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What Should the Anti-War Movement Do Now?
A Proposal from the ANSWER Coalition
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.actionsf.org
sf@internationalanswer.org
Meetings Tuesdays, 7:00 p.m.
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
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The Bases Are Loaded
Video of the Week
Alternet Focus
Will the U.S. ever leave Iraq? Official policy promises an eventual departure, while warning of the dire consequences of a "premature" withdrawal. But while Washington equivocates, facts on the ground tell another story. Independent journalist Dahr Jamail, and author Chalmers Johnson, are discovering that military bases in Iraq are being consolidated from over a hundred to a handful of "megabases" with lavish amenities. Much of what is taking place is obscured by denials and quibbles over the definition of "permanent." The Bases Are Loaded covers a wide range of topics. Gary Hart, James Goldsborough, Nadia Keilani, Raed Jarrar, Bruce Finley Kam Zarrabi and Mark Rudd all add their observations about the extent and purpose of the bases in Iraq.
http://www.alternatefocus.org/
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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Stop the Blue Angels!
Write to the Board of Supervisors today and demand they be banned from our skies!
Here is my letter:
Dear Supervisors,
I am writing to all of you although I live in Bernal Heights. The Blue Angels fly and terrorize all of us in this city and in the Bay Area. Lethal weapons flying close to the ground right over our heads is neither celebratory nor fun. The noise is deafening--and no one can avoid it by choice--just as we can't avoid the war on Iraq and Afghanistan by choice--so much for our "democracy" that ignores the voice of its people!
We shouldn't have to plead with our supervisors to carry out what is surely the will of the people of San Francisco who have already voted twice to end the war and the military recruitment in our city.
We, the people, have made our wishes clear already. We are against the war; against the military industrial complex that is the U.S. Military that is personified by the Blue Angels--the "Angels of Death."
That our war planes are the fastest and that our pilots are the best trained to bring death and destruction does not comfort us or make us proud. It is an abomination and a condemnation of our government and its brutal, world war, domination plan!
And if this isn't enough, the Blue Angels' "performances" are wrought with danger already resulting in 26 fatalities. How can this threat to the wellbeing of the people of San Francisco be considered fun entertainment?
There is no excuse for their presence in our air! They should all be grounded permanently.
Sincerely,
Bonnie Weinstein
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-824-8730
Here is the list of Supervisors:
District 1
Jake McGoldrick
Phone: (415) 554-7410
Fax: (415) 554-7415
Email: Jake.McGoldrick@sfgov.org
District 2
Michela Alioto-Pier
Phone: (415) 554-7752
Fax: (415) 554-7843
Email: Michela.Alioto-Pier@sfgov.org
District 3
Aaron Peskin
Phone: (415) 554-7450
Fax: (415) 554-7454
Email: Aaron.Peskin@sfgov.org
District 4
Ed Jew
Phone: (415) 554-7460
Fax: (415) 554-7432
Email: Ed.Jew@sfgov.org
District 5
Ross Mirkarimi
Phone: (415) 554-7630
Fax: (415) 554-7634
Email: Ross.Mirkarimi@sfgov.org
District 7
Sean Elsbernd
Phone: (415) 554-6516
Fax: (415) 554-6546
Email: Sean.Elsbernd@sfgov.org
District 8
Bevan Dufty
Phone: (415) 554-6968
Fax: (415) 554-6909
Email: Bevan.Dufty@sfgov.org
District 9
Tom Ammiano
Phone: (415) 554-5144
Fax: (415) 554-6255
Email: Tom.Ammiano@sfgov.org
District 10
Sophie Maxwell
Phone: (415) 554-7670
Fax: (415) 554-7674
Email: Sophie.Maxwell@sfgov.org
District 11
Gerardo C. Sandoval
Phone: (415) 554-6975
Fax: (415) 554-6979
Email: Gerardo.Sandoval@sfgov.org
I suggest you send a copy to our Mayor:
Gavin Newsom
gavin.newsom@sfgov.org
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Trove of F.B.I. Files on Lawyers Guild Shows Scope of Secret Surveillance
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
June 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/25/nyregion/25archives.html
2) Delphi Deal Is Blow to Jobs Bank
By NICK BUNKLEY
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/business/25cnd-delphi.html?ref=business
3) Doubting the Police
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 26, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/opinion/26herbert.html?hp
4) Three Bad Rulings
NYT Editorial
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/opinion/26tue1.html?hp
5) A Plot to Assassinate Castro Was Approved By CIA Director Allen Dulles
By Amy Zegart
June 26, 2007, 2:19 pm
http://washington.blogs.nytimes.com/
6) New Scrutiny as Immigrants Die in Custody
By NINA BERNSTEIN
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26detain.html?ref=us
7) Vote Against Banner Shows Divide on Speech in Schools
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/washington/26speech.html
8) Delphi Workers May Give Up Their Layoff-Pay Benefit
"Pay for newly hired employees would start at $14 an hour. Delphi originally proposed cutting wages to $12.50 an hour."
By NICK BUNKLEY
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/business/26auto.html
9) New Poll Finds That Young Americans Are Leaning Left
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and MEGAN THEE
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27poll.html?hp
10) Gitmos Across America
MYT Editorial
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/opinion/27weds1.html?hp
11) Half the World Soon to Be in Cities, U.N. Reports
By CELIA W. DUGGER
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/world/27cnd-population.html?hp
12) Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts
By GARDINER HARRIS
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/health/psychology/27doctors.html?ref=us
13) Workers Split With Bosses on Leave Act, Survey Finds
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27leave.html
14) Worthy Goal of Flawed Bill: Aiding Unions
By DAVID LEONHARDT
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/business/27leonhardt.html?ref=business
15) 2 Oil Firms Are Defiant in Venezuela
By SIMON ROMERO and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/business/worldbusiness/27oil.html?ref=business
16) Scraping By With a South Dakota Tribe
By MATT GROSS
June 27, 2007
http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/travel/27frugal.html
17) Fuel Rationing in Iran Prompts Lines and Protests
By NAZILA FATHI
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/world/middleeast/27cnd-iran.html?hp
18) In West Bank, Hamas Is Silent but Never Ignored
By IAN FISHER
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/world/middleeast/28westbank.html?ref=world
19) Likely Spread of Deserts to Fertile Land Requires Quick
Response, U.N. Report Says
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/world/28deserts.html?ref=world
20) 5 Charged in Planting of Devices at School
By NATE SCHWEBER
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/nyregion/28evacuate.html
21) Going Backwards: US Jail, Prison Popluation Has Biggest Rise in 6 Years
by James Vicini
Published on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 by Reuters
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/27/2147/
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1) Trove of F.B.I. Files on Lawyers Guild Shows Scope of Secret Surveillance
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
June 25, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/25/nyregion/25archives.html
One entry, dated April 14, 1954, was about I. F. Stone, who was described as being a writer from New York. Mr. Stone, it was noted, condemned Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s “persecution of innocent citizens” and likewise the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate’s corresponding committee.
Another on Oct. 24, 1966, noted that as a result of a F.B.I.-approved counterintelligence operation, Richard Lawrence Davis, who was running for a seat on the state committee of the Michigan District Communist Party, was cast under a cloud of suspicion as part of an effort to sow division in the group.
And an entry on Feb. 20, 1974, described how a source had penetrated the Revolutionary Union in Baltimore and had been able to participate in forming a new chapter of the party in Washington, D.C. The source, it said, also had a close personal relationship with Dana Beal, a leader of the Yippies, and provided information on their activities.
From 1940 to 1975, thousands of reports like these were part of extensive files compiled by the F.B.I. while it carried out a clandestine surveillance campaign on the National Lawyers Guild, an organization founded in New York in 1937 and associated with the labor movement and liberal causes.
They are among a trove of documents that archivists are poring over for the first time. The files provide a detailed history of the lawyers guild and include memos to and from the office of J. Edgar Hoover, internal F.B.I. analysis of the organization, typed and handwritten reports from covert informants and papers identifying people used by the agency to spy on the guild and other groups.
As part of a lawsuit filed in 1977 by lawyers in the New York City chapter of the guild, the F.B.I. turned over copies of roughly 400,000 pages of its files on the group.
Under a 1989 settlement, the original documents are sealed until 2025, when they will be given to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington. But the copies were donated by the guild’s lawyers in 1997 to the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University with the understanding that they could be made available to the public this year.
The F.B.I. reports, some of which were reviewed recently by this reporter, include information about future members of Congress, law professors and journalists.
Although he had not seen the documents, Richard Gid Powers, a historian at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the author of books about the F.B.I. and Mr. Hoover, said, “These records would show how the F.B.I. is interested from the very outset in people critical of its operations.”
The surveillance operation used wiretaps and counterintelligence strategies to peer into the internal affairs of the guild and the lives of its members, whose clients included Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the so-called Hollywood Ten, a group of directors, producers and screenwriters who refused to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
“It is an extremely significant archive,” said Dr. Michael Nash, who heads the Tamiment Library and Wagner Archive. “In many respects, the F.B.I. has done a very good job in documenting the National Lawyers Guild relationships with the movements that shaped progressive politics in the United States from the 1930s through the 1970s.”
The F.B.I.’s surveillance of the guild was part of a broad monitoring operation mounted by the agency under Mr. Hoover against groups and individuals it deemed seditious, like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The F.B.I. insisted that the guild was rife with communists who were directed by Moscow. Although some early guild members had been communists, there was scant evidence to show that the group was controlled by the Communist Party.
The surveillance spanned the administrations of seven presidents even though the Justice Department determined in 1958 and 1972 that the guild was not subversive or criminal.
Thousands of people were drawn into the inquiry’s orbit, whether as targets or peripheral figures, and the files provide an unusually revealing window into efforts that often focused on law-abiding citizens. The files include mentions of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the N.A.A.C.P., Students for a Democratic Society and Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
There was an F.B.I. report in 1954 on a meeting of the Chicago Committee for Academic and Professional Freedom describing the event as a “hit McCarthy rally,” attended by Earl B. Dickerson of the National Lawyers Guild and Mr. Stone. No unlawful activity was noted.
Another government document from 1964, stamped “confidential,” cites John Conyers Jr., now a congressman from Michigan and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The report says that Mr. Conyers had discussed a campaign for public office and a recent visit to Mississippi where he was said to have participated in civil rights activities.
Some reports detail how F.B.I. agents used ruses and deception to attack political opponents. In 1966, a memo from Mr. Hoover’s office instructed agents to derail the electoral efforts of George W. Crockett Jr., the guild vice president, who was running for a judgeship in Detroit.
Soon after, the agency sought to discredit him by linking him to the Communist Party. Agents wrote a letter under a false name assailing Mr. Crockett and mailed it to a right-leaning organization. Unaware of the true source of the letter, the group disseminated fliers emblazoned with a hammer and sickle and calling Mr. Crockett an “enemy collaborator.” F.B.I. agents then sent the fliers to political committees, the state bar association, unions and newspapers.
Still, Mr. Crockett won the election and later served 11 years as a congressman.
The files also identify several secret informants who were assigned code numbers by the F.B.I. One of the more well-known informants was a man named John Rees, who was paid by the F.B.I. and used an alias to masquerade as a member of left-leaning groups in the 1960s and 1970s while compiling secret intelligence newsletters about the groups that he circulated to law enforcement agencies.
His wife, Louise Rees, who also used a bogus identity, got a secretarial job with the guild. She reported to the F.B.I. about legal strategies developed by guild lawyers and was recommended for a raise in one F.B.I. document that described her as a valuable source.
Heidi Boghosian, the executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, said the guild was still sometimes the subject of investigations.
In 2004, the F.B.I. issued a subpoena to Drake University in Iowa seeking records about an antiwar conference held by a guild chapter there. And surveillance documents by the New York Police relating to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, which were recently unsealed by a federal judge, included references to the guild.
“We work with the assumption that everything we do is being monitored by the government,” Ms. Boghosian said. “Unfortunately, we’ve become used to surveillance.”
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2) Delphi Deal Is Blow to Jobs Bank
By NICK BUNKLEY
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/business/25cnd-delphi.html?ref=business
DETROIT, June 25 — Unionized workers at the Delphi Corporation, the big auto parts supplier, could vote this week to throw out the jobs bank, the longtime program that lets them continue receiving most of their pay after being laid off.
If so, the jobs bank, which critics have held up as the epitome of the American auto industry’s outdated and inefficient labor practices, could be in its last months at all three Detroit automakers, too.
Elimination of the jobs bank is one provision of a tentative agreement signed last week by the United Automobile Workers union, Delphi and Delphi’s former parent, General Motors, after nearly two years of divisive negotiations. The agreement replaces the jobs bank — which gives laid-off employees 95 percent of their base pay — with $1,500 in severance pay for every month of service, to a maximum of $40,000, according to a 46-page memorandum of understanding that details the deal.
The memorandum was posted online today by the Soldiers of Solidarity, a faction of the U.A.W. that opposes the agreement.
Local U.A.W. chapters held meetings today to discuss the agreement, and Delphi’s 17,000 U.A.W.-represented workers are expected to vote on the deal later in the week. Labor experts say ratification of the agreement could force the union to make similar concessions as it negotiates a new labor contract with Detroit’s automakers this summer.
