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"What are they recruiting for?
Murder, rape, torture, war!"
What we should be teaching our children.
Watch this video (it's only six minutes long)
then join us to get rid of JROTC.
Out of the mouths of babes:
http://lasinhanesia.multiply.com/video/item/5
THE NEXT MEETING OF JROTC MUST GO!
TUESDAY, April 1, 7:00 P.M.
GLOBAL EXCHANGE
2017 Mission St (@ 16th), San Francisco
For more information on how you can become involved contact:
Bonnie Weinstein, (415) 824-8730
Nancy Macias, (415) 255-7296 ext. 229
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THERE IS AN EMERGENCY PROTEST CALLED BY A BROAD CROSS-SECTION OF THE COMMUNITY IN FRONT OF THE ISRAELI CONSULATE, FRIDAY March 7, 2008, AT 4 PM.
456 MONTGOMERY STREET, SAN FRANCISCO.
Below is a call forwarded from the Free Palestine Alliance.
The Free Palestine Alliance
Urgent - Call for International Palestine Tribunals
March 2, 2008
Please print and forward widely!
Below is a concise and direct declaration that calls for holding international tribunals for those guilty of the successive campaigns of terror against the Palestinian people. It is unique in that it is the first international public effort to hold guilty Arab regimes, Palestinians, Israelis, and US officials fully responsible for the ongoing Zionist crimes. By signing this declaration and by passing it through as much as possible worldwide, where all signatories are sought and welcomed, we will be initiating the first real steps to holding war tribunals internationally. This is also a tangible step to returning Palestine to its international position as a flagship for justice and self-determination. We urge you to actively support this declaration wherever you are, on every continent. Take it to your protests, ask your organization to sign on, engage everyone about who is responsible, and help build a momentum that will go well beyond protests and temporary reactions into sustained efforts and full accountability. We look forward to forming international tribunal committees soon after.
Please sign and pass it on. Time is critical!
"We, the undersigned individuals and organizations, regard what is taking place against the Palestinian people, particularly those of the Gaza Strip, not only as a war crime but also as a crime against humanity. While we hold the Zionist Israeli government directly responsible for these murderous campaigns, we also hold guilty Arab regimes, including the Palestinian Authority and the office of Mahmud Abbas, as accessory to these crimes in collaboration with the US administration. Through this declaration, we are taking the first steps to begin the process of holding international tribunals for all those guilty, either directly or as an accessory through their deadly silence, irrespective of who they are. The unbelievable and seemingly unending suffering of the Palestinian people requires that those responsible are forthwith brought to justice under international criminal law."
To sign on to this declaration, please send a message to: PalTribunal@gmail.com.
Signatories and updates will be sent out periodically.
Organizations:
The Free Palestine Alliance,
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International week of solidarity with Venezuela Feb 29 - March 7th
US/Exxon - Hands off Venezuela
STOP ExxonMobil's THEFT FROM THE POOR
Supported by Australia Venezuela Solidarity Network, Venezuela
Solidarity Network (USA), Venezuela Aotearoa Solidarity Network (NZ)
To add you organisation or name to the call, email
jodybetzien@venezuelasolidarity.org
To sign a statement of protest, visit
http://venezuelasolidarity.org/?q=node/2397
An international week of protest to:
Support the Venezuelan government's efforts to defend and extend the
Venezuelan people's common ownership and control over Venezuela's
natural resources, and defend the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela's
right to assert its social, political and economic sovereignty.
Condemn ExxonMobil's economic blackmail against Venezuela and call for
it to immediately withdraw its legal campaign against PDVSA.
Reject as illegitimate and immoral the British, US and Dutch courts'
order to freeze PDVSA's assets. Only Venezuela, through its own courts
and in accordance with its own Constitution, has the right to decide the
ownership and control of the resources in its territory. So-called
"international arbitration" on Venezuela's resources via courts in the
First World countries is colonialism.
Stand in solidarity with the protest actions of Venezuela's people,
trade unions and social organizations against ExxonMobil and the US
government's economic and political thuggery, and commend the words of
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez: "They will never rob us again, those
bandits of ExxonMobil".
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Malcom X Debate at Oxford
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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COUNTDOWN TO MARCH 19!
Help build the March 19th day of action!
Volunteer now to get the word out! Plug into Tues. evening and Sat. afternoon outreach teams to make sure people know about the March 19 march and rally.
Postering & Outreach every Saturday through March 19
Help with postering and outreach tabling in San Francisco and the East Bay.
SF Outreach - 12-3pm, meet at 2489 Mission St. at 21st. St. (Rm. 24)
East Bay ANSWER Activist Meeting & Outreach - 12noon, 636 - 9th Street at MLK, Oakland
Join us for political analysis and discussion of the ongoing occupation of Iraq and plans for the March 19 demonstration on the 5th anniversary of the invasion. We will go out in teams to poster after the meeting.
You can also pick up flyers and posters in San Francisco at 2489 Mission St. Rm. 24. Call us at 415-821-6545. In the East Bay, call 510-435-0844.
5th Anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq
End the War NOW!
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, March & Rally
5 p.m. S.F. Civic Center (Polk & Grove Sts.)
Click here to Endorse:
http://www.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=4300&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&JServSessionIdr004=yse6i9sky2.app6a
Bring All the Troops Home Now
End Colonial Occupation--Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine
Money for Jobs, Housing, Healthcare & Schools, Not War
Stop the threats against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba . . .
No to racism & immigrant bashing
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.answersf.org
answer@answersf.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
HELP BUILD THE MARCH 19 MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WAR!
March 19, 2008, will mark the 5th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in defiance of the U.S. government’s drive for war. Since March of 2003, many millions more people have turned against the war in Iraq. The will of the people of the United States has been represented in many anti-war demonstrations and actions throughout the last 5 years.
Yet, the warmakers in the White House and Congress—acting in direct contradiction to the interests of the people of the United States and the world—have continued to fund and expand the brutal occupation of the Iraqi people.
Just a week ago, Washington unleashed the largest bombing campaign of the war—terrorizing Iraqi people in a Baghdad suburb. More than a million Iraqis have been killed. The U.S. occupation has created a situation of extreme violence in the country. The Iraqi people are denied access to regular electricity, education, health care and many necessary services. Unemployment is rampant.
Four thousand U.S. soldiers have been killed and more than 60,000 wounded, injured or evacuated due to serious illness. The cost of the war is $450,000,000 per day, $5,000 every second. The war has been a success for military-industrial businesses like Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater and McDonnell-Douglas, who are making huge profits from the death and destruction. At the same time, we are told that there is no money for basic human needs housing, food, healthcare, schools and jobs.
March 19, 2008, will see many actions against the war in San Francisco and across the country, including walkouts, teach-ins and civil disobedience on a day of “No Business As Usual.” The ANSWER Coalition along with many other individuals and organizations will join those actions. The ANSWER Coalition is calling for an evening march and rally, starting at the San Francisco Civic Center at 5 p.m.
Help build the March 19th day of action!
There are many ways you can help.
1. Volunteer now to get the word out! Plug into Tues. evening and Sat. afternoon outreach teams to make sure people know about the March 19 march and rally.
This Tues. Jan. 29, 6-9pm meet at 2489 Mission St. at 21st St., (Rm. 28) SF
We will be flyering at BART stations and the Mission campus of City College, postering in different locations in SF, and banner making and alert phone calls in the office. No experience necessary.
Every Saturday, 12noon 3pm from Feb. 2 through March 19
Help with postering and outreach tabling in San Francisco and the East Bay.
SF outreach - meet 2489 Mission St. at 21st. St. (Rm. 24)
East Bay Outreach meet 636 - 9th Street at MLK, Oakland, 510-435-0844
You can also pick up flyers and posters in San Francisco at 2489 Mission St. Rm. 24. Call us at 415-821-6545. In the East Bay, call 510-435-0844
2. Organize on your campus or workplace.
The ANSWER Coalition can send you materials to poster and leaflet at your campus or workplace. Call 415-821-6545 or email answer@answersf.org to get more information about organizing on your campus or workplace.
3. Schedule a speaker for your class or organization.
Anti-war and anti-racist activists with the ANSWER coalition are available to speak about the war at home and abroad and the organizing for the Mar.19 day of action. We also have videos available on a number of different issues relating to the wars at home and abroad. Contact us to learn more about scheduling a speaker.
4. Donate to build the Mar.19 demonstration. Click here to donate now:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=1443&JServSessionIdr004=yl1mwxp382.app6a
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UFPJ ACTIONS:
March 19, 2008:
* 5th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq,
* beginning of the 6th year of war and occupation,
* beginning of the 6th year of senseless death and massive destruction.
The presidential candidates, the Congress, the White House and the media all seem to be working hard to push Iraq off the agenda until after the elections this fall -- we can't let that happen! They may be willing to let hundreds more U.S. soldiers and thousands more Iraqis die between now and when the next president and Congress are sworn in, but we are not!
United for Peace and Justice is calling for and supporting a set of activities on and around the 5th anniversary that will manifest the intensifying opposition to the war and help strengthen and expand our movement. We urge you to join with us to ensure the success of these actions:
March 13-16, Winter Soldier: UFPJ member group Iraq Veterans Against the War is organizing historic hearings March 13-16 in Washington, DC. Veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Iraqis and Afghans, will tell the nation the real story of this war. UFPJ is helping local groups and individuals plan events that directly link to and amplify the Winter Soldier hearings, from which we hope to have a live video feed available so that communities around the country can gather to watch and listen. Visit www.5yearstoomany.org/wintersoldier for more info.
March 19, Mass Nonviolent Direct Action in Washington, DC: UFPJ is organizing for what we hope will be the largest day of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience yet against the war in Iraq. We've marched, we've vigiled, we've lobbied -- it's time to put our bodies on the line in large numbers. We encourage anyone who can to join us in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, March 19th, to be part of the civil disobedience, or to assist in support work. We are working to have delegations from all 50 states take part in this massive day of action. Visit www.5yearstoomany.org/march19dc for more info and to register to join us in DC.
March 19, Local Actions Throughout the Country: While we are working hard to have a large turnout in DC on March 19, it is also necessary to be visible and vocal in our local communities on that day. Congress will not be in session and so our representatives and senators will be in their home districts/states. We encourage those who are not able to make it to Washington on March 19 to organize and participate in local actions. These events may vary in location or character, but they will all be tied to the actions in Washington and sending the same message to the policy makers: It is time to end this war and occupation! To find an event in your area (more are being posted daily, so keep checking back!) or to sign up to organize a local activity, visit www.5yearstoomany.org/march19local.
For further details and info on how to get involved, please visit www.5yearstoomany.org.
Help us make the 5th anniversary the last anniversary of this war! Making the 5 Years Too Many Actions as visible and powerful as they need to be will take substantial resources. Please make the most generous donation you can today to support this critical mobilization.
Join our efforts to build the strongest actions possible in March -- actions that will not only mark the anniversary but will also help propel our movement into the critically important work that must be done throughout the year and beyond. Together, we will end this war and turn our country toward more peaceful and just priorities!
Yours, for peace and justice,
Leslie Cagan
National Coordinator, UFPJ
Help us continue to do this critical work: Make a donation to UFPJ today.
UNITED FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE
www.unitedforpeace.org | 212-868-5545
To subscribe, visit www.unitedforpeace.org/email
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Call for an Open U.S. National Antiwar Conference
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
Crown Plaza Hotel
Sponsored by the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation
P.O. Box 21008; Cleveland, OH 44121; Voice Mail: 216-736-4704; Email: NatAssembly@aol.com
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
List of Endorsers (below call):
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
Endorse the conference:
http://natassembly.org/endorse/
THE PURPOSE OF THE CONFERENCE:
2008 has ushered in the fifth year of the war against Iraq and an occupation “without end” of that beleaguered country. Unfortunately, the tremendous opposition in the U.S. to the war and occupation has not yet been fully reflected in united mass action.
The anniversary of the invasion has been marked in the U.S. by Iraq Veterans Against the War's (IVAW's) Winter Soldier hearings March 13-16, in Washington, DC, providing a forum for those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan to expose the horrors perpetrated by the U.S. wars. A nonviolent civil disobedience action against the war in Iraq was also called for March 19 in Washington and local actions around the country were slated during that month as well.
These actions help to give voice and visibility to the deeply held antiwar sentiment of this country's majority. Yet what is also urgently needed is a massive national mobilization sponsored by a united antiwar movement capable of bringing hundreds of thousands into the streets to demand “Out Now!”
Such a mobilization, in our opinion, commemorating the fifth anniversary of the war -- and held on a day agreeable to the IVAW -- could have greatly enhanced all the other activities which were part of that commemoration in the U.S. Indeed, a call was issued in London by the World Against War Conference on December 1, 2007 where 1,200 delegates from 43 nations, including Iraq, voted unanimously to call on antiwar movements in every country to mobilize mass protests against the war during the week of March 15-22 to demand that foreign troops be withdrawn immediately.
The absence of a massive united mobilization during this period in the United States -- the nation whose weapons of terrifying mass destruction have rained death and devastation on the Iraqi people -- when the whole world will mobilize in the most massive protests possible to mark this fifth year of war, should be a cause of great concern to us all.
For Mass Action to Stop the War: The independent and united mobilization of the antiwar majority in massive peaceful demonstrations in the streets against the war in Iraq is a critical element in forcing the U.S. government to immediately withdraw all U.S. military forces from that country, close all military bases, and recognize the right of the Iraqi people to determine their own destiny.
Mass actions aimed at visibly and powerfully demonstrating the will of the majority to stop the war now would dramatically show the world that despite the staunch opposition to this demand by the U.S. government, the struggle by the American people to end the slaughter goes on. And that struggle will continue until the last of the troops are withdrawn. Such actions also help bring the people of the United States onto the stage of history as active players and as makers of history itself.
Indeed, the history of every successful U.S. social movement, whether it be the elementary fight to organize trade unions to defend workers' interests, or to bring down the Jim Crow system of racial segregation, or to end the war in Vietnam, is in great part the history of independent and united mass actions aimed at engaging the vast majority to collectively fight in its own interests and therefore in the interests of all humanity.
For an Open Democratic Antiwar Conference: The most effective way to initiate and prepare united antiwar mobilizations is through convening democratic and open conferences that function transparently, with all who attend the conferences having the right to vote. It is not reasonable to expect that closed or narrow meetings of a select few, or gatherings representing only one portion of the movement, can substitute for the full participation of the extremely broad array of forces which today stand opposed to the war.
We therefore invite everyone, every organization, every coalition, everywhere in the U.S. - all who oppose the war and the occupation -- to attend an open democratic U.S. national antiwar conference and join with us in advancing and promoting the coming together of an antiwar movement in this country with the power to make a mighty contribution toward ending the war and occupation of Iraq now.
Everyone is welcome. The objective is to place on the agenda of the entire U.S. antiwar movement a proposal for the largest possible united mass mobilization(s) in the future to stop the war and end the occupation.
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
List of Endorsers
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
Sponsored by the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation
P.O. Box 21008; Cleveland, OH 44121; Voice Mail: 216-736-4704; Email: NatAssembly@aol.com
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INTERNATIONAL APPEAL
- Spare the life of journalist Parviz Kambakhsh!
- Free him immediately!
We hold the governments of the NATO occupying troops responsible for his life.
Parviz Kambakhsh, a 23-year-old Afghani student has just been sentenced to death after three months of detention under terrible conditions in the state security's detention centre in Marzar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan.
Now in his third year of a journalism course at Balkh University in Mazar-e-Sharif, Parviz Kambakhsh also works as a journalist for the newspaper Jahan-e Naw.
