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The Unemployment Game Show: Are You *Really* Unemployed? - From Mint.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulu3SCAmeBA
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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TONIGHT!
Tues. Dec. 15, 5pm
Protest AIPAC
Hilton Hotel, 333 O'Farrell St, San Francisco
Near Union Square, Powell St. BART
Protest the annual AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) dinner. Every year AIPAC holds events across the country to "celebrate" its support for the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine, funded by billions of dollars in U.S. aid. AIPAC is also a leading voice calling for a new war against Iran.
Join the ANSWER Coalition and other organizations at this important action sponsored by Stop AIPAC.
Thurs. Dec. 17, 7pm-10pm
Honduras Night!
Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia St., San Francisco
Food & Drinks. Donations at the door (no one turned away for lack of funds)
The Bay Area Latin America Solidarity Coalition invites you to support revolution & resistance in Latin America with a night of music, updates from the front line, food and drink.
SPECIAL GUESTS:
Dale Sorensen, Task Force on the Americas, participant in the Quixote Center's Human Rights and Solidarity Delegation to Honduras from Nov. 25 to Dec. 2.
Miguel Robles, Alianza Latinoamericana por los Derechos de los Inmigrantes - Report
about the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas' struggle at the Compañia de Luz y Fuerza del Centro.
Porfirio Quintano, BALASC - Presentation about the latest developments from the coup in Honduras.
Salvador Cordon, FMLN - Presentation about the presidential elections in Bolivia and Uruguay and the impact on the region.
Click here for more info, http://balasc.org/
email balasc@balasc.org or call 415-821-6545.
The ANSWER Coalition, Bay Area is a member of BALASC.
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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YOU HAVE ANOTHER CHANCE TO SEE THIS IMPORTANT FILM!
"The End of Poverty?" -- THIS FILM WILL NOW RUN THROUGH DECEMBER 22
4-Star Theatre
2200 Clement Street
San Francisco, CA 94121
(415) 666-3488
http://www.hkinsf.com/4star/
Showtimes: 12:25 2:25 4:25 6:25 8:25
Democracy Now Interview with Filmmaker Philippe Diaz
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/10/filmmaker_philippe_diaz_on_the_end
The film opens in San Francisco on December 4 at the 4-Star Theatre on Clement Street.
http://www.theendofpoverty.com/
Watch the Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRZnEBFYNS0
BUY TICKETS HERE:
http://www.movietickets.com/house_detail.asp?house_id=1118&rdate=12%2F4%2F2009
Also in coming to theatres in Los Angeles , Irvine , Seattle , Portland , Austin and Atlanta with more cities to follow - for details, visit http://www.theendofpoverty.com
Read reviews:
Louis Proyect's: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/the-end-of-poverty/
Andrew Schenker @ Village Voice: http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-11-10/film/the-end-of-poverty-maps-post-colonial-injustice/
Andrew O' Hehir@ Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/entertainment/the_end_of_poverty/index.html?story=/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/11/13/poverty
Find us on:
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/endpovertymovie
Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/endpovertymovie
Social Network - http://www.endpoverty.ning.com
Join our mailing list: http:/Re/www.cinemalibrestudio.com/mailinglist/
Please help us spread the word about this important and powerful film. We are a small, independent distribution company dedicated to social issue films.
Thank you,
The Cinema Libre Studio team
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Stop the War Coalition Friday
Web: www.stopwar.org.uk
Twitter: http://twitter.com/STWuk
CONTACT: Andrew Burgin 07939 242 229
Lindsey German 07810 540 584
PRESS RELEASE: IMMEDIATE
Military families petition Gordon Brown to bring the troops home.
On Monday 21 December at 5pm military families, who have either lost loved ones
or have relatives serving in Afghanistan, will deliver a petition to Gordon
Brown in Downing Street, calling for all British troops to be withdrawn. They
will be joined by former soldiers.
The military families and former soldiers will hold a press conference an hour
prior to delivering the petition, at 4pm in the Silver Cross, Whitehall, SW1
2BX.
Graham Knight, whose son was killed in Afghanistan, said, "We will hold a vigil
at Downing Street for those who have been killed. We have suffered terrible
personal loss in this war and we don't want any more families to go through the
same pain."
Joan Humphries, whose grandson was killed in August 2009, said, "Everyone knows
now this is a pointless war, deeply unpopular in Britain and Afghanistan. Young
lives are being sacrificed so that politicians can save face."
Lindsey German, Convenor of Stop the War Coalition said, "Tens of thousands of
people from across Britain have signed this petition, and 71% of the population
oppose the war. 100 British soldiers have been killed this year in a senseless
and unwinnable war. Gordon Brown should listen to the families of those who
have lost loved ones in the war and bring the troops home."
