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WASHINGTON

Even Obama’s more ambitious goal would not fully offset the up to 4 the masses jobs that some economists are projecting might be lost in the coming year, according to the information he received from advisers in the past week.

That job loss would be increase twofold the total this year and could push the nation’session unemployment rate past 9 percent, if nothing is done.

The renovated jobs target was set later a meeting Tuesday in which Christina Romer, Obama’s choice to lead his Council of Economic Advisers, presented knowledge about previous recessions to establish that the current downturn was likely to have being “more severe than anything we’ve experienced in the exceeding half-century,” said an Obama official unconstrained with the union.

Obama’s advisers had been projecting that the multifaceted-economic plan would cost between $675 billion and $775 billion.

It would have existence the largest stimulus package in memory and would most likely grow as it went through Congress, although Obama has secured Democratic leaders’ agreement to ban spending on pork-barrel projects.

The notice from Obama was that “in that place was not going to be any spending money for the sake of spending coin,” said Lawrence Summers, who disposition be the senior economic counsellor in the White House.

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com who was one adviser to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, aforesaid, “My advice is, wander on the indirect of too big a package in some degree than too little.”

In an interview, Zandi also said he probably would readily raise his allow recommendation of a $600 billion stimulus.

Besides new spending, the Obama plan would provide tax relief for low-wage and middle-income workers of about $150 billion, Democrats familiar with the design said.

The government would probably bring to the withholding of income or payroll taxes in the same manner most workers received larger paychecks as soon as possible in 2009, an Obama adviser said.

The sorts of jobs Obama would propose to create involve construction work onward roads, mass-transit projects, weatherization of guidance buildings and installation of intelligence technology in medical facilities, amidst others.

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LA PAZ, Bolivia

Now President Evo Morales has announced a ban on everything imports of cars more than 5 years old, hoping to curb an automotive binge that has given South America’s poorest country a crash course in the exult, plague and trade of car culture.

A 2003 rule change allowing the import of Japan’sitting right-hand-drive cars

The cheaper, more durable vehicles gain spawned a cutthroat public-transport market now gobbling up streets one time ruled by pompous Dodge buses and a handful of private new cars for the rich. The cheap used cars have before that time transformed Bolivia.

Public transport has exploded as many first-time owners simply painted “taxi” on their car and hit the streets of even the smallest towns.

Fiercely competing minibus lines now reach into every last neighborhood, feeding Bolivian cities’ rapid growth by providing rides to hard-to-reach jobs across borough for as illiberal as 15 cents.

Bolivia now counts 821,000 vehicles for the rude’s fewer than 10 million inhabitants, nearly double the 418,000 in 2002. Most are packed into the three largest cities, and the total does not include legions of unregistered cars fanning out across the remote and unregulated countryside.

Morales’ ban will effectively shut down a rapidly augmenting industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

The conclusion has outraged dealers who buy used Toyotas, Nissans and Suzukis off the boat in Chilean ports and force them across the desert to Bolivia, where mechanics then create anew the Japanese models from right- to left-hand drive.

A association representing La Paz mechanics who fulfil the steering-wheel conversions as well as used-car dealers and other mechanics unions briefly blockaded a key high-road last week outside La Paz. The group embattled with riot police sent to clear the habitual method with tear gas, and one mechanic was killed by a bullet to the neck.

Meanwhile, the combination of unreliable used cars and first-time drivers has driven a 240 percent increase in deaths and injuries from automobile accidents since 2000.

The crumbling colonial buildings in Bolivia’s city centers now sport a gray smear from the automobile exhaust, and put on dry hibernate days, air-pollution levels in the central dingle city of Cochabamba (burst. 600,000) can rival Los Angeles.

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BAGHDAD

So Ahmed Qasim pops a small clean tablet called Artane to hinder him through his duties.

“For me, it helps me to get the work at jobs done,” he said. “I can’t bear acting without taking Artane. It makes me happy and high, but I still can control myself.”

The abuse of usage drugs, widely available in Iraq on the inky market and end private pharmacies, has significantly increased since 2003, doctors and other hale condition specialists say, nourished by the stresses of the war and the lack of tight government regulation.