The young journalist was thrown into prison after being characterised as an atheist and an opponent of the regime by the NDS, the Karzai regime's security service. He is also accused of having printed atheist articles off the internet and distributed them among his classmates.
Kambakhsh was tortured continuously during his detention, both physically and mentally, and even threatened with death if he did not admit to the charges leveled against him.
He has not had access to a lawyer. He has not been allowed to see members of his family or friends.
The death sentence was delivered in his absence and in secret by Balkh Province Attorney General Hafizullah Khaliqyar and by the court in Marzar-e-Sharif.
In 2001, when the war started with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan under the aegis of NATO, the occupying troops from the United States, France, Italy and Germany talked about re-establishing democracy and democratic rights and freedoms.
The Karzai regime that was put in place by the occupying forces has reintroduced Sharia law as the basic law of the land, with the support of all the states participating in the occupation and the war.
It is precisely in the name of the Sharia law that the young journalist Parviz Kambakhsh has been sentenced to death for circulating documents downloaded from the internet.
We, the undersigned journalists and defenders of human rights and fundamental freedoms, call on the Karzai government, NATO and the occupying forces from the United States, France, Italy and Germany, to say:
- Spare the life of journalist Parviz Kambakhsh!
- Free him immediately!
- We hold the governments of the NATO occupying troops responsible for his life.
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Appeal initiated by:
Tristan MALLE General Secretary, on behalf of the General Union of Journalists, Force Ouvrière (France), and Jean Pierre BARROIS Senior Lecturer, University of Paris 12
- Spare the life of journalist Parviz Kambakhsh!
- Free him immediately!
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ENDORSEMENT COUPON
[ ] I endorse this appeal to spare the life of Parviz Kambakhsh!
NAME:
ORG/UNION/TITLE (list if for id. only):
CITY:
COUNTRY:
EMAIL:
Please fill out and return to
e-mail :
Postal Address: Syndicat Général Des journalistes Force Ouvrière, 131 rue Damrémont, 75018 Paris France
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For Immediate Release
UPDATE: SIXTH AL-AWDA CONVENTION TO MARK 60 YEARS OF PALESTINIAN NAKBA
Embassy Suites Hotel Anaheim South, 11767 Harbor Boulevard,
Garden Grove, California, 92840
May 16-18, 2008
The 6th Annual International Al-Awda Convention will mark a devastating event in the long history of the Palestinian people. We call it our Nakba.
Confirmed speakers include Bishop Atallah Hanna, Supreme Justice Dr. Sheikh Taiseer Al Tamimi, Dr. Adel Samara, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, Dr. Ghada Karmi, Dr. As'ad Abu Khalil, Dr. Saree Makdisi, and Ramzy Baroud. Former Prime Minister of Lebanon Salim El Hos and Palestinian Legislative Council member Khalida Jarrar have also been invited.
Host Organizations for the sixth international Al-Awda convention include Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Palestinian American Women Association, Free Palestine Alliance, National Council of Arab-Americans, Middle East Cultural and Information Center - San Diego, The Arab Community Center of the Inland Empire, Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid - Southern California, Palestine Aid Society, Palestinian American Congress, Bethlehem Association, Al-Mubadara - Southern California, Union of Palestinian American Women, Birzeit Society , El-Bireh Society, Arab American Friends of Nazareth, Ramallah Club, A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, International Action Center , Students for Justice in Palestine at CSUSB, Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA, Students for Justice in Palestine at UCR, Students for International Knowledge at CSUSB, Muslim Students Association at Palomar College, Muslim Students Association at UCSD, and Muslim Students Association at Mira Costa.
BACKGROUND
In May of 1948, with the support of the governments of the United States, Britain, and other European powers, Zionists declared the establishment of the "State of Israel" on stolen Palestinian Arab land and intensified their full-scale attack on Palestine. They occupied our land and forcibly expelled three quarters of a million of our people. This continues to be our great catastrophe, which we, as Palestinians with our supporters, have been struggling to overcome since.
The sixth international Al-Awda convention is taking place at a turning point in our struggle to return and reclaim our stolen homeland. Today, there are close to 10 million Palestinians of whom 7.5 million are living in forced exile from their homeland. While the Zionist "State of Israel" continues to besiege, sanction, deprive, isolate, discriminate against and murder our people, in addition to continually stealing more of our land, our resistance has grown. Along with our sisters and brothers at home and elsewhere in exile, Al-Awda has remained steadfast in demanding the implementation of the sacred, non-negotiable national, individual and collective right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands.
The sixth international Al-Awda convention will be a historic and unique event. The convention will aim to recapitulate Palestinian history with the help of those who have lived it, and to strengthen our ability to educate the US public about the importance and justness of implementing the unconditional right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands. With symposia and specialty workshops, the focus of the convention will be on education that lead to strategies and mechanisms for expanding the effectiveness of our advocacy for the return.
INVITATION
We invite all Al-Awda members, and groups and individuals who support the implementation of the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes of origin, and to reclaim their land, to join us in this landmark Sixth Annual International Convention on the 60th year of Al-Nakba.
MASS RALLY FOR THE RETURN TO PALESTINE
The convention will culminate in a major demonstration to mark 60 years of Nakba and to call for The RETURN TO PALESTINE. The demonstration will be held in solidarity and coordination with our sisters and brothers who continue the struggle in our beloved homeland.
DON'T DELAY! REGISTER TODAY!
Registration
Sponsorship
Advertising
Exhibitors
Accommodation
Directions
Media
Host Organizations
Points of Unity
Organizational endorsements welcome. Please write to us at convention6@ al-awda.org
For information on how to become part of the host committee, please write to convention6@ al-awda.org
For more information, please go to http://al-awda. org/convention6 and keep revisiting that page as it is being updated regularly.
To submit speaker and panel/workshop proposals, write to
info@al-awda. org or convention6@ al-awda.org
Until return,
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
PO Box 131352
Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
Tel: 760-685-3243
Fax: 360-933-3568
E-mail: info@al-awda. org
WWW: http://al-awda. org
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC) is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to Palestinian human rights. We are a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible.
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Statement in Defense of Free Speech
Rights on the National Mall
Partnership for Civil Justice
Sign the Statement:
http://www.justiceonline.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5273&JServSessionIdr004=9h43xaej62.app13b
We the undersigned are supporting the emergency mobilization of the people demanding that there be no new restrictions on free speech or protest related activities on the National Mall in Washington D.C. This is the real objective of the Bush Administration’s plans for the National Mall.
Unless we take action, the Bush Administration, as one of its final acts, will leave office having dramatically altered access of the people to public lands that have been the site of the most significant mass assembly protests in U.S. history.
The National Mall has been the historic site for the people of the United States to come together to seek equality, justice, and peace. These activities are the lifeblood of a democracy. The National Mall is not an ornamental lawn. The National Mall performs its most sacrosanct and valued function when it serves as the place of assembly for political protest, dissent and free speech.
We oppose any efforts to further restrict protest on the Mall, to relegate protest to a government-designated protest pit or zone, to stage-manage or channel free speech activity to suit the government, or to stifle or abridge our rights to expression upon the public forum that is the National Mall. We call for a moratorium on further actions by the National Park Service that would in any way channel, restrict or inhibit the people's use of the National Mall in furtherance of our First Amendment rights.
Initial signers:
Howard Zinn, professor, author of People's History of the United States
Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General
Cindy Sheehan
Dennis Banks, Co-Founder, American Indian Movement
Malik Rahim, Co-Founder, Common Ground Collective, New Orleans
John Passacantando, Executive Director, Greenpeace USA
Mahdi Bray, Exec. Director, Muslim American Society, Freedom Foundation
Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator, Voices for Creative Nonviolence
Elias Rashmawi, National Coordinator, National Council of Arab Americans
Heidi Boghosian, Exec. Director of National Lawyers Guild
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Co-Founder, Partnership for Civil Justice
Carl Messineo, Co-Founder, Partnership for Civil Justice
Jim Lafferty, Exec. Director of the National Lawyers Guild, Los Angeles
Tina Richards, CEO, Grassroots America
Brian Becker, National Coordinator, ANSWER Coalition
Michael Berg, father of Nicholas Berg, killed in Iraq
Dr. Harriet Adams, Esq.
Elliot Adams, President, Veterans for Peace
Jennifer Harbury, Human Rights Attorney
Ron Kovic, Vietnam Veteran, author, Born on the Fourth of July
Juan Jose Gutierrez, Latino Movement USA
Blase and Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas
Fernando Suarez Del Solar, Guerrero Azteca, father of Jesus Del Solar, soldier killed in Iraq
Chuck Kaufman, Alliance for Global Justice
Frank Dorrel, Publisher, Addicted to War
William Blum, Author
Ed Asner, Actor
Annalisa Enrile, Mariposa Alliance
Sue Udry, Director, Defending Dissent Foundation
For more info or to volunteer with the ANSWER Coalition, call 415-821-6545.
Help with a mass mailing to help spread the word about the march and rally on March 19 the 5th anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq. The mailing will continue after the ANSWER Meeting.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.answersf.org
answer@answersf.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
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What's wrong with mine safety czar Richard Stickler?
More than 4,000 mine safety failures in six years.
Send Stickler a note now!
http://action.americanrightsatwork.org/campaign/stickler_mine_safety
Many of us watched in horror last summer as miners lost their lives in the Crandall Canyon mine collapse in Utah, and before that, the disasters at Sago, Darby and Aracoma mines.
After multiple debacles, you’d think the government would make mine safety a top priority. Think again. Recent reports uncovered a huge failure at the federal agency in charge of mine safety.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) failed to fine more than 4,000 safety & health violations over the last six years for mines that broke regulations.
This is an affront to workers who put their lives at risk every day. Tell the mine safety agency to get its act together:
http://action.americanrightsatwork.org/campaign/stickler_mine_safety
Richard Stickler, the man responsible for mine safety in this country, used to be a coal mining executive. The mines he managed had injury rates that were double the national average. Senators didn’t find him to be very qualified for the job, and twice rejected his nomination. President Bush twice bypassed the Senate to appoint Stickler, despite loud protests from anyone familiar with his egregiously anti-safety record.
We put together some ideas for how Mr. Stickler can actually do his job. Can you please send him a note for us?
http://action.americanrightsatwork.org/campaign/stickler_mine_safety
Here are some ideas for how Mr. Stickler can improve mine safety:
--Enforce new mine safety rules as required by Congress
--Fine companies that break the law – all 4,000 incidents and counting – and prosecute those who don't pay
--Push for more and better safety and health regulations and enforcement
--Give miners a say in workplace safety by making it easier for them to form unions
--Think like a miner, not a mine executive
--Listen to miners, not the companies, when it comes to developing better safety regulations
Those are pretty reasonable demands of a man who has not done his job for almost two years. You can send your letter – and write your own demands – right here:
http://action.americanrightsatwork.org/campaign/stickler_mine_safety
Thank you for standing up for workers everywhere.
Sincerely,
Liz Cattaneo
American Rights at Work
www.americanrightsatwork.org
P.S. To learn more about mine safety, visit the website of the United Mine Workers of America, and find more ways to take action.
Visit the web address below to tell your friends about American Rights at Work.
Tell-a-friend!
http://action.americanrightsatwork.org/aaraw/join-forward.tcl?domain=aaraw&r=xp3UOF71il51
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SUPPORT THE DAY AFTER DEMONSTRATIONS TO FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
SEE THE "TODAY SHOW" STORY ON MUMIA ABU-JAMAL - NOW ON YOUTUBE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz-NL0Ju6aE
From: LACFreeMumia@aol.com
A ruling by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on Mumia's case, based on the hearing in Philadelphia on May 17th 2007, is expected momentarily. Freeing Mumia immediately is what is needed, but that is not an option before this court. The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal calls on everyone who supports Mumia‚s case for freedom, to rally the day after a decision comes down. Here are Bay Area day-after details:
OAKLAND:
14th and Broadway, near the Federal Building
4:30 to 6:30 PM the day after a ruling is announced,
or on Monday if the ruling comes down on a Friday.
Oakland demonstration called by the Partisan Defense Committee and Labor Black Leagues, to be held if the Court upholds the death sentence, or denies Mumia's appeals for a new trial or a new hearing. info at (510) 839-0852 or pdcbayarea@sbcglobal.org
SAN FRANCISCO:
Federal Courthouse, 7th & Mission
5 PM the day after a ruling is announced,
or Monday if the decision comes down on a Friday
San Francisco demo called by the Mobilization To Free Mumia,
info at (415) 255-1085 or www.freemumia.org
Day-after demonstrations are also planned in:
Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver
and other cities internationally.
A National Demonstration is to be held in Philadelphia, 3rd Saturday after the decision
For more information, contact: International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, www.mumia.org;
Partisan Defense Committee, www.partisandefense.org;
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition (NYC), www.freemumia.com;
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL IS INNOCENT!
World-renowned journalist, death-row inmate and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is completely innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. Mountains of evidence--unheard or ignored by the courts--shows this. He is a victim, like thousands of others, of the racist, corrupt criminal justice system in the US; only in his case, there is an added measure of political persecution. Jamal is a former member of the Black Panther Party, and is still an outspoken and active critic of the on-going racism and imperialism of the US. They want to silence him more than they want to kill him.
Anyone who has ever been victimized by, protested or been concerned about the racist travesties of justice meted out to blacks in the US, as well as attacks on immigrants, workers and revolutionary critics of the system, needs to take a close look at the frame-up of Mumia. He is innocent, and he needs to be free.
FREE MUMIA NOW!
END THE RACIST DEATH PENALTY!
FOR MASS PROTESTS AND LABOR ACTION TO FREE MUMIA!
In 1995, mass mobilizations helped save Mumia from death.
In 1999, longshore workers shut West Coast ports to free Mumia, and teachers in Oakland and Rio de Janeiro held teach-ins and stop-works.
Mumia needs powerful support again now. Come out to free Mumia!
- The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610
510.763.2347
LACFreeMumia@aol.com
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Israeli ‘Holocaust’ in Gaza
By Ali Abunimah
The Electronic Intifada
February 29, 2008
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9354.shtml
2) Cuba Signs 2 Rights Treaties Castro Long Opposed
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
[Dear reader, I can't help commenting on this article--just to point out to you that this article appeared in the Times just a day after their headline article declaring that the U.S. incarcerates one in one hundred adults--more than any other country on the planet and more than most countries, put-together--the overwhelming majority for drug offences, the majority of which are for marijuana and, when there are far more resources put into incarceration than into drug rehabilitation or the abolition of poverty! And, in addition, while there are at least 598 prisoners-without-rights held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay alone! So Cuba has 200 prisons? California has at least 33 State Prisons; eight Federal prisons; and 58 counties where there are at least one or more jails such as San Francisco with 5; Los Angeles with 9; Orange County with 4; Riverside with 6; Fresno with 4; in all, way over 127 jails and prisons in California alone. There are over 170,000 prisoners in the State prison system alone. The California Youth Detention facilities--over 16 of them--hold over 8,984 kids!...bw]
March 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/world/americas/01cuba.html?hp
3) 46 Killed in Israeli Strikes on North Gaza
By STEVEN ERLANGER and TAGHREED EL-KHODARY
March 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/world/middleeast/02mideast.html?hp
4) In Parts of U.S., Foreclosures Top Sales
By FLOYD NORRIS
March 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/business/01charts.html?ref=business
5) Strike at Supplier Leads G.M. to Idle 3 More Factories
By REUTERS
March 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/business/01axle.html?ref=business
6) ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan
by Internationalist Group ( internationalistgroup [at] msn.com )
Saturday Mar 1st, 2008 4:13 PM
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/03/01/18482849.php
7) Priced Out of the Market
Editorial
March 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/opinion/03mon1.html?hp
8) Israeli Ground Forces Pull Out of Gaza
"At least 10 Palestinians were killed in Gaza on Sunday by Israeli fire, local hospital officials said, bringing the number of Palestinians killed since Wednesday, when the latest surge in hostilities began, to more than 100."