For further information, contact:
Andrew Burgin 07939 242 229
Lindsey German 07810 540 584
FOR EXTENSIVE COVERAGE OF IRAQ, IRAN AND AFGHANISTAN,
VISIT HTTP://USLABORAGAINSTWAR.ORG
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Fw: Gaza Freedom March - San Francisco...join in!
----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Nancy Mancias
To: Nancy Mancias
Please circulate!
Hey everyone,
Please come out on December 31st to the Golden Gate Bridge at 12noon to stand in solidarity with the people of Gaza and the thousands of compassionate international activists who will travel to Cairo to march against siege in Gaza.
Organizers with the Bay Area Network for a Free Palestine, CODEPINK and others have been organizing a solidarity march across the Golden Gate Bridge. We hope you can join us!
You know the drill if you've participated in any of CODEPINK's Sunday bridge peace walks.
We are expecting company!
Israel backers set S.F. counterprotests
StandWithUs/S.F. Voice for Israel has planned three counterprotests in support of Israel in December. All three events are in San Francisco.
The first will take place Tuesday, Dec. 15, when the Israel supporters will stand in front of the San Francisco Hilton Hotel, site of an AIPAC membership dinner. Pro-Palestinian protesters often stand outside the annual dinner and in the past have harassed attendees entering the hotel, according to S.F. Voice for Israel.
Voice for Israel will demonstrate its support in front of the Union Square hotel from 4 to 6 p.m. The AIPAC event begins at 5 p.m.
The second counterdemonstration is scheduled for 5 p.m. Dec. 27 at Union Square to show support for Israel during a candlelight memorial service for the men, women and children killed in Gaza.
The third counterprotest will take place during a Dec. 31 "Walk for Gaza" across the Golden Gate Bridge. The walk, from 12 to 2 p.m., is connected to the Gaza Freedom March taking place the same day in Egypt, calling for Gaza residents' right to access food, medicine, rebuilding materials and clean water.
For more information, check http://www.standwithus.com/ or e-mail sfvoiceforisrael@yahoo.com.
Support the Gaza Freedom March
December 27th: Candlelight Memorial at Union Square, San Francisco
Gather from 4-6pm to commerate the beginning of Israel's brutal 22 day attack on Gaza a year ago. An Interfaith service will be held. People of all backgrounds and faiths are invited to join in remembering the thousands of men, women and children who were killed and permanently disabled during the assault on Gaza.
December 31st: March across the Golden Gate Bridge to support the Gaza Freedom March from Egypt into Gaza, scheduled for the same day. The Gaza Freedom March will have over 1000 people from 40+ countries (hopefully) crossing into Gaza to lift the brutal siege, and to bring preasure on the US and other governments who continue to support Israel in depriving the citizens of Gaza adequate food, medicine, rebuilding materials, and clean water. Meet at 12pm, on the south end parking lot of the Golden Gate Bridge. (No large signs, no flags = bridge rules.)
Nancy L. Mancias
CODEPINK Women for Peace
www.codepinkalert.org
PINKTank :: http://codepink4peace.org/blog/
Facebook :: http://www.facebook.com/nancymancias
Twitter :: nancymancias
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NEXT MARCH 20 COALITION MEETING:
SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 2010, 2:00 P.M.
CENTRO DEL PUEBLO
474 VALENCIA STREET
(Between 16th and 15th Streets, SF)
The first meeting was held Wednesday, December 9 at 7:00 P.M. It was a broad, democratically run meeting with over 40 people in attendance from many different groups and organizations as well as individuals.
There was an atmosphere of renewed energy and resolve to build as large a demonstration as possible to mark the seventh year of "Shock and Awe" against the people of Iraq. It was especially poignant on the eve of Obama's Orwellian "war is for peace" Nobel speech.
We are encouraging all groups, organizations and individuals to join with us to demand an immediate end of these wars and to demand that the trillions spent on war be used for jobs, housing, healthcare, education for all!
Obama, in his Nobel remarks, points out his intentions to escalate his "wars for peace" wherever the U.S. empire desires to go.
As many pointed out at the first coalition meeting on Wednesday night, the financial, physical and emotional burden for these wars falls on working people across the globe in the broadest war plan ever devised by any empire!
The honeymoon is over! These are Obama's wars and we must organize massively against them.
Please plan on attending the next March 20, 2010 coalition meeting so we can organize broad outreach in our communities and make March 20, 2010 a powerful statement of opposition to the wars and for a world of equality, peace and justice for all.