“The jobs bank doesn’t have much of a future,” said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “The U.A.W. will have an extremely difficult time getting the Big Three to preserve anything that it had to give up with Delphi.”
A Goldman Sachs analyst, Robert Barry, cited a greater likelihood that the union will give significant concessions to the automakers in upgrading G.M.’s stock to “buy” from “neutral” today. Shares of G.M. rose 81 cents, or 2.3 percent, to $36.26 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
“We think G.M. can make a compelling case to U.A.W. members that material wage and/or benefit cuts are needed,” Mr. Barry wrote in a note to clients. “And we suspect members and retirees are increasingly amenable to such cuts.”
The tentative agreement at Delphi provides for considerable wage cuts, a demand that the company had made since filing for bankruptcy protection in October 2005. The hourly pay of Delphi’s highest-paid employees — about 4,000 people hired before G.M. spun off the company in 1999 — would decrease to $14.50 to $18, from about $27 today.
In exchange for accepting the lower wages, those workers would receive three annual “buy-down” payments of $35,000, for a total of $105,000.
Workers also would be offered as much as $140,000 to leave their jobs voluntarily and give up all benefits except their pension. Those already eligible to retire could accept an incentive of $35,000 to retire with full benefits.
Similar options, with the exception of the buy-downs, were offered to employees at G.M. and the Ford Motor Company last year; more than 65,000 accepted.
The agreement would let Delphi close or sell all but four of its 18 plants, according to the memorandum signed last week. The company would maintain operations in Rochester and Lockport, N.Y.; Grand Rapids, Mich.; and Kokomo, Ind. Plants in Flint and Saginaw, Mich., and Dayton, Ohio, would be transferred back to G.M.
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3) Doubting the Police
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 26, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/opinion/26herbert.html?hp
The woman was reluctant to let her name be used. She said she had a teenage son and was afraid that he might be harassed by the police. But her desire to have the truth come out overcame her fears.
“You can use my name,” she told me, “because I did not like what the police did to those kids. My name is Greer Martin.”
Ms. Martin was standing outside her home on a quiet, tree-lined block of Putnam Avenue in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. This was the block on which, a few weeks ago, the police closed in on a large group of young men, women and children who were walking toward a subway station, on their way to a wake for a friend who had been murdered.
Thirty-two of the young people, including a 13-year-old, were arrested. Most were charged with unlawful assembly and disorderly conduct. Commissioner Ray Kelly and others in the Police Department have been spreading the word that these youngsters had been out of control, walking on top of cars and illegally blocking traffic in the street and on the sidewalk.
It does not appear that any of that was true.
The arrests occurred right outside Ms. Martin’s first-floor windows. “I was shocked beyond shock,” she said. “My windows were open, and it didn’t look like the kids had done anything wrong. The police handcuffed them and lined them up right there, at the beginning of my fence. One young lady was crying, but they didn’t resist in any way.”
She said she asked a detective why the young people were being arrested. “He told me they were trying to defuse a situation,” she said. “He said they were going to take the kids in and have a talk with them.”
A man named Conroy, who asked that his last name not be used, said he witnessed the entire incident. He lives across the street from Ms. Martin, and his 2007 Chevrolet Suburban was parked on the same side of the street that the kids were walking along when they were arrested.
He also said he was shocked by the police action. “The kids weren’t doing anything wrong,” he said.
I asked if anyone had been walking on top of cars. Conroy laughed and gestured toward his gleaming black vehicle. “Don’t you think if they had been climbing on top of cars, I would have noticed?”
He pulled out his cellphone to show me photos of some of the youngsters handcuffed and in police custody. I asked if the youngsters had blocked traffic. Conroy said, “No, not at all. There wasn’t any traffic out here until the police cars swooped in.”
I have interviewed many civilians about this case, and none have supported the police version of events. This is not a small matter. It’s a terrible thing if the police have been lying about their reasons for arresting these youngsters.
The official charges make no mention of people climbing on top of cars. It took a while for that tale to develop. The first time I heard it was in an interview I did with Capt. Scott Henderson of the 83rd Precinct a few days after the arrests. He said he had seen people walking on top of cars and that several of the youngsters had red bandanas.
The bandanas would have signaled that the youngsters were affiliated with the Bloods, the violent and notorious street gang. I asked what had happened to the bandanas. Captain Henderson said he didn’t know.
I e-mailed a list of questions to Commissioner Kelly’s office, trying to get whatever information might be available to corroborate Captain Henderson’s version of events. I asked if there were any other officers who saw anyone on top of cars. I was told that that information could not immediately be tracked down.
I asked if there were any civilian witnesses to such activity. I was referred to the office of the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes, which did not provide the identity of any witnesses.
I asked if the Police Department had the names of any youngsters who had climbed on top of a car. I was told no.
I believe that an outlandish miscarriage of justice has occurred here, that the youngsters arrested did nothing wrong and that the Police Department’s version of events is false. Commissioner Kelly could clear the matter up once and for all by mounting an honest investigation to determine what really happened.
David Brooks is on vacation.
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4) Three Bad Rulings
NYT Editorial
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/opinion/26tue1.html?hp
The Supreme Court hit the trifecta yesterday: Three cases involving the First Amendment. Three dismaying decisions by Chief Justice John Roberts’s new conservative majority.
Chief Justice Roberts and the four others in his ascendant bloc used the next-to-last decision day of this term to reopen the political system to a new flood of special-interest money, to weaken protection of student expression and to make it harder for citizens to challenge government violations of the separation of church and state. In the process, the reconfigured court extended its noxious habit of casting aside precedents without acknowledging it — insincere judicial modesty scored by Justice Antonin Scalia in a concurring opinion.
First, campaign finance. Four years ago, a differently constituted court upheld sensible provisions of the McCain-Feingold Act designed to prevent corporations and labor unions from circumventing the ban on their spending in federal campaigns by bankrolling phony “issue ads.” These ads purport to just educate voters about a policy issue, but are really aimed at a particular candidate.
The 2003 ruling correctly found that the bogus issue ads were the functional equivalent of campaign ads and upheld the Congressional restrictions on corporate and union money. Yet the Roberts court shifted course in response to sham issue ads run on radio and TV by a group called Wisconsin Right to Life with major funding from corporations opposed to Senator Russell Feingold, the Democrat who co-authored the act.
It opened a big new loophole in time to do mischief in the 2008 elections. The exact extent of the damage is unclear. But the four dissenters were correct in warning that the court’s hazy new standard for assessing these ads is bound to invite evasion and fresh public cynicism about big money and politics.
The decision contained a lot of pious language about protecting free speech. But magnifying the voice of wealthy corporations and unions over the voice of candidates and private citizens is hardly a free speech victory. Moreover, the professed devotion to the First Amendment did not extend to allowing taxpayers to challenge White House aid to faith-based organizations as a violation of church-state separation. The controlling opinion by Justice Samuel Alito offers a cockeyed reading of precedent and flimsy distinctions between executive branch initiatives and Congressionally authorized spending to deny private citizens standing to sue. That permits the White House to escape accountability when it improperly spends tax money for religious purposes.
Nor did the court’s concern for free speech extend to actually allowing free speech in the oddball case of an Alaska student who was suspended from high school in 2002 after he unfurled a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” while the Olympic torch passed. The ruling by Chief Justice Roberts said public officials did not violate the student’s rights by punishing him for words that promote a drug message at an off-campus event. This oblique reference to drugs hardly justifies such mangling of sound precedent and the First Amendment.
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5) A Plot to Assassinate Castro Was Approved By CIA Director Allen Dulles
By Amy Zegart
June 26, 2007, 2:19 pm
http://washington.blogs.nytimes.com/
For years, the public has known that the C.I.A. spent part of the 1960s concocting plans to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. None of these plots ever succeeded, and many — one explored the feasibility of sending Castro a poison-laced diving suit, another tried to rig exotic exploding seashells — seem ridiculous in retrospect. One of the $64,000 questions from that time is whether these plots were known and authorized by various C.I.A. directors and others outside the agency, including the president. The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee, spent months in 1975 and thousands of pages of testimony examining who knew what, and when. The committee found that the evidence suggested that higher-ups inside and outside the C.I.A .knew about the various assassination plots, but it was not conclusive.
Now, the “family jewels” documents show that at least one plot to kill Castro — involving underworld figure Jonnny Roselli — was directly approved by C.I.A. Director Allen Dulles. The jewels document notes on page 12 that in 1960, Richard Bissell, Director of the C.I.A.’s covert operations branch, began searching for “assets” to assist in a “sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action” against Castro. According to the document, the C.I.A. Director “was briefed and gave his approval.”
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6) New Scrutiny as Immigrants Die in Custody
By NINA BERNSTEIN
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26detain.html?ref=us
Sandra M. Kenley was returning home from her native Barbados in 2005 when she was swept into the United States’ fastest-growing form of incarceration, immigration detention.
Seven weeks later, Ms. Kenley died in a rural Virginia jail, where she had complained of not receiving medicine for high blood pressure. She was one of 62 immigrants to die in administrative custody since 2004, according to a new tally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement that counted many more deaths than the 20 previously known.
No government body is charged with accounting for deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of county jails, privately run prisons and federal facilities where more than 27,500 people who are not American citizens are held on any given day while the government decides whether to deport them.
Getting details about those who die in custody is a difficult undertaking left to family members, advocacy groups and lawyers.
But as the immigration detention system balloons to meet demands for stricter enforcement of immigration laws, deaths in custody — and the secrecy and confusion around them — are drawing increased scrutiny from lawmakers and from government investigators.
Spurred by bipartisan reports of abuses in detention, the Senate unanimously passed an amendment to the proposed immigration bill that would establish an office of detention oversight within the Department of Homeland Security. Detention capacity would grow by 20,000 beds, or 73 percent, under the bill, which is expected to be debated again today in the Senate.
Complaints focus on a lack of independent oversight and failures to enforce standards for medical care, suicide prevention and access to legal help.
The inspector general in the Department of Homeland Security recently announced a “special review” of two deaths, including that of a Korean woman at a privately run detention center in Albuquerque. Fellow detainees told a lawyer that the woman, Young Sook Kim, had pleaded for medical care for weeks, but received scant attention until her eyes yellowed and she stopped eating.
Ms. Kim died of pancreatic cancer in federal custody on Sept. 11, 2005, a day after she was taken to a hospital.
Some of the sharpest criticism of the troubled system has come from officials at one of the largest detention centers in the country, York County Prison in Pennsylvania.
“The Department of Homeland Security has made it difficult, if not impossible, to meet the constitutional requirements of providing adequate health care to inmates that have a serious need for that care,” the York County Prison’s warden, Thomas Hogan, wrote in a court affidavit last year.
Officials with the immigration agency say that some deaths are inevitable, and that sufficient outside scrutiny comes from local medical examiners. Detention expanded by more than 32 percent last year, and the average length of stay was cut to 35 days from 89, said Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman.
“We spend $98 million annually to provide medical care for people in our custody,” Ms. Zuieback said. “Anybody who violates our national immigration law is going to get the same treatment by I.C.E. regardless of their medical condition.”
She declined to release information about the 62 detention deaths since 2004, including names, dates, locations or causes.
Twenty deaths were reported over the same period in a recent briefing paper for the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants from a list compiled by civil liberties lawyers from reports by relatives, advocates and the news media.
Detention standards were adopted by the immigration agency in 2000, but are not legally enforceable, unlike rules for the treatment of criminal inmates. The Department of Homeland Security has resisted efforts by the American Bar Association to turns the standards into regulations, saying that rulemaking would reduce the agency’s flexibility.
“The deaths bring forward in the worst way the systemwide problems,” said Sunita Patel, a lawyer for Legal Aid who prepared the United Nations briefing paper.
Some advocates of curbs on immigration say the solution is quicker deportations.
“The taxpayer cannot be expected to underwrite the elaborate detention facilities that some of these organizations want,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
In the case of Ms. Kenley, a legal permanent resident of the United States for more than 30 years, detention interrupted her medical care for high blood pressure, a fibroid tumor and uterine bleeding. An autopsy attributed her death to an enlarged heart from chronic hypertensive disease. But a report by emergency medical services said that she had fallen from a top bunk, and that a cellmate had pounded on the door for 20 minutes before guards responded.
Ms. Kenley’s sister, June Everett, said her questions had gone unanswered.
“How did my sister die?” she asked, as Ms. Kenley’s daughter, Nicole, wept. “It’s a whole set of confusion, so who knows, really? And I would like to know.”
Ms. Kenley had been traveling with her 1-year-old granddaughter when she arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport, records show, and she was ordered to return without the baby to discuss two old misdemeanor drug convictions that had surfaced in an airport database.
She obeyed. A transcript shows she admitted a conviction for drug possession in 1984 and one in 2002 for trying to buy a small amount of cocaine. She described a life derailed by drug addiction after 11 years of working in a newspaper mailroom.