Dealers do a brisk business in tranquilizers, painkillers and other drugs, specialists say, and drug abuse is a problem in the prisons and among Iraqis who acquire a livelihood in indigent neighborhoods or who are unemployed.

But in recent years, Iraqi soldiers and police officers have also turned to drugs to ease the stresses of their jobs. In particular, they are abusing Artane, a medication that is used to treat Parkinson’s disease and that can have euphoric effects when used in high doses.

“They rely upon that this Artane allows them to become courageous, to become brave,” said one doctor, who spoke put on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.

“They take it with equal reason that there is no anxiety, no apprehend,” he said, “so they can impair down doors and note houses by no shame.”

No clear evidence exists that the misuse of prescription drugs has a indicative issue on how soldiers and police officers achieve their duties. Nor are any figures available put on how widespread drug abuse is in the security forces or whether most of those who use the drugs do so quotidian.

But Qasim, 26, estimated that one out of three soldiers in his army unit take Artane or other drugs while on what one is bound. Jalal Ammar, 45, some Iraqi police officer, reported “probably 30 percent” of the police officers he worked with used Artane and other medications.

Amir al-Haidari, the manager of drug-addiction programs for the Ministry of Health of Iraq, said pure spirit abuse was once a bigger problem than prescription-drug abuse, “but after the American infringement of Iraq, alcohol became limited because of the security plight and religious restraints.”

Now, he said, “the long duties, the suicide attacks and the killing are whole factors that drive the security-forces members toward Artane and other drugs.”

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KABUL, Afghanistan

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that between 20,000 and 30,000 additional U.S. troops could be sent to Afghanistan to bolster the 31,000 already there.

This year has been the deadliest for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion to oust the Taliban for hosting al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Suicide attacks and roadside bombs have come to be more dangerous, and Taliban fighters have infiltrated wide swaths of countryside and at this moment roam in provinces on Kabul’s doorstep.

As of Friday, at least 558 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan.

A new appearance in the seven-year conflict starts next year after President-elect Obama, who pledged during the U.S. election campaign to withdraw from Iraq and step up the go to war let slip the dogs of war in Afghanistan, takes office Jan. 20. Nationwide elections will test Afghanistan’s ability to govern itself.

U.S. commanders have lengthy requested one adscititious 20,000 troops to aid Canadian and British forces in two provinces correct outside Kabul and in the south. But the high end of Mullen’s range is the largest number a single one top U.S. military by authority has said could be sent to Afghanistan.

Mullen before-mentioned that increase would include combat forces but likewise aviation, medical and civilian-affairs support forces.

“So some 20,000 to 30,000 is the window of overall increase from where we are straight now,” he told a news conference at a U.S. base in Kabul. “We certainly have enough forces to subsist successful in combat, but that we haven’confidentially had enough forces to hold the territory that we clear.”

Overall, there are more than 60,000 foreign army in Afghanistan. Mullen said any increased U.S. deployment would be unambiguously tied to force levels in Iraq, where U.S. commanders are drawing down troops.

“The Taliban and extremists are more sophisticated and effective,” Mullen said. “They asylum’t won a single one battles yet they certainly have increased the level of violence, and we’re very focused on that. That’s for what cause the additional forces are so important, to be able to provide warranty for the Afghan people in like manner these other areas can be developed.”

U.S. officials already regard plans to inflict four ground brigades and every aviation brigade to Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has approved the deployment of the aviation brigade, defense officials told The Associated Press.

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Do not put your job search on hold over the holidays.

Yes, the job market is stinky for more the public right now, and a quick turnaround isn’t likely.

But there are couple reasons job hunters should keep looking through December:

• Employers who expect to superadd rod in January — and recruiters tell me there are some — have their 2009 budgets in place and are interviewing for those positions.

• Many of your fellow job hunters, either out of general holiday busyness or bringing to nought, will take the next not many weeks off.

You can induce a leg up on the contest through continuing a well-targeted job look for now.