For more information call: 415-821-6545
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein, bauaw.org
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National Call for March 4 Strike and Day of Action To Defend Public Education
By Elly
http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/?blogsub=confirmed#subscribe-blog
California has recently seen a massive movement erupt in defense of public education -- but layoffs, fee hikes, cuts, and the re-segregation of public education are attacks taking place throughout the country. A nationwide resistance movement is needed.
We call on all students, workers, teachers, parents, and their organizations and communities across the country to massively mobilize for a Strike and Day of Action in Defense of Public Education on March 4, 2010. Education cuts are attacks against all of us, particularly in working-class communities and communities of color.
The politicians and administrators say there is no money for education and social services. They say that "there is no alternative" to the cuts. But if there's money for wars, bank bailouts, and prisons, why is there no money for public education?
We can beat back the cuts if we unite students, workers, and teachers across all sectors of public education - Pre K-12, adult education, community colleges, and state-funded universities. We appeal to the leaders of the trade union movement to support and organize strikes and/or mass actions on March 4. The weight of workers and students united in strikes and mobilizations would shift the balance of forces entirely against the current agenda of cuts and make victory possible.
Building a powerful movement to defend public education will, in turn, advance the struggle in defense of all public-sector workers and services and will be an inspiration to all those fighting against the wars, for immigrants rights, in defense of jobs, for single-payer health care, and other progressive causes.
Why March 4? On October 24, 2009 more than 800 students, workers, and teachers converged at UC Berkeley at the Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education. This massive meeting brought together representatives from over 100 different schools, unions, and organizations from all across California and from all sectors of public education. After hours of open collective discussion, the participants voted democratically, as their main decision, to call for a Strike and Day of Action on March 4, 2010. All schools, unions and organizations are free to choose their specific demands and tactics -- such as strikes, rallies, walkouts, occupations, sit-ins, teach-ins, etc. -- as well as the duration of such actions.
Let's make March 4 an historic turning point in the struggle against the cuts, layoffs, fee hikes, and the re-segregation of public education.
- The California Coordinating Committee
To endorse this call and to receive more information contact:
march4strikeanddayofaction@gmail.com
and check out:
www.defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com
Andy Griggs
andyca6@gmail.com
310-704-3217
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U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
FREE PALESTINE!
San Francisco March and Rally
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
11am, Civic Center Plaza
National March on Washington
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
Fri., March 19 Day of Action & Outreach in D.C.
People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.
On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a massive National March & Rally in D.C. A day of action and outreach in Washington, D.C., will take place on Friday, March 19, preceding the Saturday march.
There will be coinciding mass marches on March 20 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The national actions are initiated by a large number of organizations and prominent individuals. (see below)
Click here to become an endorser:
http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=5940&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&autologin=true&link=endorse-body-1
Click here to make a donation:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=2302&autologin=true&donate=body-1&JServSessionIdr002=2yzk5fh8x2.app13b
We will march together to say "No Colonial-type Wars and Occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine!" We will march together to say "No War Against Iran!" We will march together to say "No War for Empire Anywhere!"
Instead of war, we will demand funds so that every person can have a job, free and universal health care, decent schools, and affordable housing.
March 20 is the seventh anniversary of the criminal war of aggression launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. One million or more Iraqis have died. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have lost their lives or been maimed, and continue to suffer a whole host of enduring problems from this terrible war.
This is the time for united action. The slogans on banners may differ, but all those who carry them should be marching shoulder to shoulder.
Killing and dying to avoid the perception of defeat
Bush is gone, but the war and occupation in Iraq still go on. The Pentagon is demanding a widening of the war in Afghanistan. They project an endless war with shifting battlefields. And a "single-payer" war budget that only grows larger and larger each year. We must act.
Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were predicated on the imperial fantasy that the U.S. could create stable, proxy colonial-type governments in both countries. They were to serve as an extension of "American" power in these strategic and resource-rich regions.
That fantasy has been destroyed. Now U.S. troops are being sent to kill or be killed so that the politicians in uniform ("the generals and admirals") and those in three-piece suits ("our elected officials") can avoid taking responsibility for a military setback in wars that should have never been started. Their military ambitions are now reduced to avoiding the appearance of defeat.
That is exactly what happened in Vietnam! Avoiding defeat, or the perception of defeat, was the goal Nixon and Kissinger set for themselves when they took office in 1969. For this noble cause, another 30,000 young GIs perished before the inevitable troop pullout from Vietnam in 1973. The number of Vietnamese killed between 1969 and 1973 was greater by many hundreds of thousands.
All of us can make the difference - progress and change comes from the streets and from the grassroots.
The people went to the polls in 2008, and the enthusiasm and desire for change after eight years of the Bush regime was the dominant cause that led to election of a big Democratic Party majority in both Houses of Congress and the election of Barack Obama to the White House.