“I turned my life around,” Ms. Kenley told the immigration inspector, pointing to three drug-free years after probation and treatment, completion of a nursing course, and legal custody of the granddaughter, Nakita. She also showed that she was taking blood pressure medication and was scheduled for surgery.
The inspector arrested her, invoking the law: two drug-related convictions made her subject to exclusion from the United States.
“I am barely living,” Ms. Kenley later wrote her sister from Pamunkey Regional Jail, in Hanover, Va., “trying to hold on until you get a lawyer to help me.”
She died at Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth, Va.
Her only court appearances were by video monitor, waiting for a volunteer lawyer who never came.
Even detainees with legal counsel sometimes do not survive.
Abdoulai Sall, 50, a Guinea-born taxi cab mechanic in Washington with no criminal record, died in detention last December.
Mr. Sall, whose boss of 17 years had sponsored him for a green card, was at an immigration interview with a lawyer, Paul S. Allen, when he was unexpectedly arrested on an old deportation order — part of a legal tangle left when another lawyer abandoned his case in the 1990s, Mr. Allen said.
The case file shows that Mr. Allen’s office urged medical intervention for Mr. Sall, who had been taking medication for a serious kidney ailment at the time of his arrest. While in detention at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va. he complained that he was not getting his medication and that his symptoms were worsening in a barracks-style unit.
Fellow detainees described Mr. Sall huddling next to the unit dryer for warmth, barely able to walk. “The medical staff told him they don’t have what he needs because immigration don’t pay enough money,” one detainee wrote.
The accusation was denied by Lou Barlow, the jail’s superintendent, who said Mr. Sall had received good care, including a visit to the local emergency room.
“We’ve never done anything unethical, illegal or immoral,” Mr. Barlow said.
Autopsy results are still pending.
Some deaths, like Ms. Kim’s, come to light well after the fact. Ms. Kim, a cook of about 60, was swept up in a raid on a massage parlor and detained for a month at the Regional Correctional Center in Albuquerque, a county prison operated by the Cornell Companies, a publicly traded corporation.
Months after her death, a lawyer in Santa Fe, N.M., Brandt Milstein, learned about the case from other Korean detainees, since deported. Mr. Milstein said that under New Mexico law, the death should have been reviewed by the state’s medical inspector, but officials had not reported it as a death in custody.
About two weeks ago — nearly two years after Ms. Kim died — the inspector general’s office called him, Mr. Milstein said. The investigation is now under way.
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7) Vote Against Banner Shows Divide on Speech in Schools
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/washington/26speech.html
WASHINGTON, June 25 — The Alaska high school student who unfurled a 14-foot banner with the odd message “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” insisted that it was a banner about nothing, a prank designed to get him and his friends on television as the Olympic torch parade went through Juneau en route to the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.
The school’s principal insisted, to the contrary, that the banner advocated, or at least celebrated, illegal drug use, and that the student, Joseph Frederick, should be punished for displaying it. She suspended him for 10 days.
On Monday, by a narrow margin, the Supreme Court backed the principal in a decision that showed the court deeply split over what weight to give to free speech in public schools.
Six justices voted to overturn a federal appeals court’s ruling that left the principal, Deborah Morse, liable for damages for violating Mr. Frederick’s First Amendment rights.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. spoke, at least nominally, for five of the six. He said for the court that Ms. Morse’s reaction to the banner, which was displayed off school property but at a school-sponsored event, was a reasonable one that did not violate the Constitution.
While the banner might have been nothing but “gibberish,” the chief justice said, it was reasonable for the principal, who “had to decide to act — or not act — on the spot,” to decide both that it promoted illegal drug use and that “failing to act would send a powerful message to the students in her charge, including Frederick, about how serious the school was about the dangers of illegal drug use.”
He added, “The First Amendment does not require schools to tolerate at school events student expression that contributes to those dangers.”
Four other justices, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., signed the chief justice’s opinion, although Justice Thomas took a much different approach. He said that Mr. Frederick had no First Amendment rights to violate.
“In light of the history of American public education,” Justice Thomas said, “it cannot seriously be suggested that the First Amendment ‘freedom of speech’ encompasses a student’s right to speak in public schools.” The court’s precedents had become incoherent, he said, adding, “I am afraid that our jurisprudence now says that students have a right to speak in school except when they don’t.”
The sixth justice, Stephen G. Breyer, did not sign the chief justice’s opinion, but wrote separately to say that the First Amendment issue was sufficiently cloudy that the court should have avoided deciding it. Instead, he said, the court should have ruled in the principal’s favor on the alternative ground that she was entitled to immunity from the student’s lawsuit.
Under the court’s doctrine of “qualified immunity,” government officials may not be sued for damages unless they have violated “clearly established” rights “of which a reasonable person would have known.”
There were additional shades of opinion within the chief justice’s majority. Justice Alito, joined by Justice Kennedy, wrote separately to emphasize what they said was the narrowness of the court’s holding. They said the decision should be understood as limited to speech advocating drug use, and noted that the court had not endorsed the much broader argument, put forward by the Bush administration, that school officials could censor speech that interfered with a school’s “educational mission.”
The breadth of that argument had alarmed religious conservatives, on the ground that school officials would get a license to enforce political correctness. Justice Alito, who had expressed a similar concern as an appeals court judge, said that the “educational mission” argument “strikes at the very heart of the First Amendment” by allowing school officials to “suppress speech on political and social issues based on disagreement with the viewpoint expressed.”
Writing for the four dissenters, Justice John Paul Stevens said that even limited to drugs, the majority opinion distorted the First Amendment by “inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs” in a way that someone might perceive as containing a “latent pro-drug message.”
Justice Stevens said that “carving out pro-drug speech for uniquely harsh treatment finds no support in our case law and is inimical to the values protected by the First Amendment.”
Noting that alcohol also posed a danger to teenagers, Justice Stevens wondered whether “the court would support punishing Frederick for flying a ‘Wine Sips 4 Jesus’ banner,” which he said might be seen as pro-religion as well as pro-alcohol.
The dissenters, who also included Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Breyer, agreed with the majority that the principal should not be held personally liable for monetary damages. The case was Morse v. Frederick, No. 06-278.
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8) Delphi Workers May Give Up Their Layoff-Pay Benefit
"Pay for newly hired employees would start at $14 an hour. Delphi originally proposed cutting wages to $12.50 an hour."
By NICK BUNKLEY
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/business/26auto.html
DETROIT, June 25 — Unionized workers at Delphi, the big auto parts supplier, could vote this week to throw out the jobs bank, a longtime program that lets them continue receiving most of their pay after being laid off.
If so, the jobs bank, which critics call the epitome of the American auto industry’s inefficient labor practices, could be in its last months at the three Detroit automakers.
Elimination of the jobs bank is one provision of a tentative agreement signed last week by the United Automobile Workers union, Delphi and Delphi’s former parent, General Motors, after nearly two years of divisive negotiations.
In place of the jobs bank, which gives the laid-off employees 95 percent of their base pay, the agreement would provide $1,500 in severance pay for every month of service, to a maximum of $40,000, according to a 46-page memorandum of understanding detailing the deal.
The memorandum was posted online Monday by the Soldiers of Solidarity, a faction of the U.A.W. that opposes the agreement.
Union chapters held meetings Sunday and Monday to discuss the agreement; Delphi’s 17,000 U.A.W.-represented workers are expected to vote on the deal this week. Labor specialists say ratification of the agreement could force the union to make similar concessions as it negotiates with the automakers this summer.
“The jobs bank doesn’t have much of a future,” said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “The U.A.W. will have an extremely difficult time getting the Big Three to preserve anything that it had to give up with Delphi.”
The U.A.W. has made a series of sacrifices in an effort to help the Detroit companies overcome severe financial turmoil. In 2005, the union agreed to have workers at G.M. and Ford pay part of their health care costs, although it refused to give Chrysler a similar deal. The U.A.W. also went along with the automakers’ plans to cut their payrolls through buyout programs, and it did not fight the numerous plant closings that all three automakers have announced.
The companies are expected to push for still more givebacks during the coming contract negotiations, which begin July 23.
A Goldman Sachs analyst, Robert Barry, upgraded G.M.’s stock to a buy rating from neutral on Monday, citing a greater chance that automakers would achieve their demands. Shares of G.M. rose 81 cents, to close at $36.27, a four-month high.
“We think G.M. can make a compelling case to U.A.W. members that material wage and/or benefit cuts are needed,” Mr. Barry wrote in a note to clients. “And we suspect members and retirees are increasingly amenable to such cuts.”
The tentative agreement at Delphi provides for considerable wage cuts, a demand the company had made since filing for bankruptcy protection in October 2005. Hourly pay for Delphi’s most highly compensated employees — about 4,000 people hired before G.M. spun off Delphi in 1999 — would decrease to a range of $14.50 to $18, from about $27 today.
In exchange for accepting the lower wages, those workers would get three annual “buy down” payments of $35,000, for a total of $105,000.
Pay for newly hired employees would start at $14 an hour. Delphi originally proposed cutting wages to $12.50 an hour.
Workers would also be offered as much as $140,000 to leave their jobs and give up all benefits except pensions. Those already eligible to retire could accept an incentive of $35,000 to retire with full benefits.
Similar options, with the exception of the buy downs, were offered to employees at G.M. and Ford last year; more than 65,000 accepted.
The agreement would let Delphi close or sell all but 4 of its 18 plants, according to the memorandum signed last week. The company would maintain operations in Rochester; Grand Rapids, Mich.; and Kokomo, Ind. Plants in Flint and Saginaw, Mich., and in Dayton, Ohio, would be transferred back to G.M.
General Motors has said it expects its liability for Delphi’s bankruptcy to be $7 billion, including a $1 billion charge against earnings this quarter.
Brian A. Johnson, an analyst with Lehman Brothers, said that replacing the jobs bank with severance pay might make newer workers who do not have the three years’ experience needed to qualify for the jobs bank more willing to approve the deal. But older workers who chose to remain at Delphi could miss out on tens of thousands of dollars if they were laid off later.
Ron Gettelfinger, the U.A.W. president, had harsh words for Delphi’s leadership Monday, as he often did during the negotiations. He thanked G.M.’s chief financial officer, Frederick A. Henderson, but criticized Delphi for publicly confirming that a deal had been signed before union leaders had a chance to discuss it fully.
“Once again, they had to be in front acting like they’re in charge and knowing what’s going on,” Mr. Gettelfinger said in a radio interview on WJR-AM in Detroit. Several hours after Delphi announced the deal in a news release Friday afternoon, Mr. Gettelfinger issued his own statement, in which he avoided mentioning Delphi by name.
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9) New Poll Finds That Young Americans Are Leaning Left
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and MEGAN THEE
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27poll.html?hp
Young Americans are more likely than the general public to favor a government-run universal health care insurance system, an open-door policy on immigration and the legalization of gay marriage, according to a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll. The poll also found that they are more likely to say the war in Iraq is heading to a successful conclusion.
The poll offers a snapshot of a group whose energy and idealism have always been as alluring to politicians as its scattered focus and shifting interests have been frustrating. It found that substantially more Americans ages 17 to 29 than four years ago are paying attention to the presidential race. But they appeared to be really familiar with only two of the candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, both Democrats.
They have continued a long-term drift away from the Republican Party. And although they are just as worried as the general population about the outlook for the country and think their generation is likely to be worse off than that of their parents, they retain a belief that their votes can make a difference, the poll found.
More than half of Americans ages 17 to 29 — 54 percent — say they intend to vote for a Democrat for president in 2008. They share with the public at large a negative view of President Bush, who has a 28 percent approval rating with this group, and of the Republican Party. They hold a markedly more positive view of Democrats than they do of Republicans.
Among this age group, Mr. Bush’s job approval rating after the attacks of Sept. 11 was more than 80 percent. Over the course of the next three years, it drifted downward leading into the presidential election of 2004, when 4 of 10 young Americans said they approved how Mr. Bush was handling his job.
At a time when Democrats have made gains after years in which Republicans have dominated Washington, young Americans appear to lean slightly more to the left than the general population: 28 percent described themselves as liberal, compared with 20 percent of the nation at large. And 27 percent called themselves conservative, compared with 32 percent of the general public.
Forty-four percent said they believed that same-sex couples should be permitted to get married, compared with 28 percent of the public at large. They are more likely than their elders to support the legalization of possession of small amounts of marijuana.
The findings on gay marriage were reminiscent of an exit poll on Election Day 2004: 41 percent of 18-to-29-year-old voters said gay couples should be permitted to legally marry, according to the exit poll.
In the current poll, 62 percent said they would support a universal, government-sponsored national health care insurance program; 47 percent of the general public holds that view. And 30 percent said that “Americans should always welcome new immigrants,” while 24 percent of the general public holds that view.
Their views on abortion mirror those of the public at large: 24 percent said it should not be permitted at all, while 38 percent said it should be made available but with greater restrictions. Thirty-seven percent said it should be generally available.
In one potential sign of shifting attitudes, respondents, by overwhelming margins, said they believed that the nation was prepared to elect as president a woman, a black person or someone who admitted to having used marijuana. But they said that they did not believe Americans would elect someone who had used cocaine or someone who was a Mormon.
