World Business

TAIPEI, Taiwan —

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The government began Sunday to distribute spending vouchers to all Taiwanese, hoping the move could spur a buying spree across the island to help prop up the slowing economy.

Taiwan’session economy has been undermined by the global household slump, with demand for the island’s high-tech exports dropping sharply in industrialized countries such because the United States.

Long lines queued up Sunday at dispense centers where either bodily substance is handed a stack of vouchers valued at 3,600 New Taiwan dollars ($108). Many people then went direct to province stores or supermarkets to buy up daily necessities.

The government is giving away a total of NT$80 billion ($2.5 billion) worth of vouchers to each of the island’s 23 million population.

The measures were meant chiefly to boost deal out in small portions sales. But other businesses suffering faltering sales - from airlines, amusement parks, hotels, restaurants to publishing houses - also tender abatement rates to win consumers.

About 20 publishing houses joined hands to solicit subscribers, offering a year’sitting subscription for any one two magazines with NT$1,200 worth of vouchers.

“While you save the economy, you fustiness also save our culture,” declared publisher Tuan Chung-chi.

After collecting vouchers for his family of four, Taichung mayor Jason Hu said he devise bribe a fitness machine and then donate it to any orphanage.

In November, the Taiwan government projected a 2.12 percent economic growth for 2009, depending that various stimulus packages, such as attracting more Chinese tourists, could reach their targets. Several research groups, however, predict the economy could contract as plenteous as 2 percent this year.

When authorities first unveiled the voucher plan in November, they declared the measures were expected to add more than 0.6 percentage subject-matter to the GDP growth rate.

But Vice President Vincent Siew said the vouchers’ impinging on the domestic economy may not be as great, with the world economic prospects looking gloomier now.

“We would be happy if the extra deal out in small portions sales generated could slow a steeper decline of the economy,” Siew declared.

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The Super Bowl is on track to remain one big, glitzy bash even in these tough economic times.

That’s not to say some advertisers aren’t robust about buying expensive ad slots as business falters. Some stalwarts such since General Motors Corp., FedEx Corp. and Garmin Ltd. won’t be advertising in succession the Feb. 1 broadcast in continuance NBC. Playboy Enterprises Inc. isn’t throwing its customary party at the game, for the primeval time in nine years.

But aggressive marketing by NBC to secure ad deals before last September’session financial meltdown helped to render certain Super Bowl XLIII won’t exist a marketing bust.

NBC said 90 percent of the Super Bowl ads had sold as of mid-January. Most ads possess sold for through $3 million per 30-second spot - every all-time high value during the term of the Super Bowl, which is the most watched adventure in the nation, by about 100 million U.S. viewers.

The sales pace matched those of prior years and the network related it was in discussions on the remaining unsold spots. Most are in the fourth quarter, and tend to journey for slightly less than other positions in the broadcast.

“There is unrivaled attention surrounding the game,” said Brian Walker, older director of communications at NBC Sports in New York. “As research confirms, it remains the most powerful vehicle for an advertiser to advance its brand and products.”

While some high-profile advertisers have pulled the plug, many are staying put and some, like as Mars Inc.’s Pedigree pet food, will be in sight in the Super Bowl for the first time.

But the tone of some ads this year will reflect tough times. As Tim Calkins, marketing professor at Northwestern University’session Kellogg School of Management puts it: A good ad connects with its audience. And that audience is stressed about finances.

Take the cause of Hyundai Motors America.

Automotive ads during the Super Bowl tend to focus on vehicle launches, and Hyundai was planning to run two 30-second spots for its Genesis Coupe - one by renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing a Bach piece that viewers be able to re-edit online.

But now, the South Korean carmaker might swap any of the ads for a spot featuring a new incentive program that forgives auto loans for car buyers who fail their income within a year of the thing acquired.

“We know consumers are concerned about their future earnings,” said Joel Ewanick, vice president of marketing at Hyundai Motor Co.’s Fountain Valley, Calif.-based American division. “That’s keeping a whole cluster of people on the sidelines from buying a new car.”

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WASHINGTON —

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When it comes to homeownership, Hispanics in New Jersey, single parents in California and elder citizens in Rhode Island all have something in common: More than a third have an unaffordable pledge.

Inequality in America has traditionally followed familiar patterns of race, age and education. Those long-standing gaps have been magnified by the real estate boom and now the historic bust, according to an Associated Press analysis of 2007 Census Bureau data.

