Saturday, January 21, 2012

Repurpose an Over-the-Door Shoe Holder into a Cleaning Products Organizer [Organization]

Repurpose an Over-the-Door Shoe Holder into a Cleaning Products OrganizerOver-the-door shoe holders are wonderful for organizing lots of household items in addition to their normal function. We've previously covered how to use them to store pantry items, cable storage, and gadgets. Now, household weblog Whine & Cheez shares how these versatile holders can help organize your cleaning products.

In this case all you need to is hang the shoe organizer from a door in your laundry room or linen closet and all of your sponges, sprays, and other cleaning gear in the shoe pockets. Keeping it handy and visible will encourage you to use the right cleaning tool for the right job.

Git er done! | Whine & Cheez

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/LZBywYKLJzw/repurpose-an-over+the+door-shoe-holder-into-a-cleaning-products-organizer

braylon edwards jimmer fredette mall of america mennonite gordon hayward smokey robinson smokey robinson

Romney aims to stay away from his income tax issue (Reuters)

SPARTANBURG, South Carolina (Reuters) ? Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney sought on Wednesday to stay away from the issue of how much he pays in taxes a day after acknowledging that his income tax rate is about 15 percent, but a key ally joined rivals' calls for Romney to release his tax returns.

During a campaign speech in Spartanburg, Romney avoided mentioning the comment he made a day earlier that his income tax rate is "probably closer to 15 percent than anything," making it lower than the rate paid by most wage-earning Americans.

The remark put Romney, one of the wealthiest people to ever run for the White House, at the forefront of a national debate over the fairness of U.S. income tax rates. Romney is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination to face Democratic President Barack Obama on November 6.

Romney's efforts to stay away from the issue took a hit earlier in the day when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a key ally of the former Massachusetts governor, urged him to release his income tax forms.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, two of Romney's rivals for the Republican nomination, pressed Romney during a debate Monday night to release his tax returns and have suggested he may be hiding something in not releasing his tax forms.

Christie played down the notion that the forms would reveal much about Romney, a former private equity executive at Bain Capital LLC with an estimated net worth of $270 million.

"Let's get all the facts out there. See what the tax returns say. And I think everybody will know that the story is probably much ado about nothing," Christie told the MSNBC program "Morning Joe."

Christie suggested that the attention being paid to Romney's finances was mostly a political drama aimed at undermining the former Massachusetts governor in advance of Saturday's South Carolina primary, the third contest in the state-by-state battle for the Republican nomination.

Christie, mentioned as a possible vice presidential running mate for Romney, has been actively campaigning for Romney, making appearances in New Hampshire and Iowa, the first two states to hold nominating contests.

'POLITICAL DIRT'

On the campaign trail in the conservative state of South Carolina on Wednesday, Republican voters who were questioned about Romney's tax returns downplayed the issue.

"I think it's political dirt," said Don Ethier, 66, an undecided voter in Spartanburg. "They're needing something to discredit him, and they're making something out of nothing."

Although most U.S. politicians running for president release their tax returns, Romney does not need to do so, said Lawrence Easler, 66, of Spartanburg. "He's a real successful guy. He earned everything he's got, legally."

Adam Temple, a Republican consultant in South Carolina unaffiliated with any of the presidential candidates, called the flap over Romney's tax rate and returns "a small issue."

"It's not about jobs or how he's gonna create them and it's not about electability," Temple said. "Those are the things South Carolina voters care about. The guy has money."

But Temple said that if Romney wins the Republican nomination and the right to face Obama, "we'd be naive to think the Obama campaign isn't gonna make that an issue."

Romney, who has been reluctant to release his tax returns, said for the first time on Monday that he would release them -- but not until April.

Christie urged Romney to move up that timetable.

"What I would say to Governor Romney is: If you have tax returns to put out, you should put them out. You should put them out sooner rather than later because it's always better to have full disclosure, especially if you're the frontrunner," Christie said on NBC's program "Today."

The questions about Romney's finances gained steam on Tuesday, when he told reporters that most of his income stems from investments, placing him at the 15 percent tax rate for capital gains.