Mr. Obama has suggested that he used cocaine as a young man. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a candidate for the Republican nomination, is a Mormon.
By a 52 to 36 majority, young Americans say that Democrats, rather than Republicans, come closer to sharing their moral values, while 58 percent said they had a favorable view of the Democratic Party, and 38 percent said they had a favorable view of Republicans.
Asked if they were enthusiastic about any of the candidates running for president, 18 percent named Mr. Obama, of Illinois, and 17 percent named Mrs. Clinton, of New York. Those two were followed by Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican, who was named by just 4 percent of the respondents.
The survey also found that 42 percent of young Americans thought it was likely or very likely that the nation would reinstate a military draft over the next few years — and two-thirds said they thought the Republican Party was more likely to do so. And 87 percent of respondents said they opposed a draft.
But when it came to the war, young Americans were more optimistic about the outcome than was the population as whole. Fifty-one percent said the United States was very or somewhat likely to succeed in Iraq, compared with 45 percent among all adults. Contrary to conventional wisdom, younger Americans have historically been more likely than the population as a whole to be supportive of what a president is doing in a time of war, as they were in Korea and Vietnam, polls have shown.
The nationwide telephone poll — a joint effort by The New York Times, CBS News and MTV — was conducted from June 15 to June 23. It involved 659 adults ages 17 to 29. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus four percentage points for all respondents.
The Times/CBS News/MTV Poll suggests that younger Americans are conflicted in their view of the country. Many have a bleak view about their own future and the direction the country is heading: 70 percent said the country was on the wrong track, while 48 percent said they feared that their generation would be worse off than their parents’. But the survey also found that this generation of Americans is not cynical: 77 percent said they thought the votes of their generation would have a great bearing on who became the next president.
By any measure, the poll suggests that young Americans are anything but apathetic about the presidential election. Fifty-eight percent said they were paying attention to the campaign. By contrast, at this point in the 2004 presidential campaign, 35 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said they were paying a lot or some attention to the campaign.
Over the last half century, the youth vote has more often than not gone with the Democratic candidate for president, though with some notable exceptions. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won his second term as president by capturing 59 percent of the youth vote, according to exit polls, and the first President George Bush won in 1988 with 52 percent of that vote. This age group, however, has supported Democratic presidential candidates in every election since.
The percentage of young voters who identified themselves as Republican grew steadily during the Reagan administration, and reached a high of 37 percent in 1989. That number has declined ever since, and is now at 25 percent.
“I think the Democratic Party is now realizing how big an impact my generation has, and they’re trying to cater to that in some way,” Ashley Robinson, 21, a Democrat from Minnesota, said in an interview after she participated in the poll. “But the traditional Republican Party is still trying to get older votes, which doesn’t make sense because there are so many more voters my age. It would be sensible to cater to us.”
That a significant number of respondents said they were enthusiastic about just two of the candidates — Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton — to a certain extent reflects that both candidates have been the subject of a huge amount of national attention and have presented the country with historic candidacies. Mr. Obama would be the first black president and Mrs. Clinton the first woman. Other candidates could begin drawing attention from this group as the campaign takes a higher platform.
More important, though, at least for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama is the impression this group has of them. In the poll, 43 percent of respondents said they held an unfavorable view of Mrs. Clinton, a number that reflects the tide of resistance she faces nationwide. By contrast, only 19 percent said they had an unfavorable view of Mr. Obama.
Marjorie Connelly, Marina Stefan and Dalia Sussman contributed reporting.
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10) Gitmos Across America
MYT Editorial
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/opinion/27weds1.html?hp
Toughness is the watchword in immigration policy these days. When you combine the new toughness with same-old bureaucratic indolence and ineptitude, you get a situation like that described by Nina Bernstein in The Times yesterday. She wrote about how the boom in immigration detention — the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration — ensnares people for dubious reasons, denies them access to medicine and lawyers and sometimes holds them until they die.
Sandra M. Kenley, a legal permanent resident who had high blood pressure and a bleeding uterus, died in a rural Virginia jail after not receiving her medication. Returning home from a trip to Barbados she was locked up because of two old misdemeanor drug convictions. Abdoulai Sall, an auto mechanic, had no criminal record, but was still seized during an immigration interview. He had a severe kidney ailment and he, too, complained about not getting his medicine. He got sicker and died in another Virginia jail last December.
Sixty-two immigrants have died since 2004 while being held in a secretive detention system, a patchwork of federal centers, private prisons and local jails. Advocacy groups and lawyers say that the system not only denies detainees the most basic rights but also lacks the oversight and regulations that apply to federal prisons. Instead of fixing this broken system, the Senate bill that is lumbering toward final passage — after surviving a crucial procedural vote yesterday — is overloaded with provisions that will make it even harsher and more unfair.
One of the worst amendments comes from Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. It would impose mandatory detention of all people who overstay their visas. It’s a huge overreach that threatens to swamp the detention system, filling already-strapped prisons at great expense and inevitably leading to more abuses and deaths. And because it takes away the power of officials to decide who poses a genuine threat and who doesn’t, it would undermine efforts to catch and deport the truly dangerous.
The cells would be full of people who shouldn’t be there: asylum seekers, the elderly, pregnant women, the sick and those ensnared in paperwork mistakes. Children, like the kindergartners in inmate scrubs walking the halls of a federal detention center outside Austin, Tex. Day laborers, like those in suburban Brewster, N.Y., whose arrests were hailed by a mayor who spoke proudly of his community’s “zero tolerance” for people unlawfully playing soccer in a schoolyard.
The country already detains some 230,000 immigrants a year, at an annual cost of $1.2 billion. Under the current immigration bill, it would build tens of thousands more beds to hold detainees. And it would need many more — Guantánamo Bays across America — if Mr. Graham’s zero-tolerance vision is fully realized.
Noncitizens are subject to our laws and to being deported if they do bad things. But this doesn’t mean the country must detain or deport everybody, or relinquish basic decency or even basic sense to achieve some imagined ideal of toughness.
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11) Half the World Soon to Be in Cities, U.N. Reports
By CELIA W. DUGGER
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/world/27cnd-population.html?hp
By next year, more than half the world’s population, 3.3 billion people, will for the first time live in towns and cities, a number expected to swell to almost 5 billion by 2030, according to a United Nations Population Fund report released today.
The onrush of change will be particularly extraordinary in Africa and Asia, where between 2000 and 2030 “the accumulated urban growth of these two regions during the whole span of history will be duplicated in a single generation,” the report says.
This surge in urban populations, fueled more by natural increase than the migration of people from the countryside, is unstoppable, said George Martin, author of the report, “State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth.”
Cities will edge out rural areas in more than sheer numbers of people. Poverty is now increasing more rapidly in urban areas as well, and governments need to plan for where the poor will live rather than leaving them to settle illegally in shanties without sewage and other services, the United Nations says.
In Latin America, where urbanization came earlier than in other developing regions, many countries and cities ignored or fruitlessly tried to retard urban growth. “Now the levels of insecurity and violence are a product of this approach,” said Mr. Martine, a demographer and sociologist. “People have been left to fend for themselves and have created these enormous slums.”
A billion people, a sixth of the world’s population, already live in slums, 90 percent of them in developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, more than 7 in 10 urban dwellers live in a slum. The region’s slum population has almost doubled in just 15 years, reaching 200 million in 2005. Its urban population is already as large as North America’s.
China, the world’s most populous nation, is now at the peak of its urban transition, the report says. Urbanites will outnumber peasants within a decade. China will then have 83 cities with more than 750,000 residents, but only five with a population of more than five million, according to the report.
In fact, the report predicts that the bulk of the urban population growth is likely to be in smaller cities and towns, not the 20 mega-cities that dominate the public imagination. The future lies in places like Gabarone, Botswana, whose population is projected to rise to 500,000 in 2020 from 18,000 in 1971, as much as it does in chaotic, sprawling metropolises like Lagos, Nigeria.
Among the mega-cities with populations of more than 10 million, only Lagos and Dhaka, Bangladesh are expected to grow at rates exceeding 3 percent over the coming decade. Such super-sized cities today contain 9 percent of all urban inhabitants, while smaller cities and towns account for more than half.
“Many of the world’s largest cities — Buenos Aires, Calcutta, Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Seoul — actually have more people moving out than in, and few are close to the size that doomsayers predicted for them in the 1970s,” the report says.
The report notes that while rates of urban growth have slowed in most regions of the world, the story now lies in the scale of growth in the sheer numbers of people.
The first great wave of urbanization unfurled over two centuries, from 1750 to 1950, in Europe and North America, with urban populations rising from 15 million to 423 million.
The second wave is happening now in the developing world. The number of people living in urban areas will have grown from 309 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 2030. By 2030, the developing world will have 80 percent of the world’s urban population.
If the coming population growth is helter skelter, with inadequate services and sprawling slums, it could pollute urban water sheds with untreated sewage and contribute to rising crime and violence, Mr. Martine said. The result of that approach is already apparent in existing slums.
“The poor settle in the worst living space, on steep hillsides or river banks that will be flooded, where nobody else wants to live and speculators haven’t taken control of the land,” he said. “They have no water and sanitation and the housing is terrible. And this situation threatens the environmental quality of the city.”
But cities are also engines of economic growth, the report notes more optimistically. “Cities concentrate poverty,” it said, “but they also represent the best hope of escaping it.”
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12) Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts
By GARDINER HARRIS
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/health/psychology/27doctors.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON, June 26 — As states begin to require that drug companies disclose their payments to doctors for lectures and other services, a pattern has emerged: psychiatrists earn more money from drug makers than doctors in any other specialty.
How this money may be influencing psychiatrists and other doctors has become one of the most contentious issues in health care. For instance, the more psychiatrists have earned from drug makers, the more they have prescribed a new class of powerful medicines known as atypical antipsychotics to children, for whom the drugs are especially risky and mostly unapproved.
Vermont officials disclosed Tuesday that drug company payments to psychiatrists in the state more than doubled last year, to an average of $45,692 each from $20,835 in 2005. Antipsychotic medicines are among the largest expenses for the state’s Medicaid program.
Over all last year, drug makers spent $2.25 million on marketing payments, fees and travel expenses to Vermont doctors, hospitals and universities, a 2.3 percent increase over the prior year, the state said.
The number most likely represents a small fraction of drug makers’ total marketing expenditures to doctors since it does not include the costs of free drug samples or the salaries of sales representatives and their staff members. According to their income statements, drug makers generally spend twice as much to market drugs as they do to research them.
“For the fourth year in a row, our analysis shows that there is a great deal of money being spent in our small state on marketing pharmaceutical products,” said William H. Sorrell, the Vermont attorney general.
Endocrinologists received the second largest amount, according to the Vermont analysis, earning an average of $33,730. Since the state identified the specialties of only the top 100 earners, these averages represent the money earned by only some of the state’s specialists. There were 11 psychiatrists and 5 endocrinologists in that top group of 100.
Still, a similar pattern was evident in a Minnesota database that was the subject of a series of articles in The New York Times this year. As in Vermont, psychiatrists earned on aggregate the most in Minnesota, with payments ranging from $51 to $689,000. The Times found that psychiatrists who took the most money from makers of antipsychotic drugs tended to prescribe the drugs to children the most often.
These and other stories have helped to fuel a growing interest among state and federal officials to document and restrict payments to doctors from drug makers. At a gathering last month at Columbia Law School in New York, state attorneys general from across the country discussed ways to get similar data for their states.
And today, the Senate Special Committee on Aging, which is led by Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, will hold the first of a series of hearings on the issue, which could lead to legislative proposals to restrict and require disclosure of payments and gifts to doctors from drug companies nationwide.
Several lawmakers on Capitol Hill have expressed interest in such legislation, including Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. “A federal law requiring public disclosure of payments to doctors could be very effective if it was carefully monitored and consistently applied,” Mr. Grassley said.
Efforts to require disclosure of payments to doctors began almost by happenstance in 1993, when The Minnesota Legislature passed a law that restricts drug companies from giving doctors gifts valued at more than $100 in any given year. The legislation also required companies to report and make public any consulting fees paid to doctors.
Lee Greenfield, a former state representative in Minnesota and one of the law’s authors, said it passed with little fanfare or debate after legislators heard stories about doctors accepting gifts of great value from drug makers.
“Why do we want them bribing doctors to use what may not be the best or most cost-effective drug for the patient purely to get some hand-held TV, we all asked,” Mr. Greenfield said.
Still, compliance with the law has been spotty. Some companies never responded to the board’s requests for disclosures. Others did so fitfully. A few sent letters saying they did not collect that information and thus could not provide it.
Minnesota officials never cracked down. Such reports were put in file drawers and largely forgotten until this past year, said Cody Wiberg, executive director of the Minnesota Board of Pharmacy. Mr. Wiberg said he planned this year to pursue companies that fail to report.
Besides Vermont and Maine, more than a dozen other states have or are now considering similar legislation, said Sharon Anglin Treat, executive director of the National Legislative Association on Prescription Drug Prices.
Officials in Maine and Vermont said they would try to compare reports of payments to doctors with Medicaid records to explore how marketing practices might influence prescribing by doctors in ways that increased costs to taxpayers.