But it should now be obvious to all that waiting for politicians to bring real change - on any front - is simply a prescription for passivity by progressives and an invitation to the array of corporate interests from military contractors to the banks, to big oil, to the health insurance giants that dominate the political life of the country. These corporate interests work around the clock to frustrate efforts for real change, and they are the guiding hand behind the recent street mobilizations of the ultra-right.
It is up to us to act. If people had waited for politicians to do the right thing, there would have never been a Civil Rights Act, or unions, women's rights, an end to the Vietnam war or any of the profound social achievements and basic rights that people cherish.
It is time to be back in the streets. Organizing centers are being set up in cities and towns throughout the country.
We must raise $50,000 immediately just to get started. Please make your contribution today. We need to reserve buses, which are expensive ($1,800 from NYC, $5,000 from Chicago, etc.). We have to print 100,000 leaflets, posters and stickers. There will be other substantial expenses as March 20 draws closer.
Please become an endorser and active supporter of the March 20 National March on Washington.
Please make an urgently needed tax-deductible donation today. We can't do this without your active support.
The initiators of the March 20 National March on Washington (preceded by the March 19 Day of Action and Outreach in D.C.) include: the ANSWER Coalition; Muslim American Society Freedom; National Council of Arab Americans; Cynthia McKinney; Malik Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground Collective; Ramsey Clark; Cindy Sheehan; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK; Deborah Sweet, Director, World Can't Wait; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild; Ron Kovic, author of "Born on the 4th of July"; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Col. Ann Wright (ret.); March Forward!; Partnership for Civil Justice; Palestinian American Women Association; Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines; Alliance for Global Justice; Claudia de la Cruz, Pastor, Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas-UCC; Phil Portluck, Social Justice Ministry, Covenant Baptist Church, D.C.; Blase & Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas; Coalition for Peace and Democracy in Honduras; Comite Pro-Democracia en Mexico; Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos; Comites de Base FMLN, Los Angeles; Free Palestine Alliance; GABRIELA Network; Justice for Filipino American Veterans; KmB Pro-People Youth; Students Fight Back; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild - LA Chapter; LEF Foundation; National Coalition to Free the Angola 3; Community Futures Collective; Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival; Companeros del Barrio; Barrio Unido for Full and Unconditional Amnesty, Bay Area United Against War.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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The US Social Forum II
• June 22-26, 2010 •
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Another World Is Possible! Another US is Necessary!
http://www.ussf2010.org/
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Dear all,
Dear all,
go the link below to endorse the BT petition against the death penalty in Iraq.
http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Petitions/Petition.html?lists=10&codes=7&s=0abaa878c308c42949c62790df13498f&email=siui_iraqsolidarity@yahoo.co.uk
regards
Tahrir
Maliki's election platform: 900 Iraqi prisoners face summary execution
In the run-up to elections, Maliki proposes executions to bolster his chances
Democracy in the new Iraq equals death and repression
Maliki serves the US occupation: it is the occupation that kills Iraqis
The machine of repression and death in Iraq continues unabated. The Presidential Council of Iraq has reportedly ratified the death sentences of some 900 detainees who languish on death row. Some 17 of them are confirmed to be women.
None of the condemned had a fair trial. The Iraqi judicial system has been deemed corrupt, fundamentally dysfunctional and plagued with sectarianism by responsible international agencies and all major human rights organisations. Hundreds of lawyers have been assassinated since 2003. The Association of Iraqi Lawyers has publicly declared that it cannot reach the detainees.
In a bid to eliminate its political opponents, further terrorise the Iraqi people, ostensibly into submission, and to be casted the "tough leader" the US pretends it is currently seeking for Iraq, Nouri Al-Maliki has pledged to carry out these executions ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled in March of 2010.
Iraq already has one of the highest rates of executions in the world. On a single day in June, 19 people were hanged in Baghdad. Without global action, 900 people will be hanged imminently.
A culture of terror and detention
Terror through mass detention, torture and abuse is one of the trademarks of the US occupation and Maliki. In addition to mass killing, mass forced displacement, the contamination of Iraqi soil, the destruction of all public infrastructure and means of survival, tens of thousands of Iraqis are arbitrarily detained in both official and ghost facilities all over Iraq.
Exact figures of the number, age and gender of detainees are withheld by authorities. Those who want investigations on abuse are either threatened or killed. In June 2009, Harith Al-Obaidi, an MP and critic of human rights abuses, announced in parliament his plan to investigate allegations of corruption, torture and abuse in Iraqi prisons. He was assassinated the following day.