By ISABEL KERSHNER
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/world/middleeast/04mideast.html?hp
9) Americans Fire Missiles Into Somalia
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/world/africa/04somalia.html?hp
10) '638 Ways to Kill Castro'
When Is a Cigar Not a Cigar? When It Tries to Kill Castro
Television Review
By MIKE HALE
March 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/arts/television/03hale.html?ref=world
11) Israel Takes Gaza Fight to Next Level in a Day of Strikes
By STEVEN ERLANGER and TAGHREED EL-KHODARY
March 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/world/middleeast/02mideast.html?ref=world
12) U.S. Plan Widens Role in Training Pakistani Forces in Qaeda Battle
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
March 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/world/asia/02military.html?ref=world
13) Statement by Felipe Pérez Roque, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba at the High Level Segment of the Seventh Session of the Human Rights Council. Geneva, March 3, 2008.
http://america.cubaminrex.cu/Derechos%20Humanos/Articulos/ConsejoDerechosHumanos/2008/2008-03-03-IntervencionING.html
14) The $2 Trillion Nightmare
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04herbert.html?hp
15) Border Insecurity
Editorial
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04tue1.html?hp
16) Unlike Consumers, Companies Are Piling Up Cash
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/business/04cash.html?hp
17) Crisis at Colombia Border Spills Into Diplomatic Realm
By SIMON ROMERO
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/world/americas/04venez.html?ref=world
18) Mourning Resonates From Staten Island to Sri Lanka
By NINA BERNSTEIN
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/nyregion/04father.html?ref=nyregion
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1) Israeli ‘Holocaust’ in Gaza
By Ali Abunimah
The Electronic Intifada
February 29, 2008
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9354.shtml
Israeli officials began damage limitation efforts after the country’s deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip with a “holocaust.”
The comments came a day after Israeli occupation forces killed 31 Palestinians, nine of them children, one a six-month-old baby, in a series of air raids across the Gaza Strip. Israel claimed that the attacks were in retaliation for a barrage of rockets fired by resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip, which killed one Israeli in the town of Sderot on Wednesday, February 27. Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, said the rockets were in retaliation for the extrajudicial execution of five Hamas members carried out by Israel on Wednesday morning. Israeli occupation forces have killed more than 200 Palestinians since the U.S.-sponsored Annapolis peace summit last November. In the same period, five Israelis have been killed by Palestinians.
Speaking to Israeli army radio today, Vilnai said, “the more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”
A report on the BBC News website headlined “Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust’“ noted that in Israel the word “holocaust”—shoah in Hebrew—is “a term rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi genocide during World War II.”
The BBC later reported that “many of Mr. Vilnai’s colleagues have quickly distanced themselves from his comments and also tried to downplay them saying he did not mean genocide.” An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Arye Mekel, claimed that Vilnai used the word “in the sense of a disaster or a catastrophe, and not in the sense of a holocaust.”
The attempt to limit the damage of Vilnai’s comments is not surprising. It was recently revealed how another Israeli official, Major-General Doron Almog, narrowly escaped arrest at London’s Heathrow airport in September 2005, in connection with allegations of war crimes committed against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. British police feared a gunfight if they attempted to board the El Al civilian aircraft on which Almog had arrived and on which he hid until he fled the United Kingdom back to Israel as a fugitive from justice.
Incitement to genocide is a punishable crime under the international Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948 after the Nazi holocaust.
“The 8 Stages of Genocide,” written by Greg Stanton, President of Genocide Watch, sets out a number of warning signs of an impending genocide, which include “dehumanization” of potential victim groups and preparation, whereby potential victims “are often segregated into ghettoes, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved.”
Vilnai’s holocaust threat, however much Israeli officials attempt to qualify it, fits into a consistent pattern of belligerent statements and actions by Israeli officials. Israel has attempted to isolate the population of Gaza, deliberately restricting essential supplies, such as food, medicines and energy, a policy endorsed by the Israeli high court but condemned by international officials as illegal collective punishment.
As The Electronic Intifada has previously reported, dehumanizing statements by Israeli political and religious leaders directed at Palestinians are common (see “Top Israeli rabbis advocate genocide,” The Electronic Intifada, May 31, 2007 and “Dehumanizing the Palestinians,” Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, September 21, 2007)
On February 28, Vilnai’s colleagues added their own inflammatory statements. Cabinet minister Meir Sheetrit stated that Israel should “hit everything that moves” in Gaza “with weapons and ammunition,” adding, “I don’t think we have to show pity for anyone who wants to kill us.”
And today, Tzachi Hanegbi, a senior member of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party said that Israel should invade Gaza to “topple the Hamas terror regime” and that Israeli forces, which now enforce the occupation of Gaza from the periphery and air, should prepare to remain in the interior of the territory “for years.”
While Israeli leaders escalate the violence and threats, some other top officials and a vast majority of the Israeli public support direct talks with Hamas to achieve a mutual ceasefire, something Hamas has repeatedly offered for months.
“Sixty-four percent of Israelis say the government must hold direct talks with the Hamas government in Gaza toward a cease-fire and the release of captive soldier Gilad Shalit,” the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on February 27 citing a Tel Aviv University poll. The report noted that half of Likud supporters and large majorities of Kadima and Labor party voters support such talks and only 28 percent of Israelis still oppose them.
Knesset Member Yossi Beilin, leader of the left-Zionist Meretz-Yahad party, called for an agreed ceasefire with Hamas, noting that “there have been at least two requests from Hamas, via a third party, to accept a cease-fire,” Haaretz reported on February 29. Israel’s public security minister, Avi Dichter, visiting Sderot the previous day, criticized Israel’s military escalation, saying, “Whoever talks about entering and occupying the Gaza Strip, these are populist ideas which I don’t connect to, and in my opinion, no intelligent person does either.” And, in an interview with the American magazine Mother Jones, published on February 19, the former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Efraim Halevy, repeated calls for Israel and the U.S. to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas. Dismissing lurid rhetoric about the group, Halevy stated that “Hamas is not al-Qaida,” and “is not subservient to Tehran.”
The question remains as to why when the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians, some senior Israeli officials, and Hamas leaders are all talking about a ceasefire, the Israeli government refuses to accept one and the U.S. refuses to call for one. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has blamed the escalating bloodshed entirely on Hamas, and has failed to call for a ceasefire. This echoes her support for Israel’s merciless 2006 bombardment of Lebanon, which she notoriously celebrated as being “the birth pangs of a new Middle East.”
The Palestinian and Israeli populations are exhausted by the relentless bloodshed, however unequal its toll. They are paying the price of a failed policy, pushed by Washington and its local clients, which attempts to demonize, isolate and destroy any movement that resists the order that the United States seeks to impose on the region.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
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2) Cuba Signs 2 Rights Treaties Castro Long Opposed
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
[Dear reader, I can't help commenting on this article--just to point out to you that this article appeared in the Times just a day after their headline article declaring that the U.S. incarcerates one in one hundred adults--more than any other country on the planet and more than most countries, put-together--the overwhelming majority for drug offences, the majority of which are for marijuana and, when there are far more resources put into incarceration than into drug rehabilitation or the abolition of poverty! And, in addition, while there are at least 598 prisoners-without-rights held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay alone! So Cuba has 200 prisons? California has at least 33 State Prisons; eight Federal prisons; and 58 counties where there are at least one or more jails such as San Francisco with 5; Los Angeles with 9; Orange County with 4; Riverside with 6; Fresno with 4; in all, way over 127 jails and prisons in California alone. There are over 170,000 prisoners in the State prison system alone. The California Youth Detention facilities--over 16 of them--hold over 8,984 kids!...bw]
March 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/world/americas/01cuba.html?hp
HAVANA — Just days after Raúl Castro took office as this country’s new president, Cuba’s communist government signed two important international human rights treaties that Fidel Castro had long opposed, another sign the new administration may be willing to set a new course.
It remains to be seen whether the government will live up to the accords and what the signing of the two pacts will mean for political prisoners on the island. The foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, said after a signing ceremony in New York on Thursday that the government still had reservations about some provisions.
Elizardo Sánchez, head of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a nongovernmental group, said the signing was “positive news because the signing of these pacts is an old demand from inside Cuba and from the international community.”
“I hope Cuba honors the letter and spirit of the law of these pacts, but I am not sure it will,” Mr. Sánchez told The Associated Press.
In a statement published here on Friday, Mr. Pérez Roque asserted that the Cuban government had always upheld the rights outlined in the two international agreements, since the moment Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 and then established a one-party totalitarian state.
“This signing formalizes and reaffirms the rights protected by each agreement, which my country has systematically been upholding since the triumph of the revolution,” he said.
One of the pacts, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, guarantees “civil and political freedom,” including the right to self-determination, peaceful assembly, freedom of religion, privacy, freedom to leave a country, and equal protection before the law.
At present, Cuba severely restricts the travel of its citizens, bans any political parties other than the communist party and prohibits independent political meetings.
Mr. Elizardo’s rights group estimates that there are at least 230 political prisoners in Cuba’s network of 200 jails and detention centers. Amnesty International has said there are at least 58 “prisoners of conscience” on the island, making Cuba one of the most repressive governments in the world when it comes to free speech.
The other pact signed Thursday, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, requires countries to ensure the right to work, fair wages, freedom to form and join trade unions, social security, education and the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.
In 2001, Fidel Castro criticized that covenant, saying it “could serve as a weapon and a pretext for imperialism to try to divide and fracture the workers, create artificial unions, and decrease their political and social power and influence.”
Mr. Pérez Roque said Cuba had not dropped its opposition to independent labor unions. He said the country was signing the covenants now because the old United Nations Human Rights Commission had been replaced by a new Human Rights Council in 2006. The new council dropped Cuba last year from the list of countries whose rights records warranted investigation, a move the United States strongly opposed.
The Cuban foreign minister accused the United States of having used the old commission for “brutal pressure and blackmail” against Cuba.
While human rights activists say it is premature to tell whether Raúl Castro will liberate political prisoners, there have been some small signs the new president favors greater freedom of speech.
The younger Castro brother has openly encouraged more debate and criticism in the society. Some free speech advocates took it as a good sign that the government held back in punishing a group of students who sharply questioned the president of the National Assembly recently over the travel ban.
Earlier this month, Cuba released four human rights activists who had been imprisoned during a crackdown in 2003, in which 73 people were arrested, and allowed them to migrate to Spain.
Though human rights advocated welcomed the release of the four prisoners, most said Cuba still has a long way to go before people can speak their minds freely. “The people are bound hand and foot, intimidated,” Mr. Sánchez, the head of the Cuban rights commission, said in an interview this week.
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3) 46 Killed in Israeli Strikes on North Gaza
By STEVEN ERLANGER and TAGHREED EL-KHODARY
March 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/world/middleeast/02mideast.html?hp
GAZA CITY — Israeli aircraft and troops attacked Palestinian positions in northern Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 46 people and wounding more than 100 in the deadliest day of fighting in more than a year. Two Israeli soldiers were killed and seven wounded, the military said.
The Israeli attacks, mostly from the air on a clear, bright day, were aimed at stopping rocket fire from Gaza into Israel, especially after Ashkelon, a large city 10 miles from Gaza, came under fire from more advanced, Katyusha-style rockets smuggled in from Iran.
Half the dead were reported to be Hamas gunmen or those belonging to affiliated groups like Islamic Jihad. But as many as 19 Palestinian civilians also died in the heavily populated area, including four children, according to Dr. Moawiya Hassanain of the Gazan Health Ministry.
More than 70 Palestinians have died since fighting surged on Wednesday; one Israeli died in Sderot from a rocket, and six Israelis were wounded on Saturday from rocket strikes in Ashkelon.
The fighting brought harsh criticism from the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who reportedly threatened to call off negotiations with Israel over a peace treaty. “We tell the world: watch and judge what’s happening, and judge who is committing international terrorism,” Mr. Abbas said in Ramallah, on the West Bank.
Mr. Abbas, who has referred to the rocket firing as useless provocation, said last week that armed conflict remained an option if negotiations failed.
An Israeli spokesman, David Baker, said that Israel was conducting “defensive measures” to protect its civilians from rocket fire against cities, which Mr. Baker called terrorism. “We have over 200,000 Israelis in range of Palestinian rockets. We cannot allow this to go on. These rocket attacks on Israelis are sheer terror, designed to kill or maim as many Israelis as possible.”
The Israeli deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, said the military was engaged in “an enlarged operation and not a major ground operation” of the type Israeli politicians have been pressing for. Mr. Vilnai told Israel Radio that “we are using mostly air units” and that Israeli forces “are permanently engaged in Gaza, and what we are doing now is within the scope of such activities.”
On Friday, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, which also means catastrophe, Mr. Vilnai warned Palestinians that they faced catastrophe if the rocket firing continued.
After something of a lull on Friday, about two dozen rockets landed in Israel on Saturday, including seven Katyushas that struck in or near Ashkelon, lightly wounding a woman and two children just after midnight. Saturday afternoon, another rocket hit the Ashkelon marina shopping center, wounding three others, the Israeli military said.
Israeli troops began their operation just after midnight, concentrating on hilly area near crowded Jabaliya, within two miles of the Gazan border, where many of the rockets are launched from among the civilian population. Late Saturday, the Israeli military confirmed that two soldiers had been killed and that seven others, including an officer, had been wounded.
In Gaza on Friday, Hussein Dardouna, 50, was burying his son, Omar, 14, killed while playing with his friends by an Israeli strike aimed at a rocket-launching team. “I couldn’t identify the body of my son,” he said. “It was very hard until I found the head of my son. I’m against these rockets, but I am afraid. What can I do? If I protest they will hit me, they will kill me.”
Another woman at the funeral said: “Everyone is afraid now. Where is Abu Mazen, where is Haniya?” she asked, referring to Mr. Abbas and the Hamas prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniya. “Come and protect us.”
Another woman, fully veiled, and a Hamas supporter, yelled at a reporter for asking such questions. Neither woman would agree to be identified.
The Israeli operation killed at least 10 fighters from Hamas, which has run Gaza since it drove out Fatah forces in fierce internal fighting last June. The dead included the son of a Hamas legislator, Muhammad Shihab.
Most residents hid in their homes.
The Palestinian dead on Saturday included at least four children, two of whom, brother and sister, 11 and 12 respectively, died in their beds from shrapnel, medics said.
Hamas said that one young girl, Malak Karfaneh, 6, died Friday night from an Israeli strike on Beit Hanun in northern Gaza, but locals said that a Palestinian rocket had fallen short and landed near the house.
Israeli officials say that up to half of Palestinian rockets — mostly crude, inaccurate Qassams — fall inside Gaza. But when Hamas broke open the border with Egypt, Israeli officials say, the militants were able to bring in more of the manufactured Katyusha-style rockets as well as antitank missiles and concrete, for building fortifications.
The United Nations agency that deals with Palestinian refugees closed down the 37 schools it runs in northern Gaza.
“We are living in the middle of the battle zone,” Rami Muhammad Ali, 21, told Reuters by phone from Jabaliya. “We wanted to flee the house, but we’ve been trapped since last night.”