“What we want to be able to do is overlay the prescribing information that we have with the drug detailing information,” said Jude Walsh, special assistant to the governor of Maine, John E. Baldacci. “If we see that doctors in a certain southern county in the state are prescribing a lot of a drug and getting a lot of detailing for that drug, that could lead to some record reviews to see what’s happening.”
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13) Workers Split With Bosses on Leave Act, Survey Finds
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27leave.html
After soliciting 15,000 comments about the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Labor Department will issue a report today concluding that the public likes the law, but corporate America has big problems with it.
The 14-year-old law gave employees at workplaces with 50 or more workers the right to take up to 12 unpaid weeks a year to cope with their own serious health condition or to care for a newborn, a newly adopted child or a seriously ill spouse, parent or child.
If they had any criticism, many workers said, it was that the law does not allow for longer leaves and that it does not provide paid leave, the way many European countries do.
One parent wrote: “My daughter was mauled by a dog. I had to take two months of leave. Had F.M.L.A. not been in place, I would have lost my job for sure.”
Many businesses complained that the Labor Department’s definition of a serious health condition enabling workers to take leave was unclear and too generous. Many companies also said their operations were hurt when workers with chronic conditions, like asthma or migraine headaches, took frequent leaves.
The department solicited comments last December.
Victoria A. Lipnic, the assistant labor secretary for employment standards, said the department had no intention of proposing any new leave regulations “imminently.”
“There was a general overall finding that this law works pretty well and is serving a lot of people that it was meant to serve,” Ms. Lipnic said.
The report estimated that 6 million to 13 million workers took leaves in 2005 under the act. The report noted that just over half of the nation’s 146 million workers were eligible for leave. Many are ineligible because they work part-time or work at businesses with fewer than 50 employees.
Ms. Lipnic said if there was any surprise, it was the extent to which businesses complained about employees who took frequent leaves.
“We heard a lot of complaints from industry sectors like transit and public safety about the problems that these unscheduled, intermittent leaves created,” she said.
The report said, “This is the most serious area of friction between employers and employees seeking to use F.M.L.A. leave.”
Jason Straczewski, director of employment and labor policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, said workers who took intermittent leaves for chronic conditions created problems at many factories, especially where skilled employees worked in small teams.
Mr. Straczewski said the government should issue new regulations to help those with legitimate chronic conditions take leaves and to make it harder for those who are exploiting the system. He also called for regulations that would give companies more medical information on employees seeking leave so they could do more to ensure that ill employees used their leaves to get better.
Some labor unions and women’s groups protested when the government began soliciting comments.
Deven McGraw, chief operating officer for the National Partnership for Women and Families said, “We raised concerns when the whole process began that all this is laying the foundation for regulatory or statutory changes that will make it harder for people who need to take leaves to be able to take care of themselves or members of their family.”
In their comments, many workers and family groups said the law would be more useful if it also covered caring for siblings and grandparents.
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14) Worthy Goal of Flawed Bill: Aiding Unions
By DAVID LEONHARDT
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/business/27leonhardt.html?ref=business
In the spring of 1949, the men who ran the steelworkers’ union decided to pick a fight over health insurance and pensions.
The Supreme Court had issued an order in April of that year giving labor unions the right to negotiate over pensions, just as they could negotiate over wages and work rules. Three weeks later, the United Steelworkers union said it was ready to strike if steel companies did not agree to new contracts.
At first, steel executives put up a united front. They agreed to contribute some money to pensions, as well as health insurance, but not nearly as much as the workers were demanding. “The truth of the matter is that American industry alone cannot afford to pay the cost of adequate insurance and pension programs for employees,” Irving S. Olds, the chairman of United States Steel, said in a speech in Erie, Pa.
President Harry S. Truman persuaded the union to delay the strike three times, but on the first day of October — in a move that is hard to imagine today — 500,000 steelworkers walked off the job. The Ford Motor Company soon had to announce that it would shut down production by Nov. 15 because of a lack of steel. General Motors, Chrysler and other big manufacturers found themselves in a similar position.
And just like that, the steel industry caved. One by one, steel companies began agreeing in early November to much of what the union had demanded: annual pensions of at least $10,000 (in today’s dollars) for any retiree with 25 years or more on the job, as well as health insurance for workers.
The strike proved to be a turning point for health benefits and pensions. They had existed in limited form for decades, but the new steel contracts helped lay the groundwork for the modern system of workplace benefits.
I was inspired to look into this bit of history by the run-up to yesterday’s Senate vote on a union organizing bill. For years, union leaders have been pushing for a law that would make it easier for them to organize new members, and with the Democrats back in control of Congress, the House passed such a bill in March.
The measure would have increased the penalties against companies that used illegal tactics to keep out unions, and it would have forced arbitration on companies that failed to reach a contract with a new union. Most important, it would have made it easier for a union to be certified. If more than half of the employees at a work site signed cards saying they wanted a union, they would get one. They would no longer have to go through an up-or-down secret ballot election as well.
This last item is the one that the bill’s critics — business lobbyists, the Bush administration, Republican leaders in Congress — have focused on. Without the secret ballot, they say, pro-union workers will intimidate others into signing cards.
Cleverly, the critics have been passing out a letter that George Miller, a California Democrat who sponsored the bill, wrote in 2001 about a labor dispute in Mexico: “The secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose,” it said.
I think it’s pretty clear that the bill’s opponents have the stronger argument here. In the best of worlds, secret ballots are simply fairer. And yesterday, the bill effectively died, when only 51 senators — every Democrat in attendance plus Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican — voted to cut off debate and move the bill forward. Sixty votes are needed to do so in the Senate, permitting the opponents to claim victory.
“The current system has been working well for a long time,” Jason Straczewski, a lobbyist at the National Association of Manufacturers, told me.
That, of course, is a much broader argument than the one about secret ballots. It is also a much weaker argument. The fact is, a lot of Americans don’t think the economy is working well enough right now. Fewer than half believe that their children will enjoy better living standards than they do, polls show. Over the course of the last 30 years, wages for most workers have grown significantly faster than inflation only once: during the bubbly economy of the late ’90s.
Thanks to a large body of economic research, we can get a sense for how much the decline of unions has to do with these larger economic trends. Unions, the research has shown, do not do much to affect the overall performance of the economy, one way or the other. “Do unions raise or reduce productivity,” Richard B. Freeman, a Harvard economist, asked in his recent book, “America Works,” an excellent overview of the labor market. “The evidence is clear: they do not.”
But if they don’t change the size of the economic pie, they do influence how it’s divvied up. All else equal, a union worker makes about 15 percent more per hour than a nonunion worker and also gets better benefits. So while there are many reasons inequality has increased over the last three decades — like technology and global trade — the decline of unions is certainly one of them.
Since 1980, as union membership has dropped sharply, the share of economic output going to corporate profits has more than doubled. The share going to workers’ compensation, meanwhile, fell to a 41-year low last year.
Yet it can still be tempting to think of labor unions as an antagonistic relic of an industrial economy — and to forget about their lingering impact. I did exactly this in a column a few months back, when I suggested that the wage freeze of World War II was responsible for the rise of pensions and health insurance. The wage freeze indeed played a role, but, as a reader, John Hoerr, pointed out to me, unions still had to force the issue. World War II had been over for more than four years when the steelworkers went on strike.
Over the last generation, companies have become far more aggressive about keeping out unions. They have required workers to attend antiunion talks, darkly warned that unions lead to lower pay and lost jobs and, as Wal-Mart Stores has done, sometimes closed entire departments or stores in the wake of unionization drives. In short, companies have been unwilling to let workers make a decision on the merits.
Traditional unions, of course, haven’t exactly distinguished themselves lately. (I’m in one and can attest to their shortcomings. Filing a health claim sometimes resembles a journey through Wonderland.) As Mr. Freeman argues, the future may lie with nimbler, less confrontational groups, like the worker committees in Australia, Canada, England and elsewhere.
The problem with the Senate bill was that it tried to solve one problem by creating another. But its larger aim — cracking down on antiunion attacks — makes a lot of sense. The playing field between companies and workers is not level today, and the results are plain to see.
It is no coincidence that the very things the steelworkers demanded in 1949 — on-the-job pensions and health insurance — are slowly going the way of labor unions.
E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
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15) 2 Oil Firms Are Defiant in Venezuela
By SIMON ROMERO and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/business/worldbusiness/27oil.html?ref=business
HOUSTON, June 26 — ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil refused on Tuesday to meet Venezuela’s deadline to reach an agreement on ceding control of their major oil production ventures, in what could be their imminent separation from billions of dollars in investments.
The possible rupture with the two companies was viewed by oil analysts as a sign that President Hugo Chávez was pressing ahead with efforts to assert greater authority over some of the most coveted oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere. It came after months of negotiations in which several of the world’s largest private oil companies tried to salvage some kind of minority ownership role in Venezuela, one of the largest sources of oil for the United States.
The possible exit of two major American oil companies from Venezuela may not have an immediate impact on American energy supplies, but any increase in oil prices that does result will only help Mr. Chávez finance his broadening government social policies.
A possible vacuum in expertise could eventually be filled by Chinese, Iranian or other state oil companies. In any case, most energy experts believe that the Venezuelan state oil company will be hard pressed to sustain production levels without American expertise.
Rafael RamÃrez, the Venezuelan energy minister, made the announcement in Caracas. He concluded that the companies had not met the government’s deadline to agree to terms under which the government oil company would take majority control over Conoco’s investments of about $3.5 billion and Exxon’s investments, valued at $800 million.
Venezuelan officials said that some foreign companies, including Chevron, BP, Total and Statoil, had agreed to cede controlling stakes in their oil ventures to Petróleos de Venezuela, the country’s government-owned energy concern. The projects included in the talks are in the Orinoco Belt, an area south of Caracas that is one of the most valued deposits of heavy oil.
“The partners who signed are betting on a secure future in our fatherland,” Mr. RamÃrez told reporters.
Still, these companies’ acceptance of the new rules in Venezuela and the potential exit of Conoco and Exxon point to concern that developments in Venezuela may influence negotiations over oil and natural gas projects in other countries, from rising African oil producers like Angola to longtime members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries like Iran.
“What happens in Venezuela is something the Russians will look at, and may have bearing on places like Iran, Nigeria and other countries,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an oil analyst at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University.
Oil is at the heart of a broader nationalization push that also includes large telecommunications and electricity companies. Mr. Chávez is trying to give his government a stronger hand in Venezuela’s economy even as the oil industry, by far the country’s largest source of revenue, struggles to maintain anemic production levels.
Michael J. Economides, an oil consultant in Houston, said Venezuela could benefit in the short term if fears over production translate into higher global oil prices. “If he produces 1 percent less,” Mr. Economides said in reference to Mr. Chávez, “the world market responds to that and he gets 20 percent more revenue over a period of time.”
Industry analysts put Venezuela’s output at about 2.3 million barrels a days, including more than 400,000 barrels a day from the heavy oil projects. Venezuela’s government says overall production is closer to 3.2 million barrels a day.
But with public spending surging under Mr. Chávez and with oil companies from Brazil, China and India hesitant to make major investments in Venezuela while legal uncertainty persists, energy analysts have cautioned that Venezuela’s government risks allowing prized reserves to remain underdeveloped.
“The Venezuelans have increased the cost of developing this resource,” said Roger Tissot, director for Latin America at PFC Energy, a consulting firm, in Washington. “At the end of the day, the Venezuelan people will pay the price for these decisions.”
Michael S. Goldberg, head of the international dispute resolution group at Baker Botts, a law firm here that represents major oil companies internationally, said he did not think Tuesday’s actions were “necessarily the end of the story.” He added, “The prospects of a deal are never over until a sale is made or an arbitrator reaches a decision.”
The investments at stake are large by any measure, with values ranging from $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion for Conoco if Venezuela takes ownership of its heavy oil projects. Exxon stands to lose about $800 million. More than $6 billion may be lost by other private companies, depending on how they are compensated.
“Although the company is hopeful that the negotiations will be successful, it has preserved all legal rights, including international arbitration,” Conoco said. Exxon also expressed hope that an agreement could be reached that would permit it to continue operating in an ownership role.
“Exxon Mobil is disappointed that we have been unable to reach an agreement on the terms for migration to a mixed enterprise structure,” the company said. “However, we continue discussions with the Venezuelan government on a way forward.”
Should the American companies leave, some of the other multinational companies that remain could eventually take their place. The Venezuelan government has been talking to government-controlled companies from China and other countries about creating new ventures to extract and refine Venezuelan oil.
“Venezuela is now free to find other partners,” said Mazhar al-Shereidah, a petroleum economist in Caracas. “I don’t think Petróleos de Venezuela can cover all the technical and financial demands of these ventures, but this doesn’t constitute a dramatic situation.”
Conoco’s shares fell 2.9 percent on Tuesday to $75.80 as investors reacted to the announcements from Caracas. Exxon, which relies less on Venezuela as a portion of its overall output, fell 0.7 percent to $81.82.