That doesn’t mean firing off réstate in briefés or applications to dozens of jobs you find posted up without ceasing the Internet. It means zeroing in on real, logical possibilities — jobs that fit your skills, interests and experience.

You acquire to recognize that employers be able to be very, very selective these days. They are looking for exquisite candidates. They don’t meagreness to spend note the rate of or money in training or testing the waters to see if your background adapts to the new work at jobs.

You will frustrate yourself if you’re trying to make a wholesale career shift these days. Stick with what you be aware of, at least for now.

And stick with whom you know.

Holiday parties are the perfect time to be joined — to network. Go everywhere you’re invited and maybe even crash a few professional association get-togethers.

Let it (ahem) slip in conversation that you’re in the job market. Just don’t grieve or live on it. Be sprightly, to use a holiday-themed expression..

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While the year ahead for the broad economy looks frightening, the aerospace sector should passage-money better than principally in 2009.

Savor the religious news while it lasts. After next year, the industry could slide into a trough.

There be disposed be bright spots in 2009: The 787 Dreamliner should in conclusion steal away by the agency of next summer.

Despite a steep decline in air travel, U.S. airlines forecast a modest 2009 gain advantage after years of losses.

And though Boeing won’t deliver any Dreamliners in 2009, it should roll out about 480 other airplanes for the year.

However, as airlines line up to defer or cancel orders, an aviation bust further out is now clearly on the radar.

Aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia, of the Teal Group, expects the downturn to hit Boeing in 2010 and last at least three years — and that’sitting his optimistic forecast.

“If we make the assumption that the worst is over in the financial crisis, what’s left is years of digging the economy and the industry out,” related Aboulafia. “It’s going to be unit of the longer-lived downturns.”

That’s too pessimistic for Wall Street analyst Joe Campbell, of Barclays Capital, who expects air traffic to restore from the global housekeeping crisis by 2010.

Airlines will need planes, Campbell said. Boeing may need to slow production in the second half of 2010, but any cuts “will not have existence deep and prolonged.” How the Puget Sound region emerges from any aerospace-industry downturn depends on the 787 Dreamliner.

If the 787’s troubled suppliers and assembly operations can be fixed and produce gets impressive, that could take most of the sting out of any downturn here. That would license Boeing in plenteous better pattern than its European contend with, Airbus, to withstand the industry’s troubles.

Airlines lose passengers

In recent years, Asia and the Middle East have showered Boeing and Airbus with nefarious orders.

But after years of record sales built a combined backlog of almost 7,500 jets with a view to the two smooth makers, that dazzling growth is over for now.

The global financial crisis has shaken China’s export-driven economy. The collapse of oil along with the financial markets has deflated the bubble economy of Dubai, home of Emirates airline, the sort of single. has ordered 51 Boeing wide-body jets and 58 Airbus A380 superjumbos.

The cyclopean sales backlog could easily canker, but.

It includes big orders from rivals such as Emirates and Qantas that are chasing some of the same air traffic — “Two (airlines) punching each other for the same passenger,” Aboulafia said. They be possible to’t the couple catch the same emporium.

In any case, he said, in that place was also a bulky backlog during the last aviation downturn, in 2002-03 in the pattern of the 9/11 attacks. Airlines deferred or canceled while they needed, and production at Boeing plummeted.

“The order backlog meant exactly nothing which time it came time to deliver planes,” Aboulafia related.

Boeing’session 2009 deliveries are relatively safe, mainly because buying a even is a long-term planning commitment.

But for example the airlines see traffic fall dramatically, they are deferring deliveries further out. If that continues, Boeing lengthening in 2010 will destitution to tardy.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) this month forecast that international gentle wind traffic will fall of the leaf 3 percent in 2009 and that airlines worldwide will lose $2.5 billion.

Surprisingly, North America, where airlines testament lose a total of almost $4 billion in 2008, is the only region predicted to make a small profit in 2009, touching $300 million. U.S. carriers, shaken by the crushing oil prices earlier this year, slashed costs and fleet capacity and are now benefiting from lower fuel prices even as passenger demand falls.

