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Along with the four killed, eight people were injured when two jon boats — flat-bottomed boats often made of aluminum — crashed in the O’Connell Slough area of the river, where the water is 10 to 12 feet deep, before 2 a.m. Saturday. One of the boats was carrying 11 people; the other had a single passenger.

By Andreas Rinke

CHICAGO |
Sun May 20, 2012 1:13pm EDT

CHICAGO (Reuters) – There are weeks in the political life of Angela Merkel that were surely more pleasant than the last one.

Last Sunday, the German chancellor’s party suffered a big loss in the regional election of North Rhine-Westphalia. On Wednesday, she sacked one of her cabinet ministers, a rare move for her, after he led the party to the election defeat.

On Saturday, she looked isolated with her insistence on fiscal austerity – also known as “consolidation” -for the ailing euro zone at the G8 summit hosted by President Barack Obama at Camp David in Maryland.

And she might have been upstaged by the new man at the top table, French President Francois Hollande, who defeated her close ally, Nicholas Sarkozy, just weeks ago and ended the so-called “Merkozy” era in Europe.

To top off an already long list of unpleasant events, the German football club Bayern Munich lost the Champions League final against Chelsea from London on penalties, a match Merkel watched on the G8 summit sidelines.

Pundits may view this week as the first chapter of decline not only for the mightiest woman in Europe, but also for the German way of managing Europe’s debt crisis in recent years.

A grand coalition of leaders including President Barack Obama, Hollande, Italy’s Mario Monti and Spain’s Mariano Rajoy want to press her into a more flexible approach to buttress Spanish banks, tackle the Italian deficit and save a rapidly crumbling Greece.

But Merkel and her allies have quite a different view. The stress on “growth” as well as spending restraint is something she has been pushing for weeks, they say. Ultimately, cold fiscal realities could bring Hollande and his allies back down to earth.

“It is a great success, that all agree now that we should have both growth and fiscal consolidation”, Merkel stressed on Saturday with a look of satisfaction.

“Merkel pushes through fiscal consolidation”, the popular German Internet site “Spiegel online” said after the G8-summit.

The chancellor fiercely denies being isolated around the table of leaders at the U.S. presidential retreat.

She did get an endorsement from British Prime Minister David Cameron, and other leaders praised her emphasis on fiscal rectitude.

“I think the German chancellor is absolutely right that every country needs to have in place strong plans for dealing with their deficits,” Cameron told the BBC. “Growth and austerity aren’t alternatives. You need a deficit reduction plan in order to get growth.”

GROWTH PAINS

Hollande told reporters he “didn’t feel” Merkel was isolated. But her name was conspicuously absent when he said: “It’s true that growth was widely discussed and desired not just by myself, President Obama, but others like Mario Monti.”

Since the chancellor noticed her policy approach was increasingly attacked domestically and abroad as a cold “austerity policy,” she has chosen to use the words “growth” and “employment” much more often in public. She also stresses that it was she who pressed the EU-partners in 2011 to adopt a “euro plus pact” on competitiveness and growth.

But the harsh public reaction only changes the wording, not so much the policy.

One reason is that Merkel has got something most of the critics don’t have – a successful economic model. Germany boasts strong economic growth that has mounting weight in the European Union and an industrial sector now exporting more to countries outside the euro zone than to those within.

“Both Obama and Hollande know very well that the Western democracies simply don’t have the resources anymore for a spending policy”, a German government source said.

In Berlin, there is a certain conviction that Hollande will quickly wake up to reality and the limited room for maneuver, especially after parliamentary elections in June. In Merkel’s view, that should bring a more balanced approach.

As Merkel found out last year, the financial markets and the rating agencies can be her best friends in pushing for solid fiscal policy. Any dreams of a spending spree in a euro-zone country will be met by higher spreads.

Even if she was at times left standing alone at Camp David, Merkel did have the company of Obama, Cameron and others as she watched the loss of Bayern Munich in one of the cabins. “There was trash talk – and sympathy for Chancellor Merkel,” the White House told reporters.

