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Tensions between Britain’s government and police leaders flared Saturday over Prime Minister David Cameron’s recruitment of a veteran American police commander to advise him on how to combat gangs and prevent a repeat of the past week’s riots.

The criticism, led by Association of Chief Police Officers leader Sir Hugh Orde, underscored deep tensions between police and Cameron’s coalition government over who was most to blame for the failure to stop the four-day rioting that raged in parts of London and other English cities until Wednesday.

Cameron criticized police tactics as too timid and announced he would seek policy guidance from William Bratton, former commander of police forces in Boston, New York and Los Angeles. British police have branded the move misguided and an insult to their professionalism.

“I am not sure I want to learn about gangs from an area of America that has 400 of them,” Orde said of Los Angeles, which the 63-year-old Bratton oversaw until 2009.

“It seems to me, if you’ve got 400 gangs, then you’re not being very effective. If you look at the style of policing in the states, and their levels of violence, they are fundamentally different from here,” said Orde, a former commander of Northern Ireland’s police and deputy commander of London’s Metropolitan Police. Orde made his comments to the Independent on Sunday newspaper.

The riots row overshadowed a day of peace on England’s streets and continued progress in processing more than 2,100 riot suspects arrested so far, mostly in London, in unprecedented round-the-clock court sessions.

In England’s second-largest city of Birmingham, prosecutors charged two males with the murder of three men in a hit-and-run attack Wednesday, the deadliest event during the past week’s urban mayhem.

Both males _ identified as Joshua Donald, 26, and a 17-year-old whose name was withheld because of his juvenile status _ were being arraigned Sunday at Birmingham Magistrates Court on three counts each of murder.

The breakthrough by a team of 70 detectives came less than four days after Haroon Jahan, 20, and brothers Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31, were mortally wounded when a car struck them at high speed. The trio had been part of a larger group standing guard in front of a row of Pakistani-owned shops.

The killings threatened to ignite clashes between the area’s South Asian and black gangs, but the father of Haroon Jahan made a series of impressively composed public statements in the hours after his son’s death pleading for forgiveness, racial harmony and no retaliation.

Hours before Saturday’s murder charges were announced, the father, Tariq Jahan, told journalists at a Birmingham news conference he had received thousands of letters from well-wishers worldwide.

“I would like to thank the community, especially the young people, for listening to what I have to say and staying calm,” said Jahan, 46, a delivery driver for an electronics chain.

Police in London were continuing to interrogate several suspects linked to the riots’ two other killings: of a 26-year-old man shot to death in a car after a high-speed chase involving a rival group of men, and a 68-year-old loner who was beaten to death after arguing with rioters and trying to extinguish a fire they had set bad credit payday advance.

England’s forces of law and order have been on the defensive over their slow initial response to riots that rapidly spread Aug. 6 from the north London district of Tottenham to several London flashpoints and, eventually, to Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham and other cities with high gang activity.

But police leaders mounted a series of critical interviews Saturday underscoring their view that Cameron was jumping the gun by seeking foreign advice at a time when his debt-hit government was pressing ahead with plans to cut police budgets by 20 percent.

Leaders of the police unions in London and the northwest city of Manchester _ which dealt relatively harshly with rioters and quelled trouble there in one night _ stressed that Cameron needed to listen to their expertise first, rather than seek to apply lessons from America’s better-armed, more aggressive approach to policing.

“America polices by force. We don’t want to do that in this country,” said Paul Deller of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents more than 30,000 officers in the British capital.

Deller, a 25-year Met officer, accused the government of not being serious about following Bratton’s recipe for reducing crime.

“When Mr. Bratton was in New York and Los Angeles, the first thing he did was to increase the number of police on the street, whereas we’ve got a government that wants to do exactly the opposite,” he said, warning that planned budget cuts would mean 2,000 officers lose their jobs in London and thousands more nationwide.

Ian Hanson, chairman of the federation’s Manchester branch, said local officers knew better how to police their own communities than “someone who lives 5,000 miles away.”

Results of an opinion poll published Sunday suggested stronger public support for the police than for Cameron’s approach to the crisis.

The poll, commissioned jointly by British newspapers Sunday Mirror and the Independent on Sunday, found that 61 percent thought Cameron and his Cabinet colleagues were too slow to end their foreign summer holidays following last weekend’s outbreak of violence. Cameron returned to London from his break in Italy’s Tuscany region Tuesday, after almost all of the London rioting had passed.