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16) Scraping By With a South Dakota Tribe
By MATT GROSS
June 27, 2007
http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/travel/27frugal.html
Over the last six weeks, as I’ve steered my old Volvo up and down hills, across plains and through thick forests, I’ve frequently fallen into a hypnotic groove. The right music will come on the iPod — the Rolling Stones, or a plaintive Neko Case lyric, or naïve pop from 1960s Cambodia — and the sun will wring stunning purples out of stone or mysteriously frost the wheat fields at dusk. It’s at these times that the road seems to drive me, the car hugging the curves unbidden, and I want to shut my eyes and hold onto these moments until I careen off the asphalt to my doom.
And so it’s amazing that I survived South Dakota, which offered such moments with terrifying regularity. I entered from the southeast, where the plains stretch so far that 40 miles would zip by and I’d hardly notice. Next came the long, slow hills around Lake Francis Case, deep green and dotted with pitch-black cattle. Then the Badlands, where canyons and spires evoke an eerie desolation. At last, near the border with Wyoming, I hit the Black Hills, where forests crowd the old logging tracks — some blacktop, others gravel. In a blink the pines and aspens gave way to mountain pastures and the sun sliced through ominous rain clouds to produce light of startling clarity. I didn’t want to stop.
But stop I did, for there was one place I had to see: the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. This is the home of the Oglala Lakota Sioux, historically one of the worst-treated Native American tribes, as well as one of the most romanticized (see “Dances With Wolves”). Poverty is endemic, along with diabetes and alcoholism. And its struggles with the federal government have been storied and tragic. As an American citizen, I felt a certain duty to witness the effects of my government’s actions. And as the Frugal Traveler, I figured some time on one of the country’s poorest reservations wouldn’t hurt my wallet.
So I descended the Black Hills and drove back into the prairie. Again, I was struck by the landscape’s great beauty: the grasses shimmered green and gold across the vast space, gnawed on by buffalo bigger than my Volvo. That changed, however, as I entered the town of Oglala, and the grandeur gave way to grimness — run-down businesses and scattered clumps of trailer homes. In “Travels With Charley,” John Steinbeck had praised such housing as a nifty innovation, never knowing it would become a symbol of rural poverty.
After a free tour of the Red Cloud Indian School, a venerable Jesuit institution that was a bright spot in a bleak landscape, I drove through the town of Pine Ridge — a bigger, grayer version of Oglala — and on to Wounded Knee, where in 1890 the United States cavalry massacred as many as 300 Indians, who they mistakenly believed were preparing to do battle against the government.
Wounded Knee today consists of three small clusters of homes, a hilltop cemetery, a memorial center and the dry creek where the massacre took place. It was there that I parked my car — I was the only tourist — and there that I met a man who called himself J. T. Kills Crow. J. T. is 40, a Lakota with a broad face, a big grin and a faded blue towel hanging around his neck, and he approached me almost as soon as I stepped out of my car, offering to show me around. The memorial center, a squat brown building across the street, was closed, so I said yes.
J. T. may not have been a trained tour guide, but as a lifelong resident of Wounded Knee, he brought a disturbingly personal touch to the site. He pointed to one spot in the creek bed, which was littered with rusty cans and broken glass, and described how fellow Indians were targeted by snipers. But it wasn’t until he described another incident — when, at the age of 7, he and his father found a dead man in their basement — that I realized he wasn’t referring to the 1890 tragedy. No, he’d witnessed the 1973 standoff between members of the American Indian Movement and federal authorities, a 71-day ordeal during which two American Indian activists were killed, a federal marshal was paralyzed and more than 1,000 people were arrested.
Every speck of dirt held a dark secret. Down a well, under a concrete slab — everywhere, he said, were bodies. But no one wanted to dig them up, for fear of getting blamed by the authorities. “The government still mistreats us,” he said matter-of-factly.
As we walked back to my car, grasshoppers leaped among the knee-high brush, and J. T. invited me back to his house, saying I could spend the night. How could the Frugal Traveler refuse? (I had not told him I was a reporter.)
J. T.’s home in Wounded Knee looked like most of the others in the neighborhood — low, cheaply built, with four dim bedrooms —but at least it wasn’t covered with graffiti and it wasn’t surrounded by chicken wire. A pile of beer cans was beside the corpse of a Pontiac, and a discarded plastic toy squawked an electronic melody without cease.
We sat on his shady front step, drinking beer from plastic cups (Pine Ridge is officially dry, so you can’t be seen with a can) and chatting about life on the reservation. J. T.’s had been complicated, with the tough turns you might expect in this place — growing up in foster homes, struggling with alcoholism — but he was no cliché. He’d worked summers as a foreman in Denver, studied tae kwon do and, off and on over the years, been a law officer.
Now, however, J. T. was wary of the police — as was the entire town. The sight of a cruiser might send everyone into momentary second-guessing: Am I doing anything they’ll hassle me for?
The friends, neighbors and relatives who came by to visit all seemed to be scrounging for gas money, and although several kids were playing a friendly game of basketball on a court swept clean of broken glass, J. T. added a black note: The court was supposed to have floodlights, he said, but the money for them was stolen from the house of the local councilman.
Still, Wounded Knee didn’t feel particularly sad, and there were moments of black humor among the horror stories of disease, crime and bad luck. When a neighbor walked out of his house and climbed into a car, J. T. noted that the vehicle had no fan belt — a “true Indian car,” he called it.
Then he added about the neighbor: “And he doesn’t have any kidneys either!”
Toward evening, J. T. and I drove into the town of Pine Ridge to pick up dinner from Pizza Hut — the first national chain I have visited this summer — then skipped across state lines into Nebraska to buy two cases of Hurricane malt liquor, which we hustled into the back of my Volvo and covered with a blanket. This subterfuge seemed so normal, so routine, that I didn’t quite realize I might be breaking the law. I wasn’t being too frugal either. I’d paid $21 for the pizza, $42 for the beer, and I offered J. T. $20 for his tour services. Back at J. T.’s house, we ate with his wife and youngest son, and watched the privileged blondes of MTV’s “Laguna Beach” coo over a new Mercedes S.U.V.
The sky darkened, and the kids traded their basketball for fireworks. J. T. brought me to meet the councilman and I handed him a Cuban cigarillo I’d picked up in Turkey last year. (Giving tobacco, J. T. told me, is an important Lakota tradition.)
“Just remember,” the councilman said as he tucked it behind his ear, “you’re in a foreign country now.”
That night, I slept in a tent outside J. T.’s house while he watched over me, drinking Hurricanes. When I awoke, the town was silent but for the children’s toy still warbling. I walked 50 feet past J. T.’s house and looked out at the vast plains surrounding Wounded Knee — the grasses rippling in the winds, the buffaloes still roaming wild somewhere out there.
Then, without waking my host, I crumbled a cigarillo onto the soil — another Lakota tradition — and drove away with my windows wide-open to air out the smell of spilled beer, and with nothing in my ears but the wind.
Next stops: Kansas and Oklahoma.
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17) Fuel Rationing in Iran Prompts Lines and Protests
By NAZILA FATHI
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/world/middleeast/27cnd-iran.html?hp
TEHRAN, June 27 — Angry drivers set fire to at least two gasoline stations in Tehran Tuesday night after the government announced that fuel would be rationed beginning at midnight.
Long lines were seen at other gas stations in the capital today as new rules took effect, limiting drivers of private cars to 26 gallons a month at the subsidized price of 34 cents a gallon. Taxicab drivers are limited to 211 gallons a month. The government is still considering whether to allow drivers to buy additional fuel at higher prices.
Traffic jams developed near some stations as police officers worked to control the lines.
The government first planned to start the rationing a year ago, but put the decision off repeatedly out of fear that it would spark unrest. State television reported today that “several gas stations and public places had been attacked by vandals.” One was set ablaze by protesters in the western Tehran neighborhood of Poonak and Niayesh. Another in Azadi Street in southwest Tehran was attacked, according to a report in Etemad, a daily newspaper.
Iran is rich with crude oil and is the second largest exporter of oil in OPEC. But it has far fewer refineries than it needs to satisfy booming domestic demand, so it must import as much as half of its gasoline from refineries abroad, at a cost of $5 billion a year.
Analysts warned that rationing would make it difficult for unemployed people who used their private cars as taxis to earn a living, and that it could accelerate inflation, which is already a problem in the country. Prices of dairy products like milk, butter and yogurt have risen by 20 percent or more this week.
The Iranian economy may also be pinched by new sanctions being debated by the United Nations Security Council over Iran’s refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment program.
The minister of oil and the minister of intelligence met privately with members of parliament to discuss the effects of the decision to ration gasoline. Afterward, the speaker. Gholamali Hadad Adel, told reporters that the parliament would back the government.
“The rationing can help reduce the consumption,” Mr. Adel said, according to the parliament’s web site. “It can also make us more independent and become less vulnerable in the international community.”
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18) In West Bank, Hamas Is Silent but Never Ignored
By IAN FISHER
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/world/middleeast/28westbank.html?ref=world
HAWARA, West Bank, June 26 — A new code was born here overnight. No one, it seems, belongs to Hamas in the West Bank anymore. Everyone now is an “Islamist,” a word that neatly, and maybe more safely, shears the religious from party affiliation amid the uncertainty of a Palestinian people newly divided.
“I don’t want to spend my life in jail!” a 35-year-old restaurant owner said, refusing to give his name after expressing pro-Hamas sentiments in an interview here.
Hamas, shrewd as it is deadly, has gone to ground in the West Bank, which is controlled now by its secular rival Fatah and supported by the United States, Europe and Israel as the territory with the only workable Palestinian government.
Dozens of Hamas members have been arrested in the last week, since the militant Islamic group drove Fatah out of Gaza, the West Bank’s smaller and more radical sibling. Men with beards — the symbol of religious devotion and, often, of Hamas — say they are sticking close to home. Hamas’s charities, a bedrock of the group’s support, have been attacked, and their workers are lying low.
But in scores of interviews in the West Bank with people of all political shades, one thing seems clear: Hamas remains a powerful presence in the West Bank, even if kept somewhat in check by both Fatah and the Israeli Army. This may be the most crucial fact that Israel, the United States and others will have to absorb as they bolster the West Bank as a sort of trial Palestinian state.
“If Hamas doesn’t like it, Hamas can destroy it,” said Fais Hamdan, 34, a stone cutter with an “Islamist” beard in this village of 6,000 near Nablus, as he sat in the restaurant with the owner who would not give his name. “If they want to kill any political deal, they only have to attack a settlement or another Israeli target. Don’t think that Hamas is very weak in the West Bank.”
The central issue, as it has been for years, remains credibility.
Hamas crushed Fatah politically last year, sweeping legislative elections in January 2006, partly because Fatah was perceived as corrupt and aloof. That reality, even many Fatah members complain, has changed little.
Hamas also still remains, on paper at least, a strong political force, with the majority of legislative seats in parliament and in control of dozens of city and town councils around the West Bank. Israel has curtailed that as best it can. Of the 74 Hamas legislators, 40 are in Israeli prisons — and many of its other leaders have been arrested since the fighting erupted in Gaza.
But that could end up helping Hamas because Israeli prison is where Palestinian leaders often gain their contacts and organizational skill.
More broadly, many Palestinians seem to hold little hope that anyone — America, Israel or even Arab states fearful that Hamas’s Islamism could spread — will actually make good on promises of aid to the West Bank.
That perception seemed reinforced on Monday, after the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, met with President Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, and made what Palestinians considered a paltry opening gesture: the release of only a portion of the $600 million of withheld Palestinian tax money and an offer to free just 250 prisoners held in Israeli jails, among some 11,000.
“Look at the irony here,” the restaurant owner said. “Abu Mazen says he rejects talks with Hamas but he sits down with Olmert. And Olmert isn’t going to give him anything! Then Hamas leaders appear on TV and say, ‘Fatah negotiated for 15 years with Israel and nothing happened. Israel didn’t give us anything for 15 years. Why now?’
“And people are listening,” he added.
For the moment, political leaders and security officials say, the danger of the Gaza violence spilling into the West Bank seems remote. Fatah is stronger here and, unlike in Gaza, Israeli soldiers still occupy the West Bank.
At any rate, Hamas seems for now to have taken itself out of any fight in the West Bank — though its critics say that is not only because its members fear arrest.
“If they are hiding, then they are hiding for shame at the crimes that were committed in Gaza,” said Ahmad Hazaa Shreim, a legislator and leader of Fatah in Qalqilya, a Palestinian city of 40,000 close to the Israeli line.
Qalqilya, walled off almost completely by the Israeli barrier, presents a telling test case for the future of Hamas in the West Bank. Flags of both Fatah and Hamas still fly here, and in 2005, its residents voted in a 15-member city council composed entirely of Hamas members (including the mayor, who was in an Israeli jail at the time and was arrested again last month).
But then last year, the city bucked the trend, voting in a majority of Fatah legislators at a time when Hamas won elections around the Palestinian territories.
Now the two forces are locked in another standoff. Hamas is coming under verbal fire for pushing Fatah from Gaza.
