The 7 biggest political downfalls of 2011 (The Week)

New York ? From Mubarak to Weiner, it was a banner year for fallen despots, dictators, congressmen, and presidential hopefuls

If global politics had an annual awards show, the segment devoted to eulogizing those statesmen we lost in 2011 would be long and impressive. From deposed international despots to sexually reckless U.S. politicians who were forced to leave the political sphere, it was a bad year to get caught on the wrong side of revolutions and popular revulsion. Here, seven of the most dramatic, unexpected falls from power in 2011:

1. Hosni Mubarak
Egypt's president for 30 years, Mubarak was forced out?on Feb. 11, after 18 days of mostly peaceful protests centered in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Mubarak was hardly sent into a comfortable retirement: International banks froze billions of dollars of his and his family's assets, and Mubarak ? reportedly in grave health ? was locked up to face murder and corruption charges. Mubarak's downfall is right up there with "the fall of communism 20 years ago" as a "validation to all those around the world who believe in democracy, the power of peaceful protest, and the right of all people to seek redress of their grievances," said The Baltimore Sun in an editorial.

SEE MORE: The 4 biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2011

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2. Moammar Gadhafi
The Libyan strongman ruled for 12 years longer than Mubarak, but his end was more gruesome and more final. After months of battle with rebel forces aided by NATO airstrikes, Gadhafi went into hiding in late August when he lost control of Libya's capital, Tripoli. Then, on Oct. 20, Gadhafi was discovered by enemy forces in Sirte, where he was beaten, humiliated, and killed. "Libyans suffered terribly under Gadhafi for decades," said Amy Davidson in The New Yorker. But, in the interest of justice, clearing up the murkiness surrounding the dictator's brutal death "matters, even for him."

3. Silvio Berlusconi
By the time Italy's colorfully controversial prime minister was forced into retirement?on Nov. 12, nearly two decades after taking office, he had achieved a profound unpopularity. Berlusconi presided?over his country's slide toward insolvency, and he was long plagued by allegations of corruption and myriad sex scandals, including charges that he slept with an underage prostitute. The real surprise isn't that "the undisputed clown of international politics has finally been forced out of the circus," said Alex Fusco in Britain's The Independent. It's that he wasn't "led out of office in handcuffs."

4. Dominique Strauss-Kahn
The International Monetary Fund chief and early frontrunner in France's 2012 presidential race was arrested in New York City on May 15, after hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo accused Strauss-Kahn of raping her. New York prosecutors dropped the criminal charges?on Aug. 23 after doubts emerged about Diallo's credibility, but Strauss-Kahn's IMF career and presidential prospects were already in tatters. The collapse of the New York case "doesn't mean that Strauss-Kahn is innocent, of course," said Doug Mataconis at?Outside the Beltway, but I think he has a right to ask "where he goes to get his reputation back."

5. Anthony Weiner
In one of the oddest sex-related scandals of the year, Rep. Weiner (D-N.Y.) resigned from Congress in disgrace on June 16 after he was caught sending sexually suggestive or lewd photos of himself to a group of women he never met in real life. Weiner was busted by a conservative blogger on May 27 when the congressman accidentally posted a photo of his underwear-clad erection to his public Twitter feeed, then clumsily tried to cover his tracks. Finally, Weiner tearfully admitted to being a serial sexter. "Weiner can be described, I think, as Twitter?s first major political casualty," said Greg Sargent at?The Washington Post.

6. John Ensign
Though more old-school than Weiner's mess, the Nevada Republican's sex scandal was perhaps?equally "salacious."?Ensign resigned from the Senate on May 3, barely dodging the Senate Ethics Committee's scathing report, which was released on May 12. The report detailed?Ensign's affair with his campaign treasurer, his attempts to buy her silence and that of her husband ? another longtime aide ? with his parents' cash and a lobbying job, and Ensign's potentially illegal attempts to cover that up. The committee's made-for-TV retelling of the affair is "astounding and a hell of a read," said Taylor Marsh at her blog. "Ensign is actually lucky he resigned," because the Senate would have expelled him after this bombshell.

7. Herman Cain
The one-time Republican frontrunner for the presidential nomination effectively dropped out of the race?on Dec. 3, after badly mishandling several documented accusations of sexual harassment and an alleged extramarital affair. Cain also faced widespread criticism for breezily fumbling routine foreign policy and economic questions. The Cain campaign will "go down as one of the most hapless and bumbling operations in modern presidential politics," said Jonathan Martin at?Politico.

