Ny Safidinao

The Middle East has long had a reputation for being one of the world's perennial trouble spots. But for expatriates, the tiny Persian Gulf county Bahrain ranks as one of the most welcoming places to work. See the full list of the World's Friendliest Countries That's the surprising result of a new survey of 3,100 expatriates conducted by HSBC Bank. Bahrain ranked first in one key measure of how easy it is for expatriates to set up a new life for their families. It received high marks from expats who like the country's easy access to modern health care, decent and affordable housing, and network of social groups that expatriates can join. Canada, which ranked first in a similar survey last year, fell to second place on HSBC's integration score, which measures how easily foreigners and their families can settle into a new country. Australia, Thailand and Malaysia rounded out the top five. Foreign workers in these countries found it easy to make local friends and said t...

Many Americans take Social Security early, at age 62, because they really need it. They're in poor health or unemployed or both. Others take benefits early because they're worried they'll lose out on what's rightfully theirs if benefits are reduced. But few people try to figure out the best age to take Social Security -- and that's a serious mistake. Even though it's challenging, calculating the best time to take benefits is well worth it, especially given that Social Security represents about one-third of the average retiree's income. What's key is evaluating the so-called break-even period to determine whether it would be better to delay Social Security benefits (delaying them means a higher monthly benefit), take a reduced benefit early, or start them at "normal" retirement age. Of course, there's a good reason why so few people really do the calculations. "When to begin Social Security retirement benefits is a challenging question ...

WASHINGTON — Social Security recipients won't get a cost-of-living increase next year for the first time in more than a third of a century, and that could boost President Barack Obama's plan to send seniors another round of $250 payments before the congressional elections. Democratic leaders in Congress have signed onto the plan, greatly improving its chances, even as some budget hawks say the payments are unwarranted and could add to the federal budget deficit. Republican leaders said they, too, favor the payments but don't want to increase the deficit to pay for them. More than 50 million Social Security recipients will see no increase in their monthly payments next year, the government said Thursday, the first year without an increase since automatic adjustments were adopted in 1975. Blame it on falling consumer prices. By law, cost-of-living adjustments are pegged to inflation, which is negative this year because of lower energy costs. Social Security payments do not go...

Not Coming to America From the boons of Ford's assembly line and Eisenhower's interstate highway system to the banes of suburban sprawl and oil dependence, U.S. history is closely tied to the automobile. But that doesn't mean Americans are privy to any ride they want. Carmakers like BMW, Ford, and Volkswagen design and manufacture all kinds of vehicles for consumers in different countries with separate needs and budgets. Here, gaze on internationally released cars you're unlikely to see in U.S. showrooms any time soon. 1. Alfa Romeo Brera Designer: Giorgetto Giugiaro Available: Europe Famed Italian carmaker Pininfarina added some flair to this sporty two-door coupe. It has the front end of an old-school muscle car, but the lines and hatchback give it a more modern look. 2. Artega GT Designer: Henrik Fisker Available: Europe Designed by the man who cooked up the Aston Martin V8 Vantage and the BMW Z8 , this sports car takes its cues from classic Ferrari and Porsche shape...

All Things Considered, January 15, 2009 · When a president leaves office after eight years, journalists typically write retrospectives about his time in office. The vice president is barely mentioned, if at all. But President Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, is like no other in American history. Before Cheney, discussion about the vice presidency focused on how to make the office stronger, more effective. Not any more. "Vice President Cheney has been the most powerful vice president that we've ever had," said Joel Goldstein, author of The Modern American Vice Presidency. In the first term, Cheney reshaped national security law, expanded the prerogatives of the executive branch and orchestrated secret, warrantless domestic surveillance, circumventing a court set up by Congress specifically to oversee such surveillance. He presented the president with options that led to a shutdown of negotiations with North Korea, and played a major role in persuading President Bush...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Among the offices Barack Obama has yet to fill, one has a special importance to his family: first dog. At his first postelection news conference on Friday, the president-elect called choosing a dog a "major issue" in the Obama household and a hot topic on his Web site. "We have two criteria that have to be reconciled. One is that Malia is allergic, so it has to be hypoallergenic," he said. "On the other hand, our preference would be to get a shelter dog, but a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me." Add to that the strain of the inevitable attention that comes to a cute pup in the White House. On Thursday, President Bush's normally docile Scottish terrier Barney bit a Reuters reporter on the right index finger. So, how to choose? No breeds are completely hypoallergenic. However, some breeds have a tendency to cause fewer problems — mostly those that don't shed and need to have their coats trimmed regularly, or those that tend to s...

CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama moved swiftly on Thursday to fill his administration and form his response to the economic crisis. Mr. Obama scheduled his first post-election visit to the White House and convened an economic advisory board to meet here amid signs of a deteriorating financial outlook. With the global economy on a knife’s edge, and labor figures on Friday very likely to show mounting American job losses, the financial markets, foreign leaders and even the Bush administration are looking to Mr. Obama for signs of how he will manage the crisis. In responding, Mr. Obama must strike a delicate balance between cooperating with an unpopular president whose policies he campaigned to change, and the inclination to wait until he takes charge in two and a half months to prescribe his own remedies. Adding to the pressure were steep drops in world financial markets on Thursday; the Dow Jones industrial average alone fell 443 points, or nearly 5 percent, compiling a two-day lo...