And strong majorities backed greater support and resources for the police, calling for planned budget cuts to be put on hold. About 65 percent said British troops should be used to reinforce police in event of future riots, while even heavier majorities said police should be permitted to use water cannon and plastic bullets against rioters and impose curfews on unruly communities. All of those measures have been used to control street violence in the British territory of Northern Ireland but never in Britain itself.

The survey of 2,008 people, conducted Tuesday and Wednesday, had an error margin of 3 percentage points.

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Greece has banned short selling on the stock market for two months from Tuesday, after shares on the Athens Stock Exchange plunged to their lowest level in more than 14 years.

The bourse’s general index sank below the 1,000-point mark Monday, closing down 6 percent at 998.24 _ the lowest level since January, 1997 _ as financial markets were buffeted by worries over the U.S. economy following a downgrade of the country’s debt.

The slide was markedly more than the declines recorded in other markets in Europe.

Greece became the first EU country to seek an international bailout last year, when it saw its borrowing costs spiral out of control as investors doubted it could repay its debts. International creditors agreed last month to extend it a second bailout.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) _ Shares on the Athens Stock Exchange plunged Monday to their lowest level in more than 14 years, with the bourse’s general index sinking below the 1,000-point mark as financial markets remained spooked by a downgrade of U.S. debt.

The Greek index dropped 6 percent to 998.24 points _ the lowest level since January, 1997. That’s markedly more than the declines recorded in other markets in Europe.

Debt-ridden Greece became the first European Union country to seek an international bailout last year, when it saw its borrowing costs spiral out of control as investors doubted the country could repay its massive debts.

The financial crisis has also affected other eurozone countries, with Portugal and Ireland also receiving bailouts.

On Monday, Europe’s central bank is widely thought to have begun buying the depressed-bonds of Italy and Spain to calm investor fears that the two countries won’t be able to pay their debts.

Though that bond-buying effort appears to have worked in the short-term by reducing the two countries borrowing costs, stock markets around the world have been in retreat as investors respond to Standard & Poor’s momentous downgrade of the U.S.’s rating.

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Canada

OTTAWA—The Bank of Canada has left the key overnight interest rate unchanged at one per cent amid slower than expected U.S. growth, but acknowledged that it will “eventually” have to go higher.

Economists had widely expected the Bank of Canada to leave rates unchanged in the announcement.

The latest decision on interest rates comes amid a growing credit crisis in Europe and fiscal gridlock in the United States.

However, the Canadian economy has appeared to be on track with three consecutive months of job growth and signs of inflation.

The bank’s overnight target rate affects the prime lending rate at Canada’s big banks and in turn the rates for variable rate mortgages and lines of credit.

The central bank last raised rates in September 2010.

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The labour disputes at Canada Post and Air Canada have certainly caught the country’s attention. Stopping mail delivery and disrupting people’s travel plans, even for a short time, will do that.

Air Canada quickly reached a deal with its 4,000 striking customer service workers after the government threatened back-to-work legislation but it’s likely going to be a long, hot summer for the airline as several other unions are also at the bargaining table.

Meanwhile, Canada Post and its union face binding arbitration if the government has to pass back-to-work legislation to end the lockout It’s a messy situation.

One of the core issues in both disruptions is pensions. Get used to it. We are going to see a lot more disputes like these in the coming years. There is a clash of interests taking shape in our society. Employees are trying to protect what they regard as basic entitlements, one of the most important of which is pension plans. Meanwhile, corporations and governments, to an increasing extent, are realizing they can no longer afford the costs of Cadillac pension plans.

Both Air Canada and Canada Post are trying to cope with huge pension deficits, compounded in Air Canada’s case by the fact it now has more retirees than active employees to support them.

In both cases, management’s solution is to propose a two-tier system. Current employees can remain in the existing defined benefit (DB) plans, which guarantee a specific level of income at retirement — a guarantee the companies are obligated to fulfill if the plan runs short of money, assuming they are still solvent. New hires would be moved into a defined contribution (DC) plan, in which there is no income guarantee at the end. The amount of money each person receives depends on how much was contributed over the years and the investment performance of the money credited to each individual.