He described the scene, saying: “Rockets and missiles are whistling by all the time, and the building has been shaken by mines the Palestinians are setting off against the Israeli soldiers.”
A Hamas military spokesman who calls himself Abu Obeida said, “The Zionist forces have failed in Gaza before.” Hamas, under some political pressure from the effective closing of Gaza and deteriorating conditions there, seems to be trying to lure Israel into a major ground operation.
The Israelis have been cautious, with little desire to reoccupy Gaza and take full responsibility for its 1.5 million inhabitants, nearly 70 percent of them refugees or their descendants. The Israeli security cabinet will meet during the week to discuss Gaza, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arriving as well.
She has defended Israel’s right to defend itself but has urged restraint. A major Israeli operation would likely put a crimp in American-sponsored peace talks between Mr. Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel.
Steven Erlanger reported from Jerusalem, and Taghreed El-Khodary from Gaza City.
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4) In Parts of U.S., Foreclosures Top Sales
By FLOYD NORRIS
March 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/business/01charts.html?ref=business
Mortgage foreclosure notices are going out so fast that in some states the number of new foreclosure proceedings each month is greater than the number of homes sold that month.
The foreclosure problem appears to be greatest in the West, particularly in Nevada, where home prices soared in the housing boom and are now falling rapidly.
Worries about foreclosures have led to a variety of legislative proposals in Washington and in state capitals, as well as to a voluntary plan organized by the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., that seeks to delay foreclosures while homeowners and lenders try to work out agreements. But so far, no consensus has emerged on legislation, and the volume of foreclosure notices continues to rise.
During January, it was reported this week by RealtyTrac, there were 153,745 initial foreclosure notices sent out in the United States. That dwarfed the 43,000 total sales of newly built single-family homes and amounted to nearly half the total sales figure, which includes sales of existing homes and condominiums.
In the West, however, the picture was much worse. There the number of sales was barely higher than the number of foreclosure notices. It appears that in the most heavily affected states the sales totals lagged behind the number of foreclosure notices.
Moreover, the volume of foreclosures is especially high in some states. In California, RealtyTrac reports, nearly a quarter-million properties were subject to some legal action related to foreclosure in 2007. Not all those foreclosures were completed, of course, either because the process dragged into this year or because the homeowner managed to sell the house or come up with money to make the missed payments. But those foreclosure moves affected 1.9 percent of the living units in the state — or 1 in 52 homes.
California led the country in number of properties affected by foreclosure moves, but was only fourth in terms of the percentage of homes affected. Nevada led in that dubious category, with 3.4 percent — or 1 in 30 — of the housing units affected. It was followed by Michigan, which missed out on the housing boom but is playing a large role in the bust, and by Florida, which like Nevada experienced a wave of speculative building amid rapidly rising prices.
Those foreclosures, of course, represent dislocation for the homeowners being forced out of their homes and losses for the lenders. But they also represent an alternative supply of homes for buyers, providing competition for other sellers.
That can be particularly true because sales of homes that have been foreclosed, or are about to be foreclosed if they cannot be sold quickly, are made by sellers who are in no position to wait for better prices. Those sales can help to push prices lower for everyone.
For new-home builders, one result has been growing inventories of completed homes without buyers. The number of such houses across the country hit a record 197,000 in December, and slipped only to 195,000 in January, the Census Bureau reported this week. Moreover, the median age of such houses is up to 6.7 months, nearly twice the age of such houses when the housing market was peaking in the fall of 2006.
The states with the lowest rates of foreclosures tend to be states that missed the boom in housing prices and now have reasonably good economies. In South Dakota, there were only 50 homes involved in foreclosures last year, a minuscule 0.007 percent of homes in the state. Vermont, Maine, West Virginia and North Dakota also turned in rates below 0.1 percent.
Floyd Norris comments in his blog at norris.blogs.nytimes.com.
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5) Strike at Supplier Leads G.M. to Idle 3 More Factories
By REUTERS
March 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/business/01axle.html?ref=business
DETROIT (Reuters) — The General Motors Corporation said Friday that it would idle three more assembly plants because of parts shortages caused by a strike against its supplier, American Axle and Manufacturing.
G.M. said it would idle truck plants in Flint, Mich.; Fort Wayne, Ind.; and Oshawa, Ontario.
Taken together the three plants employ about 9,500 workers. G.M. already closed a plant in Pontiac, Mich., because of shortages in shipments of axles and related components.
The shutdowns showed the spreading impact of the strike by the United Automobile Workers against American Axle that began this week after contract talks broke down over wages.
Including the Pontiac plant, some 12,500 workers devoted to production of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks have been laid off because of the strike.
Other G.M. operations at risk because of their reliance on American Axle parts include plants devoted to S.U.V. production in Arlington, Tex.; Janesville, Wis.; and Silao, Mexico.
Chrysler is having similar problems involving another strike. It stopped work at a minivan plant in Windsor, Ontario, on Friday because of a shortage of parts from the TRW Automotive Holdings Corporation, the target of a strike by the Canadian Auto Workers union.
Analysts have said that a short work stoppage could allow G.M. to run down inventories of trucks and sport utility vehicles, but that a longer disruption could be costly.
About 3,600 union workers in Michigan and New York went on strike on Tuesday against American Axle, and talks have not resumed.
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6) California | Anti-War | Labor & Workers
ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan
by Internationalist Group ( internationalistgroup [at] msn.com )
Saturday Mar 1st, 2008 4:13 PM
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/03/01/18482849.php
In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!
For Workers Strikes Against the War!
ILWU to Shut Down West Coast Ports May 1 Demanding End to War in Iraq, Afghanistan
In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. In a February 22 letter to AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, ILWU International president Robert McEllrath reported that at a recent coast-wide union meeting, “One of the resolutions adopted by caucus delegates called on longshore workers to stop work during the day shift on May 1, 2008 to express their opposition to the war in Iraq.”
This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. It is doubly important that this mobilization of labor’s power is to take place on May Day, the international workers day, which is not honored in the U.S. Moreover, the resolution voted by the ILWU delegates opposes not only the hugely unpopular war in Iraq, but also the war and occupation of Afghanistan (which Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Republican John McCain all want to expand). The motion to shut down the ports also demands the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the entire region, including the oil sheikdoms of the strategically important Persian/Arab Gulf.
The Internationalist Group has fought from the moment U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in September 2002 for American unions to strike against the war. Despite the fact that millions have marched in the streets of Europe and the United States against the war in Iraq, the war goes on. Neither of the twin war parties of U.S. imperialism – Democrats and Republicans – and none of the capitalist candidates will stop this horrendous slaughter that has already killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The only way to stop the Pentagon killing machine is by mobilizing the power of a greater force – that of the international working class.
The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. The ILWU should be commended for courageously taking the first step, and it is up to working people everywhere to back them up. Wherever support is strong enough, on May 1 there should be mass walkouts, sick-outs, labor marches, plant-gate meetings, lunch-time rallies, teach-ins. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!
Now is the time for bold class action. Opposition to the war is even greater in the U.S. working class than in the population as a whole, more than two-thirds of which wants to stop the war but is stymied by the capitalist political system. In his letter to Sweeney, the ILWU president asked “if other AFL-CIO affiliates are planning to participate in similar events.” Labor militants should make sure the answer to that question is a resounding “yes!”
There should be no illusions that this will be easy. No doubt the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) bosses will try to get the courts to rule the stop-work action illegal. The ILWU leadership could get cold feet, since this motion was passed because of overwhelming support from the delegates despite attempts to stop it or, failing that, to water it down or limit the action. And the U.S. government could try to ban it on the grounds of “national security,” just as Bush & Co. slapped a Taft-Hartley injunction on the docks during contract negotiations in the fall of 2002, saying that any work stoppage was a threat to the “war effort,” and threatened to occupy the ports with troops!
The answer to every attempt to sabotage or undercut this first labor action against this war, and against Washington’s broader “war on terror” which is intended to terrorize the world into submission must be to redouble efforts to bring out workers’ power independent of the capitalist parties and politicians. If the ILWU work stoppage is successful, it will only be a small, but very important, beginning that must be generalized and deepened. It will take industrial-strength labor action to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses’ war on immigrants, oppressed minorities, poor and working people “at home.”
ILWU in the Forefront of Labor Action Against the War
Workers strike action against imperialist war isn’t new – it just hasn’t happened here for a long, long time. During World War I there were huge mass strikes in Germany against the battlefield carnage, culminating in the downfall of the kaiser in November 1918. A year earlier in Russia, working-class opposition to the war led to the overthrow of the tsar and the October Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International call today for transport workers to “hot cargo” (refuse to handle) war shipments. In the early 1920s, Communist-led French dock workers did exactly that, boycotting ships carrying war materiel to suppress a colonial rebellion in the Rif region of Morocco, as they also did during France’s war in Indochina in the 1950s.
In the U.S., the ILWU struck in 1948 amid Cold War hysteria and in defiance of the “slave labor” Taft-Hartley Act to defend its union hiring hall against the bosses and government screaming about “reds” in the union leadership. In 1953, at the height of McCarthyite witch-hunting, the ILWU called a four-day general strike in Hawaii of sugar, pineapple and dock workers over the jailing of seven union members for being communists. During the Vietnam War, socialist historian Isaac Deutscher said that he would trade all the peace marches for a single dock strike. The ILWU was the first U.S. union to oppose the Vietnam war, but during war and especially during the 1971 strike union leader Harry Bridges refused to stop the movement of military cargo. (Ship owners made use of this by falsely labeling cargo as “military” to evade picket lines and undermine the strike.) This betrayal went hand in hand with a “mechanization and modernization” contract that slashed union jobs.
As the U.S.-led imperialist invasion of Iraq was looming, in January 2003 train drivers in Scotland refused to move a freight train carrying munitions to a NATO military base. The next month, Italian railroad unionists and antiwar activists blocked NATO war trains by occupying the rails. In the United States, ILWU dock workers were a target of “anti-terrorist” government repression, as police fired supposedly “less than lethal” munitions point blank at an antiwar protest on the Oakland, California docks, injuring six longshore workers and arresting 25 people (who eventually won their legal case against the police). And every year since the war started, the San Francisco/Oakland ILWU Local 10 has voted for motions for labor action against the war. Usually they were voted down at caucuses and conventions of the ILWU, but not this time.
Last May, Local 10 longshoremen and Local 34 ships clerks refused to cross picket lines set up by the Oakland Teachers Association and antiwar activists, defying arbitrators’ orders by refusing to work ships of the notorious antiunion outfit, Stevedoring Services of America (see “Oakland Dock Workers Honor Picket, Shut Down War Cargo Shipper,” The Internationalist No. 26, July 2007). In the aftermath of that action, the union issued a call for a Labor Conference to Stop the War that would “plan workplace rallies, labor mobilizations in the streets and strike action against the war.” The Call to Action stated:
“ILWU Local 10 has repeatedly warned that the so-called ‘war on terror’ is really a war on working people and democratic rights. Around the country, hundreds of unions and labor councils have passed motions condemning the war, but that has not stopped the war. We need to use labor’s muscle to stop the war by mobilizing union power in the streets, at the plant gates and on the docks to force the immediate and total withdrawal of all U. S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.”
As the conference date approached, the union was the target of several police attacks, including a vicious cop assault on two black dock workers from San Francisco working in the port of Sacramento. Some 250 demonstrators from every ILWU local in Northern California rallied in their defense outside the courthouse. Their trial to be set march 18 at a hearing will encounter even larger demonstrations.
The Internationalist Group and its union supporters helped build and attended the October 20 conference, along with some 150 labor and socialist activists from the Bay Area, elsewhere in California and across the country. At the meeting, a particular focus was resistance to the Transportation Workers Identification Card (TWIC), which threatens minority workers and the union hiring hall, and which the Democratic Party in particular has been pushing in order to carry out a purge of dock workers in the name of the “war on terror.” Not long after that conference, a federal judge ordered Local 10 elections canceled and replaced by a Labor Department-run vote, on the eve of 2008 contract bargaining. Federal agents even invaded the union hall to enforce their order. This action is a threat to the independence of all unions.
This set the stage for the recent longshore-warehouse caucus, which voted a motion for a 24-hour “No Peace, No Work Holiday” against the war. The resolution was introduced in Local 10 by Jack Heyman, who also presented the motion for the 24 April 1999 coast-wide port shutdown demanding freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther and renowned radical journalist who has been on Pennsylvania’s death row for the last quarter century. Although the union tops maneuvered to prevent Heyman from being elected as a delegate to the Coast Caucus, the motion passed in Local 10. At the Caucus, the delegate from Local 34 referred to the October Labor Conference to Stop the War as the origin of the motion.
At the close of the Caucus on February 8, there was a vigorous debate on the resolution. The union tops tried to stop it, to no avail. They kept asking, “are you sure you want to do this action.” The delegates overwhelmingly said “yes.” Even conservative trade unionists, including veterans of the Vietnam War, were getting up saying the government is lying to us, we’ve had it with this war, we’ve got to put a stop to it now. So instead the bureaucrats tried to gut the motion, which was cut down from 24 hours to 8, and changed into a “stop-work” meeting (covered by a contract clause) instead of a straight-out shutdown, thinking that this would lessen opposition from the employers. In the end there was a voice vote and only three delegates out of 100 voted against.
The efforts to undercut the motion continue, as is to be expected from a leadership which, like the rest of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, seeks “labor peace” with the bosses. In his letter to Sweeney, ILWU International president tried to present the action as an effort to “express support for the troops by bringing them home safely,” although the motion voted by the delegates says nothing of the sort. Playing the “support our troops” game is an effort to swear loyalty to the broader aims of U.S. imperialism. It aids the warmongers, when what’s needed is independent working-class action against the system that produces endless imperialist war. Yet despite the efforts to water it down and distort it, the May 1 action voted for by the ILWU delegates is a call to use labor’s muscle to put an end to the war.
Mobilize Labor’s Power to Defeat the Bosses’ War!
For the West Coast dock workers union to shut down the ports against the war means a big step forward in the class struggle. The Internationalist Group has uniquely fought for workers strikes against the war, when all the popular-front “peace” coalitions dismissed this and even some shamefaced ex-Trotskyists refused to call for it, saying it had “no resonance” among the workers (see our October 20007 Special Supplement to The Internationalist, “Why We Fight For Workers Strikes Against the War [and the Opportunists Don’t]”). With signs, banners and propaganda we have sought to drive home the central lesson that it is necessary to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses’ war “at home” by mobilizing the power of the workers movement independent of and against the capitalist parties.
That means fighting the war mobilization down the line. First and foremost, this means actively joining the struggle for immigrant rights as the government turns undocumented working people into “the enemy within.” Class-conscious workers should demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Last year, San Francisco Local 10 voted to stop work and join marches for immigrant rights on May 1, but this was opposed by the employers PMA and sabotaged at the last minute by the union tops. Shamefully, Local 13 in Los Angeles, a majority Mexican American port, made no protest when police attacked immigrant rights protesters that same day. Today, as the ICE immigration police stage Gestapo-style raids across the country, organized labor should take the lead in organizing rapid response networks to come into the streets to block the raids. Despite the campaign by the capitalist media and politicians to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria, there is widespread disgust among American working people toward the jackbooted storm troopers who are terrorizing immigrant communities.
