NEWS Even as the United States economy displays unanticipated resilience, with a healthy jobs report released on Friday, the outlook for Europe’s economy grows ever dimmer. As it does, the pressure builds on Europe’s most powerful leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, and her economic team to find a way to get the Continent growing again. But this puts Ms. Merkel in a bind, as she has to answer to German voters in September when the country holds parliamentary elections. While the European economy may be deteriorating at an alarming rate, the electorate here is still enamored of her as the Iron Chancellor, advocating the austerity policies that are rapidly falling into disfavor elsewhere, among economists as well as the public. Nick Kulish reports from Berlin.
For Iraqis frustrated with poor services, sectarian politics and violence, the governor of Maysan Province, Ali Dwai, provides a rare example of democracy’s potential. Mr. Dwai’s popularity, though, reflects something more than excitement for a hard-working politician. As the only provincial governor of Mr. Sadr’s political party, he represents the maturation of a grass-roots political movement that has sought to mimic Lebanon’s Hezbollah by fusing Shiite faith, military strength and a concern for the common citizen to build political power. Tim Arango reports from Amara, Iraq.
Government investigators have found that JPMorgan Chase devised “manipulative schemes†that transformed “money-losing power plants into powerful profit centers,†and that one of its most senior executives gave “false and misleading statements†under oath. The findings appear in a confidential government document, reviewed by The New York Times, that was sent to the bank in March, warning of a potential crackdown by the regulator of the nation’s energy markets. Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Protess report from New York.
Ten months after being pushed out as chief executive of Barclays, Robert Diamond is trying to be something other than the “unacceptable face of banking.†Despite all the headlines about his role running a bank at the heart of the LIBOR scandal, Mr. Diamond’s role in the matter was minimal, and perhaps wildly overblown. Unlike other chief executives who have lost their jobs since the financial crisis, Mr. Diamond was not ousted by his company’s board. He was pushed out by the British government â€" specifically by Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England. Andrew Ross Sorkin reports from New York.
A deteriorating economy in the European Union is expected to drive unemployment to new highs this year in countries including Spain and Portugal that already are feeling acute pain, the Union’s top economics official warned on Friday. The new forecasts stood in stark contrast with figures from the United States on Friday that showed that more new jobs were created in April than expected, which pushed the unemployment rate to a four-year low. While American job creation is still slower than in a typical recovery, the new data could ease concerns of a sharp slowdown in the U.S. economy. James Kanter reports from Brussels.
ARTS The photographer Garry Winogrand refreshed classic street photography in the 1960s and ’70s, influenced by (and influencing) the increasingly warped sensibility that had started to shape the broader culture. Using a snapshot style, he captured the nation’s unseemly nervous breakdown in stark black and white. Since his death in 1984 at 56, though, Mr. Winogrand’s reputation has waned. But one of the goals of an ambitious exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is to restore and clarify Winogrand’s place in 20th-century photography, to offer viewers the chance to re-evaluate Winogrand’s unruly and grand oeuvre. “Garry Winogrand,†which runs in San Francisco through June 2, is the largest Winogrand retrospective ever mounted and the first major United States museum show of his work since 1988. It is scheduled to travel next year to the National Gallery of Art in Washington (which helped organize it), the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Jeu de Paume in Paris Ted Loos reports.
SPORTS With its systemic corruption, fractious leadership, an entrenched code of silence and some of its members recently embroiled in a high-profile drug trial, professional cycling these days often seems to resemble organized crime more than sport. Fitting, then, that the cycling world will gather in Naples on Saturday â€" not for Camorra-like clandestine meetings, but to start the Giro d’Italia, the three-week Grand Tour that signals the start of the sport’s high season. Recent editions of the Giro have been short on star power, but organizers have managed to up the wattage considerably this year by attracting Bradley Wiggins, the defending Tour de France champion, to headline the 21-stage race that will span 3,405 kilometers, or 2,116 miles. John Brand reports.