When it comes to providing a secure retirement, defined contribution plans suck. With no guarantee of income, there is no certainty. A stock market crash a few years before retirement could wipe out half the accumulated assets. It happened as recently as 2008-2009. No wonder the unions are fighting back.

Unfortunately, economic realities will probably defeat them. The private sector is increasingly turning away from defined benefit plans to embrace defined contribution plans or hybrids.

The 2011 Pension Risk Survey published by human resources consulting firm Towers Watson reported that 51 per cent of private-sector defined-benefit-plan respondents have now converted their plans to defined contribution for current or future employees. That was up from 42 per cent in 2008. A press release issued by the company said there is no indication the trend is relenting.

Towers Watson described the future of defined benefit plans as being at “a tipping point,” saying private-sector employers have “crossed a pension Rubicon.”

Ian Markham, Canadian retirement innovation leader at Towers Watson, added: “This year’s survey results show employers planning a conversion to DC are intent on doing so regardless of whether economic conditions improve, or a more sponsor-friendly legislative environment appears, or even in lieu of less dramatic changes to plan design or investment strategy.”

The upshot is that if you work in the private sector and are fortunate enough to have any kind of a pension plan (only 25 per cent of people do, according to Statistics Canada) it will likely be the DC type. This puts the onus on you to manage the money to best advantage. Unfortunately, many people have no idea how to do that.

I occasionally lead seminars for defined contribution plan members at which I explain how their plan works and how to use it to their best advantage. Most of the participants have no idea where to start. Many of them simply leave their contributions in a money-market fund or put it into five-year GICs.

In both cases, the returns are well below the level needed to build a healthy retirement fund. For example, one plan I looked at recently was paying less than 2 per cent on a five-year GIC while the one-year return on its money market fund was 0.96 per cent. That’s not good enough.

If you belong to a DC plan, you need to take control. Otherwise, you are going to be sadly disappointed when you discover how little income you’ll receive when you retire. Here are some things you should do.

Know the investment options. A typical DC pension plan will present members with a smorgasbord of investment choices — one I looked at recently had 29 options, including stand-alone funds, portfolio funds and GICs. Understandably, many people are overwhelmed when presented with such a complex menu. It’s no wonder they fall back to the familiar world of GICs.

There are no easy shortcuts. You have to make time to study the choices carefully or use a financial professional to do it for you. Over the years, you’ll be contributing tens of thousands of dollars to the plan — in fact it is probably the largest single investment you will ever make apart from your home.

Decide on asset allocation. Before you commit, decide on your asset allocation: the percentages of cash, bonds and stocks you want to hold in your plan. The less able you are to handle risk, the greater your emphasis on cash and bonds. Younger, more aggressive pension plan members should give greater weighting to equity funds to maximize returns but scale back the risk level as they get older.

Make changes as needed. Your first selections are not locked in. Except for nonredeemable GICs, you should be able to make changes in your pension plan portfolio whenever you wish. So check the performance of your plan, and of the individual holdings, at least twice a year. Replace underachieving funds with better performers — you should receive regular updates from the company that administers the plan.

Also, review the asset allocation at least once a year. If one of the components does exceptionally well, the added value will skew your weightings and you’ll need to rebalance. For example, if you have a target weight of 60 per cent equity funds and stock markets have a great year, as in 2009, you’ll probably find the weighting at year-end has ballooned to 65 per cent. At that point, switch some of the equity funds to bond or money market funds to get back to your original target.

Maximize your contributions. Some defined contribution plans allow you to decide how much of your pay you want to contribute, for example between 4 per cent and 6 per cent. Choosing the highest level will pay off big-time in the long run, especially if the employer is matching your contribution.

Let’s say your income is $50,000 annually and you have 30 years remaining until retirement. Your employer offers the choice of a contribution level of 4 per cent, 5 per cent, or 6 per cent, which the company will match. Assuming an average annual compound rate of return of 6 per cent, if you choose the lowest contribution level the value of the plan after 30 years will be just over $316,000. If you put in 5 per cent of your pay, that increases to $395,000. But if you choose the highest level of 6 per cent, the plan will be worth $474,000 when it comes time to stop work. The end difference between the lowest and highest contribution levels is $158,000 more in retirement savings!

As you can see, there’s a lot of money involved. That’s why it is so important to take the time to properly manage your defined contribution pension plan. It may not be the best plan around but if that’s the type you have, make the most of it.

