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PHOENIX – About a dozen people carrying guns, including one with a military-style rifle, milled among protesters outside the convention center where President Barack Obama was giving a speech Monday — the latest incident in which protesters have openly displayed firearms near the president.

Gun-rights advocates say they're exercising their constitutional right to bear arms and protest, while those who argue for more gun control say it could be a disaster waiting to happen.

Phoenix police said the gun-toters at Monday's event, including the man carrying an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, didn't need permits. No crimes were committed, and no one was arrested.

The man with the rifle declined to be identified but told The Arizona Republic that he was carrying the assault weapon because he could. "In Arizona, I still have some freedoms," he said.

Phoenix police Detective J. Oliver, who monitored the man at the downtown protest, said police also wanted to make sure no one decided to harm him.

"Just by his presence and people seeing the rifle and people knowing the president was in town, it sparked a lot of emotions," Oliver said. "We were keeping peace on both ends."

Last week, during Obama's health care town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., a man carrying a sign reading "It is time to water the tree of liberty" stood outside with a pistol strapped to his leg.

"It's a political statement," he told The Boston Globe. "If you don't use your rights, then you lose your rights."

Police asked the man to move away from school property, but he was not arrested.

Fred Solop, a Northern Arizona University political scientist, said the incidents in New Hampshire and Arizona could signal the beginning of a disturbing trend.

"When you start to bring guns to political rallies, it does layer on another level of concern and significance," Solop said. "It actually becomes quite scary for many people. It creates a chilling effect in the ability of our society to carry on honest communication."

He said he's never heard of someone bringing an assault weapon near a presidential event. "The larger the gun, the more menacing the situation," he said.

Phoenix was Obama's last stop on a four-day tour of western states, including Montana and Colorado.

Authorities in Montana said they received no reports of anyone carrying firearms during Obama's health care town hall near Bozeman on Friday. About 1,000 people both for and against Obama converged at a protest area near the Gallatin Field Airport hangar where the event took place. One person accused of disorderly conduct was detained and released, according to the Gallatin Airport Authority.

Heather Benjamin of Denver's Mesa County sheriff's department, the lead agency during Obama's visit there, said no one was arrested.

Arizona is an "open-carry" state, which means anyone legally allowed to have a firearm can carry it in public as long as it's visible. Only someone carrying a concealed weapon is required to have a permit.

Paul Helmke, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said people should not be allowed to bring guns to events where Obama is.

"To me, this is craziness," he said. "When you bring a loaded gun, particularly a loaded assault rifle, to any political event, but particularly to one where the president is appearing, you're just making the situation dangerous for everyone."

He said people who bring guns to presidential events are distracting the Secret Service and law enforcement from protecting the president. "The more guns we see at more events like this, there's more potential for something tragic happening," he said.

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said armed demonstrators in open-carry states such as Arizona and New Hampshire have little impact on security plans for the president.

"In both cases, the subject was not entering our site or otherwise attempting to," Donovan said. "They were in a designated public viewing area. The main thing to know is that they would not have been allowed inside with a weapon."

Representatives of the National Rifle Association did not return calls for comment.

Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090817/ap_on_re_us/us_obama_protesters_guns

HARARE, Zimbabwe – A woman pays her bus fare with 3 trillion in old Zimbabwe dollars — the equivalent of 50 U.S. cents. The collector accepts the brick of neatly folded bundles of a trillion each without bothering to count the notes.

"No one seems to worry, and it works," said the woman, Lucy Denya, a Harare secretary who says she's seen police officers using old notes to board buses.

The Zimbabwe dollar is officially dead. It was killed off in hopes of curbing record world inflation of billions of percentage points, and Zimbabwe has replaced it with the U.S. dollar and the South African rand.

Yet the role of the old Zimdollar, as it is known, remains in flux. It is still used, and has become another point of contention for the divided leadership of the country, now one of the poorest in the world.

President Robert Mugabe has called for the return of the Zimdollar as legal tender, complaining that most Zimbabweans lack the hard currency needed to buy basic goods. The central bank under governor Gideon Gono, a Mugabe loyalist, has acknowledged printing extra local money to fund government spending that fueled inflation.

But Finance Minister Tendai Biti, who joined the government as part of a power-sharing agreement between his Movement for Democratic Change and Mugabe's ZANU-PF party, has declared the local dollar indefinitely obsolete. He has threatened to quit if a return to the local currency is forced upon him.

"We are putting the tombstone on the corpse of the Zimbabwe dollar," Biti told lawmakers in a midyear fiscal policy statement. In a speech to business leaders, he said, "We are no longer printing our own money."

Biti said monthly inflation rose slightly in June to 0.6 percent, up from zero the month before. He blamed the rise on price hikes in property rentals, gasoline and other nonfood items. He also noted that GDP per capita has plunged from $720 in 2002 to $265 last year, reflecting the shortage of hard cash in the economy.

That shortage is not helped by the state of the global economy, on which Zimbabwe depends.

With the collapse of the country's agricultural economy after the seizure of thousands of white-owned farms beginning in 2000, an estimated 4 million Zimbabweans — many of them skilled — left the country to find jobs in neighboring South Africa and further afield. The so-called "diaspora dollar" became by far the nation's biggest source of hard currency.

But in the global recession, those inflows are diminishing, bankers say. In a typical case, a businessman's daughter in Britain e-mailed him in June that she was halving her monthly remittance of $400.