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/oped/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/theweek/20111226/cm_theweek/222126

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Top 10 things about college football in 2011

Yardbarker's editors read thousands of sports blogs and newspapers every day. We condense it all, and send you one email every morning with the best, juiciest College Football Rumors and Gossip. * Not a College Football fan? Choose another sport or team

Source: http://network.yardbarker.com/college_football/article_external/top_10_things_about_college_football_in_2011/8945413

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Vote for the Most Important Gadget of the Year: Round 2 [Gadget Of The Year]

DiscloseTV: Israel: EU paying lip service over Iran http://t.co/zqnzjGbI #news #breakingnews

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2011 Newsmaker: Four-alarm fire gutted historic Watsonville building: Apple Growers Ice & Cold Storage loss called 'end of an era'

EDITOR'S NOTE: During the final two weeks of 2011, the Sentinel is taking a look back at the most newsworthy stories and newsmakers of the year. The series will be published in ascending order, ending on Jan. 1 with the story selected by the Sentinel staff as the year's biggest.

WATSONVILLE ? When Stephanie Phillips first smelled smoke about 3:30 p.m. April 20, she thought it would probably turn out to be nothing, or at least of little consequence.

Then, as firefighters tackled flames rising from the historic warehouse on West Beach Street, she decided to wait and watch while they extinguished the blaze.

But it took three days and dozens of firefighters from several counties to put out Watsonville's most significant fire in years. By then, the Apple Growers Ice & Cold Storage warehouse was gutted, a $10 million loss to the structure and its contents, mostly Martinelli's apple cider.

Phillips, Apple Growers manager, said she never would have guessed her world would be upended on what had been a typical Wednesday afternoon.

?It just seems like this is the end of an era,? Phillips said earlier this month as she presided over what looks to be the final chapter in a business that dates to the late 1920s and symbolizes a time when apples formed the Pajaro Valley's economic foundation.

?This place has been here for so long,? she said. ?It's sad.?

Cork and redwood insulation

tarred to the concrete walls of the warehouse fueled what was later ruled an accidental fire sparked by roofers. Pallets of apple juice stacked high and close prevented firefighters from working the blaze from the inside, and due to the age of the building, there were no sprinklers.

That first night, concern about the potential for a toxic ammonia leak from refrigeration pipes and deteriorating air quality due to smoke led to emergency warning calls to 28,000 phone customers within a three-mile radius. Hundreds of fish died in nearby Watsonville Slough as soot and foam poured into the water.

At its peak, 16 engines, three ladder trucks and 80 firefighters battled the four-alarm fire.

Watsonville Fire Chief Mark Bisbee said the burn time, the number of firefighters involved, and the impact on habitat and air quality all made Apple Growers a consequential fire ?not just for Watsonville, but probably for the (San Francisco) Bay Area.?

The fire cost $227,000 to fight. Watsonville spent nearly $40,000, and the rest had to be absorbed by the agencies providing mutual aid.

S. Martinelli & Co., a Watsonville business with a global reach, lost more than $3 million in apple juice and cider. More would have gone up in flames if not for the efforts of company forklift drivers, who raced ahead of the fire to save a quarter of the stored product.

John Martinelli, president of the 143-year-old family-owned company, said insurance covered the loss, but product was in short supply for several months. Not until early December was inventory back on track, he said.

Martinelli solved a potential storage problem for this year's apple crop ? held in past years at Apple Growers until processing it into cider ? with the purchase of a long vacant frozen food plant.

But the loss that really hurts is the disappearance of a piece of the past, he said. The heirs of the 23 Croatian apple growers, who built the cold storage business in 1928 to store their produce, have decided not to rebuild and the 3.5-acre property is for sale.

The business stood the test of time, though.

Over the years, apples, vegetables, strawberries and nursery stock chilled within its walls. It had become less profitable in recent years, according to the late Steve Zupan, who served as company president until his death in August. But it was still in use. As late as December, undamaged portions of the 78,000-square-foot building held onions grown in Hollister.

?It's tragic,? Martinelli said. ?It's an icon. The facade of that building is such a big part of Watsonville and Watsonville history and especially the apple industry.?

For Phillips, the loss is personal. She's worked at Apple Growers for more than 20 years. Asked what she'll do when the building is sold, she shrugged.