Also read:

Why $1 million in an RRSP isn’t a pension

Freedom 45: I plan to retire in 13 years

Gordon Pape publishes the Internet Wealth Builder newsletter. His website is www.BuildingWealth.ca

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NATO pounded the area near Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s compound again before dawn Thursday, rattling windows in the heart of the capital with thunderous booms as smoke rose from the vicinity.

It was not clear what was hit, and there was no word on casualties. Government officials did not immediately comment on the strike. NATO warplanes have repeatedly targeted the area in and around the Bab al-Aziziya compound.

NATO launched its air campaign nearly three months ago under a United Nations resolution to protect civilians. What started as a peaceful uprising inside the country against Gadhafi and his more than four-decade rule has become a civil war.

Poorly equipped and trained rebel fighters have taken control of the eastern third of Libya and pockets of the west. The fighting had reached a stalemate until last week when NATO launched the heaviest bombardment of Gadhafi forces since the alliance took control of the skies over Libya.

NATO has been pounding Gadhafi’s military and government positions with increasing vigor and the rebels are again on the move.

Tunisian army official Mokhtar Ben Nasr said the number of Libyans fleeing has mounted in recent days, with 6,330 Libyan refugees crossing into Tunisia earlier this week. Dozens of Libyan soldiers also have defected to Tunisia by boat, the state news agency there reported Wednesday.

Britain’s prime minister has said that time is running out for Gadhafi’s forces, even as some senior military leaders within NATO have voiced concerns that the mission is straining the alliance’s resources.

“Time is on our side,” British Prime Minister David Cameron told lawmakers Wednesday. “We have got NATO, we’ve got the United Nations, we’ve got the Arab League, we have right on our side. The pressure is building militarily, diplomatically, politically, and time is running out for Gadhafi.”

In Washington, the White House insisted Wednesday that President Barack Obama has the authority to continue U.S. military action in Libya even without authorization from lawmakers in Congress.

Its 32-page report to Congress argues that because the U.S. has a limited, supporting role in the NATO-led bombing campaign in Libya and American forces are not engaged in sustained fighting, the president is within his constitutional rights to direct the mission on his own.

But the report appeared to do little to quell congressional criticism. A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the White House was using “creative arguments” that raised additional questions.

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The secretly taped conversations aired at the insider trading trial of Raj Rajaratnam, a one-time billionaire hedge fund boss, have given jurors a sometimes colorful dose of the go-big-or-go-home mentality at Wall Street firms.

Now the jury must determine whether the conduct caught on tape was criminal. Regardless of its decision, the highly publicized audio evidence alone seems certain to make an impression on high-stakes financiers and how they do business.

The wiretaps should “scare the hell out of anyone thinking about doing insider trading,” said Ed Novak, a veteran white-collar defense attorney in Phoenix.

For seven weeks, federal prosecutors in New York have played nearly 50 tapes of conversations between the 53-year-old defendant and fellow portfolio managers, analysts and executives at public companies, including some who have pleaded guilty to charges that they tipped off Rajaratnam.

Prosecutors accuse Rajaratnam, who was arrested in October 2009, of making at least $68 million by trading illegally after he started his now defunct family of hedge funds, the Galleon Group, more than a decade ago.

Defense attorney John Dowd has told the Manhattan federal jury in closing arguments that what they hear on the tapes is nothing more than his client discussing stock outlooks that were widely known among professional traders who pay attention to every scrap of information on the securities they follow.

But the defense focus on the intricacies of what constitutes material and immaterial or public and non-public information, and the finer points of when Rajaratnam received guidance from an in-house analyst versus one of the alleged tipsters “is going right past most jurors,” Novak said.

When the jurors begin deliberating _ possibly as soon as Monday afternoon _ Novak predicted, “They’re going to immediately talk about those tape recordings, and that’s where the case is going to be decided.”

One of the only defenses against the wiretaps is “don’t believe your ears,” said Jonathan New, a former prosecutor now in white-collar defense in New York. “That’s a very hard thing to sell.”

Prosecutors alleged in their closing arguments that Rajaratnam, who was born in Sri Lanka, was motivated by money and a desire to “conquer the stock market at the expense of the law.”

The gunslinger mindset of the Galleon chief and others, the government says, was demonstrated in a July 2008 conversation with admitted conspirator Danielle Chiesi in which they gloat over a blockbuster inside trade.