Depending on the source, the number of detainees varies from 44,014 to some 400,000. Tens of thousands of families don't know the fate of a loved one arbitrarily arrested. Even the number of detention facilities is unknown. The ICRC, responsible for monitoring prisoners in time of conflict, has repeatedly complained of being denied access to all "field operation detention facilities" and secret prisons. Amnesty International, the International Federation of Human Rights and even the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq, mandated by the Security Council to provide human rights reporting, are denied access to official detention centres by US Command.
The Red Cross has reported that intelligence officers of the US occupation themselves estimate that 70-90 per cent of Iraqi detainees are arrested "by mistake". The majority is taken in sweeping and arbitrary mass arrest campaigns. They are held incommunicado, without charges, without visits from families or access to lawyers, for indefinite periods. The few who are formally accused are charged on the basis of confessions made under torture or the testimonies of dubious informants of the occupation. No tangible evidence is ever provided.
Since 2003, an estimated 2,400 children have been detained by the US, some as young as 10 years old. After denying it for years, the occupation has now acknowledged that a large but unspecified number of women are being held. Many were kidnapped to blackmail their husbands, accused of "terrorism," into surrendering. They often have their infants and children in prison with them. Several women inmates interviewed by UN researchers reported being raped and sexually abused while held in custody. The US bears primary and final responsibility for these conditions.
Maliki's new Iraq: repression
Everyday news outlets report more arrests and new killings by persons wearing official uniforms. The Maliki government praises itself for the recent waves of detention. Since its appointment, all it has succeeded in achieving is more repression of his opponents while the crimes against innocent people had never been investigated and punished.
Under occupation, Iraq has become the second most corrupted country in the world, the trade of prisoners one of the government militias' most lucrative businesses. The police kidnap, hold prisoners in ghost prisons, sell them and blackmail their families for ransom with impunity.
Year after year, alarming reports have been published by leading human rights organisations, inside and outside Iraq, pointing to random arrests, unlawful detentions, summary executions, abuses, rape and torture of prisoners in Iraq, both at the hands of occupation forces and their local armed gangs.
Under false accusations and deceitful propaganda, the absence of law or a functioning judicial system, and with the support of the US for its puppet government, humanity and the rights of the human being are insulted every day in Iraq. Millions of Iraqis are suffering.
An occupation that tries to impose its plans and interests by force and destruction on a people whose rights, interests and identity is to resist it can only result in the perpetuation of genocide - the intended destruction of Iraq and the Iraqi people as a state and nation.
Call for global action
We call on all to work to stop these executions, demand the release of all political prisoners, and impose a moratorium on the death penalty in Iraq.
Every Iraqi deserves protection and justice.
We call on the UN Human Rights Council to appoint a Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in Iraq.
We call on all organisations that defend the first human right - the right to life - to take up with urgency the cause of the 900 prisoners on death row in Iraq.
We call on all lawyers associations to protest the absence of law and due process in Iraq, and to declare the imminent execution of these 900 prisoners unlawful.
900 prisoners killed in Iraq would be 900 insults to the common conscience of humanity.
We call on all to do everything within their means to bring the cases of these 900 prisoners facing death to the public eye, and to demand action by relevant authorities.
The US occupation of Iraq must end. It is that occupation that is the ultimate rope around the neck of Iraq, and the ultimate prison for the Iraqi people.
Hana Al Bayaty, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal
Abdul Ilah Albayaty, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal
Ian Douglas, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal
Dirk Adriaensens, Executive Committee of the BRussells Tribunal
Please endorse, distribute and take action
For more information contact:
info@brusselstribunal.org
www.brusselstribunal.org
Endnotes
Zaineb Alani
http://www.thewordsthatcomeout.blogspot.com
http://www.tigresssmiles.blogspot.com
"Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and didn't notice when it fell from me / like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. / Please, if anyone passes by / and stumbles across it, / perhaps in a suitcase / open to the sky, / or engraved on a rock / like a gaping wound, / ... / If anyone stumbles across it, / return it to me please. / Please return it, sir. / Please return it, madam. / It is my country . . . / I was in a hurry / when I lost it yesterday." -Dunya Mikhail, Iraqi poet
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----- Forwarded Message ----
From: MOOS-Bay
To: Counter Recruitment Events
Subject: [events] Youth Mini Grants, Online Petition, Discount CR Brochures
CR Brochures Available for Cut Rates!
Full Picture recently purchased a large quantity of the brochure, "What Every Girl Should Know About the U.S. Military," which was produced jointly by the War Resisters League and the Women of Color Resource Center. A copy of the brochure can be seen online at http://coloredgirls.live.radicaldesigns.org/downloads/What%20Every%20Girl%20Should%20Know.pdf.