The top effective tax rate for U.S. salary earners is 35 percent.

The South Carolina primary may offer the last chance for conservatives such as Gingrich, a former House of Representatives speaker, and Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, to slow Romney's momentum.

Gingrich and Perry, the Texas governor, have been eager to paint Romney as out of touch with ordinary voters amid a slow economic recovery, and have pounced on the tax issue.

Gingrich has said he will release his own tax returns this week. Perry already has done so.

Some tax analysts have said Romney's tax returns could shed light on his work at the helm of Bain Capital that could give political ammunition to rivals.

A Wall Street Journal editorial on Wednesday called on Romney to use his returns as a platform to call for a simplified U.S. tax code.

"Mr. Romney could use the opportunity to make the moral and practical case for lower rates and fewer loopholes," the Journal said.

(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey, Colleen Jenkins and Alistair Bell. Editing by David Lindsey)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/business/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120118/pl_nm/us_usa_campaign_romney

jahvid best libya map libya map world series game 2 world series game 2 libya bay area news

Friday, January 20, 2012

No Wikipedia? What if the Internet went down? (AP)

WASHINGTON ? If a day without Wikipedia was a bother, think bigger. In this plugged-in world, we would barely be able to cope if the entire Internet went down in a city, state or country for a day or a week.

Sure, we'd survive. People have done it. Countries have, as Egypt did last year during the anti-government protests. And most of civilization went along until the 1990s without the Internet. But now we're so intertwined socially, financially and industrially that suddenly going back to the 1980s would hit the world as hard as a natural disaster, experts say.

No email, Twitter or Facebook. No buying online. No stock trades. No just-in-time industrial shipping. No real-time tracking of diseases. It's gotten so that not just the entire Internet but individual websites such as Google are considered critical infrastructure, experts said.

"Nobody would die, but there would be a major hassle," said computer security expert Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure in Helsinki, Finland.

If an Internet outage lasted more than a day or two, the financial hit would be huge, with mass unemployment, said Ken Mayland, a former chief bank economist and president of ClearView Economics. Eugene Spafford, director of Purdue University's Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, worries about bank runs and general panic.

Psychologically, too, it could be wrenching.

"I think it's easier to get off heroin," said Lisa Welter of New York City, who weaned herself for a month last year from just the social aspects of the Internet ? she still paid bills online ? and felt as if she was "living in a cave."

"There would be a sense of loss: What would I do with my time?" said Kimberly Young, a psychologist who directs the Center for Internet Addiction and Recovery.

On Wednesday, certain websites, most prominently Wikipedia, went dark to protest legislation in Congress that would crack down on pirated movies and TV shows. It was a one-day stunt. But it raises questions about our connectedness.

It is possible that hackers, terrorists, accidents or even sunspots could take down the Internet and cause areas to become cut off and unreachable, said Spafford, one of the foremost experts on computer security. The U.S. and other developed nations have multiple and robust routing systems that make it unlikely large areas would be affected, but smaller countries could be vulnerable to nationwide outages, Hypponen said.

The world only has to look back one year to Egypt to see what a sudden unplugging could spawn.

The government of Hosni Mubarak tried to stop protests in January 2011 by switching off the Internet. The shutdown halted businesses, banking operations and ? at the height of the demonstrations ? the ability of the protest leaders to organize and communicate with one another.

During the five days that the Internet was out, anti-Mubarak activists had to rely on help from abroad to spread their news and update Web pages. The outage harmed protesters' ability to organize or to counter government propaganda that portrayed them as agents of foreign powers, said Ahmed Saleh, who was in charge of managing the Facebook page that was credited with mobilizing thousands of Egyptians to take to the streets.

With the shutdown, the protests swelled as people unable to follow minute-by-minute what was going on took to the streets.

"No Internet meant that more people went down and realized that this was for real. The protests grew, and so did the anger against the government domestically and internationally," Saleh said.

He said the lack of Internet also allowed him to "live the moment" because he was not distracted with tweeting and posting on Facebook or analyzing the situation. This, he said, strengthened real face-to-face connections between people.

Nicholas Christin, associate director of the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, said that while a prolonged Internet outage would be uncomfortable, it might also bring out the best in people.