At the same time, the unions should use the power to put a halt to the attacks on civil liberties which are part of the home front of the imperialist war. Driver’s licenses with biometric data, TWIC identification cards with “background checks,” warrantless spying and phone tapping, setting up special military tribunals for “trials” in which defendants are denied the right of habeas corpus, to know the “evidence” or even the charges against them – all these are part of a drive that is in high gear pushing the United States toward a full-fledged police state. There have been scores, perhaps hundreds of resolutions by unions and city, county and state labor bodies against the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, showing that labor activists are well aware of the danger. But just as is the case with the countless union antiwar resolutions, there has been no labor action. It is commonplace in the labor movement to bemoan the lack of real action when Reagan broke the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers’ strike, paving the way for massive union-busting, takeaways and racist attacks all down the line. Let’s not let the labor bureaucrats bury the vital struggles of today.
Now is the time to turn words into deeds, to speak to the capitalist rulers in the only language they understand. The imperialist war parties must be defeated by a class mobilization of the working people at the head of all the oppressed. The ILWU motion to stop work on May Day to put a stop to the war can provide working people everywhere with the opening to turn from impotent protest to a struggle for power. For that the key is to build a class-struggle workers party fighting for a workers government, for socialist revolution here and around the world, that will put an end once and for all to the system of endless war, poverty and racism.
Write to the Internationalist Group, Box 3321, Church Street Station, New York, NY 10008. E-mail: internationalistgroup@msn.com. Visit us on the Internet at: www.internationalist.org
http://www.internationalist.org/
© 2000–2008 San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center. Unless otherwise stated by the author, all content is free for non-commercial reuse, reprint, and rebroadcast, on the net and elsewhere. Opinions are those of the contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by the SF Bay Area IMC.
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7) Priced Out of the Market
Editorial
March 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/opinion/03mon1.html?hp
The world’s food situation is bleak, and shortsighted policies in the United States and other wealthy countries — which are diverting crops to environmentally dubious biofuels — bear much of the blame.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the price of wheat is more than 80 percent higher than a year ago, and corn prices are up by a quarter. Global cereal stocks have fallen to their lowest level since 1982.
As usual, the brunt is falling disproportionately on the poor. The F.A.O. estimates that the cereal import bill of the neediest countries will increase by a third for the second year in a row. Prices have gone so high that the World Food Program, which aims to feed 73 million people this year, said it might have to reduce rations or the number of people it will help.
The world has faced periodic bouts when it looked as if population growth would outstrip the food supply. Each time, food production has grown to meet demand. This time it might not be so easy.
Population growth and economic progress are part of the problem. Consumption of meat and other high-quality foods —mainly in China and India— has boosted demand for grain for animal feed. Poor harvests due to bad weather in this country and elsewhere have contributed. High energy prices are adding to the pressures.
Yet the most important reason for the price shock is the rich world’s subsidized appetite for biofuels. In the United States, 14 percent of the corn crop was used to produce ethanol in 2006 — a share expected to reach 30 percent by 2010. This is also cutting into production of staples like soybeans, as farmers take advantage of generous subsidies and switch crops to corn for fuel.
The benefits of this strategy are dubious. A study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggested that — absent new technologies — the United States, Canada and the European Union would require between 30 percent and 70 percent of their current crop area if they were to replace 10 percent of their transport fuel consumption with biofuels. And two recent studies suggested that a large-scale effort across the world to grow crops for biofuels would add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere rather than reduce it.
The human costs of this diversion of food into energy are all too evident.
As a first step, the United States and other wealthy countries that are driving this problem must ensure that the United Nations and other relief agencies get the support they need to feed the most vulnerable people. But aid is not a solution.
Congress must take a hard look at the effect of corn ethanol on food supplies in the same way the new energy bill requires it to review the environmental effects. It must move toward ending subsidies that will become even more difficult to justify as oil prices rise and the costs of producing corn ethanol decline. And it must press other wealthy countries to do the same before hunger turns to mass starvation.
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8) Israeli Ground Forces Pull Out of Gaza
"At least 10 Palestinians were killed in Gaza on Sunday by Israeli fire, local hospital officials said, bringing the number of Palestinians killed since Wednesday, when the latest surge in hostilities began, to more than 100."
By ISABEL KERSHNER
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/world/middleeast/04mideast.html?hp
JERUSALEM — Israeli ground forces pulled out of northern Gaza early Monday after a two-day operation against Palestinian rocket-launching squads. Scores of Palestinians, including many civilians, and two Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting.
In Gaza City, thousands of Palestinians attended what Hamas called a victory rally. Soon after the Israeli troops left northern Gaza, militants fired more rockets into Israel.
Two longer-range imported Katyusha-style rockets struck the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon on Monday morning. One hit an apartment block, causing damage but no physical injury to the residents. At least two shorter-range Qassam rockets, manufactured in Gaza, fell inside Israel, but also caused no casualties.
Israeli officials said the ground operation had not been intended to stop the rocket fire altogether, but was part of a series of continuing measures against the militants.
Overnight, the Israeli Air Force struck several weapons storage and manufacturing facilities and a Hamas command center in Gaza, and the targets also included a group of armed men, an Israeli military spokeswoman said.
At least four Palestinians were killed in the latest airstrikes, according to Palestinian medical officials.
The army pullout came a day after Israeli-Palestinian violence spilled over from Gaza to the West Bank, and a spokesman for the Western-backed Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, said contacts with Israel had been temporarily suspended “in light of the Israeli aggression.”
These developments were likely to mar further a trip to the region by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, which starts Monday, when she visits Egypt.
On Sunday, Palestinian militants in Gaza fired rockets into Israel, including some longer-range ones that hit Ashkelon and the desert town of Netivot, despite the forceful Israeli military action and the presence of the large Israeli ground force in northern Gaza.
Those rockets caused property damage, but no serious injuries, said Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman.
At least 10 Palestinians were killed in Gaza on Sunday by Israeli fire, local hospital officials said, bringing the number of Palestinians killed since Wednesday, when the latest surge in hostilities began, to more than 100.
Israel says that most of those killed were armed militants, but Palestinian officials say that more than half were civilians, including several children.
A spokesman for the military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, said Sunday that 35 members of his group had been killed. About nine militants from smaller groups like Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees were also reported among the dead.
Hamas, the militant Islamic group, took control of the Gaza Strip last June after routing the pro-Abbas forces there. Its military wing has claimed responsibility for most of the recent rocket fire.
In the West Bank, as protests broke out against the rising death toll in Gaza, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian boy, Mahmoud al-Masalmeh, 14, near Hebron and dispersed stone-throwing demonstrators in several other areas.
Regarding the death of the youth, near Hebron, an army spokeswoman said that there had been “very violent disturbances” in the area and that soldiers had opened fire on two Palestinians who were acting suspiciously near the West Bank barrier in the course of the disturbances, hitting at least one of them.
Two Israeli soldiers who were killed in the fighting in Gaza on Saturday were buried in Israel on Sunday.
The increase in violence started Wednesday when five members of the Qassam Brigades were killed in an Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza. Israeli military officials said that the squad had intended to carry out a special operation against Israel, possibly involving infiltrating the border and capturing a soldier.
Militants in Gaza responded by firing barrages of rockets at Sderot, killing an Israeli civilian, the first such fatality in months. On Thursday they started launching manufactured Katyusha-style rockets at Ashkelon, a city of 120,000 people about 10 miles north of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials described the firing of the longer-range rockets as a serious escalation of the conflict, and they mounted a ground and air campaign in northern Gaza that left more than 60 Palestinians dead on Saturday.
In Gaza City on Sunday, two more bodies were pulled from a house that had been bombed by the Israeli Air Force the day before, bringing the number of fatalities there to six. One member of the family was known to be a member of the Qassam Brigades. Ahed Atallah, a family member who was not in the house at the time, said that only he and a married sister had survived.
Late Sunday afternoon, militants fired two more missiles into Ashkelon, one damaging a house, the police said. The residents escaped unharmed.
Three hours earlier, Meram Levy, 30, a mother of two young children, was carrying shards of broken glass out of her apartment after a longer-range rocket had landed outside before dawn on Saturday, shattering all the windows.
“At night I’m very scared,” Ms. Levy said. She and her husband are now sleeping in shifts, she said, to listen for the alert on the city’s new public address system.
The popular Ashkelon marina was also hit by a rocket on Saturday afternoon, and two local residents were lightly wounded. Pini Biton, who owns a restaurant at the marina, said the militants in Gaza had “crossed all the red lines.” The outdoor cafes and bars there were empty at lunchtime on Sunday, despite the fine weather.
The fact that the rockets had reached Ashkelon made Israelis realize that “they can get anywhere,” Mr. Biton said.
Before dawn on Sunday, the air force struck three targets in Gaza that the army spokeswoman described as Hamas headquarters and weapons-storage facilities. The targets included a headquarters of Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, Palestinian and Israeli officials said. It was empty at the time.
The air force also struck against armed militants in northern Gaza on Sunday afternoon, the army spokeswoman said.
A senior Israeli military official said the army was trying to hit the sites where rockets were stored, many located in or near civilian homes.
Abu Obeida, the Qassam Brigades spokesman, told reporters in Gaza that his group would continue firing rockets.
In remarks at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert responded to international criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, saying that “nobody has the right to preach morality to the state of Israel for taking basic action to defend itself.”
Mr. Olmert also seemed to reject the argument by Mr. Abbas that peace talks could not carry on in the shadow of the events in Gaza. “The more that Hamas is hit, the greater the chances of reaching a diplomatic agreement and peace,” Mr. Olmert said. He added that beyond its public statements, “the Palestinian leadership with whom we are trying to make peace understands this.”
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Jerusalem, and Taghreed El-Khodary from Gaza City.
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9) Americans Fire Missiles Into Somalia
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ERIC SCHMITT
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/world/africa/04somalia.html?hp
NAIROBI, Kenya — American naval forces fired missiles into southern Somalia on Monday, aiming at what the Defense Department called terrorist targets.
Residents reached by telephone said the only casualties were three wounded civilians, three dead cows, one dead donkey and a partly destroyed house.
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington, said the target was a “known Al Qaeda terrorist,” and another American military official said the attack was carried out with at least two Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a submarine. The official said the missiles are believed to have hit their targets but did not elaborate on the targets.
Witnesses on the ground, though, described the attack differently.
“I did not know from where they were launched, but what I know is that they hit a house in this town,” said Mohammed Amin Abdullahi Osman, a resident of Dhobley, a small town in southern Somalia near the Kenyan border.
Mr. Mohammed said two missiles crashed into the house around 3:30 a.m.
It was not the first time that American forces have fired missiles into Somalia in pursuit of what the Pentagon has called terrorist operatives in the country. They did it at least three times last year.
Dhobley lies in the growing swath of southern Somalia that seems to be falling under the control of Somalia’s Islamist movement once again. The Islamists had risen to power in 2006 and brought a degree of law and order to Somalia for the first time since the central government collapsed in 1991.
But they were driven out of Somalia in late 2006 and early 2007 by a joint Ethiopian-American offensive. The Americans and Ethiopians suspected Somalia’s Islamists of harboring Al Qaeda terrorists, including men connected to the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Thousands of Ethiopian troops poured across the border, backed up by American air strikes and American intelligence. The Islamist movement then went underground.
But in the past several months, the Islamists seem to be making a comeback, taking over towns in southern Somalia, including Dhobley, and inflicting a steady stream of casualties on Ethiopian forces with suicide bombs and hit-and-run attacks. Efforts by foreign diplomats and the United Nations to broker a truce have failed, and concerns are rising that Somalia could be headed toward another war-induced famine like the one it suffered in the early 1990s.
Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Mohammed Ibrahim contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.
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10) '638 Ways to Kill Castro'
When Is a Cigar Not a Cigar? When It Tries to Kill Castro
Television Review
By MIKE HALE
March 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/arts/television/03hale.html?ref=world
Now that Fidel Castro has resigned as president of Cuba, it seems likely that illness and age will finally be allowed to accomplish what two generations of Cuban exiles have been unable to, despite obsessive zeal and the help of the American government. For a quick and entertaining roundup of their attempts, Sundance Channel is offering the well-timed American television premiere of “638 Ways to Kill Castro,” a 2006 British documentary being shown Monday night.
The title refers to the number of assassination plans that Fabián Escalante, the former director of Cuban intelligence, claims to have evidence for and, in many cases, to have thwarted. Mr. Escalante breaks it down by administration: Eisenhower, 38; Kennedy, 42; Johnson, 72; Nixon, 184; Carter, 64; Reagan, 197; Bush Sr., 16; Clinton, 21. (That adds up to 634, but we can forgive him for losing track of a few poisoned diving suits.)
The film doesn’t try to prove those eye-catching figures (and Mr. Escalante is also known for propounding a theory of the John F. Kennedy assassination involving Cuban counterrevolutionaries and the Chicago mob). But it covers more than enough on-the-record plotting and scheming to show just how preoccupied Castro’s enemies have been with removing him.
The more freakish ideas — the poisoned fountain pens and milkshakes, the exploding seashells and cigars — are mentioned in passing, but the focus is on traditional methods like guns and bombs, and much of the story is told in the words of the prospective assassins. The filmmakers track down a number of men known or suspected to have plotted against Castro and interview them on camera, generally in what appear to be comfortable Florida homes.
Some speak guardedly, some openly, but they all project the same aura of righteousness and pride, often echoed by their wives and children: they define themselves through their hatred of Castro and their willingness to do something about it. Luis Posada Carriles, who has been linked to bombings of hotels in Havana and a Cubana Airlines flight, is unusual among the men in this group because he is in jail, facing immigration charges, when the filmmakers find him. But in a telephone interview he sounds the same defiant, if slightly pathetic, note: “I don’t want to be the one to say it, but I think he feels safer when I’m in jail, don’t you?” (Mr. Posada has since been released, even though the Justice Department has labeled him an “admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks.”)
“638 Ways to Kill Castro” is not an objective accounting: the ruggedly handsome Mr. Escalante, who kept Mr. Castro alive for so long, is its action hero, and its primary sources, including the former American diplomat Wayne Smith and the journalist Ann Louise Bardach, are clearly critical of America’s treatment of Cuba. At 75 minutes, the film doesn’t have the time to substantiate themes like the Bush family’s cozy relationship with anti-Castro Cubans in Florida. But it’s hard to doubt the depth of that group’s hatred, and the lengths to which it would go, when you see men in fatigues staging war games in the Everglades, complete with a mock execution of a stand-in Fidel. It’s enough to make you wonder whether he’s safe even now.
638 WAYS TO KILL CASTRO
Sundance, Monday night at 9:15, Eastern and Pacific times; 8:15 Central time.
Directed by Dollan Cannell; Peter Moore, executive producer; Kari Lia, producer; original music by Samuel Sim; cinematography by Petra Graf and Michael Timney.
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11) Israel Takes Gaza Fight to Next Level in a Day of Strikes
By STEVEN ERLANGER and TAGHREED EL-KHODARY
March 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/world/middleeast/02mideast.html?ref=world
GAZA — Israeli aircraft and troops attacked Palestinian positions in northern Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 54 people and wounding more than 100 in the deadliest day of fighting in more than a year. Two Israeli soldiers were killed and seven wounded, the military said.
The Israeli attacks, mostly from the air on a clear, bright day, were aimed at stopping rocket fire from Gaza into Israel, the Israelis said, especially after Ashkelon, a large city 10 miles from Gaza, came under fire from more advanced, Katyusha-style rockets of Iranian design.
Half the dead were reported to be Hamas gunmen or those belonging to affiliated groups like Islamic Jihad. But at least 19 Palestinian civilians also died in the heavily populated area, including four children, according to Dr. Moawiya Hassanain of the Gazan Health Ministry.
More than 80 Palestinians have died since fighting surged on Wednesday; in addition to the soldiers, an Israeli died in Sderot from a rocket, and six Israelis were wounded Saturday from rocket strikes in Ashkelon.