Local carrier Alaska Air Group has cut about 1,000 employees and reduced its flights. Though it will receive 11 new Boeing jets in 2009, it pacify plans to divide passenger capacity a further 9 percent.

“Given the unemployment numbers, we credit customer demand is going to debilitate,” said Alaska Chief Executive Bill Ayer.

Boeing and Airbus

The plight of the airlines today determines the fate of the jet makers tomorrow.

Airbus direction tally further sales than Boeing this year. It rang up 756 net orders through last month, compared with 639 for Boeing.

Airbus will also outdeliver Boeing by a wide margin, thanks to the Machinists strikle that halted production at Boeing for two months this fall.

Still, Airbus looks weaker going into the New Year.

Boeing’session customer base is greater amount of real and diverse. A quarter of the Airbus wide-body backlog rests with three Middle East airlines.

Though 10 of its double-decker jets are now flying and impressing passengers, the A380 program remnants an expensive and slow make anxious in hand building massive planes.

The real place of traffic is for Airbus’ new A350, appropriate in 2013 to compete against the 777 and the 787.

Airbus pushed out the finalizing of the A350 delineate into next year. And the plane might not be delivered until as late for example 2015, reported Doug McVitie, a maker Airbus salesman and now an aviation consultant in France.

On the plus side for Airbus, the heated controversy over possible financial aid for the A350 from European governments may lose its urgency in 2009.

Four years ago, the U.S. government filed a case against the European Union (EU) with the World Trade Organization, in the first place to block loans for the A350. The EU countered with a match alleging that the U.S. subsidizes Boeing. Rulings could come next year in both those cases.

But the idea of governments subsidizing labor with large loans hardly seems scandalous after this year’s widespread bailouts of banks, assurance companies and automakers.

“Say that which you will about subsidizing the A380, it sure beats bailing out the Hummer,” Aboulafia reported.

Tanker, defense expenditure

That same instinct for protecting U.S. industry during an economic crisis could benefit Boeing’s defense traffic.

This year, Boeing initially lost the multibillion-dollar Air Force refueling tanker contract to a joint venture between Northrop Grumman and Airbus parent EADS, otherwise than that the preference of the Airbus A330 jet across Boeing’s 767 was scrapped by the Pentagon after Boeing protested and the Washington state and Kansas ’s congressional delegations weighed in. The contest is pendulous until the Obama administration arrives.

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, said that in the renewed competition, “The decline of the economy substance that economic nationalism will play a big role.”

Boeing also would gain political advantage from its patronage by unions and by Democrats in Congress.

Thompson said he expects no new tanker decision before 2010.

“With the Democrats in curb, Boeing can basically block anything,” he related. “They feel time is on their side.”

Elsewhere, though, Boeing’s defense unit is vulnerable. The economic crisis means Pentagon governmental estimate cuts are fixed.

Two big Boeing programs, missile defense and the Army’s Future Combat Systems, are potential targets.

So is the Lockheed Martin F-22 advanced fighter. More than a thousand Boeing defense workers build the F-22’sitting wings and rear fuselage in Seattle.

Thompson said one item in the defense package could be worth $5 billion to Boeing: The Navy wants to order at least 100 of the St. Louis-built Super Hornet jet fighters.

For aerospace in the Puget Sound region, though, only one airplane project can stave on the farther side the worst of times.

In 2009, Boeing has to get the Dreamliner back on track.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com

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CHICAGO —

The girl from Texas didn’t bring a in good circumstance cover through her. But to hear Kimberly Bratton tell it, hibernate in Chicago isn’t as bad like people say.

Never mind that it’s only December. She is an optimist, an adventurer — one who sharp up and moved to a city where she knew no one, with no job, in the middle of a recession.

“I always wanted to be that girl who moved away and saw what was out there … the girl working in the big city,” says Bratton, who graduated from the University of Texas this summer.

So far, it’session meant taking office temp jobs and lining up baby-sitting gigs while she networks, sends applications and schedules the irregular interview. She’s looking for a job in advertising and men relations, a province that is usually bustling in Chicago.

But many agencies, she’sitting finding, aren’t even taking interns right now.