“Hamas people always wore the clothes of religion,” complained the 65-year-old owner of a shoe shop in Qalqilya, who like many people refused to give his name out of fear. “Now after what happened in Gaza, the mask has been removed from these people.”
But Hamas supporters say Fatah’s mask is off, too. Amid arrests and violent overtaking of government and Hamas buildings around the West Bank, at least 23 people, most of them Hamas members, have been detained in Qalqilya alone by the Palestinian security forces controlled by Fatah in the last week. Fatah says that only armed men are being sought.
While a Fatah building was firebombed and a security patrol fired on, several shops owned by Hamas supporters have been shot at. At the edge of town, a small charitable factory that makes artificial limbs — and is said to be controlled by Hamas — was systematically demolished; all the windows were broken, wheelchairs were overturned, plaster casts were shattered.
It was carried out, the factory’s operators say, by 16 well-organized men in ski masks.
“Sixteen people?” said Tawfik Daoud, the charity’s treasurer, who denied any link to Hamas. “Masked? They were not thieves. It’s obvious who did it.”
Fatah has come under much criticism here for the raid, though Mr. Shreim, the Fatah chief, who had been respected by Hamas because he spent 22 years in Israeli jails, strongly denies that Fatah had anything to do with it.
Still, there is a rising concern among the West Bank’s many religious people, even those who claim not to belong to Hamas, that life may become more difficult all around for the religious. For whatever anger there may be at Hamas, the fear seems to be preserving its support.
“They are chasing Hamas people,” said a bearded 27-year-old man who gave his name as Abu Khaled. “The situation in town makes people sympathize with them.”
It is tense, too, in Hebron, another religious city to the south. Local security officers say they are not expecting a fight with Hamas, but just in case they have piled sandbags in front of their headquarters and built up gun positions around them.
Akram al-Himouni, a local Fatah leader, said he saw some hope if Hamas apologized for Gaza and allowed Fatah back there. If Hamas does not “say sorry,” he said, “then the story will become worse, and there could be a military resolution.”
He added grimly: “I know Hamas. I believe there may not be a dialogue; the resolution may be unfortunately by force.”
But many others predicted some sort of reunion, if not from love than from an inescapable logic tied, as always here, to what the outside world decides to do.
If the outside world manages to create stability in the West Bank, and thus hunger for real peace, many argue a final settlement cannot happen without Hamas, which represents a sizable, if unknowable, percentage of the population. [On Wednesday, Saudi and Jordanian officials called for Palestinian unity.]
If it fails, the choice is either more, possibly worse, fighting — or some self-protective accord that preserves the value of unity that Palestinians say is part of their heritage. The choice seems starker in the West Bank, where neither side can clearly dominate the way Hamas does in Gaza.
“Now the blood is very hot,” said Khaled Osaily, the politically independent mayor of Hebron. “Later things will calm down and people will find a solution. They will come back together. They don’t have another option.”
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19) Likely Spread of Deserts to Fertile Land Requires Quick
Response, U.N. Report Says
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/world/28deserts.html?ref=world
ROME, June 27 — Enough fertile land could turn into desert within the next generation to create an “environmental crisis of global proportions,” large-scale migrations and political instability in parts of Africa and Central Asia unless current trends are quickly stemmed, a new United Nations report concludes.
“The costs of desertification are large,” said Zafar Adeel of the United Nations University, who is based in Canada and is an author of the report, to be released Thursday.
“Already at the moment there are tens of millions of people on the move,” Dr. Adeel said in an interview. “There’s internal displacement. There’s international migration. There are a number of causes. But by and large, in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia this movement is triggered by degradation of land.”
The report’s authors say individual nations and international groups must collaborate to solve what has so far been an underrecognized crisis in the making, caused mainly by climate change. Water resources are overexploited because the poor have no other options, and climate change has exacerbated the cycle. Governments and wealthier countries must aid these populations to develop more sustainable livelihoods or suffer the consequences, the report says.
“Today, those migrants who are escaping dry lands are mostly moving around far from the developed world,” Janos Bogardi of the United Nations University in Bonn, Germany, a technical adviser on the report, said in an interview. “Those who end up on boats to Europe are the tip of an iceberg.”
Far more people move within their homeland, or to adjacent countries. Case studies have shown that up to 20 percent of Malians move to Ivory Coast in search of agricultural work during years of drought, for example. But as temperatures rise and desertification increases, such safer places may be overwhelmed.
“The numbers we now find alarming may explode in an uncontrollable way,” Dr. Bogardi said. “Because if you look at land use now and dry land, there is the potential that we are nearing a tipping point.”
The United Nations report estimates that 50 million people are at risk of displacement in the next 10 years if desertification is not checked. The report is a result of a United Nations-sponsored conference last December of 150 experts from 40 countries.
Experts say climate shifts are one of several converging stresses creating the raised vulnerability in dry areas. Others include population growth, diversion of rivers for irrigation and a lack of ability to store water from flooding rains to use when dry times come.
The report’s authors suggest that dry lands can be partly restored with vegetation that can be used to absorb some of the developed world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Developed countries might invest in programs to prevent conversion of dry land to desert to compensate for automobile and factory emissions, through emissions trading schemes like those in Europe, for example.
“The surface area is so large that even a bit of improved vegetation is going to make a significant contribution,” Dr. Adeel said. “So you’re addressing climate change and also creating a livelihood for people who are poor, so it’s a win-win situation.”
A recent study by Christian Aid, a charity based in Britain, found that 155 million people are currently displaced by conflicts, natural disasters and development. By 2050, an additional billion people may be forced to leave their homes because of climate change, said John Davison, the author of that report.
“All of our concerns here in Europe about immigration bypass the huge crisis that is already occurring in the developing world, which is already bad,” he said. “If you add climate change to the mix, there’s a danger of it spinning out of control.”
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20) 5 Charged in Planting of Devices at School
By NATE SCHWEBER
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/nyregion/28evacuate.html
TOTOWA, N.J., June 27 — Five teenagers who graduated last week from Wayne Valley High School have been arrested in connection with the discovery of 16 devices with fuses in lockers at the school, forcing the evacuation of 1,400 students on the last full day of classes.
The Passaic County prosecutor’s office announced the arrests, made on Tuesday night and early Wednesday, at a news conference at which authorities called the devices “smoke bombs.”
The young men, three of them 18 and two 17 at the time of the evacuation, face up to 25 years in prison if found guilty, said James Wilson, chief of the arson unit for the Passaic County prosecutor.
Charges against the five include burglary, conspiracy to commit burglary, attempt to cause widespread injury or damage, attempted arson, conspiracy to commit arson and possession of a weapon.
On June 13 the students at Wayne Valley High School, about 20 miles northwest of New York City, were evacuated to a church after a student found fuses dangling from a locker. The police then found 16 six-inch devices shaped like sticks of dynamite bound with duct tape into bunches of four. The devices, first believed to be incendiary, were split between two lockers at opposite ends of a hallway where many students congregate, Mr. Wilson said.
School surveillance videos showed that just after midnight on June 12 three people wearing black hooded sweatshirts and masks broke into the school and stashed a backpack in a locker room, Mr. Wilson said. Videotape showed two students during school hours taking the backpack from the locker room and hiding it in a second-floor locker. Later that night, the video camera recorded two people breaking into the school and putting smoke bombs from the backpack in two lockers, with fuses hanging beneath the door.
During the break-ins another student kept watch from a car outside, the police said.
Although the two break-ins set off alarms, the suspects were gone by the time the Wayne police arrived, Chief Donald Stouthamer said.
Based on identifications from the tapes, officials said they obtained search warrants for each suspect’s home and in one found smoke bombs.
The smoke bombs were legally bought in Pennsylvania, Mr. Wilson said.
Students could have been injured in the panic if the hallway had filled with smoke, Mr. Wilson said. He also said there was a chance the devices could have ignited paper left in the lockers, possibly causing a fire.
“These are pretty intelligent kids,” Mr. Wilson said. “It doesn’t take, no pun intended, rocket scientists for them to realize they could have burned down part of that school.”
The three 18-year-olds, considered adults, are Robert S. Margolies, Mauricio Alarco and Michael J. Bacchioni. They were released on $50,000 bail each. The two juveniles, one of whom turned 18 last week, were to be placed under house arrest. All the suspects are to appear in court in about three weeks, Mr. Wilson said. None have criminal records, he said.
The departing Wayne school superintendent, Maria Nuccetelli, said that pranks were common near the end of a school year and had in past years included students’ painting a road’s yellow divider line blue to represent the school’s colors. “But we’ve never had anything of this magnitude, and in a post-Sept. 11 world you cannot classify this as a prank,” she said.
During the initial investigation, officers confiscated a backpack filled with bottle rockets on the first floor of the school. Although that turned out to be unrelated to the smoke bombs, three freshmen were suspended in connection with the fireworks.
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21) Going Backwards: US Jail, Prison Popluation Has Biggest Rise in 6 Years
by James Vicini
Published on Wednesday, June 27, 2007 by Reuters
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/27/2147/
WASHINGTON - The United States, which has the most prisoners of any country in the world, last year recorded the largest increase in the number of people in prisons and jails since 2000, the Justice Department reported on Wednesday.
It said the nation’s prison and jail populations increased by more than 62,000 inmates, or 2.8 percent, to about 2,245,000 inmates in the 12-month period that ended on June 30, 2006. It was the biggest jump in numbers and percentage change in six years.
Criminal justice experts have attributed the record U.S. prison population to tough sentencing laws, record numbers of drug offenders and high crimes rates.
State or federal prisons held two-thirds of the nation’s incarcerated population while local jails held the rest, according to the report by the department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The number of inmates in state prisons rose by 3 percent, the report said. That growth mainly reflected rising prison admissions, which have been going up faster than the number of released prisoners. Also, more parole violators have returned to prison, the report said.
Forty-two states and the federal system all had more inmates in June last year than the previous year. The number of jail inmates increased by 2.5 percent during the same 12-month period, the report said.
The report on U.S. prison numbers is issued every six months.
Jason Ziedenberg of the Justice Policy Institute, a group that seeks alternatives to incarceration, said the new numbers showed an “alarming growth” in an already overburdened prison system.
“Billions of public safety dollars are absorbed by prison expansion and limits the nation’s ability to focus on more effective strategies to promote public safety,” he said.
Officials at the Drug Policy Alliance, another group opposed to long prison sentences for drug offenders, said the drug policies of the past 30 years have been a major contributor to the U.S. prison population explosion.
According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King’s College in London, the United States has long had the world’s largest prison population, followed by China at 1.5 million and Russia at 885,670.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Texas: Immigrant Drowns After Border Agent Is Attacked
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
An illegal immigrant drowned in a border canal after a Border Patrol agent trying to rescue him was hit in the head with a rock thrown by a suspected human smuggler, Border Patrol officials said. The agent fired at least one shot at the suspect and another would-be immigrant, who fled back into Mexico, said an agency spokesman, Patrick Berry.
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/us/28brfs-IMMIGRANTDRO_BRF.html
California: Immigrants Die in Crash
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Two suspected illegal immigrants died in a fiery head-on collision after the driver of a pickup fled the Border Patrol and swerved into oncoming traffic on a winding, rural road east of San Diego, the authorities said. Several people were seriously injured. The Border Patrol halted its pursuit after reaching the 55 m.p.h. speed limit, said a spokesman, Quinn Palmer.
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/us/28brfs-IMMIGRANTSDI_BRF.html
White House Is Subpoenaed on Wiretapping
By JAMES RISEN
June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/washington/28nsa.html?hp
Fidel Castro on the 50th Anniversary
of the Chinese Revolution
http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/mayjun_07/0507002.html
Files on Illegal Spying Show C.I.A. Skeletons From Cold War
By MARK MAZZETTI and TIM WEINER
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/washington/27cia.html?ref=us
Canada: Native Protests Planned for National Day
By IAN AUSTEN
Native groups are threatening to cause major travel disruptions at the start of the forthcoming Canada Day holiday weekend . Shawn Best, a spokesman for the Tyendinaga Mohawk Council, said members would block either Ontario’s main highway near Kingston, Ontario, or the rail line between Montreal and Toronto on Friday to protest poverty and land claims. He said that other native groups had told him they planned similar moves in other parts of the country.
June 27, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/world/americas/27briefs-native.html
28-Mile Virtual Fence Is Rising Along the Border
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26fence.html?ref=us
U.S. Plan to Capture and Kill Insurgents in Baquba Fell Far Short of Goal, Officer Says
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
June 26, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/world/middleeast/26baquba.html
Army kidnaps six Palestinians from several parts of the West Bank
The Israeli army invades several cities and towns in the West Bank and kidnapped at least six Palestinians in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
http://www.imemc. org/article/ 49172
The Situation Room: Government officials, including the mayor, are concealing records of disastrously high levels of toxic dust from Lennar’s grading at the Hunters Point Shipyard by Ahimsa Porter Sumchai, M.D., http://www.sfbayview.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=222&Itemid=14
Boom times for banks in Venezuela
By JENS ERIK GOULD
www.latinamericanpost.com/index.php?mod=seccion&secc=4&conn=4860
The Big Profits in Biowarfare Research
Corporate America's Deadliest Secret
By SHERWOOD ROSS
June 22, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross06222007.html
How Could Blair Possibly Get This Job?
