Social Democrats Claim Victory in Portugal

Pedro Passos Coelho, the leader of the Social Democrats, is expected to become the next prime minister, at the helm of a center-right coalition government with the conservative Popular Party.

In recent opinion polls, Mr. Passos Coelho had been leading José Sócrates, the Socialist caretaker prime minister, but by a narrower margin than in Sunday’s vote.

With about 80 percent of the votes counted, the Social Democrats had won 39 percent of the votes compared with 28 percent for the Socialists. The Popular Party, meanwhile, had 12 percent of the vote.

The result is expected to be welcomed by international creditors who had feared that a less clear-cut outcome could have extended the political squabbling over fiscal strategy that set off the collapse of the government of Mr. Sócrates in the first place.

Conceding defeat with only half of the votes counted, Mr. Sócrates admitted to having made “some mistakes” and also announced that he would tender his resignation as party leader. “This is my electoral defeat, and I assume complete responsibility for it,” he said on television.

Mr. Sócrates actually resigned in late March, when lawmakers led by the Social Democrats rejected his latest austerity package. However, he then remained at the controls of a caretaker government that was forced to request and then negotiate a bailout package with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund because of the country’s inability to meet its refinancing obligations.

Portugal’s bailout followed that of Greece and Ireland last year.

Luís Cabral, a Portuguese economics professor at the IESE Business School, said that Mr. Passos Coelho’s victory was “good news for Portugal’s creditors,” because the three-year financial assistance program negotiated last month by the European Union and the I.M.F. is “much closer to the Social Democrats’ political program than the losing Socialists’, especially in what concerns structural reforms.”

However, Mr. Cabral warned, it was too early to say whether electoral pledges made by Mr. Passos Coelho would translate into an actual overhaul of Portugal’s economy.

“One can only hope that the pressure created by the current economic and financial crisis will suffice to garner the political support required for a series of painful and unpopular but necessary reforms,” he said.

José Costas, a 36-year social worker, said that he continued to feel “ideologically on the left,” but had voted for the first time for the Social Democrats on Sunday.

“When you have hit the wall like our economy has, you have to accept that it’s time to gamble on a change of direction and give somebody new a chance,” he said.

As in regional elections in neighboring Spain last month, voters punished the governing Socialists for overseeing an economic slump that has also sent Portugal’s unemployment soaring to 12 percent.

In Portugal’s case, however, the prospects for a recovery are much bleaker, with the finance minister instead forecasting last month that the economy would contract by 2 percent both this year and next.

Furthermore, the economic crisis and ensuing bailout had made the vote “decisive,” José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission and a former Portuguese prime minister, argued earlier in the day.

Given the financial and economic woes of his country, Mr. Barroso said, Sunday’s vote ranked as the most important for the country since Portugal’s return to democracy in the 1970s.

View the original article here

Field Notes: Divorce Lawyers’ New Friend: Social Networks

Bar associations have been conducting workshops on how to navigate this often brazen new world.

“It has changed the way we do business,” said Gary L. Nickelson, a matrimonial lawyer in Fort Worth. “Before, we would hire private investigators, have opposing spouses followed, try to interview acquaintances and friends. We would strive forever to get evidence, and now people can’t wait to post on MySpace or Facebook who they are out drinking with. We just come along and scoop that up.”

Linda Lea M. Viken, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who has her own firm in Rapid City, S.D., agreed.

“Facebook has become an open book of people’s lives,” she said. “They write things as though they were having a conversation with one friend, so they say the most outrageous and private things. You can’t get better evidence than what comes from their own mouths or their own computers.”

A survey released last year by the academy found that in the previous five years, 81 percent of its 1,600 members had used information plucked from social networks.

Social networks, of course, are not the only electronic sources of evidence. Videos on YouTube, text messages, dating services, voice mail, cellphones, even Global Positioning System receivers and E-ZPass records can be gold mines of potentially damaging information.

“We had one woman who said her husband was beating her, and we found the E-ZPass records showing her crossing the George Washington Bridge at the precise time she said she was being beaten,” said Alton L. Abramowitz, a New York lawyer.

The things people post can be worse than any accusation of an angry spouse. For example, Ms. Viken said, a father seeking custody “had listed on his Facebook page that he was single with no children looking for a fun time.”

And if divorcing spouses do not sabotage themselves, their friends, real or on Facebook, can do it for them — either intentionally because they are taking sides in the dispute, or accidentally.

“John may be dating Susan,” said Randall M. Kessler, an Atlanta lawyer who is the chairman-elect of the American Bar Association’s family law section. “If they go out with friends, she does not tell them he is married. Susan’s friend takes pictures and posts them on Facebook, where his wife sees them.”

Indeed, though many people restrict who can see their Facebook profiles and pages, lawyers said they can find useful information simply by looking at their friends’ pages.

Still, Steven Tavlin, a private investigator who runs the Holmes Detective Bureau in New York, is skeptical about just how much social media sites can yield.

“I haven’t found it to be that much of a help,” he said. “Anyone who is cheating is not going to have that stuff out in the open anyway. I guess stupid people might.”

Mr. Tavlin, who said that he seldom takes a matrimonial case “unless it’s interesting,” added, “being anonymous is easy in a million different ways and it doesn’t come back to you.”

