Shorts (right)
Santorum says finances forced him out of the presidential race
In his first interview since ending his presidential campaign, Rick Santorum said Thursday that what pushed him out of the Republican race was his campaign’s dwindling bank account.
“We repeatedly went out there — sort of a David and Goliath — and were outspent by a lot of money, but we had a lot of other things going for us,” Santorum said during an interview with Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian advocacy group.
“Money is not everything in politics. But you do have to have enough to be successful, and we were reaching a point” where, Santorum said, the campaign was “frankly not in the position.”
“Someone — one of the old politicos when I got involved in this race — said the same thing, which is: ‚“Every presidential campaign ends for the same reason: You run out of money,”’ he said.
After losing the Wisconsin primary, Santorum said, “it was a situation where we simply didn’t have the resources to compete going forward.”
“You reach a point where you want to compete,” he continued, “but you have to be able to compete, and we felt we couldn’t.”
—Jim Rutenberg, The New York Times
Deal approved to curb the isolation of ill inmates
BOSTON — A federal judge on Thursday approved a settlement meant to guarantee alternatives to segregation for mentally ill inmates in Massachusetts prisons.
The settlement results from a lawsuit filed in 2007 by an advocacy group. It sought to stop Massachusetts from placing mentally ill inmates with disciplinary problems in small isolation cells for up to 23 hours a day, saying that doing so violated their constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The group, the Disability Law Center, sued the Massachusetts Department of Correction after 11 prisoners, including some with serious mental illness, committed suicide in segregation cells within a 28-month period. The suit described the experiences of numerous inmates in state prisons whom it said had engaged in self-destructive behavior while in solitary confinement without adequate mental health services. They included some who, according to the suit, were segregated for years at a time against the recommendations of clinicians.”
—Abby Goodnough, The New York Times
With higher earnings, Google announces 2-for-1 stock split
SAN FRANCISCO — Google is back on its game.
The search giant Thursday announced an effective two-for-one stock split, its first, as it recorded higher revenues and earnings for the first quarter.
Net income rose 60 percent to $2.89 billion, or $8.88 a share, compared with $1.8 billion, or $5.59 a share, in the same quarter a year earlier.
The company said revenue rose 24 percent to $10.65 billion.
The results beat analysts’ expectations. Analysts, according to First Call, had been expecting revenue of $8.15 billion. Analysts also focus on the amount advertisers pay for clicks on Google ads, a metric called cost-per-click, which dropped 12 percent from the quarter a year ago and 6 percent from the fourth quarter. But the number of paid clicks was up 39 percent from the comparable quarter a year ago and up 7 percent from the fourth quarter of 2011.
The stock, which rose more than $15 during regular trading to $651, rose slightly in after-hours trading.
—David Streitfeld, The New York Times
Egypt’s ex-spy chief emerges as presidential candidate
CAIRO — Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s former spy chief and briefly its vice president, had all but vanished from the scene. Since surrendering power to a council of generals on behalf of President Hosni Mubarak more than a year ago, Suleiman, 74, had appeared in public just once: on the ritual pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are asked to complete before they die, being pushed in a wheelchair.
Then this week, as Suleiman burst back into public view with a presidential campaign of his own, it became clear that he never went very far after all. Gatekeepers at intelligence headquarters still refer visitors to his office inside. He still rides in an official car, surrounded by military security to his luxury villa nearby.
His presidential campaign is also being managed by his longtime chief of staff in the intelligence service, apparently from inside its headquarters. And some say that may explain how Suleiman collected, in just 48 hours, the requisite 30,000 notarized statements of support to qualify his candidacy.
A former general, Mubarak confidant and close ally of Washington, he was a silent pillar behind the scenes of the old government. He fully emerged into the public eye only in Mubarak’s last days, when Mubarak appointed him to be his emissary to the opposition and his chosen successor.
Until this week, he seemed likely to be remembered mainly for the intrigue surrounding his short goodbye. He read a 30-second statement that Mubarak had handed power to a military council, with a burly military officer looking over shoulder — to help ensure he stayed on script, many assumed.
But that officer, legendary here as “The Man Behind Omar Suleiman,” was Hussein Kamal Sharif — the same chief of staff who is now managing Suleiman’s campaign.
With the military rulers set to turn over power after presidential elections beginning next month, Suleiman’s sudden re-emergence from the shadows of the fallen government has spurred fear — and, in some precincts, hope — at the prospect of a return of a new strongman. Rivals have accused his old-regime allies of plotting voter fraud to put him in office. Islamists have called for a large demonstration on Friday to protest his return.
—David D. Kirkpatrick, The New York Times