The Bumbling Envoy
By ROBERT FISK
Weekend Edition
June 23 / 24, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/fisk06232007.html
Nationwide, Black children 4-6 times more likely to die of asthma http://www.fpnotebook.com/LUN13.htm .
Nigeria: Strike - 50 Labour Leaders Arrested
Daily Champion (Lagos)
22 June 2007
Posted to the web 22 June 2007
Chukwudi Achife, Ufomba Uzuegbu, Akor Sylvester
Lagos
http://allafrica.com/stories/200706220007.html
Climate change blamed as Lake Superior shrinks
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 20 June 2007
http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2679474.ece
General Strike Over Rising Fuel Price Takes Hold in Nigerian Cities
By SARAH SIMPSON
June 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/world/africa/21nigeria.html
At Least 12 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq in 2 Days
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and GRAHAM BOWLEY
June 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/world/middleeast/21cnd-iraq.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
The General's Report
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
25 June 2007 Issue
"How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061707A.shtml
Medical Marijuana Measure Falls With Connecticut Governor’s Veto
By MATTHEW J. MALONE
June 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/nyregion/20rell.html
AP Blog: Living on Cuba's Rationed Food
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:18 p.m. ET
"AP Havana Bureau Chief Anita Snow is spending the month of June living on the ''libreta,'' a ration book for food consumption in Cuba. Here's her story."
June 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-INT-Cuba-Weblog.html?ex=1182916800&en=6f07cb599a5fd992&ei=5070&emc=eta1
The Earth today stands in imminent peril
" ...and nothing short of a planetary rescue will save it from the environmental cataclysm of dangerous climate change. Those are not the words of eco-warriors but the considered opinion of a group of eminent scientists writing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal."
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 19 June 2007
http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2675747.ece
With Rise in Radiation Exposure, Experts Urge Caution on Tests
By RONI CARYN RABIN
June 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/health/19cons.html?ref=health
Conservancy Buys Large Area of Adirondack Wilderness
By ANTHONY DePALMA
June 19, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/19/nyregion/19adirondacks.html?ref=nyregion
Global: Hidden cancer epidemic kills hundreds of thousands each year
"A worldwide epidemic of occupational cancer is claiming at least one life every 52 seconds, but this tragedy is being ignored by both official regulators and employers. A new cancer prevention guide, reveals that over 600,000 deaths a year – one death every 52 seconds – are caused by occupational cancer, making up almost one-third of all work-related deaths."
http://www.hazards.org/cancer/index.htm
Preventing occupational cancer
"A new cancer prevention guide, reveals that over 600,000 deaths a year – one death every 52 seconds – are caused by occupational cancer, making up almost one-third of all work-related deaths."
IMF / News article
http://www.imfmetal.org/main/index.cfm?n=47&l=2&c=15708
A Harsh Lesson in Finances for After-School Students
By DAVID GONZALEZ
June 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/nyregion/18citywide.html?ref=nyregion
Long Reviled, Merit Pay Gains Among Teachers
By SAM DILLON
June 18, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/education/18pay.html?ref=us
Meadow Birds in Precipitous Decline, Audubon Says
By FELICITY BARRINGER
June 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/us/15birds.html?ref=science
Strike in South Africa expands
By Geoff Hill
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published June 12, 2007
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20070611-114232-8445r.htm
Oregon: More Than 165 Workers Are Detained After Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
More than 165 workers were detained to be processed for possible deportation after federal agents raided the Fresh Del Monte Produce food-processing plant and two offices of a staffing company in Portland. Three people were indicted on immigration, illegal documents and identity theft charges. An official at Fresh Del Monte Produce Company headquarters in Coral Gables, Fla., said the company could not comment until federal investigators provided it with more information. Mayor Tom Potter of Portland criticized the raids. The three arrests were understandable, Mr. Potter said, but “to go after local workers who are here to support their families while filling the demands of local businesses for their labor is bad policy.”
June 13, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/us/13brfs-immigration.html
Robert Fisk: Lies and outrages... would you believe it?
It was Israel which attacked Egypt after Nasser closed the straits of Tiran
Published: 09 June 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2636206.ece
Judge Throws Out Sentence in Teen Sex Case
By BRENDA GOODMAN
June 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/us/11cnd-consent.html?hp
US Military Envisions "Post-Occupation" Force
"US military officials are increasingly envisioning a "post-occupation" troop presence in Iraq that neither maintains current levels nor leads to a complete pullout, but aims for a smaller, longer-term force that would remain in the country for years."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061107J.shtml
Lieberman Backs Limited U.S. Attacks on Iran
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
June 10, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/washington/10cnd-policy.html
Biologists Make Skin Cells Work Like Stem Cells
By NICHOLAS WADE
June 7, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/science/07cell.html?ref=science
Report Confirms CIA Secret Prisons in Europe
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060807J.shtml
The Dirty Water Underground
By GREGORY DICUM
OAKLAND, Calif.
May 31, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/garden/31greywater.html
A Hot-Selling Weapon, an Inviting Target
By ANDREW PARK
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03rifle.html?ref=business
Surf’s Up, but the Water Is Brown
By MIREYA NAVARRO
June 3, 2007
Los Angeles
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/fashion/03beaches.html
When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?
By ELIZABETH WEIL
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/magazine/03kindergarten-t.html?hp
After Sanctions, Doctors Get Drug Company Pay
By GARDINER HARRIS and JANET ROBERTS
June 3, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/health/03docs.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
Somalia: The Other (Hidden) War for Oil
by Carl Bloice; Black Commentator
May 07, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12768
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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ADDICTED TO WAR
Animated Video Preview
Narrated by Peter Coyote
Is now on YouTube and Google Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZwyuHEN5h8
We are planning on making the ADDICTED To WAR movie.
Can you let me know what you think about this animated preview?
Do you think it would work as a full length film?
Please send your response to:
Fdorrel@sbcglobal. net or Fdorrel@Addictedtow ar.com
In Peace,
Frank Dorrel
Publisher
Addicted To War
P.O. Box 3261
Culver City, CA 90231-3261
310-838-8131
fdorrel@addictedtow ar.com
fdorrel@sbcglobal. net
www.addictedtowar. com
For copies of the book:
http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html
OR SEND CHECK OR MONEY ORDER TO:
Frank Dorrel
P.O. BOX 3261
CULVER CITY, CALIF. 90231-3261
fdorrel@addictedtowar.com
$10.00 per copy (Spanish or English); special bulk rates
can be found at: http://www.addictedtowar.com/bookbulk.html
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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DEMAND THE RELEASE OF SAMI AL-ARIAN
The National Council of Arab Americans (NCA) demands the immediate
release of political prisoner, Dr. Sami Al-Arian. Although
Dr. Al-Arian is no longer on a hunger strike we must still demand
he be released by the US Department of Justice (DOJ). After an earlier
plea agreement that absolved Dr. Al-Arian from any further questioning,
he was sentenced up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify before
a grand jury in Virginia. He has long sense served his time yet
Dr. Al-Arian is still being held. Release him now!
See:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/16/1410255
ACTION:
We ask all people of conscience to demand the immediate
release and end to Dr. Al- Arian's suffering.
Call, Email and Write:
1- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
Department of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Fax Number: (202) 307-6777
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
2- The Honorable John Conyers, Jr
2426 Rayburn Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-5126
(202) 225-0072 Fax
John.Conyers@mail.house.gov
3- Senator Patrick Leahy
433 Russell Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
(202)224-4242
senator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov
4- Honorable Judge Gerald Lee
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
401 Courthouse Square, Alexandria, VA 22314
March 22, 2007
[No email given...bw]
National Council of Arab Americans (NCA)
http://www.arab-american.net/
Criminalizing Solidarity: Sami Al-Arian and the War of
Terror
By Charlotte Kates, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2007
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6767.shtml
Related:
Robert Fisk: The true story of free speech in America
This systematic censorship of Middle East reality
continues even in schools
Published: 07 April 2007
http://news. independent. co.uk/world/ fisk/article2430 125.ece
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Excerpt of interview between Barbara Walters and Hugo Chavez
http://www.borev.net/2007/03/what_you_had_something_better.html
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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THIS IS AN EXCELLENT VIDEO DESTRIBUTED BY U.S. LABOR AGAINST
THE WAR (USLAW) FEATURING SPEAKERS AT THE JANUARY 27TH
MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOCUSING ON THE DEMAND - BRING
THE TROOPS HOME NOW.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6935451906479097836&hl=en
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Defend the Los Angeles Eight!
http://www.committee4justice.com/
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George Takai responds to Tim Hardaway's homophobic remarks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcJoJZIcQW4&eurl_
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Iran
http://www.lucasgray.com/video/peacetrain.html
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Another view of the war. A link from Amer Jubran
http://d3130.servadmin.com/~leeflash/
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Petition: Halt the Blue Angels
http://action.globalexchange.org/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=458
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/289327
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A Girl Like Me
7:08 min
Youth Documentary
Kiri Davis, Director, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, Producer
Winner of the Diversity Award
Sponsored by Third Millennium Foundation
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1091431409617440489
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Film/Song about Angola
http://www.prisonactivist.org/angola/
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Cheyenne and Arapaho oral histories hammer history's account of the
Sand Creek Massacre"
CENTENNIAL, CO -- A new documentary film based on an award-winning
documentary short film, "The Sand Creek Massacre", and driven by
Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people who tell their version about
what happened during the Sand Creek Massacre via their oral
histories, has been released by Olympus Films+, LLC, a Centennial,
Colorado film company.
"You have done an extraordinary job" said Margie Small, Tobient
Entertainment, " on the Colorado PBS episode, the library videos for
public schools and libraries, the trailer, etc...and getting the
story told and giving honor to those ancestors who had to witness
this tragic and brutal attack...film is one of the best ways."
"The images shown in the film were selected for native awareness
value" said Donald L. Vasicek, award-winning writer/filmmaker, "we
also focused on preserving American history on film because tribal
elders are dying and taking their oral histories with them. The film
shows a non-violent solution to problem-solving and 19th century
Colorado history, so it's multi-dimensional in that sense. "
Chief Eugene Blackbear, Sr., Cheyenne, who starred as Chief Black
Kettle in "The Last of the Dogmen" also starring Tom Berenger and
Barbara Hershey and "Dr. Colorado", Tom Noel, University of Colorado
history professor, are featured.
The trailer can be viewed and the film can be ordered for $24.95 plus
$4.95 for shipping and handling at http://www.fullduck.com/node/53.
Vasicek's web site, http://www.donvasicek.com, provides detailed
information about the Sand Creek Massacre including various still
images particularly on the Sand Creek Massacre home page and on the
proposal page.
Olympus Films+, LLC is dedicated to writing and producing quality
products that serve to educate others about the human condition.
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
7078 South Fairfax Street
Centennial, CO 80122
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
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A NEW LOOK AT U.S. RADIOACTIVE WEAPONS
Join us in a campaign to expose and stop the use
of these illegal weapons
http://poisondust.org/
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You may enjoy watching these.
In struggle
Che:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqcezl9dD2c
Leon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukkFVV5X0p4
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!
Stop funding Israel's war against Palestine
Complete the form at the website listed below with your information.
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?
JServSessionIdr003=cga2p2o6x1.app2a&cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=177
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Sand Creek Massacre
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
On November 29, 1864, 700 Colorado troops savagely slaughtered
over 450 Cheyenne children, disabled, elders, and women in the
southeastern Colorado Territory under its protection. This act
became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film project
("The Sand Creek Massacre" documentary film project) is an
examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne
people as told from their perspective. This project chronicles
that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century
struggle for respectful coexistence between white and native
plains cultures in the United States of America.
Listed below are links on which you can click to get the latest news,
products, and view, free, "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" award-
winning documentary short. In order to create more native
awareness, particularly to save the roots of America's history,
please read the following:
Some people in America are trying to save the world. Bless
them. In the meantime, the roots of America are dying.
What happens to a plant when the roots die? The plant dies
according to my biology teacher in high school. American's
roots are its native people. Many of America's native people
are dying from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, hunger,
and disease, which was introduced to them by the Caucasian
male. Tribal elders are dying. When they die, their oral
histories go with them. Our native's oral histories are the
essence of the roots of America, what took place before
our ancestors came over to America, what is taking place,
and what will be taking place. It is time we replenish
America's roots with native awareness, else America
continues its decaying, and ultimately, its death.
You can help. The 22-MINUTE SAND CREEK MASSACRE
DOCUMENTARY PRESENTATION/EDUCATIONAL DVD IS
READY FOR PURCHASE! (pass the word about this powerful
educational tool to friends, family, schools, parents, teachers,
and other related people and organizations to contact
me (dvasicek@earthlink.net, 303-903-2103) for information
about how they can purchase the DVD and have me come
to their children's school to show the film and to interact
in a questions and answers discussion about the Sand
Creek Massacre.
Happy Holidays!
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
SHOP:
http://www.manataka.org/page633.html
BuyIndies.com
donvasicek.com.
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