NEW YORK - Dominique Strauss-Kahn (picture) resigned from his post as manager of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) late on Wednesday - saying he felt compelled to focus his energy on the sexual assault charges he faces - as reports emerged that the Frenchman was once a client of a notorious New York brothel operator, whose call girls had complained about him being too aggressive. According to a letter released by the IMF's executive board, Strauss-Kahn denied the allegations but said he felt compelled to resign with "infinite sadness" because he was thinking of his family and he also wanted to protect the IMF. Behind bars on New York's Rikers Island since Monday, the beleaguered French politician was scheduled to return to a Manhattan court early today to again ask for bail on charges he sexually assaulted a hotel maid - a move certain to be vigorously opposed by prosecutors. In court papers filed by his defence team on Wednesday, Strauss-Kahn said he had surrendered his passport and would not flee the country. His attorneys proposed posting US$1 million (S$1.24 million) bail in cash and confining him to the home of his daughter, Camille, a Columbia University graduate student, 24 hours a day with electronic monitoring. They had proposed similar conditions at an earlier bail hearing but added the promise of house arrest on Wednesday. A judge denied him bail on Monday. Investigators revisited to the penthouse hotel room and cut out a piece of carpet in a painstaking search for DNA evidence, law enforcement officials said. New York detectives and prosecutors believe the carpet in the hotel room may contain Strauss-Kahn's semen, spat out after an episode of forced oral sex, the officials said. One of the officials said that the DNA testing was being "fast-tracked" but added that the results could still be a few days away. 'He paid for sex too' Meanwhile, infamous New York madame Kristin Davis claimed that Strauss-Kahn had twice used the services of her call girls in 2006, before he took charge of the IMF, according to reports. "He paid in cash," Ms Davis was quoted as saying, adding that he paid about US$2,400 for each two-hour session. "The first girl I sent to him said he was aggressive and didn't want to be back with him again." She added: "Strauss-Kahn was rough and aggressive, however he maintained a certain level of decorum because he was dealing with an agency." Strauss-Kahn was reportedly referred to Ms Davis by Bosnian prostitute Irma Nici, who had been living in Paris and figured in the sex scandal which saw Mr Eliot Spitzer resign as New York Governor in 2008. Ms Nici also claims to have slept with David Beckham, who denies the allegation. Agencies
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Peter Risdon Says:
May 16, 2011 at 2:40 pm | Reply
The paragraph you quoted from ends with this sentence:
“According to the best-sited stations, the diurnal temperature range in the lower 48 states has no century-scale trend.”
That was a surprise given the tenor of this post: “… maybe this is the end to questions as to whether surface temperature increases actually exist.”
Did you mean that we can now say the answer to that is that surface temperature increases do not exist? Or that, pace Keenan in the WSJ, the data do not contain statistically significant trends?
andyrussell Says:
May 16, 2011 at 2:58 pm | Reply
I don’t think diurnal temperature range is very important. Do you?
What’s more, the “century-scale” bit covers some interesting detail. Before Fall et al., it seems that the only work on diurnal temperature range showed a negative trend from the mid-century to 1980s-ish. What Fall et al. found was that this has increased again since the 1980s. So there’s no “century-scale trend”.
But that tells you very little about mean surface temperature trends.
Mark Says:
May 17, 2011 at 10:45 pm
I have heard it claimed that the reduction in diurnal temperature range over the past few decades provides evidence that GHG increases are responsible for the warming. In that sense, some people think diurnal temperature range is important.
Incidentally, I don’t think Fall et al. were the first to find that DTR has increased since the 1980s. I read a paper that said much the same thing a few years ago.
Sorry for the lack of references to back up these statements. I’m a little too busy at the moment to chase them up.
andyrussell Says:
May 18, 2011 at 8:43 am
Ok, so I’m probably not giving DTR as much significance as it deserves.
My point is that I don’t really care about DTR. I don’t think I know anyone who has a particular interest in DTR. If this paper had been published by anyone else I wouldn’t have looked at it. It’s not very interesting. It’s just another paper on climate observations that fits in with the “consensus view of climate change” or however you want to put it. That’s useful, but not to me or most people.
If, however, the paper had shown what Watts has been saying it would show for quite a while now (i.e. that the postitive temperature trend in the surface station record in the US was an artefact of poor station siting) then that would have been very interesting. To me and to many other people.
But it didn’t.
Ben Says:
May 16, 2011 at 4:49 pm | Reply
So Peter… If the diurnal high and the diurnal low both rise by 1°C, you think this means there has been no warming? After-all, the diurnal range hasn’t changed! Others might draw a different conclusion.
Peter Risdon Says:
May 17, 2011 at 8:26 am | Reply
I understand diurnal range has significance, and the relationship between day and night time temperature ranges is important, especially with regard to the period 1950 to 1980 when the effect of man-made global warming, it has been argued, was masked by a cooling but revealed by the changes in the relationship between these ranges.
I further understand that this argument is based on the idea that human pollution caused this daytime cooling, that it affected the range of day time temperatures as well as the difference between night time temperatures which continued to show warming, and daytime ones that didn’t. This makes day time temperature range significant: if this is right it would be expected to show a variation that correlates with human activity.
But this isn’t my field; I’m just reading what I can in an attempt to understand as much as possible about an important issue and, for me at least, that means reading Watts and reading this blog. Just searching out stuff you’re already disposed to accept isn’t good enough. My comment was prompted by what struck me as a somewhat partial quotation and exasperation: I’m with Feynman when he said you should point out the problems with a theory, not just the things that support it.
[It's not really a "partial quotation" is it? That sentence you are interested in is stuck on the end of the abstract as a new paragraph and isn't really related to the 2 sentences I quote and which are related to the subject of this post. I'm not really interested in DTR and I doubt Watts was either. - AR]
At least Watts invites people with different views to post on his blog and has been at the forefront of attempts to cross the ideological divide, not least with Judith Curry.
Ben, of course you’re right. Andy, a century is an arbitrary scale, of course.
I’d still be interested in your take on statistical significance.
JMurphy Says:
May 17, 2011 at 12:05 pm | Reply
In what way has Watts atempted to cross “the ideological divide” ?
Ben Says:
May 17, 2011 at 3:16 pm | Reply
Peter, I encourage a critical (i.e. thoughtful) reading of Anthony’s blog but my god do you really think he’s “at the forefront of attempts to cross the ideological divide”? Anthony has done more to harden denialist thought than anyone, with the possible exception Marc Morano.
The “different views” he solicits are unthreatening fig-leaves.
andyrussell Says:
May 17, 2011 at 3:24 pm | Reply
I’ve got no problem with most of what Keenan says, although he’s not the first/only person to be saying these things. There’s a JoC paper from 2010 and it was one of the useful points to come out of the UEA email enquiries (i.e. working more with stats people). Not sure where the funding was supposed to come from for these new people though!
I suppose the bigger problem comes down to climate science covering so much stuff – you can’t just look at problems from a stats/dynamics/modelling/chemistry/radiation/whatever perspective for too long before a) not getting very far or b) needing to doing something you’ve not done before.