President-elect Barack Obama began moving Wednesday to build his administration and make good on his ambitious promises to point the United States in a different direction, as his commanding victory reordered the American political landscape and transfixed much of the nation and the world. A day after becoming the first African-American to capture the presidency, Mr. Obama announced a transition team and prepared to name an ally as his White House chief of staff in his first steps toward assuming power. President Bush vowed to work closely with Mr. Obama to ensure a smooth transition in the first handover since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the fourth-ranking House Democrat and a close friend of Mr. Obama’s from Chicago, has been offered the job of chief of staff, and although he was said to be concerned about the effects on his family and giving up his influential role on Capitol Hill, many Democrats said they expected him to accept it. Mr. Ob...

Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive. The election of Mr. Obama amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago. Mr. Obama, 47, a first-term senator from Illinois, defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, 72, a former prisoner of war who was making his second bid for the presidency. To the very end, Mr. McCain’s campaign was eclipsed by an opponent who was nothing short of a phenomenon, drawing huge crowds epitomized by the tens of thousands of people who t...

WASHINGTON – It's a nightmare scenario for Democrats — their nominee Barack Obama winning the popular vote while Republican John McCain ekes out an Electoral College victory. Sure, McCain trails in every recent national poll. Sure, surveys show that Obama leads in the race to reach the requisite 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Sure, chances of Republicans retaining the White House are remote. But some last-minute state polls show the GOP nominee closing the gap in key states — Republican turf of Virginia, Florida and Ohio among them, and Democratic-leaning Pennsylvania, too. If the tightening polls are correct and undecided voters in those states break McCain's way — both big ifs — that could make for a repeat of the 2000 heartbreaker for Democrats that gave Republicans the White House. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote by 537,179 votes. But George W. Bush won the state-by-state electoral balloting that determines the presidency, 271 to 266. The...

MIAMI — The strange tale of Joe the Plumber unfolded a bit more on the campaign trail Friday when Senator John McCain used a rally here to defend the Ohio man he made a national star of by focusing on him in Wednesday night’s presidential debate. The man, Joe Wurzelbacher, gained fame after he met Senator Barack Obama recently and expressed concerns that Mr. Obama’s tax plans would hurt him if he ever became wealthy enough to buy his own plumbing business. Mr. McCain seized on the encounter at the debate to highlight the fact that Mr. Obama’s tax plan — which would cut taxes on 95 percent of Americans — would raise the taxes on small businesses. The Obama campaign countered that Mr. Wurzelbacher in fact stood to get a bigger cut under their plan. But under the glare of the ensuing media spotlight, reporters found that Mr. Wurzelbacher did not actually have a plumbing license, and that he actually owed some back taxes. Mr. McCain leapt to his defense here Friday in a rally at Florida In...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent," responsible for their own troubles. The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points. Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He's an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation's oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents. More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can't win the White House w...

Harsh advertisements and negative attacks are a staple of presidential campaigns, but Senator John McCain has drawn an avalanche of criticism this week from Democrats, independent groups and even some Republicans for regularly stretching the truth in attacking Senator Barack Obama’s record and positions. Mr. Obama has also been accused of distortions, but this week Mr. McCain has found himself under particularly heavy fire for a pair of headline-grabbing attacks. First the McCain campaign twisted Mr. Obama’s words to suggest that he had compared Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, to a pig after Mr. Obama said, in questioning Mr. McCain’s claim to be the change agent in the race, “You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig.” (Mr. McCain once used the same expression to describe Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health plan.) Then he falsely claimed that Mr. Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners (he supported teaching them to be ale...

DAYTON, Ohio (Reuters) - Republican John McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate on Friday, a senior campaign official said, in a surprise choice that could help him appeal to women voters. The choice of Palin, 44, will be unveiled later on Friday in a rally in Dayton as McCain grabs the political focus away from Democratic rival Barack Obama one day after Obama accepted his party's presidential nomination. McCain and Palin will face Obama and his No. 2, Joe Biden, in the November 4 presidential election. The pick followed days of speculation about McCain's choice, with most of the better-known contenders like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney slowly eliminated over the last 24 hours. Palin is a conservative first-term governor of Alaska with strong anti-abortion views and a record of fiscal conservatism. She is an avid sportswoman who would bring youth and vitality to the ticket. McCain turns 72 on Friday. Palin is not well-known nationally, and that coul...

DENVER — With her husband looking on tenderly and her supporters watching with tears in their eyes, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton deferred her own dreams on Tuesday night and delivered an emphatic plea at the Democratic National Convention to unite behind her rival, Senator Barack Obama, no matter what ill will lingered. Mrs. Clinton, who was once certain that she would win the Democratic nomination this year, also took steps on Tuesday — deliberate steps, aides said — to keep the door open to a future bid for the presidency. She rallied supporters in her speech, and, at an earlier event with 3,000 women, described her passion about her own campaign. And her aides limited input on the speech from Obama advisers, while seeking advice from her former strategist, Mark Penn, a loathed figure in the Obama camp. But the main task for Mrs. Clinton at the convention — reaffirming her support for Mr. Obama in soaring and unconditional language — dominated her 23-minute speech, and she betrayed...