"I think you would find that people are very resilient," he said. "We would go back to the libraries."

Christin said he has gone a week without the Internet as part of a vacation. The first few days were rough, he said, but then "it was fantastic."

Christin did it by choice. Others had it imposed on them because of weather disasters or financial problems. They weren't nostalgic about it.

For three days, Jill Williams lost the Internet and power because of a California windstorm last month. Her small business requires her to use email to plan events.

"Those three days I felt deprived," she recalled in an email, responding to a Twitter request for anecdotes about going Internet-less. "The Internet has totally consumed my life, both business as well as pleasure."

Wyatt McMahon of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech University was having a hard time Wednesday just dealing with the shutdown at Wikipedia, which he leans on as a first step in his searches in his field, which combines statistics and biology.

If the entire Internet were lost, "that would be beyond catastrophic. Every single day, every single hour, if not every 30 minutes, I am using the Internet for work," McMahon said. "So if anything like that were to happen, it would bring everything to a screeching halt."

___

Sarah El Deeb in Cairo and Jocelyn Noveck in New York contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/science/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120119/ap_on_hi_te/us_world_without_internet

sopa marg helgenberger censorship wikipedia steven tyler blake shelton sopa and pipa bills

Summary Box: New London airport gets support

(AP)? WILL IT FLY? Support is growing for a new London airport in the Thames Estuary region of southeast England, the capital's mayor said Wednesday. Boris Johnson said the government was "increasingly interested" in the ambitious proposal, which would see a massive new air hub built where the River Thames meets the North Sea.

HEATHROW HEAVE-HO: The new airport would effectively replace Heathrow, London's current long-haul hub. The airport handles 65 million passengers annually, making it Europe's busiest, but longstanding plans to build a third runway there were scrapped following a drawn-out and acrimonious debate with local residents and environmental groups.

READY FOR TAKEOFF: The airport would be built about 40 miles southeast of central London. A proposal recently published by London-based Foster & Partners envisions a multi-runway facility on a marshy, sparsely populated peninsula at the edge of the estuary. It would be linked to London by a four-track, high-speed train line which would plug into the Channel tunnel rail link and a planned high-speed line to Birmingham, England.

Source: http://feeds.cbsnews.com/~r/CBSNewsGamecore/~3/AHjPDqlsE9s/

justin timberlake michael dyer meteor shower bachmann bachmann dan savage iowa caucus results

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Teri Whitcraft: The Million Moms Challenge: Helping Moms Around the World, One Story at a Time

The statistics are staggering: Every 90 seconds, someone in the world dies during pregnancy or childbirth. That's 1000 women and girls every day. Yet experts say more than 80 percent of those deaths are preventable with access to basic medical care -- and that doesn't include the more than 1 million babies a year who are stillborn because their mothers did not receive needed medical care.

How can you NOT want to help?

The "Sisterhood of Motherhood"

Last September, ABC News and the United Nations Foundation joined forces to launch the Million Moms Challenge, a call to action to engage millions of Americans with millions of moms in developing countries. Our goal: to create a vibrant community around the shared dream of a healthy pregnancy, a safe birth, and a baby who will survive and thrive -- basic human rights that all too often are simply out of reach for women in the developing world.

The idea was to transcend distance, language and cultural differences by tapping into the common experience of moms -- the so-called "Sisterhood of Motherhood." As Tina Sharkey, CEO of Baby Center, told ABC News: "Whether your child is born in a hut or in a private hospital room, that moment of profound transformation is the same. No matter what language you speak, what personal belief system guides you -- at our core, all moms want the exact same thing -- a happy and healthy family."

Watch Arianna, Sarah Brown and Donna Karan share their birth stories:

-First we partnered with nearly two dozen of the most respected non-governmental organizations around the world- including Save the Children, Partners in Health, World Vision, White Ribbon Alliance, ONE.org and mothers2mothers, to name a few.

We created a dedicated website (www.MillionMomsChallenge.com) featuring original video stories, news from our partners, and live, interactive posts from hundreds of mom bloggers (provided by BlogFrog).