While minorities have made expressive gains in wealth and home ownership since 1990, “things are going into reverse gear,” and now the homeownership rate for blacks and Hispanics is falling, declared Edward Wolff, a New York University economist who studies income and independence distribution.

Nearly 9.5 million households, or nearly single in kind out of every five of the nearly 52 million homeowners with a mortgage, spend 38 percent or more of their pretax gains without interruption their mortgage payment, thing owned taxes and insurance, the AP’s separation found. That’s the new opening to qualify for the loan assistance program launched last month by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance companies now under government control.

Not surprisingly, the most financially burdened are in California, Florida, Nevada and the Northeast, areas hardest hit by soaring home prices and now foreclosures.

Yet in every specify, in that place are many pockets of homeowners who are conscientious one unexpected medical bill or car repair from falling behind on their mortgages and setting the foreclosure clock ticking.

The AP’s algebra reveals the enormous scope of the U.S. housing market bust and for what cause unevenly the burdens are spread, both geographically and demographically. And the situation is worsening - a record 10 percent of U.S. homeowners with a mortgage are at minutest single payment behind or were in foreclosure in the same manner through of finally fall, compared with 7.5 percent a year earlier and just under 6 percent in 2006.

The burden is clearly greater amount of arduous among minority households, the AP parsing found.

Just in subordination to a third of Hispanic homeowners exhaust at least 38 percent of their revenue forward housing expenses, compared with about a quarter of Asian and black households and nearly 16 percent of white households.

In much of the country, the trend is more pronounced. For example, included among those who spent at in the smallest degree 38 percent of their income in continuance housing are:

About 40 percent of black borrowers in California, Nevada, Oregon and Massachusetts.

More than 30 percent of Asian borrowers in California and Florida.

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NEW YORK —

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The New York Times Co. is in talks with billionaire Carlos Slim Helu about a possible investment of hundreds of millions of dollars that could withstand the newspaper publisher to meet debt payments, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing anonymous sources Saturday.

A spokeswoman for The New York Times declined to remark Sunday. Helu’s representatives could not be immediately reached in the place of comment.

The Journal said nay conduct one’s self is set and that discussions between the paper and Slim, the owner of Mexico’session telephone huge man Telmex, could tranquillize collapse. Other media outlets, also citing on nameless sources, reported that talks were taking place.

The Times has near to $46 million in cash and $1.1 billion in debt as of the end of September, the Journal reported. A $400 the great body of the people credit knack expires in May.

In September, the financier and members of his house purchased 6.4 percent of the company’sitting publicly traded shares. The price of the investment has dropped by half since then, the Journal said.

Forbes last year named Slim was the earth’s second-richest man.

The Ochs-Sulzberger family owns a controlling interest in the firm through special voting shares. The hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners holds a 19.9 percent stake in the company, which publishes its namesake paper, the Boston Globe and other properties.

The Journal said one possible plan could involve issuing preferred stock. The stock wouldn’t offer voting rights but would pay a dividend, the Journal said. This could spare the Ochs-Sulzberger line of ancestors to retain control of the company. But preferred shares often can be converted to common stock behind a certain period.

The company is planning a special board meeting next week, the Journal said.

The company has been trying to conserve turn into money. In November it slashed its quarterly dividend by 74 percent. And it has plans to assemble $225 million from its new, 52-story Manhattan headquarters, either by the agency of selling the building and leasing it back or a mortgage. The company owns 58 percent of the building, a portion that has not besides been mortgaged.

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Nearly a decade ago, the U.S. Marines staged ape urban battles designed to test future management for fighting in streets and alleys. The war games featured an array of advanced warlike hardware, including aerial drones with the laser-sharp cameras and micro-robots to scout for mines and potential ambushes.

But the exercises in California and at the Marines’ Quantico, Va., sorry also reinforced the inevitable realities of urban conflict: Troops are drawn into a confusing and obscure arena where hit-and-run guerrillas often be seized of the upper hand and civilians are caught in the crossfire.

“Urban areas be able to be extraordinary in their level of intricacy,” said a summary of the 2000-1 maneuvers published by the Rand Corp.

Now, Israel’session push into teeming Gaza City has highlighted these risks on a scale and extremity not witnessed since late 2004, when U.S.-led forces launched a grinding, block-by-block showdown against Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah that lasted for nearly three months.