?I don't know,? she said. ?I'll stay until they kick me out.?

?At A Glance

Apple Growers Fire

WHAT: Four-alarm fire at historic warehouse

WHEN: 3:30 p.m. April 20

WHERE: 850 W. Beach St., Watsonville

WHO: More than 80 firefighters responded

CAUSE: Spark from a roofer's torch

DAMAGES: $10 million, building and stored Martinelli's apple cider and juice

ABOUT THE SERIES

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: The Sentinel took a look back Sunday at the year of the whale. This fall, dozens of them put on a spectacular show for kayakers, paddle boarders and boaters just off the coast in Santa Cruz. Read the story at www.santacruzsentinel.com.

MONDAY: Millions of dollars in apples and property were lost in April when a four-alarm fire blazed through the Apple Growers Ice & Cold Storage warehouse in Watsonville.

COMING TUESDAY: David and DeDe Houghton, beloved owners of a Santa Cruz dive shop and engineering firm, and their young sons perished when their plane crashed in July outside Watsonville Community Hospital shortly after takeoff at Watsonville Municipal Airport.

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Source: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_19615950?source=rss_viewed

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Burglar posts loot on Facebook, arrested

PITTSBURGH, Pa. - An 18-year-old Pittsburgh man is accused of burglarizing a market with three teens, then posted pictures on his Facebook page showing the suspects mugging with some of the loot.

Isaiah Cutler who has been jailed since Friday in the Dec. 12 burglary. Online court records don't list an attorney for him.

Police say Cutler, a 17-year-old and two 14-year-olds stole more than $8,000 worth of cash, cigarettes, candy and checks from the business. About an hour later, police say, Cutler posted pictures of the teens posing with the loot on his page on the social networking site.

The younger suspects have been charged in juvenile court and been released to their parents.

Cutler faces a preliminary hearing Wednesday on charges of theft, burglary and conspiracy.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://www.abc2news.com/dpp/news/national/burglar-arrested-after-posting-loot-on-facebook

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Analysis: Russia's Putin risks losing touch amid protests (Reuters)

MOSCOW (Reuters) ? Vladimir Putin is looking increasingly out of touch in Russia after the opposition brought tens of thousands of people out onto the streets of Moscow for the second time in two weeks to demand a parliamentary election be re-run.

But the looming New Year holiday in Russia means there is likely to be a pause in the biggest opposition protests since he rose to power 12 years ago and he will hope they will now at least temporarily lose momentum.

The protesters say they are tired of his domination of Russia after eight years as president and now four as prime minister, and suspect the December 4 election, won by his United Russia party, was rigged.

First Putin dismissed the protesters as chattering monkeys financed from abroad, then he backed President Dmitry Medvedev's proposal for gradual political reform and later the 59-year-old leader had a former KGB spy appointed as Kremlin chief of staff.

The gulf between Putin and many of his people has convinced many that he has lost his popular touch and is refusing to take the protests as seriously as many of his closest allies do as he prepares to reclaim the presidency in an election in March.

"They do not understand," one person close to policy makers said of Putin and Medvedev. "One is weak and the other does not want to listen, though people have tried to explain the seriousness of the situation."

That could bode badly for the long-term stability of the world's biggest country and energy producer.

Opponents say Putin's inner circle is a small group of former KGB spies, businessmen and Kremlin officials who have little empathy with the Internet-savvy generation of younger, urban Russians who have come out onto the streets this month.

But Putin's portrayal of the protesters as pawns financed by a foreign power has also contrasted with the conclusions drawn by some of the other men at his court.

Kremlin deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, who helped Putin craft his tightly controlled political system, warned on Friday that some enemies wanted to provoke a revolution but that the protesters were among the best people in society.

PUTIN'S COURT

"The best part of our society, or rather the most productive part, is demanding respect," Surkov, one of Putin's most powerful advisers on domestic policy, told Izvestia. "You cannot simply swipe away their opinions in an arrogant way."

An even closer Putin ally, former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, joined Saturday's protest in Moscow, warning that Russia needed much more serious political reforms to ensure a stable development.

"I came today because I do not believe the elections were fair and I believe we need to hold an investigation and punish those responsible up to and including criminal responsibility," Kudrin, 51, told Reuters at the protest.