The independent Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce blamed acute shortages of hard currency on payments to buy imported basic goods previously manufactured in Zimbabwe, such as soap and cooking oil from South Africa.

Without enough cash no matter how they cut it, Zimbabweans survive on a mish-mash of currencies.

All the bus drivers can do with Zimdollars is give them back to other passengers in change for American bills. In one reported incident, a passenger pulled a gun on a bus driver who insisted on paying change in local notes.

Outside the cities, where hard currency can be hard to come by, Zimbabwe dollars are used like promissory notes in small transactions. And trillion Zimbabwe dollar notes, the world's biggest denomination bills, are a hit with collectors, selling briskly on eBay. In Zimbabwe, they change hands like tokens or IOUs.

Stores without small change in hard currency don't offer obsolete Zimbabwe dollars in change like the bus drivers do, but routinely provide candies and chocolate bars or "coupons" handwritten on check-out slips to be redeemed on future purchases.

Irene Gwata, owner of a small trading store in rural northwestern Zimbabwe, said hard currency has stopped filtering down to her customers in recent weeks. Locals trade goat meat, chickens and pails of corn for goods, she said.

She saw a village woman board a bus and pay with a live chicken trussed in wire for the 150-kilometer (90-mile) trip to Harare.

With characteristic Zimbabwean humor in adversity, Gwata said, "people wanted to know if she was going to get eggs for change."

Elizabeth McMillan and Melanie Patten

Halifax — The Canadian Press Last updated on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2009 07:36PM EDT

Federal New Democrats listened eagerly Saturday as members of the team behind U.S. President Barack Obama's historic electoral victory in November shared their winning strategies.

But New Democratic Leader Jack Layton and some delegates attending the annual convention in Halifax played down any link between the party and Democrats south of the border, despite a proposal to drop the word “New” from the NDP's name.

“We're very, very distinct from the Democratic party in the United States,” said Mariano Klimowicz, a 51-year-old New Democrat from Windsor, Ont. “We're more socialist-minded, more program-minded.”

Mr. Klimowicz, president of the riding association for Windsor West, said the proposal is not about identifying with the Americans.

“People don't understand what the (NDP) stands for when you're just using an acronym,” said Mr. Klimowicz, who helped author a resolution to change the party's name.

“It was very important for us to use the word Democrat, Democratic party. I think that people would get more of an idea of the progressive things we do ... across the country.”

Delegates were expected to vote on the name change Sunday, but party officials said there might not be enough time to introduce the resolution.

On Saturday, delegates heard from Marshall Ganz, a political organizer with Obama's campaign. Betsy Myers, the campaign's chief operating officer, also spoke.

Mr. Ganz recalled a time when few people believed Mr. Obama would become the next president.

“In January of 2007, nobody thought a black man with a funny name had a ghost of a chance of becoming president of the United States,” he said.

An army of organizers and volunteers played a pivotal role in changing that attitude, said Mr. Ganz.

Speaking to reporters, Ms. Myers said Mr. Obama's campaign took advantage of the Internet to spread its message, but the campaign team also used traditional methods.

For example, no event was too small for Mr. Obama to attend, she said.

“Barack Obama worked his tail off,” Ms. Myers said. “He never let up.”

There were echoes of Mr. Obama's themes during the NDP's election campaign last fall. Party staffers conceded that some ideas had been lifted from the Democrats.

Leigh Borden, an NDP delegate from Newfoundland, said New Democrats can learn from the success of Mr. Obama's campaign without mimicking U.S. Democrats.

“New Democrats are social democrats first and foremost, and I don't think that the Democrats in the United States necessarily are,” said Ms. Borden, 31. “It's more about embracing the strategies and the hope.”

Mr. Layton was reluctant to say whether his party is trying to tap into Mr. Obama's success and elicit comparisons with the Democrats.

“I sure was excited by Obama's victory, but then again, I was really worried where George Bush was taking the country,” Mr. Layton said in a recent interview.

“We don't agree on everything .... But I think it would be fair to say that it's been good for the world that we have a new administration and direction in Washington, and we'd like to see a new direction here in Canada.”

Gord Bedient, a delegate from Saskatoon, said New Democrats could learn a few things from the Americans.

“It's how the Obama administration got down to the grassroots level, how they connected,” said Mr. Bedient, an electrician. “I think that's what we have to do.”

Several delegates said they were pleased with the federal NDP's slow but steady progress, but agreed the party needed to communicate its message more clearly at a grassroots level if it is to make an electoral breakthrough.

Julius Arscott, 26, said the party needs to be more leftist to attract voters.

But the Toronto resident has no illusions of a sweeping success in the next election.

“Do I think Jack Layton is going to be the next prime minister? Probably not.”

Pollster Jeff Walker said New Democrats have to forge deeper connections with working-class, low-wage earners outside of the manufacturing sector.

“There's a group, the core group of NDP supporters, that are from those kind of traditional, manufacturing sector (and) other kinds of sectoral organizations,” he said.

“But for lots of people in the same socio-economic group, they haven't got a strong affinity with the NDP.”

Mr. Walker said taking a different approach could also broaden the NDP's appeal.

“When they get into the realm of talking only about taxation, or talking only about how companies are bad as a kind of default proposition, I think a lot of people turn off to that kind of message.”

source: www.theglobeandmail.com