Even as Israel declared Saturday it would limping gait the attacks opened in late December, the long-term lessons of the incursion are already being weighed by military experts around the creation. It’s a study in strategies for both sides

For Hamas, which is chiefly supplied through tunnels under the Egyptian border, the fight is suddenly about holding territory and foiling Israel’s advance after years of lobbing rockets from the not absolute safety of Gaza.

Military strategists are closely attention how Hamas uses its advantages: sniper positions, ability to plant roadside bombs and booby stuff and efforts to smoke-pipe Israel forces deeper into narrow streets and crowded neighborhoods to what they are more vulnerable to attacks.

“Hamas will seek to suck the (Israeli) forces as abundant into the urban terrain as possible,” said withdrawn British Col. Christopher Langton, a military analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “They will attempt to shape the battlefield.”

But this also runs the risk of even more civilian casualties

“These are heavy human costs when fighting moves into cities,” said Langton. “It’s been true through history and it’s true today.”

Yet a significant distinction is that the world has a ringside seat through round-the-clock television coverage and the Internet. That, coupled through the tumor advocacy energy of full of heart rights groups, heightens the burdens on conventional armies with civilian casualties a near certainty in urban skirmish.

Israel has been through this type of fight before

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WASHINGTON

The buildup in Iraq was in its first weeks, and it seemed hard to imagine that by the time the next president took office, there would be a consensus about the pace of a U.S. withdrawal. The two Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, were talking about a peaceful power-sharing agreement.

The Dow was at 12,580, on the way to 14,000 that summer. General Motors was making money selling cars even while reporting some concerns about “nonprime mortgages” held by its financing division. And the greatest worries about China and India were that their economies were growing so fast they could overheat.

Agenda shifts

The challenges Obama will begin to confront Tuesday afternoon bear only a passing resemblance to those on the table on the day nearly two years ago when he conceded “there is a certain presumptuousness in this

The agenda he is setting out to enact is significantly altered from what he had in mind then, partly by choice but mostly by circumstance. In the past two years, and especially in the 2

Behind the scenes, his national staff has raced to reassess strategies for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza and Iran, even before logging on to their secure computers in the West Wing.

“He’s facing the classic problem of having to handle a number of crises before he’s really got time to set out a long-term architecture,” G. John Ikenberry, a Princeton professor who co-wrote a detailed study of the national-security agenda for whoever became the next president.

Change in focus

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recently called Obama’s task analogous to “redesigning the airplane while you’re flying it.”

But the shifting reality has done more than force a change in focus. It also led Obama to re-examine his assumptions about a range of issues, hone his thinking and reach out to new advisers, some of them drawn from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign, some of his aides said.

At home, Obama is confronting an economic and financial crisis that is sure to demand a certain amount of trial and error. With some of the nation’s biggest banks under intense strain, he will face tough decisions about redesigning the bailout strategy even as more money is being poured in.

Conflicts to handle

Abroad, Afghanistan, Iran and the Israel-Palestinian conflict are likely to be among the first tests of how Obama handles the changed landscape.

As his inauguration has approached, Obama renewed his pledge to engage directly with the Iranians, something President Bush permitted only at the end of his presidency and only at a low government level. Clinton, who once cast Obama’s calls for high-level engagement as an example of his inexperience, will now be in charge of the effort.

But the enterprise is bound to be complicated by the fact that Bush is handing off to his successor an expanded, covert effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program, one of many secret programs Obama has been briefed about in detail.

Obama made clear Saturday, just before boarding a train in Philadelphia that was supposed to evoke Abraham Lincoln’s sweep into Washington, D.C., in 1861, that he was ready to make good on his promise to increase troop levels in Afghanistan. “Two wars,” he said, “one that needs to be ended responsibly, one that needs to be waged wisely.”

His views on Afghanistan are likely to be heavily influenced by Gen. James L. Jones, his national-security adviser, who wrote an influential report a year ago making the case that U.S. and NATO forces were not winning the war and needed a revamped strategy to confront Taliban forces coming over the border from Pakistan.

Jones, in turn, has asked Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the war czar for Iraq and Afghanistan, to stay on.

But it may be the battle in Gaza

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LONDON

A dozen people, mostly in their teens and 20s, chatted in the cavernous living room, wearing heavy coats in the unheated parlor lit by a single bright light.