And we hit the road, traveling to 16 countries and producing dozens of stories, ranging from investigative reports to feature stories to an hour-long primetime special with Diane Sawyer -- "Giving Life: A Risky Proposition."

"The Most Dangerous Thing A Woman Can Do"

For the primetime special on December 16th, 2011, we focused on countries where giving birth is literally the most dangerous thing a woman can do.

In Afghanistan, where more than half of marriages involve child brides, we met 15-year-old Miriam, married at 13 and about to give birth to her first child. Our producers travelled into Taliban-controlled areas to tell the stories of young mothers; one producer was threatened and stripped of his possessions at gunpoint during a trip near the Pakistan border.

In Sierra Leone, where one in six women dies in pregnancy or childbirth -- most often from postpartum bleeding -- we investigated why so few hospitals have the anti-hemorrhaging drug misoprostol, which can save lives for less than the cost of a postage stamp.

We also looked at success stories. Deborah Roberts reported on the so-called "Bangladesh miracle": how one of the poorest countries in the world achieved a 40 percent reduction in maternal deaths in the past decade, primarily by training skilled birth attendants and sending text and voice messages to pregnant women. And in Mexico, Dr. Richard Besser reported on the dramatic impact family planning has had on improving the lives of women and their children.

Baby Bumps and Twitterthons

But it wasn't just television. To engage a new audience, we worked with Baby Center to host the world's first virtual Baby Shower for Global Good -- an 8-hour "twitterthon" where more than a 1600 people won prizes and tweeted with top experts around the world. Total twitter impressions: over 94 million.

We launched the Imagine Me & You Facebook contest, where more than 450 women submitted photos of their "baby bumps" with a message for their little ones in an effort to win a rare photo session with renowned photographer Anne Geddes in her Sydney, Australia, studio . The contest sparked more than 40,000 "likes" and signups for the Challenge.

And we worked with the USC Institute for Global Health to develop an online video game "1000 Days," highlighting the crucial 1000-day window from pregnancy through age two when proper nutrition can determine a child's future.

An Outpouring of Support

In just 4 months, the Million Moms Challenge created an online community of more than 110,000 and raised more than $200, 000 (including generous contributions from Johnson & Johnson and Disney Baby). But it was our viewers who did the heavy lifting, donating more than $1.5 million throughout the entire year to organizations featured in our division-wide "Be the Change: Save a Life" series. It was clear that people wanted to make a difference -- and they did:

  • After Dr. Richard Besser met a woman in Bangladesh whose child died from diarrhea linked to dirty water, we asked viewers to help build a water tap for the island community. They donated enough to build 10 faucets and 20 toilets.
  • After Christiane Amanpour reported on malnutrition in Guatemala, where 80% of children are stunted, we asked viewers to donate40,000 to help children in one village develop normally. They gave enough to help the children of five villages.
  • Elizabeth Vargas met a group of students from Stanford University developing a low-cost incubator for premature babies in India. The resulting100,000 in donations helped propel the incubator into testing, and it is now being used to help babies in villages in rural India.

Then there were smaller -- but equally important -- milestones that had less to do with raising money than raising awareness here at home:

  • When JuJu Chang reported how Hope Phones was collecting old cell phones in the U.S. and recycling them so new phones can be bought for health workers in the developing world, the nonprofit went from collecting 200 handsets per month to 500 handsets per business day.
  • After seeing David Muir's report on a measles outbreak in Somalia and a vaccine that costs just 24 cents, 15-year-old Dimitri Godur rallied his eighth-grade classmates in Florida to raise money for the Shot@Life campaign -- enough for more than 4,000 doses of the "24 cent solution."
  • When ABC News and Duke Global Health Institute asked college students to send in their big idea for improving maternal health, eight graduate students from John Hopkins won a $10,000 prize donated by the Lemelson Foundation. Their idea: a "Protein Pen" that can screen for preeclampsia as well as other potentially deadly conditions for less than a penny a test. They recently returned from field-testing the pen in Nepal.

The Next Chapter

For the entire team here at ABC News -- including all the correspondents and producers who reported from around the world -- the year-long global health series has been an extraordinary project. And it's just the beginning.