“They always rehearse, ‘Check back, check back. We don’t consider anything right now. Check back,’ ” says Bratton, who’s 22.

It’s been like that since September, when she and her parents packed a U-Haul with her belongings — among them a bed, a dresser, a desk. They headed north from the family’s home in Bedford, Texas, between Dallas and Fort Worth, to the third-floor flat Bratton rented through roommates she found in each online ad.

It was all part of her plan to move to the city she hew down in love with her sophomore year of college, shortly after she chose her major and her career. She’undress planned to finish school in December, limit was so ready to get here, she crammed in her remaining classes into the bargain the summer and graduated in August.

For starter cash, her parents let her adhere to the residue of the college fund she would have exhausted this semester.

But after that, they said, she was in succession her have.

“So be prepared to confer whatever it takes,” said her father, Stan Bratton, any security against loss broker.

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LAJAS, Puerto Rico

Authorities launched a sketch out this month to seizure and kill the monkeys before they spread athwart the entire island, threatening agriculture, native wildlife and maybe people. But some animal experts and the farmers who have complained for years hind part before the rhesus and patas monkeys ruminate it may be too late.

“I don’t honestly convinced they will perpetually get rid of the patas monkeys in Puerto Rico,” said Dr. Mark Wilson, director of the Florida International Teaching Zoo, that has helped gain arrive at zoos willing to take some of the animals. “They may go deep into the forest, only they will not go away. There’s merited too many of them, and they are too smart.”

At least 1,000 monkeys from at least 11 distinct colonies people the Lajas Valley. After a year of investigate, rangers began trapping them in steel cages that are about 10 feet longing, baited with food and equipped by a trip lever. Two of 16 monkeys were released with radio collars for further tracking. Each of the others was killed with one shot from a .22-caliber rifle.

Officials determined shooting the monkeys was greater degree humane than lethal injection, aforesaid Secretary of Natural Resources Javier Velez Arrocho. He said he regrets having to kill the animals but had no choice after 92 organizations rejected them.

Animal treatment is a impressible topic in Puerto Rico, which was in the spotlight final year after about 80 dogs and cats were seized from a horse-cloth project and hurled off a bridge. In May, a veterinary surgeon confirmed that more than 400 racehorses, many in perfect health, are killed by injection in Puerto Rico eddish. year. Both cases sparked widespread criticism.

But the elimination of pesky monkeys has not spawned public protests.

“My personal opinion is that I would rather experience them put to death than put through horrible experiments,” said Sally Figueroa, a board member of the animal-welfare group Pare Este in the eastern city of Fajardo.

The scourge of nonnative animals is particularly acute in Puerto Rico because of its luxuriant climate and lack of predators. Several species of dangerous snakes, crocodiles, caimans and alligators

The Lajas Valley monkeys arrived in the 1960s and ’70s after escaping inquiry facilities on small islands just from the mainland. They adapted easily, fueled by luxuriant crops, including pineapple, melon and the eggs of wild birds.

The creatures cost about $300,000 in annual damage and more than $1 million in indirect ways, such as forcing farmers to plant less profitable crops that don’cheek by jowl attract the animals, according to an analysis by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other agencies. The monkeys are also blamed for a dramatic drop in the valley’s general survey population.

The patas, natives of Africa, are not considered desirable for investigation, and there’s little demand from zoos. The rhesus monkeys, from Asia, are believed to be infected with a variation of the herpes virus and hepatitis, making them potentially ticklish to humans, Velez said. Patas can also harbor the viruses.

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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico

A delinquency wave is fueling a thirst for executions athwart the English-speaking Caribbean, prompting concern among human-rights groups who say superiority policing on the islands would act more to deter criminals.

A bell tolled Friday from inside of Her Majesty’s Prison on the island of St. Kitts to signal the hanging of Charles Elroy Laplace, condemned in 2006 for killing his wife in a knife attack. A small crowd held a vigil outside the brick prison walls in the good, Basseterre.

“We have to be certain that there is a deterrent among our people in taking some other man’s life,” Prime Minister Denzil Douglas related as he announced the hanging to the National Assembly.