Our network of counter-recruiting organizations and activists will probably not be able to distribute all of them in the near future. We'd like to see them get out to the youth who need them, and -- if necessary -- are willing to sell them at "a loss" to other counter-recruiters who'll be able to reach youth that we cannot. We paid 11.6 cents each, including shipping, which is significantly less than what you'd pay when buying small quantities. If you can make use of some, let us know how many and how much, if anything, you're able to pay. Please remember that we'll have to incur additional costs to ship them to you unless you're able to pick them up at the AFSC office in San Francisco, where we have them stored.
Kevin Casey, Full Picture Core Group, (510) 289-2621 kevinkevin-c-is@sbcglobal.net
Support Oakland Youth: Online Petition--Pass the Word!
The BAY-Peace Youth Manifesto is on it's home stretch to win stronger policies to protect Oakland high school students against aggressive military recruiting. Please help us reach our goal of 2000 signatures to deliver to the Oakland School Board. Sign the Youth Manifesto today and forward this link to your contacts to sign our online petition: http://www.baypeace.org
Mini-Grants for High School Counter Recruitment Projects
If you are part of a high school student group that would like to do a counter recruitment project, you can apply for a grant of up to $500 to help you get your message out about non-military alternatives for youth, aggressive military recruiting in our schools and resisting war.
Bay Area high school students are encouraged to apply. The deadline is the last day of each month, and the funds will be distributed quickly to qualified applicants, so don't wait to apply! For info contact: moos-bay@riseup.net
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Lynne Stewart Update and Letter from Lynne from behind bars
On Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 a status conference was held before Judge Koeltl to discuss the procedures concerning Lynne's re-sentencing.
The conference was held in a larger courtroom to accommodate all the people who came to support Lynne. Lynne was represented by Elizabeth Fink, Joshua Dratel and Jill Shellow. Although the "Mandate" (formal Order) hasn't issued yet from the 2nd Circuit, the question raised by the Judge was whether the resentencing should be de novo (which means that the Judge would throw out all the reasoning that went in to his previous sentence and start from scratch) or simply a clarification and update of the sentencing he already gave Lynne of 28 months.
The Judge outlined a schedule; the update of the Presentence Report by the U.S. Probation Dept. is due on February 5, 2010, any objections to that report are to be submitted by February 19, 2009 and the defense and government submission addressing the resentencing of Lynne by March 12th. Replies by March 29th. The formal sentencing is now set for April 22 at 4:30 p.m.
This is a time for the Lynne Stewart Defense committee to be alarmed and very concerned for Lynne. Lynne is a 70 year old woman and any additional significant time could mean that she could die in prison. No harm was caused to anyone by her actions. Lynne's life work as cited by the Judge in his previous sentencing stand as a testimony to her good intentions. Notwithstanding the verdict, Lynne Stewart had absolutely no terroristic intentions or political harmony with her client Sheik Rahman.
The judge said that if there are any letters regarding this new sentencing they will only be considered if they submitted by counsel. We know that people are anxious to do something for Lynne and this is one thing you can do and you have the time to write a thoughtful letter that we believe the Judge will read and take into consideration. For now you can send your letters to the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee, 350 Broadway, Suite 700, New York, NY 10013. Address the letter to: Honorable John G. Koeltl, United States District Judge, Southern District of New York, 500 Pearl Street, New York, NY 10007 - BUT MAIL TO LSDC not directly to the Judge. We will accumulate the letters for the attorneys who will then submit them to the Judge.
The issue of Lynne's health has been on all our minds. This is the situation to date: She has been receiving her medication. Her blood pressure has been extremely high. Initially the medical department of MCC/NY had suggested cutting Lynne's prescription for high blood pressure medicine in half but since Lynne's blood pressures was so high it is being monitored very closely. The main issue for Lynne right now is that surgery for a bladder problem had already scheduled before the 2nd Circuit decision and her consequent incarceration. Now it appears that she will undergo surgery for this condition which is not life threatening but increasingly uncomfortable for Lynne in the near future at a metropolitan New York hospital.
In the near future we will be working with others to plan a public event, and working in cooperation with others to fight for Lynne Stewart's sentence to remain 28 months. I will be sending out further notices of events and updates on Lynne's situation as news becomes available. Meanwhile you can write to Lynne Stewart, Reg. # 53504-054, MCC/NY, 150 Park Row, New York, NY 10007. Do not send stamps, this mail will be treated as contraband and discarded by the prison. Do not send anything that needs to be signed for. Lynne has been given a subscription to the New York Times and the New Yorker. If you would like to subscribe Lynne to a publication please drop us a line first (email info@lynnestewart.org ) just to make sure that you are not duplicating someone else's contribution.
