaks operation, he seems to give the internet itself a moral superiority that it does not possess. All the internet does is allow information to be copied, disseminated and accessed at an unprecedented rate; it can offer no value judgment about the outcome. For example, the internet can allow a prospective employer to have in front of them an embarrassing photograph posted on a social network by an applicant 10 years ago. Do we say, jolly good, the more openness the better – no, we routinely advise young people to use the privacy settings and to be careful about whom they trust with personal data. Clearly this is advice some governments need to take about their own internal data.

It's too early to tell whether the present torrent of releases will have good or bad effects. But surely the question of whether we should live with WikiLeaks or close down the internet is a false dichotomy. The need for some things to be secret some of the time has not changed; the rise of the internet just makes it harder to hang on to them.

Hugh Davies

Sandhurst, Berkshire

• Congratulations on publishing Naughton's outstanding article about WikiLeaks. It refreshingly acknowledges the corruption of governments that continue unjust wars merely to save face, even after they themselves acknowledge that they can never achieve their goals. It also exposes whose side such powerful (and popular) internet sites as Amazon, Facebook, PayPal etc are on when it comes to a choice between the power elites and the people.

Jim McCluskey

Twickenham, Middlesex

• The drip, drip of the WikiLeaks revelations exposes the so-called special relationship between the US and the UK as being totally one-sided (Report, 4 December). The UK supports the US's wars with the lives of its troops and billions of pounds of treasure, and allows the US to use its Nato airbases for missions outside those for which they were originally intended. Furthermore, the UK promises to protect the US from its investigation of the Iraq war, and allows its citizens (Gary McKinnon, for example) to face being expedited to a justice system that, after conviction, will impose a much harsher sentence than what they would receive for a similar offence in the UK. Ted Heath was right in refusing to accept the concept of a special relationship between the US and the UK. A special relationship must offer advantages to both parties. This one doesn't.

George Lewis

Brackley, Northamptonshire

• The latest WikiLeaks revelations on the al-Megrahi case, if factually accurate, raise some disturbing questions (Report, 8 December). What, for instance, led the Libyan regime to think that it might achieve its objective of securing al-Megrahi's release by issuing threats against Britain? Could it have been because they had witnessed Saudi Arabia's successful bid to end the Serious Fraud Office's investigation of allegations of corruption by BAE Systems in negotiating the al-Yamamah arms deal, by issuing threats against Britain just three years before?

Professor Philip Stenning

Keele University

• Idiots, liars, racists, gangsters and torturers have human rights too; so it's deplorable that WickedLeaks should have so comprehensively abrogated these. Nonetheless, we owe Julian Assange and his source(s) an immense debt of gratitude for finally, incontrovertibly, rubbishing the purveyors of ID and DNA databases who tried to pretend that data would be secure and only accessible to those authorised and needing access, and regularly trotted out the mantra: "If you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear." Well, those who've been WikiLeaked may not exactly confirm the latter ... but it's rather delicious to see it come back and bite them!

David Lewin

Oxford

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European mobile operators say big sites need to pay for users' data demands - The Guardian

StreetStats from Top10.com seeks to crowdsource the speed of 3G networks

European mobile networks have called on companies such as Facebook, Apple, Google to help pay for network upgrades as the growth in smartphone use has made data demand soar.

The call from major operators, including France Telecom (owner of Orange), Telecom Italia and Vodafone, would require content providers such as Apple and Google to pay fees linked to the usage of their products, according to a report by Bloomberg.

It is likely to meet stern resistance from the companies whose content is attracting people to buy smartphones, which will argue that the mobile networks are effectively trying to charge at both ends of the connection. The demands breach the broad principle of net neutrality, which suggests that companies offering connectivity should not charge providers for content passing over their networks.

Meanwhile British users are being offered a free app to help them crowdsource the speed of 3G networks so that they can pinpoint the best coverage and choose between networks.

France Telecom's chief executive Stepane Richard yesterday reiterated a call he had made last month for "service providers" such as Apple, with its iTunes service, and Google with YouTube, to pay for the use that users make of mobile networks' systems. "It's necessary to put in place a system of payments by service providers as a function of their use."

The call was echoed by Telecom Italia's chief executive Franco Bernabe and Telefonica SA's CEO Cesar Alierta at the LeWeb conference in Paris. Bernabe said that the tension between user demand for data and the mobile networks' readiness "is set to compromise the economic sustainability of the current business model for telecom companies."

IDC calculates that the number of mobile data connections in western Europe will rise by 15% annually to reach 270m in 2014, but that overall end-user revenues to networks will fall by 1% annually. Meanwhile the analyst Canalsy reckons operators' annual spending on network systems to support growing data and voice traffic is forecast to leap by 28% to about $3.7bn (£2.42bn) this year.

Meanwhile British smartphone users can find out what sort of 3G connection speeds they can expect using a crowdsourcing web and smartphone app developed by a UK broadband site - produced in reaction to huge perceived variations in connection speeds.

Devised by the comparison website Top10.com, the app is called StreetStats and the company says the web version has already had more than 2m users comparing fixed-line broadband speeds.

"The UK's 3G networks are notoriously patchy, with mobile data speeds varying wildly from provider to provider, town to town and even from street to street," said Harry Jones, a director of Top10.com. "Whilst consumers rely on their smartphones to access the internet and email, very little information exists to help them explore and understand 3G coverage in their area."

Available now free for the iPhone, as well as on a web page accessible from any smartphone, and from next year as an Android app, the program does a small network connection test and produces a crowdsourced map showing what sort of download and upload speeds people have managed to achieve on 3G networks at various locations.

"Armed with this information for the first time, consumers can now make a more informed choice about the phone network they sign up to, ensuring they achieve the best service available in their area," said Harry Jones, a director of Top10.com. "By making 3G speeds across the UK transparent for everyone, Top10.com hope to empower consumers to find the right service for them, and to put pressure on mobile phone networks to improve their services in slow areas."

Like all crowdsourcing applications, it will depends on user input for its effectiveness: so far it has had a few hundred tests, almost all in London, although there have also been a handful of tests in Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester and various other locations.

The UK's 3G networks have come under increasing strain as sales of smartphones have rocketed. The iPhone in particular drove data use dramatically on its arrival in 2007 on O2's network, but Android phones added to the arrival of the iPhone on every network

Richard at France Telecom said that the explosion in data use is "good news.... but a challenge for carriers like us" and said it "raises the question of the business model of mobile data." In February Alierta said that content providers were getting a free ride on Telefonica's networks, "which is good news for them and a tragedy for us... that can't continue."

At Top10.com, Jones said: "As the gap narrows between the tariffs and handsets offered by mobile networks, the quality of their 3G coverage is becoming increasingly important to customers. With the rise of data-hungry smartphones, tablets and netbooks, we expect 3G to become as essential as home broadband in the years ahead. With StreetStats 3G, we wanted to build a tool that would empower consumers to make the right decision when choosing a mobile network and, more generally, track the evolution of UK 3G speeds as they improve."

The company already offers a system for testing fixed broadband lines via the web, which shows home broadband speeds for competing networks on an interactive map.

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