The fighting brought harsh criticism from the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who reportedly threatened to call off negotiations with Israel over a peace treaty. “We tell the world: watch and judge what’s happening, and judge who is committing international terrorism,” Mr. Abbas said in Ramallah, on the West Bank.
Mr. Abbas, who has referred to the rocket firing as useless provocation, said last week that armed conflict remained an option if negotiations failed.
An Israeli spokesman, David Baker, said that Israel was conducting “defensive measures” to protect its civilians from rocket fire against cities, which Mr. Baker called terrorism. “We have over 200,000 Israelis in range of Palestinian rockets. We cannot allow this to go on.”
The Israeli deputy defense minister, Matan Vilnai, said the military was engaged in “an enlarged operation and not a major ground operation” of the type Israeli politicians have been pressing for. Mr. Vilnai told Israel Radio that “we are using mostly air units” and that Israeli forces “are permanently engaged in Gaza, and what we are doing now is within the scope of such activities.”
Early Sunday, the United Nations Security Council issued a statement condemning the escalation of the fighting and urging Israelis and Palestinians “to immediately cease all acts of violence,” The Associated Press reported.
The statement, though not a formal resolution, also stressed that the violence “must not be allowed to deter the political process” aimed at “establishing two states — Israel and Palestine — living side by side in peace and security.”
About two dozen rockets landed in Israel on Saturday, including seven Katyusha-style rockets in or near Ashkelon, lightly wounding a woman and two children just after midnight. Saturday afternoon, another rocket hit the Ashkelon marina shopping center, wounding three others, the Israeli military said.
Israeli troops began their operation just after midnight, concentrating on a hilly area near crowded Jabaliya, within two miles of the Gazan border, where many of the rockets have been launched from among the civilian population. Late Saturday, the Israeli military confirmed that two soldiers had been killed and that seven others, including an officer, had been wounded.
In Gaza on Friday, Hussein Dardouna, 50, was burying his son, Omar, 14, killed while playing with his friends by an Israeli strike aimed at a rocket-launching team. “I couldn’t identify the body of my son,” he said. “It was very hard until I found the head of my son. I’m against these rockets, but I am afraid. What can I do? If I protest they will hit me, they will kill me.”
A woman at the funeral said: “Everyone is afraid now. Where is Abu Mazen, where is Haniya?” she asked, referring to Mr. Abbas and the Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniya. “Come and protect us.”
The Israeli operation killed at least 10 fighters from Hamas, which has run Gaza since it drove out Fatah forces in fierce internal fighting last June.
Most residents hid in their homes. The Palestinian dead on Saturday included at least four children.
Hamas said that one girl, Malak Karfaneh, 6, died Friday night from an Israeli strike on Beit Hanun in northern Gaza, but residents said that a Palestinian rocket had fallen short and landed near the house, killing her and wounding three siblings.
Israeli officials say that up to half of Palestinian rockets — mostly crude, inaccurate Qassams — fall inside Gaza. But when Hamas broke open the border with Egypt, Israeli officials say, the militants were able to bring in more of the manufactured Katyusha-style rockets as well as antitank missiles and concrete, for building fortifications.
The United Nations agency that deals with Palestinian refugees closed down the 37 schools it runs in northern Gaza.
“We are living in the middle of the battle zone,” Rami Muhammad Ali, 21, told Reuters by phone from Jabaliya. “We wanted to flee the house, but we’ve been trapped since last night.”
He described the scene, saying, “Rockets and missiles are whistling by all the time, and the building has been shaken by mines the Palestinians are setting off against the Israeli soldiers.”
A Hamas military spokesman who calls himself Abu Obeida said, “The Zionist forces have failed in Gaza before.” Hamas, under some political pressure from the effective isolation of Gaza and deteriorating conditions there, seems to be trying to lure Israel into a major ground operation.
The Israelis have been cautious, with little desire to reoccupy Gaza and take full responsibility for its 1.5 million inhabitants, nearly 70 percent of them refugees or their descendants. The Israeli security cabinet will meet during the week to discuss Gaza, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arriving as well.
She has defended Israel’s right to defend itself but has urged restraint. A major Israeli operation would most likely put a crimp in American-sponsored peace talks between Mr. Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel.
A White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, said late Saturday: “We call for an end to violence and all acts of terrorism directed against innocent civilians. There is a clear distinction between terrorist rocket attacks that target civilians and action in self-defense.”
Steven Erlanger reported from Jerusalem, and Taghreed El-Khodary from Gaza.
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12) U.S. Plan Widens Role in Training Pakistani Forces in Qaeda Battle
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER
March 2, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/world/asia/02military.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON — The United States military is developing a plan to send about 100 American trainers to work with a Pakistani paramilitary force that is the vanguard in the fight against Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in Pakistan’s restive tribal areas, American military officials said.
Pakistan has ruled out allowing American combat troops to fight Qaeda and Taliban militants in the tribal areas. But Pakistani leaders have privately indicated that they would welcome additional American trainers to help teach new skills to Pakistani soldiers whose army was tailored not for counterinsurgency but to fight a conventional land war against India.
Even though the training program would unfold over several months, it is being disclosed at a time of heightened operations in the unruly tribal areas along the Afghan border. At least eight people suspected of being Islamic militants were killed Thursday in a triple missile attack on a house used for training in the tribal areas.
For several years, small teams of American Special Operations forces have trained their Pakistani counterparts in counterinsurgency tactics. But the 40-page classified plan now under review at the United States Central Command to help train the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force of about 85,000 members recruited from ethnic groups on the border, would significantly increase the size and scope of the American training role in the country.
United States trainers initially would be restricted to training compounds, but with Pakistani consent could eventually accompany Pakistani troops on missions “to the point of contact” with militants, as American trainers now do with Iraqi troops in Iraq, a senior American military official said. Britain is also considering a similar training mission in Pakistan, officials said. A spokesman at the British Embassy here declined to comment.
“The U.S. is bringing in a small number of trainers to assist Pakistan in their efforts to improve training of the Frontier Corps,” Elizabeth O. Colton, a spokeswoman for the United States Embassy in Islamabad, said in an e-mail message. “The U.S. trainers will be primarily focused on assisting the Pakistan cadre who will do the actual training of the Frontier Corps troops.”
Ms. Colton declined to specify how many American trainers would participate or where their bases would be. But Defense Department officials said that the number of American trainers could grow to about 100. Along with intensified missile strikes in Pakistan against suspected militants, the increased training program is another sign of the Bush administration’s growing concern and frustration with Pakistan’s failure to do more about Al Qaeda’s movements in the tribal areas.
The proposed expanded training program is modest compared with the training efforts under way in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is said to offer scant likelihood of blossoming into a much larger American combat presence. American officials are also acutely aware of Pakistani sensitivities to any United States military presence in the country, even trainers, and spoke largely on the basis of anonymity because of the diplomatic concerns and because the plan had not been formally approved.
Until now, American officials have worked closely with President Pervez Musharraf on counterterrorism policies, including training programs. The landslide victory by Pakistan’s opposition parties in last month’s parliamentary elections adds a degree of complication and confusion to any long-term military planning of this sort because it is unclear to what extent new leaders, like Asif Ali Zardari, the head of the victorious Pakistan Peoples Party and the widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, will embrace those policies.
American officials are also taking a number of other steps to help increase Pakistan’s long-term ability to battle a newly resurgent Al Qaeda and other extremist groups in the tribal areas.
At the request of Pakistan’s new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Central Command two weeks ago sent a four-member intelligence team, led by a lieutenant colonel, to work closely with Pakistani intelligence officers in Islamabad. The Americans are helping with techniques on sharing satellite imagery and addressing Pakistani requests to buy equipment used to intercept the militants’ communications, a senior American officer said.
The United States is also helping to establish border coordination centers in Afghanistan just across the Pakistan border, where Afghan, Pakistani and American officials can share intelligence about Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups in and around the tribal areas.
The Pentagon has spent about $25 million so far to equip the Frontier Corps with new body armor, vehicles, radios and surveillance equipment, and plans to spend $75 million more in the next year. Over all, a senior Bush administration official said, the United States could spend more than $400 million in the next several years to enhance the Frontier Corps, including building a training base near Peshawar.
The training proposal now under review at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., which oversees military operations in the Middle East and much of South Asia, is subject to the approval of the commander, Adm. William J. Fallon, and top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.
Admiral Fallon said in an interview at his headquarters last week that additional trainers would be part of “a comprehensive approach” to address Pakistan’s security needs. “They want to do as much of this as they can themselves,” Admiral Fallon said.
Pakistani officials said they were aware of the Pentagon’s general offer for more trainers, but were not familiar with the details of the Central Command plan.
That document, titled “Plan for Training the Frontier Corps,” envisions a combination of Special Forces and regular Army troops working with the Frontier Corps in basic marksmanship, infantry skills and counterinsurgency techniques, Defense Department officials said.
Until recently, the Frontier Corps had not received American military financing because the corps technically falls under the Pakistani Interior Ministry, a nonmilitary agency that the Pentagon ordinarily does not deal with. But American and Pakistani officials say the Frontier Corps is drawn from Pashtun tribesmen, who know the language and culture of the tribal areas, and in the long term is the most suitable force to combat an insurgency there.
American and Pakistani officials acknowledge that it will take several years to build the Frontier Corps into an effective counterinsurgency. American officials say they have seen some Frontier Corps members wearing sandals on patrol and wielding barely functional Kalashnikov rifles with little ammunition.
The need for the training is evident. In January, hundreds of Islamic militants attacked a paramilitary fort in the restive South Waziristan tribal region in northwest Pakistan, killing 22 soldiers and taking several others hostage. A Pentagon official said the fort was overrun in part because the commander had failed to range his artillery properly before the attack.
“Pakistani military operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas have had limited effect on Al Qaeda,” Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. “Pakistan recognizes the threat and realizes the need to develop more effective counterinsurgency and counterterrorism capabilities to complement their conventional forces.”
Robert L. Grenier, a former director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, told a panel of the Council on Foreign Relations last week that any high-profile American military presence in the tribal areas or the neighboring North-West Frontier Province would be “the kiss of death.”
But Pakistan, he said, would welcome small numbers of trainers who kept a low profile, and were not involved in combat operations. “To an increasing degree as they see that it doesn’t cause the sky to fall, they will be willing to accept low-level support from the Americans, particularly in the form of training,” said Mr. Grenier, a former C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad.
Mr. Grenier added that the role American trainers played would rest largely with General Kayani, the new army chief. “He’s a very conservative, very cautious fellow,” Mr. Grenier said. “He will want to make his own decisions as to what is sustainable and what is not in the way of U.S. support.”
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13) Statement by Felipe Pérez Roque, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Cuba at the High Level Segment of the Seventh Session of the Human Rights Council. Geneva, March 3, 2008.
http://america.cubaminrex.cu/Derechos%20Humanos/Articulos/ConsejoDerechosHumanos/2008/2008-03-03-IntervencionING.html
Excellencies:
I am speaking on behalf of Cuba, the country who is suffering under the longest and cruellest blockade known to history; the small rebel country which is threatened with "a change of regime", never to be forgiven its noble spirit and integrity.
That Cuba should be founding member of this Council is proof that, finally, reason conquers force, the defence of principles defeats power and wealth. Proof of the fact that you cannot fool all of the people, all of the time.
During 2007 we concluded, in essence, the institutional building of the Human Rights Council. It was the victory of our majority –the Non-Aligned Movement in particular – over a very paltry group of countries –one or two of the powerful ones – who conspired up until the last second to frustrate the process. It was the result of a delicate balance, we all know this.
When in December 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 62/219, as a result of the action of the Non-Aligned Movement, approving the institutional building of the Human Rights Council, we who struggled for years, convinced that it was possible and indispensable to create a new body to replace the discredited Commission on Human Rights, finally saw the fruits of our patience and our serious and honest labour.
And so we arrive at this moment in time. And now we should ask ourselves: can we be sure that the new Council will be different from the old Commission? Will it truly be a body that will contribute to the promotion and protection of all human rights for all the inhabitants on this planet?
No, we really cannot ensure that just yet. It is now that the Council will be put to the acid test.
The legitimacy of the Council will depend, to a great extent, on how the Universal Periodic Review Mechanism will end up functioning.
It will not be enough that every country be subject to the new mechanism. The Council has to function under the strictest respect for the principles of objectivity, impartiality and non-selectivity. Otherwise, it will be a resounding failure.
If the conclusions and recommendations end up depending of the powers and influence of every country, the Council will be repeating the same errors that caused the old Commission to blow up.
If, once again, a tribunal is set up to judge the South countries, to be an instrument made to threaten those who rebel, while it turns a blind eye to human rights violations committed by a powerful country, the Council will be an abysmal failure.
And it would be far worse because it would be a copy of the former Commission on Human Rights but this time clothed with the bogus cloak of presumed universality.
Will those powerful countries that imposed their petty interests and their vision on the Commission on Human Rights be ready to correct their error?
That is the question they are going to have to answer with deeds and not with words.
The Human Rights Council must now show that it is truly a different body, based on cooperation and respectful dialogue, with no selectivity or impositions, an organ that indeed contributes to the promotion and protection of human rights the world over, from the viewpoint of full respect for the independence of all countries.
To the overly critical, to those who have been pitilessly attacking the Council because they lost their old rights and privileges, to those who have not understood that the world is changing and that the people have said “Enough!” and have started up, to the United States and to any other “sceptic”, to all of you I suggest humility and reflection. To cause the Council’s work to fail will be an enormous responsibility that would have to be shouldered for the rest of time.
Delegates:
The Non-Aligned Movement that has become a key player in the process of institutional building defends the need for the Human Rights Council. The Council must live and, furthermore, it must act.
While threats to bomb 60 or more countries, the ones that are disdainfully named “dark corners of the planet” exist, this Human Rights Council must live and act.
While five Cuban anti-terrorist combatants are being submitted to 10 years of unfair and cruel incarceration in American jails, this Human Rights Council must live and act.
While there is one person justifying asphyxiation as a legitimate method to extract confessions, this Human Rights Council must live and act.
While people are still being kidnapped anywhere, clandestine flights are being organized to move them and hold them in concentration camps, in full twenty-first century, this Human Rights Council must live and act.
While the heroic people of Palestine remain Stateless and are denied their rights, this Human Rights Council must live and act.
While injustice and inequality still exist in the world, while every day we suffer from almost 900 million starving people, 800 million illiterate people, 11 million children dead before their fifth birthday and 600 thousand impoverished women dead in childbirth, this Human Rights Council must live and act.
While the right to development is a chimera for more than 100 countries, while 1600 million people still have no electricity, while an unfair and excluding international economic and political world order still exists, this Human Rights Council must live and act.
Delegates:
But 2007 has also marked a historic victory for Cuba, also enjoyed and celebrated by all those who admire the steadfastness and honesty with which our country had faced up to, and still faces up to, the lies and manipulations by the media.
After twenty long years of “Cuban struggle against demons”, the Human Rights Council put an end to the unfair and selective exercise conceived of and imposed by the United States as an excuse to legitimize its aggression against our Homeland.
And I have here the balance sheet on this uneven conflict: Cuba, the defendant, transformed into a founding member of the Council, presiding over the Non-Aligned Movement and working constructively to strengthen the Council. The United States, our accuser, transformed into a “failed State” in the matter; responsible for the most grievous crimes and human rights violations; foe to the new Council because it has not been able to manipulate or control it. We see it here, lacking direction and authority, thrashing around, always backing the worst of causes, defending torture, administrating secret prisons, organizing clandestine flights.