Photos are okay, cards postcards and letters. All mail is opened and read. Commissary can be sent to Lynne via Western Union using the registration number and address either via the internet or at a Western Union location. Thank you for your support for Lynne it means the world to her.
Pat Levasseur, Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
***
Letter from Lynne Stewart
Dear Sisters and Brothers, Friends and Supporters:
Well the moment we all hoped would never come is upon us. Good bye to a good cup of coffee in the morning, a soft chair, the hugs of grandchildren and the smaller pleasures in life. I must say I am being treated well and that is due to my lawyer team and your overwhelming support.
While I have received "celebrity" treatment here in MCC - high visibility - conditions for the other women are deplorable. Medical care, food, education, recreation are all at minimal levels. If it weren't for the unqualified bonds of sisterhood and the commissary it would be even more dismal.
My fellow prisoners have supplied me with books and crosswords, a warm (it is cold in here most of the time) sweat shirt and pants, treats from the commissary, and of course, jailhouse humor. Most important many of them know of my work and have a deep reservoir of can I say it? Respect.
I continue to both answer the questions put to me by them, I also can't resist commenting on the T.V. news or what is happening on the floor - a little LS politics always! (Smile) to open hearts and minds!
Liz Fink, my lawyer leader, believes I will be here at MCC-NY for a while - perhaps a year before being moved to prison. Being is jail is like suddenly inhabiting a parallel universe but at least I have the luxury of time to read! Tomorrow I will get my commissary order which may include an AM/FM Radio and be restored to WBAI and music (classical and jazz).
We are campaigning to get the bladder operation (scheduled before I came in to MCC) to happen here in New York City. Please be alert to the website I case I need some outside support.
I want to say that the show of support outside the Courthouse on Thursday as I was "transported" is so cherished by me. The broad organizational representation was breathtaking and the love and politics expressed (the anger too) will keep me nourished through this.
Organize - Agitate, Agitate, Agitate! And write to me and others locked down by the Evil Empire.
Love Struggle, Lynne Stewart
FREE LYNNE STEWART NOW!
Lynne Stewart in Jail!
For further information contact: Jeff Mackler, Coordinator, West Coast Lynne Stewart Defense Committee 510-268-9429 jmackler@lmi.net
Mail tax free contributions payable to National Lawyers Guild Foundation. Write in memo box: "Lynne Stewart Defense." Mail to: Lynne Stewart Defense, P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, CA 94610.
SEND RESOLUTIONS AND STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT TO DEFENSE ATTORNEY JOSHUA L. DRATEL, ESQ. FAX: (212) 571 3792 AND EMAIL: jdratel@aol.com
SEND PROTESTS TO ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER:
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Department of Justice Main Switchboard - 202-514-2000
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Office of the Attorney General Public Comment Line - 202-353-1555
To send Lynne a letter, write:
Lynne Stewart
53504-054
MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, NY NY 10007
Lynne Stewart speaks in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOQ5_VKRf5k&feature=related
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The trial of Johannes Mehserle, killer of unarmed Oscar Grant, has been moved to Los Angeles.
In the case of an innocent verdict, folks are encouraged to head to Oakland City Hall ASAP to express our outrage in a massive and peaceful way! Our power is in our numbers! Oscar Grant's family and friends need our support!
For more information:
Contact BAMN at 510-502-9072
letters@bamn.com
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With a New Smile, 'Rage' Fades Away [SINGLE PAYER NOW!!!]
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/12/08/health/20091208_Clinic/index.html?ref=us
FTA [F**k The Army] Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HlkgPCgU7g
Jon Stewart: Obama Is Channeling Bush (VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/03/jon-stewart-obama-is-chan_n_378283.html
US anti-war activists protest
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/12/200912283650408132.html
Buffy Sainte Marie - No No Keshagesh
[Keshagesh is the Cree word to describe a greedy puppy that wants to keep eating everything, a metaphor for corporate greed]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKmAb1gNN74&feature=player_embedded#
Buffy Sainte-Marie - No No Keshagesh lyrics:
http://www.lyricsmode.com/?i=print_lyrics&id=705368
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The Tar Sands Blow
Hi -
I just signed the Tar Sands Blow petition -- and I hope you'll do the same.
The Canadian tar sands produce the dirtiest oil on earth -- including five times the greenhouse gases of conventional oil. World leaders meet next month in Copenhagen to deal with climate change. Sign the petition -- so that we all don't get a raw deal.
http://ien.thetarsandsblow.org/
The Story of Mouseland: As told by Tommy Douglas in 1944
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqgOvzUeiAA
The Communist Manifesto illustrated by Cartoons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KUl4yfABE4
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Holiday gifts from Courage to Resist
www.couragetoresist.org/orders
Free and fast 2-3 day priority shipping!*
Please place your order this week to ensure holiday delivery.
