1. Tony
Abbott will be Australian prime minister after decisive election victory
Voters register brutal verdict on Labor, with early
counting indicating a swing of at least 4-5% to the Coalition
Tony Abbott and his family cast their votes
in Sydney on Saturday. Photograph: William West/AFP
Tony Abbott
will be Australia’s 28th prime minister after a decisive victory became clear
almost as soon as ballot counting began, with voters casting a brutal verdict on
a divisive Labor era that lasted just six years.
Early
counting indicated a swing of at least 4-6% to Abbott’s Liberal National party
Coalition, with much bigger swings in some areas.
Abbott has
been a relentlessly negative opposition leader who won the job with a pledge
not to recognise Labor’s 2007 mandate to implement its emissions trading
scheme, but who now promises a conflict-weary electorate calm, stable
“grown-up” government and demands the upper house recognise his electoral
mandate to immediately repeal the carbon tax.
The swing to
the Coalition appears to have ripped through Labor’s heartland, despite the
last-minute ousting of Julia Gillard in favour of Kevin Rudd on the calculation
that Rudd’s higher popularity ratings would “save the party’s furniture”.
In many
traditional Labor areas the swings appear to be much bigger than the national
average, and even before vote counting began senior Labor figures were publicly
conceding that all hope was lost. Their predictions were confirmed as vote counting
started. The anti-Labor swing is particularly strong in Tasmania, where Labor
holds four seats.
2.
Obama Falls Short on Wider
Backing for Syria Attack
The New York
Times September 6, 2013
STRELNA, Russia — President Obama raced home
on Friday to confront one of the biggest tests of his presidency as he ramped
up a campaign to persuade Congress to support airstrikes against Syria that
many world leaders he had consulted declined to back.
After two days of tense discussions,
including a dinner debate that went into the morning hours, Mr. Obama left
without forging an international consensus behind military action as other
leaders urged him not to attack without United Nations permission. But he won
agreement from some allies on blaming Syria’s government for a chemical weapons
attack and on endorsing an unspecified response.
The deep divisions on display here at the
Group of 20 summit meeting raised the stakes even further for Mr. Obama as he
seeks authorization from Congress for a “limited, proportional” attack. While
aides said he never expected or sought a more explicit endorsement of military
action during the meeting, the president hoped to use the statement from allies
condemning Syria to leverage more domestic support, but he acknowledged that he
had a “hard sell” and might fail to win over an American public that polls show
still opposes a strike.
Mr. Obama wasted little time vaulting back
into the domestic debate as he called members of Congress from both parties
from Air Force One on his way back to Washington. He ordered aides to fan out
in coming days with a series of speeches, briefings, telephone calls and
television appearances to sway both Democrats and Republicans reluctant to get
involved in yet another Middle East war. He also announced that he would
address the nation from the White House on Tuesday evening to lay out his case
before Congress votes.
“Failing to respond to this breach of this
international norm would send a signal to rogue nations, authoritarian regimes
and terrorist organizations that they can develop and use weapons of mass
destruction and not pay a consequence,” he said at a news conference in this
St. Petersburg suburb.
3.
The Six-Figure Price Tag for
Selling a $2 Hot Dog
The New
York Times September 4, 2013
Call it the half-million-dollar hot dog cart.
Mohammad Mastafa of Astoria, Queens, has to sell almost that much in drinks and
snacks annually to break even on the pushcart he owns at Fifth Avenue and East
62nd Street near the Central Park Zoo. He pays the city’s parks department
$289,500 a year just for the right to operate his single cart there.
It may seem like an exorbitant amount of
money, but it isn’t shocking to many of the other food vendors like Mr. Mastafa
who compete to operate pushcarts in New York City parks.
The zoo entrance drew the highest bid among
the 150 pushcart sites in public parks, but the operators of four other carts
in and around Central Park also pay the city more than $200,000 a year each. In
fact, the 20 highest license fees, each exceeding $100,000, are all for Central
Park carts.
“It’s a lot of peanuts, it’s a lot of hot
dogs,” said Elizabeth W. Smith, the assistant parks commissioner for revenue
and marketing.
It is a lot of visitors in need of
sustenance. So while vendors are adamant about not divulging details about what
they make, most pushcart sites presumably turn a profit or they would not
attract such high bids.
4.
Can’t Sleep? This (Yawn) Might
Work
The New York Times September 4, 2013
As any traveler knows, sleep — on a plane or
in a hotel room — can be elusive. And there’s no shortage of odd-looking
contraptions that promise to help, be it the aptly namedOstrich Pillow that cocoons your head in a padded
sack or the UpRight Sleeper that prevents your head from falling
forward so long as you’re willing to look like Hannibal Lecter
post-incarceration.
These gadgets may work — like the SkyRest travel pillow that has won over a
number of fliers despite resembling a giant inflatable cheese wedge — but many
people prefer not to travel the world calling to mind large birds and
cannibals. And let’s not pretend we’re going to practice good sleep hygiene by
avoiding late-night meals (research shows they can disrupt sleep) and banishing
smartphones from our beds either (the backlight can rattle your body clock).
If you want shut-eye but don’t want to reach
for pills or cocktails, road warriors and sleep studies suggest you must
control what you see and hear. Of course, sleep is so complex and personal that
there’s no universal cure for insomnia. That said, I — a reluctant authority on
the subject as I don’t sleep well even in my own bed — set out to test an
assortment of new or traveler-recommended products designed to regulate two
sleep hurdles we all share: sound and light.
Let’s begin with sound, given the
increasingly creative ways to manage it. When your plane cabin is a racket,
when music is thumping through the walls of your hotel room, or when you simply
can’t quiet your mind, ear plugs just won’t do.
Airsleep, a new app for iPhones, iPods and
iPads, is meant to transport you to dreamland with the sound of rain, waves and
wind along with “dreamwave brainwave” technology that supposedly alters your
brain wave patterns to help you relax. Neurophysiological claims aside, the app
was designed for travelers and has some useful features: you can adjust the
length of each track based on travel time (up to 10 hours) and listen while
your iPhone is in Airplane Mode (though be sure to download tracks before your
flight, when you have an Internet connection). If in fact your brain waves are
lulled into submission, you can choose how you want the spell to be broken: chimes,
bells, harp, gong, xylophone or silence.
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