(Editing by Mary Milliken and Christopher Wilson)

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What may be most surprising is how many of those arguing in his defense are prominent gay rights advocates.

With Mr. Ravi set to be sentenced on Monday, many of them have argued against the jail sentence prosecutors have recommended. They say Mr. Ravi is being punished for the suicide of his roommate, Tyler Clementi, although he was not charged in it, and that pinning blame on him ignores the complicated social pressures that drive gay teenagers to kill themselves. As repugnant as his behavior was, they say, it was not the blatantly bigoted or threatening actions that typically define hate crimes. Some fear that a sentence that overreaches might provide tinder to anti-gay sentiment — a New Jersey talk radio host complained soon after the verdict of the “gay lobby” railroading Mr. Ravi.

While Mr. Clementi’s suicide in September 2010 galvanized public attention on the struggles of gay teenagers, the question of how to punish Mr. Ravi has revealed the deep discomfort that many gay people feel about using the case as a crucible.

“You’re making an example of Ravi in order to send a message to other people who might be bullying, to schools and parents and to prosecutors who have not considered this a crime before,” said Marc Poirier, a law professor at Seton Hall University who is gay and has written about hate-crimes legislation. “That’s a function of criminal law, to condemn as general deterrence. But I think this is a fairly shaky set of facts on which to do it.”

In an op-ed article in The Star-Ledger of Newark this month, Jim McGreevey, who resigned as governor after declaring himself “a gay American,” argued that Mr. Ravi’s conviction “showed how far we have traveled from the hateful, homophobic past.”

“The criminal justice system worked, this time for a gay victim,” Mr. McGreevey wrote. “But there was something disquieting about the prospect of retributive punishment being meted out on behalf of a gay young man.”

Mr. McGreevey, who now counsels prisoners, argued that jail time would neither rehabilitate nor send a message. “Perhaps the long trail of gay history inevitably leads to this call for punishment,” he wrote, “but it need not.”

The discussion itself is causing some gay rights advocates discomfort. Richard Kim, the executive editor of The Nation online, who wrote after Mr. Clementi’s suicide about his own experience growing up gay in New Jersey, said he was wary that expressing opposition to a prison sentence would make him appear to link hands with those who accuse gay men and lesbians of seeking “special treatment” with laws against bullying.

“That’s not my argument,” Mr. Kim said. Still, he added, he does not think the verdict against Mr. Ravi was justified, and he does not think he should serve jail time.

“I haven’t seen anything to convince me it has any deterrent effect,” he said.

Mr. Ravi set up a webcam to spy on Mr. Clementi three weeks into their freshman year at Rutgers University, after Mr. Clementi asked to have the room alone so he could be with a boyfriend he had recently met on a Web site for gay men.

Mr. Clementi’s suicide three days later prompted an outcry from celebrities and politicians, and pushed New Jersey to pass one of the nation’s strictest anti-bullying laws.

In court, prosecutors used an extensive electronic record to show how Mr. Ravi had sent Twitter and text messages declaring that he had seen his roommate “making out with a dude,” and encouraging others to watch. The jury convicted Mr. Ravi on all 15 counts, including invasion of privacy, hate crimes and tampering with evidence after he tried to cover up his Twitter trail.

Dan Savage, a gay columnist whose video campaign, “It Gets Better,” began in response to other suicides of gay teenagers just before Mr. Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge, argued that simply locking up Mr. Ravi was a lost opportunity to talk about the other institutions and people “complicit” in Mr. Clementi’s death.

“What was he told about being gay growing up, by his faith leaders, by the media, by the culture?” Mr. Savage said. “Ravi may have been the last person who made him feel unsafe and abused and worthless, but he couldn’t have been the first. The rush to pin all the responsibility on Ravi and then wash our hands and walk away means we’re not going to learn the lessons of these kids.”

In an essay in Slate, J. Bryan Lowder urged against a prison sentence: “Unfortunately, we can’t lock the bully up, because the bully is in all of us.”

NOAA via AFP/Getty Images

This satellite image from Sunday shows Tropical Storm Alberto southeast of Charleston, S.C.