About 15 squatters have lived since late November in this grand but vacant five-story house, with spiral staircases, an elevator and 19th-century Chinese wallpaper hand-painted with birds and flowers.

“It’s better for a building to be occupied than empty,” said Simon McAndrew, 29, a former hairdresser who has organized takeovers of several expensive and vacant homes in central London. “We’re artists, and we’re doing something good with the space.”

Squatting

Despite local governments’ efforts to discourage it, squatting appears to be on the rise once more as a deep recession hits the country.

In Britain, trespassing is a civil offense, not a criminal one. Provided the squatters do not break a window or door to enter or otherwise damage the property, police are largely powerless to remove them.

Landlords must petition a court for an eviction order, and they can be prosecuted if they attempt to remove the intruders by force.

“The owners are upset and distressed about this. They can’t understand how the squatters can be permitted to break into their house and live there,” said Andrew Jeffrey, a lawyer who represents the owners of the Mayfair house. “In nine out of 10 countries around the globe, this would not be tolerated, and the police would remove them immediately.”

Nic Madge, a circuit-court judge in London and a specialist in property law, said proposals in the 1970s to criminalize squatting were defeated in the face of “considerable political opposition.”

Ron Bailey, an activist who started Britain’s modern squatting movement in 1968 and has written books about squatting, said Britons have a history of sympathy for the practice that goes back hundreds of years.

“We look at it as a social good,” he said.

No one knows how many squatters there are across Britain, but estimates range from 4,000 to 15,000 or more. Most are evicted in a matter of days or weeks, but some occupy properties for years. If they last 10 years, the law allows them to petition a court for ownership.

In one celebrated recent case, a judge awarded a $3.5 million piece of land in the Hampstead Heath park in North London to a 70-year-old man who had lived in a shack there for 21 years.

Many squatters, such as those in the Mayfair mansion, are well-educated young people with counterculture ideals. Some are artists looking for a cheap communal space in which to work and live, while some just want to tweak the establishment.

Others squat because they have nowhere else to live.

Britain’s Council of Mortgage Lenders said home repossessions soared from 8,200 in 2004 to about 45,000 last year and could reach 75,000 this year, creating more homeless people and more empty houses.

At the same time, falling house prices mean fewer contractors see profit in buying and restoring vacant and crumbling properties.

“These places are staying empty now; a couple of years ago, they would have been bought and fixed,” said David Ireland, chief executive of the Empty Homes Agency.

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KABUL, Afghanistan

Six American troops and a U.S. civilian were among at least 30 people injured in the rush-hour explosion on a highway in the heart of the capital that runs between the German Embassy and an American base.

Hours later, a self-murderer bomber struck a NATO military escorting force in the eastern province of Nangarhar, killing an Afghan civilian, Western military officials said.

Also Saturday, a U.S. serviceman was killed in a Chinook helicopter’session hard coming to land in Kunar province, in oriental Afghanistan. It was not just now clear whether the craft was shot down, although the U.S. military acknowledged insurgent fire in the area at the note the rate of.

A Taliban spokesman claimed trust for the Kabul explosion, proverb German diplomats and military personnel were the target.

Zabiullah Mujahid, the speaker, said a suicide bomber named Shumse Rehman carried deficient in the attack in a Toyota Corolla.

But several witnesses at the scene said they saw a Ford truck carrying couple foreign soldiers explode in flames near the front gate of the German Embassy.

The blast engulfed the narrow two-lane road between the embassy and Camp Eggers, the U.S. body of soldiers sorry, charring several of the towering unite barrier walls at the edge of the installations.

Ranjeet, an Afghan commuter who was driving near the embassy, said the blast knocked him from his motorcycle and left dozens of injured the masses scattered on the road. “I saw seven to 10 bodies, and there were also injured people. They were lying on the ground, crying to the end for help,” aforesaid Ranjeet, who uses only one name.

Witnesses watched in horror since several U.S. soldiers and security personnel struggled to retrieve the body of any of their comrades, dragging him out of a second-story window in a building on the military foundation.

German Embassy officials could not be immediately reached for comment. But a German official in Berlin told The Associated Press that there were no German fatalities, even supposing several embassy personnel were wounded in the explosion.

About 3,200 German troops are stationed in Afghanistan. The embassy served as the headquarters for German soldiers who are training Afghan police and Afghan army personnel.