As the network becomes more focused on political coverage during the election year, the U.N. Foundation will carry the momentum of the Million Moms community into its next phase , continuing to shine a light on the individuals and organizations helping to save the lives of mothers and children around the globe. And now, with the Global Motherhood platform at the Huffington Post, the idea of a vibrant global community -- that "Sisterhood of Motherhood" -- is becoming even more of a reality.

Here's to million moms reaching out to moms and children to create healthier communities throughout the world!

The Million Moms Challenge was part of ABC News' year-long, division-wide series "Be the Change: Save a Life", sponsored in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Teri Whitcraft is a Senior Producer of ABC News Special Units, and Coordinating Producer of ABC News' year-long, division-wide global health series.

?

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/teri-whitcraft/million-moms-challenge_b_1214617.html

miguel cabrera pay it forward pay it forward haunted houses favicon.ico favicon.ico footloose

Romney rolls out final SC primary ad (AP)

COLUMBIA, S.C. ? Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is rolling out his closing appeal for votes in Saturday's South Carolina primary with an ad that takes swipes at President Barack Obama's economic policies and makes tough-to-keep promises.

The ad shows Romney giving his victory speech in New Hampshire's primary two weeks ago with his family in the background and mixes images from campaign stops on factory floors around the country.

"President Obama wants to fundamentally transform America," Romney says. "I stand ready to lead us down a different path. This president has enacted job-killing regulations; I'll eliminate them. He lost our triple-A credit rating; I'll restore it. He passed Obamacare; I'll repeal it."

Romney promises in the ad to cut, cap and balance the federal budget. "If you believe that the disappointments of the last few years are a detour, not a destiny," he says, "then I am asking for your vote."

The ad is a stark contrast to the harsh messages Romney and a political action committee supporting him have been using for weeks in South Carolina, a state whose Republican primary winner has gone on to win the nomination each time since 1980. South Carolina's primary is expected to thin the field before candidates rush to delegate-rich Florida, which holds its primary Jan. 31.

Television ads, mailers and phone messages have been rough. Mail pieces, for instance, have called challenger Rick Santorum a hypocrite for raising his pay while in the Senate and said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich launched an attack on America's free enterprise system by questioning Romney's business deals.

Romney's ad sets up several challenging policy initiatives for a Romney administration. Cutting the deficit, much less balancing the federal budget and capping spending, has been an elusive goal for a deeply partisan Congress. While Romney and other candidates complain about regulations killing jobs, businesses have cited the overall economy and slow consumer demand more frequently than regulations as the top problems. That suggests that rolling back regulations may not easily lead to job creation.

When Standard and Poor's downgraded the nation's AAA debt rating last year, it came after months of warnings about gridlock in Congress over dealing with the nation's financial problems. In a time of rising economic challenges, S&P said the U.S. had weakened "effectiveness, stability and predictability" in its policymaking and political institutions. It is far from clear when and how those shortcomings will be repaired.

The new federal health care law that Obama pushed through over GOP objections will have key elements tested in the Supreme Court this year. Even if those elements fail, facets of the health care law are popular and may never be repealed, including ending lifetime maximum policy limits and extending coverage under a parent's health insurance policy to children until they're 25.

___

Follow Jim Davenport on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jimdavenport_ap

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120119/ap_on_el_pr/us_romney_ad

under armour pepsi crocodile orange county choppers real housewives of orange county hyundai elantra ancestry

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

French president: Credit downgrade changes nothing

French President Nicolas Sarkozy gestures during a meeting with Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, not seen, at the Moncloa Palace, in Madrid, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

French President Nicolas Sarkozy gestures during a meeting with Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, not seen, at the Moncloa Palace, in Madrid, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, right, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, left, talk before a join press conference after a meeting at the Moncloa Palace, in Madrid, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, right, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, left, attend a join press conference after a meeting at the Moncloa Palace, in Madrid, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, right, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, left, attend a join press conference after a meeting at the Moncloa Palace, in Madrid, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, right, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, left, shake hands after a join press conference after a meeting at the Moncloa Palace, in Madrid, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

MADRID (AP) ? French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday shrugged off his country's loss of its prized AAA debt rating, saying the downgrade by rating agency Standard & Poor's would change nothing.