"There is a possibility today, without any sort of revolution, to make a transformation to ensure fair elections and real representation in parliament," said Kudrin, who helped Putin get his first job in the Kremlin in 1996.

But Putin has other powerful advisers too.

Nikolai Patrushev, the powerful head of the Russian security council and former head of the FSB state security service, said this month that Russia should impose "rational regulation" of the Internet.

Another former KGB spy, Sergei Ivanov, was appointed Kremlin chief of staff on Thursday and Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, a Putin ally, has voiced concern about the role played by the Internet in the Arab Spring revolts.

Patrushev, 60, Ivanov, 58, and Sechin, 51, are all old friends of Putin and though they may be divided by tactics and court politics, they are ultimately hardliners.

Medvedev, Russia's 46-year-old iPad-carrying president, may have more sense of the anger against Putin but he is weak, sources close to the situation said.

"Medvedev understands this all a little better because he is a person less prone to conspiratorial theories," said a source with close ties to the leadership, adding that Russia's leaders were hoping the protests would burn themselves out.

"Putin has realized his popularity is declining," the source said.

PUTIN'S POPULARITY

For Putin, who has used his popularity to justify his plan to run for the presidency in the March 4 presidential election, that may be a hard thing to accept.

Putin still remains Russia's most popular politician and though his ratings are high by Western standards, they are low according to Putin's own expectations.

Russia's biggest independent pollster, Levada-Center, said 63 percent of Russians approved of his activities as prime minister in a poll carried out on Dec 16-20.

But that is just three percentage points above the lowest level since August 2000, when he was dogged by the botched reaction to a naval disaster that killed all 118 crewmen aboard the submarine Kursk.

"They are worrying and they are nervous," said Mikhail Kasyanov, who served as prime minister under Putin for four years before joining the opposition. "And they really do have something to be worried and nervous about."

CHATTERING MONKEYS?

Putin seems intent on riding out the protests. While tens of thousands turned out for the second time on two weeks on Saturday, he is likely to take comfort from the fact that there was not a huge increase in the numbers.

Tens of thousands protested in cities across Russia on December 10. On Saturday, organizers said they had gathered 120,000 in Moscow though the police put the number at 30,000.

The truth may lie somewhere in between: Russia's Navaya Gazeta opposition newspaper said its reporters counted more than 102,000 while estimates from state news agency RIA put the crowd at about 56,000.

Putin appears to reason that even though the protests are much larger than any he has faced before, it is still a relatively small percentage of the population that is protesting in a country of more than 140 million.

He is counting on the support of the many millions in the provinces who regard him as the man who restored order to Russia after the chaos of the decade that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In a televised question and answer session with the Russian people, Putin used a reference to the chattering monkeys known as "Bandar Log" in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book to describe the protesters and said he thought the white ribbons which are the symbol of the election protests were condoms.

But Alexei Navalny, the most prominent leader of the divided opposition groups which refuse to negotiate with the Kremlin, turned Putin's comments back against the authorities.

"Hi all of you Bandar Logs and Internet hamsters: You were called Bandar Log but you came here today. But where is the chap who called us that?" Navalny, 35, told tens of thousands of people at the protest in Moscow's Sakharov Avenue.

Navalny's satire may excite the crowds and the thousands who read his blogs but there is still no leader of the fragmented opposition. As if to illustrate that, dozens of different leaders addressed the crowd in Moscow.

United or not, Navalny warned that there were enough people at the protest to take the Kremlin by force, though he quickly added that this was not the plan.

"If the authorities continue to cheat the people and thieves and if those two swindlers continue the usurpation of power - they have stolen it from the people - then the people will come and take it back because it is theirs by rights," he told Reuters.

So does he plan a revolution?

"It is not a revolution," he said. "The revolution, the illegal takeover of power, was implemented by Putin and Medvedev. Here there will be a legal return of power to the people."

(Editing by Jon Hemming)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111226/wl_nm/us_russia_putin

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A's ship Gio Gonzalez to Washington

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Source: www.bettingexpress.com --- Monday, December 26, 2011
The Oakland Athletics have traded left-handed starting pitcher Gio Gonzalez to the Washington Nationals for four of their top prospects. The 26-year-old Gonzalez went 16-12 last season with a 3.12 earned-run average and 197 strikeouts in 202 innings pitched. Gonzalez, a four-year veteran, has spent his entire big-league career with Oakland and has compiled a 38-32 record with a 3.93 earned-run average ...

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