And so, for now this battle has reached this point: with a resounding victory for David, small but great in his dignity, against Goliath the giant, powerful with his nuclear weapons and threats of preventive wars but small in terms of moral authority and international respect, the greatest treasure any nation can aspire to possess.
And so, also, one day we shall defeat the criminal blockade which has been forced upon us in the attempt to force us to our knees in hunger and disease.
And now, and only now, triumphing over blackmail and lies, we, the Cubans, by our own free will, in an independent and sovereign manner, are doing what could not , nor will ever, be wrested from us as concessions.
Therefore now and not before, we once again invited a Special Rapporteur of the Council and, if the constructive climate prevailing today continues and the campaign against Cuba does not resume, we will invite others in the future.
Therefore now and not before, we have signed the International Covenants on Human Rights.
Therefore now and not before, we are ready to work seriously to present ourselves in 2009 at the Universal Periodic Review Mechanism.
Today Cuba repeats her will to cooperate in the work of the Council, to cooperate with the mechanisms for universal human rights that are non-discriminatory and based on the strictest respect for our sovereignty.
Cuba also reiterates her steadfast decision to confront any new attempt to install selectivity, politicization, double standards and hypocrisy within the Council.
Delegates:
A few words about Cuba, my Homeland.
Our country has just concluded an electoral process which, according to our Constitution and our laws, saw its beginnings last September. It has been a genuine referendum in which the people have massively supported the Revolution and socialism in our country.
Local authorities and National Assembly members were elected by secret and direct vote.
President Bush called on the Cuban people not to vote and, nevertheless, almost 97 percent of the more than 8 million registered voters cast their ballots. Let’s see if in the upcoming U.S. elections these results can be matched.
President Bush called on Cubans to cast blank ballots. Less than 4 percent of the voters did that. He urged Cubans not to vote for all the proposed candidates, as the Revolution requested, and 91 percent of the voters supported, freely and conscientiously, all of the candidates proposed by the Revolution.
It has been an extraordinary political victory that has not been able to be either covered up or distorted.
The world has been witness to the civic spirit and political awareness of the Cuban people.
Over there in Cuba, after his historic decision, Fidel is still enjoying the stingy and mediocre reaction of those who thought that his authority stemmed from his office, of those who thought that if you removed Fidel from office or assassinated him that would be the magic formula for the downfall of the Cuban Revolution.
And it didn’t happen. Fidel is the people; his ideas are the ideas of the people; Raúl, with all the authority he is endowed with because of his own background, is also Fidel in his loyalty to our Homeland, to the Revolution and to socialism; at the end of the day, Fidel is every man and woman in the world who fights for justice and liberty for people everywhere.
And that is where the Empire stands, impotent, not knowing what to do or what to say. Conscious of the fact that it cannot prevent Cubans from making their own decisions and from following a path they have freely chosen. It is the result of having carried out a profound social Revolution in our nation. It is the result of the people truly being in power. It is the result of, finally and in a case that has not happened very often in history, the lower classes, the ever-forgotten ones, now becoming the deputies, the ministers, the military leaders; it is the people in power, masters of their own destinies and masters of their own country.
That and no other, my fellow delegates, is Cuba's crossroads. Either save the Revolution and continue being a free people or return to the condition of being an enslaved people, a virtual colony, like we were at one time, of our powerful and voracious neighbour.
To those who support our struggle, who are many, who are the majority, we thank you. Our battle is also one for the independence and the respect for peoples everywhere that you represent.
To those who support our adversary, either because of convictions, hypocrisy or fear, it is not important. We know how to carry the sense of decorum that they are lacking.
In the year commemorating the 60th anniversary of the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Cuba renews its commitment in the struggle for a world of justice, liberty and equality for all. The challenge is enormous, and our optimism is greater.
Thank you very much.
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14) The $2 Trillion Nightmare
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04herbert.html?hp
We’ve been hearing a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a Congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.
The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.
On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”
Mr. Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put “on a more sustainable basis.” And he cited the committee’s own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.
What we’re getting instead is the stuff of nightmares. Mr. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia, has been working with a colleague at Harvard, Linda Bilmes, to document, among other things, some of the less obvious costs of the war. These include the obligation to provide health care and disability benefits for returning veterans. Those costs will be with us for decades.
Mr. Stiglitz noted that nearly 40 percent of the 700,000 troops from the first gulf war, which lasted just a month, have become eligible for disability benefits. The current war is approaching five years in duration.
“Imagine then,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “what a war — that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years — will cost. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at V.A. hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems.”
The Bush administration has tried its best to conceal the horrendous costs of the war. It has bypassed the normal budgetary process, financing the war almost entirely through “emergency” appropriations that get far less scrutiny.
Even the most basic wartime information is difficult to come by. Mr. Stiglitz, who has written a new book with Ms. Bilmes called “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” said they had to go to veterans’ groups, who in turn had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act, just to find out how many Americans had been injured in Iraq.
Mr. Stiglitz and Mr. Hormats both addressed the foolhardiness of waging war at the same time that the government is cutting taxes and sharply increasing non-war-related expenditures.
Mr. Hormats told the committee:
“Normally, when America goes to war, nonessential spending programs are reduced to make room in the budget for the higher costs of the war. Individual programs that benefit specific constituencies are sacrificed for the common good ... And taxes have never been cut during a major American war. For example, President Eisenhower adamantly resisted pressure from Senate Republicans for a tax cut during the Korean War.”
Said Mr. Stiglitz: “Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself ... By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.”
Some former presidents — Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower — were quoted at the hearing on the need for accountability and shared sacrifice during wartime. But this is the 21st century. That ancient rhetoric can hardly be expected to compete for media attention, even in a time of war, with the giddy fun of S.N.L.
It’s a new era.
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15) Border Insecurity
Editorial
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04tue1.html?hp
From San Diego on the Pacific to Brownsville on the Rio Grande, a steel curtain is descending across the continent. Behind it lies a nation so confused and conflicted by its immigration problems that it has decided to wall itself off and wait for things to fix themselves. This country once was a confident global magnet for an invigorating flow of immigrant workers and citizens-to-be. Now it is just hunkering.
The evidence of this neurosis is visible at the border with Mexico, where the Department of Homeland Security has been rushing to reinforce an ineffective system of fencing and sensors, trucks and boots on the ground. The mission, imposed upon it by Congress after a wearying stalemate on immigration reform, is a mandate to do the impossible, at record speed and at record expense.
This commitment to enforcement alone, without fixing legal immigration, was always Plan B. Even President Bush, the master of the botched federal initiative, predicted it would fail. He is looking unusually prescient.
In Arizona, a 28-mile pilot project to build a “virtual fence” of sensors and cameras has fallen short of expectations. The problem, according to the Government Accountability Office, was too much haste and too little consultation with the Border Patrol. The main contractor, Boeing, rushed into the project with the wrong software. Its cameras couldn’t focus on targets, and systems were confounded by innocuous things like rain. The Bush administration has confused things further by saying the system is working as planned — but won’t be expanded.
That is not necessarily good news along remote border areas in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, where there is a lot of desert and mountains and where the alternative — pouring billions into building a real fence — is viewed as simply insane. No amount of fencing would seriously deter illegal crossers, border-town officials insist, and the effort actually makes things worse: You have to build roads to build the fence, and the new roads connect with old ones and vastly increase their usefulness to smugglers in cars and trucks. Mayor Ray Borane of Douglas, Ariz., said that people on the Mexican side have cut through his section of the fence with torches, welding on doors with their own locks, going in and out at will. “They cut holes in the thing like you wouldn’t believe,” he said.
In Texas, the fence is a dotted line, blocking some places but not others. It cuts through the University of Texas at Brownsville and blocks the migration of wildlife by bifurcating valuable nature preserves in which the country has already made a heavy investment. At the same time, it seems at pains not to disrupt things that really matter, like golf, stopping short of the River Bend country club and a luxury gated community owned by Ray L. Hunt, a Dallas oil billionaire.
Let’s agree that any country needs to control its borders and ports, and that this one has done too little on that front. But that worthy goal founders when the overall strategy boils down to simplistic components — bits of fencing and technological cure-alls — rather than a comprehensive solution that also attacks the reasons people cross illegally. Despite what critics of “amnesty” say, immigration reform has never been a choice between legalization and enforcement, because legalization is enforcement. Only by bringing people onto the books and being realistic about the supply of visas, letting people in through ports of entry, instead of chasing them across the desert, will the country restore sanity and order to this broken system.
The view from Mayor Borane’s part of the world, shared by dozens of border mayors and sheriffs and governors like Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Bill Richardson of New Mexico, is that nothing short of a phalanx of federal agents standing shoulder-to-shoulder for 2,000 miles would shut the border the way the hard-liners on talk radio want it shut. The sensible solution is to bring the visa supply in line with reality, let workers and family members through more easily and give the Border Patrol the resources — virtual and otherwise — to catch drug smugglers and other bad people.
As for the fence, we like Mayor Borane’s suggestion to let it stand as a monument to the government’s chronic inability — so far — to do anything smart about illegal immigration.
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16) Unlike Consumers, Companies Are Piling Up Cash
By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/business/04cash.html?hp
At least someone knows how to fill a piggy bank.
Unlike most American consumers, whose failure to save has exasperated economists for years, the typical American corporation has increased its savings so sharply that it probably has enough cash on hand to completely pay off its debts.
That should be good news in an economy unsettled by rising energy prices, tightening credit, gyrating stock prices and declining values for the dollar and the family homestead. Indeed, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, cited strong corporate balance sheets as a bright spot in the darkening forecast he presented to Congress last week.
Some analysts also speculate that these cash-rich companies may start sharing their wealth with investors through special dividends, providing welcome stimulus for the economy.
Corporate spending on equipment and other capital expenditures has declined as savings have soared, suggesting that companies could stimulate the economy now by going on a hiring and spending spree. But that raises worries among some analysts that companies will spend their cash unwisely, making them more vulnerable in the future.
The increase over the last decade in the amount of cash, as a percent of total assets, for the companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has been steep. One study shows that the average cash ratio doubled from 1998 to 2004 and the median ratio more than tripled, while debt levels fell. According to S.& P., the total cash held by companies in its industrial index exceeded $600 billion in February, up from about $203 billion in 1998.
René M. Stulz, who holds the Reese chair in banking and monetary economics at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University, said research he conducted with two other professors on corporate cash levels since 1980 indicated that growing cash holdings over that period most likely reflected the simple fact that the world became a much riskier place for business.
“Companies responded to those rising risks by saving more,” said Professor Stulz, whose study excluded utilities and financial companies because their cash reserves are monitored by regulators.
An even longer savings trend was spotted by Jason DeSena Trennert, managing partner and chief investment strategist at Strategas Research Partners in New York, who said his own rough examination of corporate balance sheets shows that “cash, as a percent of total assets, is as high as it’s been since the 1960s.”
The ledgers of many individual companies bear out these findings. For example, the cash ratio at Paychex — cash and short-term investments as a percent of total assets — has more than doubled, from less than 30 percent in 1988 to more than 70 percent by last summer. Over the same period, Apple’s cash ratio grew to more than 60 percent, from just over 38 percent.
The cash ratio at Avon Products, just under 3 percent in 1988, was nearly 17 percent by last December. And Microsoft’s savings account is so large that its chief financial officer has observed that the company could, if it wished, cover most of the $20 billion cash component of its pending $44.6 billion offer for Yahoo from its own reserves.
This cash-saving trend may have a downside, though. Because companies can spend from their own account without scrutiny from the investment bankers or commercial bankers who might otherwise lend them money, corporate executives can do some really dumb things with their cash, said Amy Dittmar, an assistant professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, who has studied corporate spending habits in the United States and abroad.
“There is a subtle line between having enough money to do what you have to do versus having enough money to do anything you want to do,” Professor Dittmar said.
Manny Weintraub, a former managing director and top-performing money manager for Neuberger Berman who formed his own investment advisory firm in late 2003, agreed. “Like your mother told you, the rule should be that if you don’t have anything nice to buy, don’t buy anything,” he said.
The Stulz team’s study showed that this trend of rising cash ratios was not limited to very large corporations — indeed, the average increase is more pronounced among firms below the top one-fifth of the sample.
Over the same time, the study found, one measure of corporate debt — the net debt ratio, or debt minus cash as a percent of total assets — fell so sharply that, by 2004, it was below zero, where it stayed at least through 2006.
“In other words,” the researchers noted, “on average, firms could have paid off their debt with their cash holdings.”
Those who study corporate balance sheets suggest that several factors have contributed to this change in corporate savings patterns.
In the last 25 years, the speed and scale of globalization have increased sharply. That shift to worldwide markets confronted companies with increased currency risks, political risks and new competition — all adding to the overall risk of doing business.
During the same period, conglomerates and similarly diversified companies fell out of favor, as Wall Street looked for “pure plays” and companies narrowed their focus to a few core businesses — in effect, putting more of their eggs in fewer baskets.
That left those companies more vulnerable to any event that shook those baskets, Professor Dittmar explained. “When firms become less diverse and more focused, they become more volatile,” she said. And when that happens, they need cash to cushion the bumps.
While rising risks may explain most of these changing patterns, other business trends may also have had an impact.
For example, the Stulz team’s paper shows that rising cash levels were, to some degree, influenced by a drop in capital spending on hard assets, which can be used as collateral for borrowing. Similarly, the study found, as companies increased their focus on research and development investments, which are not as useful for borrowing purposes, cash levels rose.
Moreover, cash has traditionally been just one component of “working capital,” along with inventories and accounts receivable. But innovations like “just in time” supply chains and faster payment systems have reduced the role of inventories and accounts receivable and, conversely, raised the role of cash on corporate balance sheets, Professor Dittmar said.
Adding to that, the corporate universe now contains a higher percentage of the companies that have traditionally held lots of cash, notably technology companies. These companies now make up about 45 percent of the economy, up from less than 30 percent in 1980. That would inevitably increase the overall averages for cash ratios.
The study by the Stulz team, however, specifically allowed for that change — and found that even among technology companies, the ratio of cash on the balance sheets has grown sharply over that period.
According to Mr. Trennert, the cash ratios at technology companies have doubled since 2000.
With cash levels this high, Mr. Trennert said he expected that some companies — those that also have high levels of insider ownership — may elect to pay a special dividend in the coming year, ahead of any future change in the favorable tax treatment those dividends now receive. “If I were a C.E.O.’s tax lawyer, that would certainly be my advice,” he said.
As the Stulz team noted, this trend is in many ways paradoxical and unexpected. In the last 25 years there has been an explosion in financial products intended to help companies manage risk — from currency devaluations to commodity shortages.
“We would expect improvements in financial technology to reduce cash holdings,” the researchers noted.
And yet, corporations have continued to cope with risk the old-fashioned way: by saving for a rainy day. That suggests that either corporations are not making sufficient use of risk-management tools, or that the tools themselves — while helpful — are inadequate to cope with the increased levels of risk that companies now confront, Professor Stulz said.
Some veteran investors also suggest another factor that may have encouraged the growth in cash ratios. Mr. Weintraub, the money manager, pointed out that in the years examined in the Stulz team’s study, Wall Street started giving greater weight to balance-sheet strength.
Though that focus clearly faltered during the technology stock bubble of the late 1990s, it is coming back into vogue in today’s uncertain times, said Quincy Krosby, an economist and chief investment strategist at the Hartford, an insurance and financial services company.
With the markets so unsteady, companies with soft stock prices and solid balance sheets are attracting attention from institutional investors, she said, in part because the companies, especially in the technology realm, have enough cash to expand their market share through acquisitions.