“But it’s a conquest right?” Rajaratnam says.

“It’s a conquest,” she says. “It’s mentally fabulous for me. … You’re a warrior. I’m a warrior.”

And there’s more, like the day in July 2008 when prosecutors say a brassy-sounding Chiesi called Rajaratnam to give him an inside tip that a stock price was dipping.

“They’re going to guide down,” she says. “I just got a call from my guy. I played him like a fine-tuned piano.”

Prosecutors say Rajaratnam taught Chiesi to cover her tracks when she was trading on secrets by moving money in and out of companies to imitate an innocent investment pattern. During an August 2008 conversation, she asks him if she should use the tactic with a computer chip maker whose stock she thinks might shoot up 30 percent once a secret’s out.

“I think you should buy and sell, and buy and sell, you know?” Rajaratnam tells her.

At a minimum, the sometimes brazen tone of the tapes shows that Rajaratnam and others _ while cautious with their email and instant-message traffic _ were uninhibited on phone calls. In another call, Chiesi muses that she might be under investigation and tells Rajaratnam she’s “glad that we talk on a secure line” _ a segment that drew muffled chuckles in the courtroom.

The exchange reflects a sense in the hedge fund culture “that the phone is a safe place,” said Eric Fisher, a New York defense attorney and former federal prosecutor. “And it usually is _ absent a wiretap.”

The behavior exposed in the Galleon case is still outside the norm on Wall Street, said Jonathan New, another ex-federal prosecutor and New York defense attorney. Still, he added, if federal authorities are seeking to send a warning, the securities industry is hearing it.

“There’s a concern on Wall Street that you have a very aggressive prosecutor in the picture,” he said.

The Galleon investigation that led to more than two dozen arrests and 20 guilty pleas has already led firms where employees have access to secrets about public companies to tighten policies and procedures, said Latour “L.T.”‘ Lafferty, a former federal prosecutor now practicing white-collar defense in a Tampa, Fla., firm.

“When you start seeing people in handcuffs doing the perp walk, that’s called one healthy dose of reality,” Lafferty said. “The government warns you against this type of conduct and everybody looks the other way until people start getting arrested.”

But Richard Scheff, a former Department of the Treasury official and defense attorney in Philadelphia, predicted that human nature would trump the case’s deterrence effect.

Decades of wiretapping by federal authorities in a variety of cases “hasn’t deterred a lot of people, and the reason is nobody thinks it’s going to be them,” Scheff said.

“What drives this kind of conduct,” he added, “is greed, and greed colors judgment.”

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From the time he was a child, Steven Bolduc knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur.

More than being his own boss, he also wanted to create something that could help his own community.

Originally from the Fort William First Nation near Thunder Bay, Bolduc grew up both on and off reserve, and ended up spending his teenage years in Hamilton.

Armed with two degrees from Brock University and University of Windsor, he worked as a procurement officer for Fortune 500 companies. He squirreled away his money before buying a Print Three franchise in RBC Plaza in 2008, launching the Aboriginal Printing Corp.

Bolduc, 40, who loves graphic design, decided the printing was the way to go.

Cities hoping for cash for new infrastructure spending came away short-handed in the provincial budget.

While the Liberals are continuing transfers like the gas tax and the ongoing uploading to Queen

Rates on long-term certificates of deposit have been creeping up.  That’s good news for savers, but does that mean inflation is bound to follow?

Rates on 5-year CDs have been rising for the past nine weeks, moving from a national average of 1.54 percent to 1.62.

Dan Geller of Market Rates Insight thinks that’s a sign that consumer prices are headed up, too.  “Long-term CD rates are the canary in the coal mine,” he says in a press release. 

He points to 2003, when both inflation and long-term CD rates began to rise in November. That “could be the same scenario we’re facing now,” he says.  It took another eight months for the Federal Reserve to begin pushing up short-term interest rates, its standard anti-inflation medicine.

Banks are trying to lock consumers into low-rate CDs now, in anticipation of having to pay higher rates later as the economy recovers and inflation resumes, says Geller.

Of course, anticipating inflation isn’t the only reason that banks raise rates.  Rising loan demand can also make bankers hungry for deposits.  And a .08 point rise in rates isn’t huge.

You can find Geller’s report here.

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