While finding evidence of wrongdoing by one party is no longer as crucial as it was before no-fault divorce laws were adopted across the country — last year New York became the last state to do so — contests over child custody or assets often require proof of blame.

“No-fault does not mean that fault is irrelevant,” said Kenneth P. Altshuler, a lawyer in Portland, Me., and the president-elect of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “It is when you are lying about money, when you show bad behavior in front of children, when there is untreated substance abuse. Facebook has made it very easy to show lack of credibility and that is what can win a case. Once you catch them in one lie, nothing else they say is credible to the judge.”

Still, it is not a free-for-all. There are strictly defined legal limits on what information can be lifted and what is in the private domain and can be obtained only through legal procedures like subpoenas, depositions and discovery.

“It is important how I obtain information,” Ms. Viken said. “If my client gives it to me and it has been obtained improperly, then I can’t use it.”

Yet a great deal is available with a subpoena, she said, citing a situation in which a client contended that his wife was playing the online game “World of Warcraft” when she said she was home schooling their daughter.

Ms. Viken subpoenaed the records from the company that tracks players for the game; they showed that on some days the woman played for 10 hours.

“It turned out that her version of home schooling was to put her daughter on another computer program lasting an hour and the rest of the time the daughter watched television,” Ms. Viken said. “Needless to say, that was a valuable piece of information and the father got primary custody.”

Most often, lawyers say they use the evidence they have extracted online to exert the threat of potential embarrassment.

“Once people start to think about the silly or irresponsible things they have said, or photos they have posted online, they don’t want to risk being defined in court by their online conduct,” Mr. Kessler said. “That makes them more eager to settle and that is a very good thing.”

 

Speaking Up in Class, Silently, Using Social Media

 

Now, Erin Olson, an English teacher in Sioux Rapids, Iowa, is among a small but growing cadre of educators trying to exploit Twitter-like technology to enhance classroom discussion. Last Friday, as some of her 11th graders read aloud from a poem called “To the Lady,” which ponders why bystanders do not intervene to stop injustice, others kept up a running commentary on their laptops.

The poet “says that people cried out and tried but nothing was done,” one student typed, her words posted in cyberspace.

“She is giving raw proof,” another student offered, “that we are slaves to our society.”

Instead of being a distraction — an electronic version of note-passing — the chatter echoed and fed into the main discourse, said Mrs. Olson, who monitored the stream and tried to absorb it into the lesson. She and others say social media, once kept outside the school door, can entice students who rarely raise a hand to express themselves via a medium they find as natural as breathing.

“When we have class discussions, I don’t really feel the need to speak up or anything,” said one of her students, Justin Lansink, 17. “When you type something down, it’s a lot easier to say what I feel.”

With Twitter and other microblogging platforms, teachers from elementary schools to universities are setting up what is known as a “backchannel” in their classes. The real-time digital streams allow students to comment, pose questions (answered either by one another or the teacher) and shed inhibitions about voicing opinions. Perhaps most importantly, if they are texting on-task, they are less likely to be texting about something else.

Nicholas Provenzano, an English teacher at Grosse Pointe South High School, outside Detroit, said that in a class of 30, only about 12 usually carried the conversation, but that eight more might pipe up on a backchannel. “Another eight kids entering a discussion is huge,” he noted.

Skeptics — and at this stage they far outnumber enthusiasts — fear introducing backchannels into classrooms will distract students and teachers, and lead to off-topic, inappropriate or even bullying remarks. A national survey released last month found that 2 percent of college faculty members had used Twitter in class, and nearly half thought that doing so would negatively affect learning. When Derek Bruff, a math lecturer and assistant director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, suggests fellow professors try backchannels, “Most look at me like I’m coming from another planet,” he said.

“The word on the street about laptops in class,” Dr. Bruff added, is that students use them to tune out, checking e-mail or shopping. He said professors could reduce such activity by giving students something class-related to do on their mobile devices.

Besides Twitter, teachers have turned to other platforms for backchannels, some with more structure and privacy. Most are free on the Web and — so far — free of advertising. Google Moderator lets a class type questions and vote for the ones they would most like answered. Today’s Meet, used by Mrs. Olson, sets up a virtual “room.”

Purdue University, in Indiana, developed its own backchannel system, Hot Seat, two years ago, at a cost of $84,000. It lets students post comments and questions, which can be read on laptops or smartphones or projected on a large screen. Sugato Chakravarty, who lectures about personal finance, pauses to answer those that have been “voted up” by his audience.

Before Hot Seat, “I could never get people to speak up,” Professor Chakravarty said. “Everybody’s intimidated.”

“It’s clear to me,” he added, “that absent this kind of social media interaction, there are things students think about that normally they’d never say.”

But the technology has been slow to win over faculty. It was used in just 12 courses this spring. Sandra Sydnor-Bousso, a professor of hospitality and tourism management, said Hot Seat did not mesh well with her style of walking around class to encourage a dialogue. “The last thing I want to do is to give them yet another way to distract themselves.”

In high schools and elementary schools, teachers try to exercise tight control over backchannels, often reviewing a transcript after class for inappropriate remarks. Even schools that encourage students to use mobile devices prohibit gossip during class.