But won’t big cash cushions turn these companies into sitting ducks for leveraged-buyout firms or foreign buyers spending today’s remarkably cheap dollars?
Maybe not — or, at least, maybe not yet.
Professor Dittmar noted that the credit squeeze has made it less likely that highly leveraged private equity funds can go gunning for cash-rich companies, as they have in the past.
Political pressures, meanwhile, are likely to protect American companies from hostile foreign buyers — certainly through an election year, and even longer if the Democrats take the White House and make gains in Congress, Mr. Weintraub noted.
But, with the debt-burdened American consumer cutting back, wouldn’t the risk of a recession decline if companies with overstuffed wallets took their cash out and spent it?
Emphatically not, said Professor Stulz. Research strongly suggests that companies are holding more cash because they need it to operate more safely in a risky environment, he said.
“If they spend it, they will become more fragile,” he added. “And an increase in the number of fragile firms is not in the best interests of the economy.”
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17) Crisis at Colombia Border Spills Into Diplomatic Realm
By SIMON ROMERO
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/world/americas/04venez.html?ref=world
CARACAS, Venezuela — The three-way crisis in the Andes escalated Monday as Ecuador broke off diplomatic relations with Colombia, and Venezuela expelled Colombia’s ambassador and other diplomats.
The three countries swapped charges of treachery and deceit, ratcheting up tension in a dispute that began when Colombian forces hunted down and killed a Colombian guerrilla leader on Ecuadorean soil over the weekend.
The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry, in ordering the expulsion of diplomatic personnel of the Colombian Embassy, said it was acting “in defense of the sovereignty of the fatherland and the dignity of the Venezuelan people.”
President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, who had expelled Colombia’s ambassador over the weekend, went a step further on Monday, breaking off diplomatic relations. The move was not unexpected after his claim that President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia was lying about the nature of the raid.
Venezuela and Ecuador sent troops to the Colombian border on Sunday in response to Colombia’s military raid on a rebel encampment in the jungle about a mile inside Ecuador. Colombian forces killed 21 guerrillas belonging to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Colombia’s largest rebel group.
In addition to killing a senior rebel leader, Raúl Reyes, Colombia said it recovered his laptop computer, whose contents were at the center of several allegations on Monday.
At a news conference in Bogotá, Gen. Oscar Naranjo, Colombia’s police chief, accused Venezuela of channeling $300 million to the FARC, based on what he said was information obtained from Mr. Reyes’s computer.
General Naranjo also said computer documents showed financial support from the FARC for President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, going back to the time Mr. Chávez spent in prison after an unsuccessful coup attempt in Caracas in 1992.
“This implies more than cozying up, but an armed alliance between the FARC and the Venezuelan government,” General Naranjo said.
Venezuela’s government, which sent tank units to its border with Colombia in a response to the Colombian raid, denied aiding the rebels. “We are used to the Colombian government’s lies,” said Vice President Ramón Carrizales.
General Naranjo also referred to information suggesting that the FARC, which has been at war with Colombia’s government for the last four decades, had appeared interested in acquiring 110 pounds of uranium.
The general displayed photographs and documents he said were taken from Mr. Reyes’s computer, but the context of the information was unclear.
Ecuador also rejected claims by Colombia of ties with the FARC, and sent 3,200 troops to Sucumbios, an Amazonian province near its border with Colombia where the attack on the FARC’s camp took place.
Mr. Correa, the Ecuadorean president, said the Colombian rebels were killed in their sleep “in their pajamas,” and not in the heat of pursuit as Colombia’s security forces said. Ecuadorean emergency officials recovered several wounded members of the FARC, transporting them to hospitals in Quito.
Faced with one of Latin America’s worst diplomatic crises in recent years, the Organization of American States said it would convene a meeting in Washington on Tuesday to try to prevent an escalation of the dispute between Colombia, a staunch Bush administration ally, and the leftist governments of Ecuador and Venezuela.
Even as Colombia’s government offered details on the FARC’s relations with Venezuela and Ecuador, Colombian officials said Monday that they would not send more troops to the borders with the two countries in response to the mobilizations ordered by Mr. Chávez and Mr. Correa.
Because of the FARC’s resilient history at the heart of Colombia’s war, it has had contact with insurgencies and governments throughout Latin America and beyond, including the United States, which classifies the FARC and other armed groups in Colombia as terrorists.
For instance, in 1998 a Clinton administration official, Philip T. Chicola, then the State Department’s director of Andean affairs, had a clandestine meeting with Mr. Reyes in Costa Rica in an effort to establish a way of communicating with the FARC during times of crisis.
The meeting was described in a diplomatic cable written by Mr. Chicola in January 1999 and declassified in 2004. Also present at the meeting was Mr. Reyes’s wife, Olga Marín, a woman believed to be the daughter of the FARC’s top commander, Manuel Marulanda, and also reported to be present, and possibly wounded, in the raid on the jungle camp on Saturday.
The Bush administration on Monday reiterated its support for Colombia’s struggle against the FARC and cocaine trafficking, but called for a negotiated solution to the crisis.
“This, for us, is an issue between the governments of Colombia and Ecuador,” said Tom H. Casey, deputy spokesman at the State Department, in a briefing to reporters on Monday in Washington. “We believe it’s appropriate for them to work that out through diplomatic discussion.”
Still, what began over the weekend as an operation by Colombian forces in Ecuadorean territory has evolved into a wider regional matter.
“Our view of this issue right now is that there is no doubt that there is a territorial violation and we condemn it,” said Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, speaking to reporters in Brasília. “It raises insecurity problems in all countries of the region, mostly in the smaller ones.”
And amid the Colombian accusations, Mr. Chávez remains at the center of the increasing tension, with his political opponents here criticizing his decision to mobilize troops and fighter jets in a show of Venezuelan force.
“If anyone has to protest, it is Ecuador’s government, as the military incident took place in Ecuadorean territory, not ours,” Teodoro Petkoff, the publisher of the newspaper Tal Cual, said in an editorial. “Venezuela has nothing to complain about.”
Jenny Carolina Gonzalez contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia.
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18) Mourning Resonates From Staten Island to Sri Lanka
By NINA BERNSTEIN
March 4, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/nyregion/04father.html?ref=nyregion
It sounds like a throwback to another century: A healthy, middle-class woman sickens late in her pregnancy, gives birth and dies two and a half weeks later, leaving her young husband to care for their newborn son alone.
Even the new father, Indika S. Arachchige, 34, grieving in their Staten Island home under balloons and streamers that exclaim, “It’s a Boy,” still cannot quite believe that so much everyday American happiness could be swept away so fast.
A pending autopsy may explain the death of his wife, Tai Ling Feng, 36, a Taiwan-born United States citizen who worked in a bank. But to the young widower and the multiethnic circle of friends who had cheered on the couple’s courtship as a uniquely New York love story, immigration law now seems to be compounding a New York tragedy.
Mr. Arachchige, a legal permanent resident from Sri Lanka who manages two Subway sandwich shops on Staten Island, finds himself without a relative in the United States, struggling to adjust to life with a newborn while mourning his wife, who died three weeks ago.
He “desperately needs the support of his family in this time of need,” a social worker at Staten Island University Hospital wrote to the United States Embassy in Sri Lanka, urging American officials to grant Mr. Arachchige’s 24-year-old sister permission to visit to help care for the baby.
But despite pleas from doctors and hospital administrators, beginning before the mother’s death, American officials have denied the sister a tourist visa — apparently because they are not convinced that she would ever return to Sri Lanka, a poor country torn by civil war.
Such denials are routine, said Cyril Ferenchak, a spokesman for the State Department, noting that he could not discuss individual cases because of confidentiality laws. While people with European passports can just get on a plane and expect to be granted a 90-day visit, citizens from less prosperous countries must apply for a visa under rules designed to prevent illegal immigration. And a young, unmarried, unemployed woman responding to her brother’s need would have great difficulty showing she had “compelling ties” to Sri Lanka to guarantee her return, Mr. Ferenchak said.
Moreover, he said, her care for the baby might be construed as working — that is, taking an American’s job — because she would be “filling a void as a caregiver.”
So the father’s buddies from the sandwich shop and the mother’s girlfriends from the bank were trying to fill the void after the infant left the hospital on Feb. 24, the day after his mother’s burial.
While the new father was at prayers for the dead at a Buddhist temple, the mother’s girlfriends, most of them Hispanic, decorated the house with balloons for the baby’s homecoming. The sole female employee at the sandwich shop, an Irish-American mother of three who had sat beside the father at the wake as he sobbed uncontrollably, gave up her days off to baby-sit. And his mostly Sri Lankan male co-workers, knowing that he dreaded being alone, dropped by with food every evening and stayed for hours.
Still, when his son, Brian, began to cry, it was up to the dad to scoop him up from the crib and try to comfort him with a bottle, a fresh diaper or a rocking embrace, as the nurses in the hospital had taught him.
On a Friday at the end of that first week, after a night when the baby had awakened three times and a snowstorm kept friends away, the father seemed dazed by grief and exhaustion.
Softly, he recounted the days and nights since Jan 17, when Ms. Feng was admitted to the hospital with a fever that baffled medical specialists — as a doctor involved in her care confirmed. Hospital officials would not discuss her case, citing privacy laws. Labor was induced on Jan. 24, a month before her due date, and she gave birth to a healthy 6 pound 4 ounce boy.
But her condition worsened. Mr. Arachchige (pronounced ah-rah-TCHIG-ay) told of shuttling from the hospital nursery on Staten Island to his wife’s bedside at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, where she was transferred about two weeks after the baby’s birth, and where she died five days later, on Feb. 11, just before she was to undergo an emergency liver transplant. “I was crying, crying,” he recalled. “I told the nurses, ‘Please, do something, I can’t see her like this.’ But nothing they did worked.”
Through the baby monitor, his son’s whimpers grew louder, and Mr. Arachchige loped upstairs, past a framed photo of himself and Ms. Feng beaming in a flower-filled marriage ceremony in Sri Lanka last October, one year after their simple 2006 wedding at Staten Island’s Borough Hall.
Was the baby wet again? Hungry? No. His father cradled him, stroked his cheek and laid him down to sleep.
“When he gets older, how am I going to say to him, ‘Two weeks after you’re born, your mother passed away, maybe because you came to the world?’ ” the father said. “Everybody’s going to ask, ‘Where is your mom?’ ”
His own mother, a retired teacher, is undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer in Sri Lanka. His mother-in-law, 61, offered to help with the baby, but then said she had to return to work in a Staten Island nursing home so she could qualify for Social Security.
His friends hope that public attention can help his sister to obtain a visa.
“That’s really his only answer,” said Patricia Carroll Owdziej, 55, the sandwich shop co-worker who calls herself “Indika’s American mom.”
“He’s the primary caregiver at night, and then he’s getting up and going to work, and it’s killing him,” she added. “In his culture, the men don’t do anything with the babies. It’s totally a woman’s job.”
Mr. Arachchige, a trained accountant who came here in 1999 and rose from making sandwiches for $5.50 an hour to mastering the sandwich chain’s computer system, seems to have overcome any cultural barrier to hands-on fatherhood. But whether talking about Brian’s first bath, efforts to soothe the infant’s crying fits or his own panicked waking from dreams of loss, he used one phrase again and again: “I’m so afraid.”
Eventually there will be some life insurance and Social Security survivor’s benefits to help raise Brian. For now there is a mortgage to pay, and a baby who shows no signs of sleeping through the night.
Last week, Grace Bello, 31, one of Ms. Feng’s closest friends, enlisted a friend’s mother to pitch in four days a week. Mrs. Owdziej covered two more, and stayed over on Thursday, “so he can at least get one night’s sleep.”
They are mourning, too. Ms. Bello, an American citizen who came from Colombia in 1995, choked up as she spoke of her close friendship with Ms. Feng, who had come here 1985.
“That’s the beauty of New York,” she said, recalling how they traded holidays, with Ms. Feng helping her decorate every Christmas, while she learned to celebrate the Chinese New Year.
On Amboy Road, where the sandwich shop is two doors away from the bank, that was also the beauty of the couple’s romance, both a small-town love story and a global affair. It started five years ago with eye contact and banter. Soon she was learning the names of Sri Lankan dishes, and he mastered a few phrases in Mandarin. But English was the language of their love, and together, they explored a new world.
“He was her life, and she was his life,” Mrs. Owdziej said. “You had to be there to witness it.”
Now his parents tell him to come back to Sri Lanka with the baby, but he does not want to abandon the place that feels like home, he said. He began to name places he and Ms. Feng had been together — restaurants in Queens and Brooklyn, Cape May on their honeymoon, the races at Saratoga Springs.
“I keep everything for the memories,” he said, as his son slept nearby. “I have to explain, ‘You have a great mother.’ ”
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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North Carolina: Ministers Say Police Destroyed Records
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
Three ministers accused a Greensboro police officer of ordering officers to destroy about 50 boxes of police files related to the fatal shooting of five people at an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in 1979. The Revs. Cardes Brown, Gregory Headen and Nelson Johnson said an active-duty officer told them he and at least three other officers were told to destroy the records in 2004 or 2005, shortly after a seven-member panel that had been convened to research the shootings requested police files related to them. The ministers did not identify the officer who provided the information. On Nov. 3, 1979, a heavily armed caravan of Klansman and Nazi Party members confronted the rally. Five marchers were killed and 10 were injured. Those charged were later acquitted in state and federal trials. The city and some Klan members were found liable for the deaths in civil litigation.
February 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/us/27brfs-MINISTERSSAY_BRF.html?ref=us
Gaza: Israeli Army Clears Itself in 21 Deaths
By ISABEL KERSHNER
World Briefing | Middle East
The army said no legal action would be taken against military officials over an artillery strike in Beit Hanun in 2006 in which an errant shell hit residential buildings and killed 21 Palestinian civilians. An army investigation concluded that the shell was fired based on information that militants were intending to fire rockets from the area, an army statement said. The civilian deaths, it said, were “directly due to a rare and severe failure” in the artillery control system. The army’s military advocate general concluded that there was no need for further investigation.
February 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/world/middleeast/27briefs-israelistrike.html?ref=world
World Briefing | Asia
Taiwan: Tons of Fish Wash Up on Beaches
By REUTERS
About 45 tons of fish have washed up dead along 200 miles of beach on the outlying Penghu Islands after an unusual cold snap. News reports said 10 times as many dead fish were still in the water.
February 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/world/asia/23briefs-TONSOFFISHWA_BRF.html?ref=world
Zimbabwe: Inflation Breaks the Six-Figure Mark
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
World Briefing | Africa
The government’s statistics office said the inflation rate surged to a new record of 100,580 percent in January, up from 66,212 percent in December. Rangarirai Mberi, news editor of the independent Financial Gazette in Harare, said the state of the economy would feature prominently in next month’s presidential and parliamentary elections. “Numbers no longer shock people,” he said. Zimbabweans have learned to live in a hyperinflationary environment, he added, “but the question is, how long can this continue?”
February 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/world/africa/21briefs-INFLATIONBRE_BRF.html?ref=world
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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Stop the Termination or the Cherokee Nation
http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/activismissues.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5580
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We Didn't Start the Fire
http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html
I Can't Take it No More
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#9214483115237950361
The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
MONEY AS DEBT
http://video. google.com/ videoplay? docid=-905047436 2583451279
http://www.moneyasd ebt.net/
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6582099850410121223&pr=goog-sl
IRAQ FOR SALE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155
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Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
—MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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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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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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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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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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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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"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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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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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.Peace Articles at Libraryofpeace.org">
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