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SEOUL, South Korea

American clear apprehension officials desire previously estimated that North Korea had harvested plenty fuel for six or in greater numbers bombs, be it so it has never been clear if it constructed the weapons. The scholar, Selig S. Harrison, said the officials had not defined what “weaponized” meant, but the implication was that they had built nuclear arms.

After the threats on Saturday, South Korea ordered its military to heighten vigilance by its heavily fortified border with North Korea, according to a spokesman with the South Korean military united chiefs of staff.

North Korea’s saber-rattling with regard to the South has increased in intensity since President Lee Myung-bak took office in Seoul a year ago, vowing to take a tougher stance on North Korea, reversing 10 years of his liberal predecessors’ efforts to promise the North with relating to housekeeping speed. But what made the threat on Saturday extraordinary, and more worrisome to some South Korean analysts, was the way it was delivered

“Strong military measures will come from our revolutionary armed force,” the spokesman, a colonel, said, according to Yonhap, South Korea’s national news agency, which monitors North Korean broadcasts.

Usually, the North Korean polity issues written statements that are delivered through the rough’s state-controlled media; sometimes the statements are read by press officers, not by means of a uniformed member of the military.

The spokesman warned of a clash along a disputed west. occidental sea border betwixt the Koreas. The sum of two units navies fought skirmishes there in 1999 and 2002.

It is always difficult to decipher the messages that North Korea’s reclusive government is trying to delegate with its oftentimes bombastic statements. In times of crucial bargaining, North Korea often tries to drive a wedge betwixt Washington and South Korea and raises the stakes by increasing demands and issuing dire threats.

With President-elect Barack Obama about to take office and negotiations more than the North’s nuclear program expected to resume, it is possible that the North is merely setting up its negotiating thesis.

But analysts said the North’s remarks could furthermore be an indication that it was intending to hold on to its arms despite an agreement it signed with five countries, including the United States in 2005, in which it committed to eventually giving up any nuclear weapons. The exact conditions under the load of which it would do so were left vague.

Questions over the freedom from disease of the country’s leader, Kim Jong Il, in addition involve any attempts to understand North Korea’s aims. In August, there were reports that Kim suffered a stroke, and since then rumors have swirled about whether he was still making important decisions.

Harrison, the scholar, presented North Korea’s claims of weaponization on Saturday in Beijing posterior returning from North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang.

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For nearly two decades, Boeing’s 747 jumbo jet has served as the president’s flying White House, projecting America’s might in whatever place it landed.

But in the nearest decade, “United States of America” could end up being emblazoned on an even bigger flat that has been a figure of European harmony and arrogance.

The 747 Air Force One is scheduled to be replaced, and the strange plane is likely to be stuffed with top-secret gee-whiz gadgetry, including countermeasures to thwart missile attacks, and aerial-refueling capabilities so it can slip away for days without landing.

That’session on predominate of comforts likely to make even the world’sitting richest jet setters envious, including a medical facility and prodigal staterooms with showers.

What it will not be seized of is a presidential escape pod, analysts said, a feature that became an urban legend, thanks to a 1997 action film that starred Harrison Ford.

2016 is mark date

It is unlikely that President-elect Obama will get a chance to fly in a new Air Force One because the reinstatement isn’t scheduled to originate flying until 2016 at the earliest. It takes up to three years just to vary the plane in the same state it can confront attacks and enable the president to command from the heavens.

But for the first time, the Pentagon has raised the prospect that the replacement in spite of the most photographed and most advanced voyager jet in the world could come from a firm overseas.

In a move stated to raise the political rage of the “buy American” crowd in Congress, the Air Force has requested information from aircraft makers, including Airbus, of Europe, to replace the aging 747 jet. Boeing, headquartered in Chicago, has built presidential jets since the early 1960s.

“I just can’privately see how they could allow that to happen,” John Pike, monitor of the military policy Web site GlobalSecurity.org, before-mentioned about congressional rebound to an Airbus plane. “The American president getting off of an American plane has been a major part of U.S. being a superpower.”

An Airbus plane is not as far-fetched as some would think, analysts said.

The Pentagon’s request for information made quietly last week set in port an open-ended contest. Airbus and Boeing are the only two companies capable of building an aircraft as sophisticated as that required by the leader of the world’s largest good husbandry. Last year, the double-decked Airbus A380 unseated the 747 as the universe’s largest passenger smooth.

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