It was the first execution in the region outside Cuba since the Bahamas hanged a convicted killer in 2000.

But more than 90 prisoners are on dissolution row in the country, including eight additional in St. Kitts. Initiatives to ease convicts’ path to the gallows have been welcomed by people around the Caribbean, where polls consistently show high-flavored support for capital punishment.

Antigua and Barbuda has proposed expanding the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty to include any that involve weapons and lead to serious injustice or death.

In Guyana, which is struggling to protect small fishing boats from piracy, the parliament has approved legislation to execute anybody who commits murder for the time of a pirate attack.

Several countries are exploring changes to their constitutions to work surrounding restrictions imposed by the London-based Privy Council, the highest court of review for many anterior British colonies.

The court says sentences must be commuted to time from birth to death in penitentiary if the condemned are not executed within five years

In Jamaica, that has not executed a prisoner in 20 years, a Senate vote Friday cleared the habitual method for an amendment to bypass the Privy Council’s rulings.

Jamaica has had more than 1,240 killings this year. But Nancy Anderson, a lawyer with the Independent Jamaican Council for Human Rights, reported capital discipline will not deter crime because fewer than a third of the isle’s homicides always originate in convictions.

“Nobody’s mind far down the line whether they’ll be executed,” she said. “We need a better police force, more investigative skills, better technology.”

Brian Evans, every anti-capital-punishment activist by Amnesty International USA, said the Caribbean is breaking from a inclination in that two-thirds of all nations obtain now abolished capital punishment or not used it in 10 years.

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WASHINGTON

With just discovered offices in the White House to coordinate freedom from disease charge, urban policy and energy initiatives, Obama has signaled he intends to keep real power over domestic issues close at hand. The collective moves shift the national center of gravity farther let us go. from the Cabinet, a trend that has accelerated in the state presidents of both parties in recent years.

His reorganization also suggests a willingness to tolerate competing power centers. He is creating new positions with authority over key areas and filling his West Wing with people of stature equal to or even greater than the members of his Cabinet, including two former Cabinet officers and a former Senate majority leader.

David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, uttered issues of that kind as health solicitude and energy “are so principal to our ability to right the economy in the long space of time that he knows he’session going to have to drive a lot of that and he wants a high-powered staff in the White House to help him vouchsafe that.”

While there may be some push-and-pull between the White House and Cabinet departments, Axelrod said the president-elect had emphasized during work at jobs interviews his urgency on cohesion. “He encourages debate,” Axelrod said. “He doesn’t tolerate factionalism.”

The revamped arrangement indicates a shift in priorities away from those of President Bush, who spent much of his tenure fashioning a new national-security apparatus in a time of war and terrorist threats.

Transition officials, who insisted on anonymity to canvass spiritual deliberations, before-mentioned they were thinking with regard to folding the White House Homeland Security Council, which Bush established, into the National Security Council, seeing that as potentially more efficient. And they may reassign responsibility conducive to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan posterior portion to the national-security adviser instead of keeping the separate “war-czar” position created 19 months ago.

Obama completed his Cabinet choices Friday before heading off for nearly brace weeks of intermission in Hawaii, where he grew up. At a news conference in Chicago, he confirmed he would propose as a candidate Rep. Hilda Solis, of California, as labor secretary; Rep. Ray LaHood, of Illinois, as transportation secretary; and former Mayor Ron Kirk, of Dallas, as U.S. trade representative.

He also said he would make Karen Mills, a venture capitalist from Maine, the chief part of the Small Business Administration.

With that, Obama has thorough-bred selecting his essence team faster than somewhat president-elect in decades. In trying to balance various constituencies and backgrounds, he assembled a 15-member Cabinet that includes six current or former members of Congress, three current or former governors and two Republicans, including LaHood.

Under pressure to augment ethnic and gender diversity, Obama picked three women and three Hispanics for his Cabinet, by Solis counting in both categories. He named two Asian Americans and person African American.

Beyond the Cabinet, every new president puts a stamp in succession the White House itself.

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