The comments, his first since S&P lowered its score on France and eight European other countries on Friday, followed a successful auction by France of euro8.6 billion ($10.9 billion) in short-term debt Monday. The yields, the interest rates charged by investors on the debt, fell ? a sign investors still see the country as a good bet.

France won a further small reprieve Monday, when the Moody's agency confirmed that it would keep its top rating. However, the S&P decision could seriously impair Sarkozy's bid for re-election this spring.

Sarkozy told reporters he was unconcerned with the opinions of ratings agencies.

"We have to react to this (the downgrade) with calm, by taking a step back," he said at a news conference with the new Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. "At the core, my conviction is that it changes nothing."

Sarkozy won support from Rajoy for a new European tax on financial transactions being pushed by France and Germany. Rajoy's center-right government took power last month, and had not previously stated its position on the tax.

The French president said the ratings agencies' decisions would not affect his policies, though he did acknowledge that France has work to do, saying that its deficits and spending were too high and that its growth was too slow.

He also noted that two of the three major agencies still rate France at triple-A, the highest rating. Fitch confirmed the rating last week. The S&P move was especially brutal for France, one of the world's biggest economies and a financier of bailouts for smaller, poorer eurozone countries.

There are more government auctions in Europe this week, including longer-term offerings from France on Thursday, so the European debt crisis will never be too far from investors' minds.

The news conference began combatively when Sarkozy refused to answer a question about whether France's downgrade would affect its ability to lead Europe out of the crisis and if it had any connection with the meeting between the French, Italian and German leaders scheduled for next week being postponed.

Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have taken the lead in proposing solutions to the crisis and major decisions are often hashed out at their meetings ahead of European summits.

"You don't have the latest information," Sarkozy blithely told the reporter, apparently referring to Moody's decision on Monday. The reporter rephrased the question two more times, but Sarkozy again refused to answer.

Later on, in response to other questions, he confirmed that the three-way summit would take place in February and spoke about the S&P downgrade.

Earlier, Sarkozy met with Spanish King Juan Carlos, who said he's confident France and Spain would help Europe find a way out of the crisis.

The king said the two nations were "struggling together for the advance of a unified and prosperous Europe in solidarity that confronts the crisis with strength."

Rajoy's Socialist predecessor also supported the financial tax championed by Sarkozy, but was ousted from office by Spaniards angry about the country's hurting economy and high unemployment.

The European Commission has estimated that the tax could raise as much as euro57 billion ($72.2 billion) a year, funds that could be used to help reduce the substantial budget deficits crippling European economies.

For the tax to be successful, however, it needs to be adopted by as many countries as possible. Sarkozy has said it might be enough to enact it among the 17-nation euro countries. Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti prefers applying it across the full 27-nation European Union, but that would be more difficult because of U.K. opposition.

Part of the reason for the tax would be to raise funds at a time when governments are struggling with high debts.

Moody's cited France's economic strength as a reason for affirming its top rating but said bleak growth prospects in France and the region present "risks to the French government's fiscal consolidation plans."

"France, like other eurozone sovereigns, may face a number of challenges in the coming months. The need to provide additional support to other European sovereigns or to its own banking system cannot be excluded," Moody's warned.

Moody's said Monday it "will update the market during the first quarter of 2012 as part of the initiative to revisit the overall architecture of our sovereign ratings in the EU."

Sarkozy's challengers for the presidency have seized on the S&P downgrade as evidence that his policies are wrong-headed and ineffective.

It will be a bruising election battle for Sarkozy, a dynamic leader who has a strong international profile but is widely disliked at home. Leftists say he has coddled the rich, while many of those who supported him in his 2007 campaign say he hasn't fulfilled his promises.

___

Angela Charlton and Sarah DiLorenzo in Paris and Alan Clendenning in Madrid contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-01-16-EU-Europe-Financial-Crisis/id-7b99ed1bb71949039d24b5fbce134d9e

courtney stodden drake take care herman cain accuser herman cain accuser election day joe frazier where do i vote