Support mom still facing Afghanistan deployment, court martial
By Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist. November 16, 2009
"I currently don't have a family care plan, but they told me they did not
care and for me to get ready to go to Afghanistan," explained Oakland,
California native Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, a 21-year-old soldier based at
Hunter Army Airfield outside of Savannah, Georgia.
As I spoke to Alexis on the phone, I believed if I found her a civilian
lawyer to work with the military, a reasonable resolution would be quickly
found. Unlike most service members Courage to Resist assists, Alexis was not
refusing to deploy. She was not looking to speak out against war. She was
simply asking for more time to find someone to care for her 11-month old son
Kamani. Within a few days, however, the Army had tossed Alexis in the
stockade and turned Kamani over to the Chatham County (Georgia) foster care
system.
Read more...
http://couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/792/1/
Please make a tax-deductible donation to Alexis' legal and family support
fund.
http://couragetoresist.org/alexis
Details:
Courage to Resist Urgent Action Alert
Army sends infant to protective services, mom to Afghanistan this weekend
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/789/1/
Army has mom, Alexis Hutchinson, arrested and 11-month old son put into county foster care system. Alexis has now been ordered to deploy to Afghanistan on Sunday, November 15, where she will be court martialed.
Action Alert: Contact Congresswoman Barbara Lee to urge her to "Request that the Army not deploy Alexis Hutchinson to Afghanistan so that she can care for her son." From the 9th District (Oakland-Berkeley, CA) phone: 510-763-0370 (fax: 510-763-6538). Nationwide: 202- 225-2661 (fax: 202-225-9817).
Donate to Alexis' legal and family support fund (couragetoresist.org/alexis)
Alexis' attorney now available for media interviews.
By friends of Alexis and Courage to Resist. November 12, 2009
Also in the news:
Army Sends Infant to Protective Services, Mom to Afghanistan
by Dahr Jamail, Inter Press Service. November 13, 2009
Online version with possible updates
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/789/1/
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VIDEO INTERVIEW: Dan Berger on Political Prisoners in the United States
By Angola 3 News
Angola 3 News
37 years ago in Louisiana, 3 young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000-acre former slave plantation called Angola. In 1972 and 1973 prison officials charged Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King with murders they did not commit and threw them into 6x9 ft. cells in solitary confinement, for over 36 years. Robert was freed in 2001, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.
http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2009/09/video-dan-berger-on-political-prisoners.html
Taking Aim Radio Program with
Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone
The Chimera of Capitalist Recovery, Parts 1 and 2
http://www.takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html
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JROTC MUST GO!
The San Francisco Board of Education has re-installed the Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corps in San Francisco schools -- including allowing it to count for Physical Education credits.
This is a complete reversal of the 2006 decision to end JROTC altogether in San Francisco public schools. Our children need a good physical education program, not a death education program!
With the economy in crisis; jobs and higher education for youth more unattainable; the lure, lies and false promises of military recruiters is driving more and more of our children into the military trap.
This is an economic draft and the San Francisco Board of Education is helping to snare our children to provide cannon fodder for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and for over 700 U.S. military bases around the world!
We can't depend upon "friendly politicians" who, while they are campaigning for office claim they are against the wars but when they get elected vote in favor of military recruitment--the economic draft--in our schools. We can't depend upon them. That has been proven beyond doubt!
It is up to all of us to come together to stop this NOW!
GET JROTC AND ALL MILITARY RECRUITERS OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS NOW!
Write, call, pester and ORGANIZE against the re-institution of JROTC in our San Francisco public schools NOW!
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
San Francisco Board of Education
555 Franklin Street, 1st Floor
San Francisco, CA 94102
415/241-6427, (415) 241-6493
cascoe@sfusd.edu
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HELP VFP PUT THIS BOOK IN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LIBRARY
For a donation of only $18.95, we can put a copy of the book "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military" into a public or high school library of your choice. [Reason number 1: You may be killed]
A letter and bookplate will let readers know that your donation helped make this possible.
Putting a book in either a public or school library ensures that students, parents, and members of the community will have this valuable information when they need it.
Don't have a library you would like us to put it in? We'll find one for you!
https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/826/t/9311/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=4906
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This is a must-see video about the life of Oscar Grant, a young man who loved his family and was loved by his family. It's important to watch to understand the tremendous loss felt by his whole family as a result of his cold-blooded murder by BART police officers--Johannes Mehserle being the shooter while the others held Oscar down and handcuffed him to aid Mehserle in the murder of Oscar Grant January 1, 2009.
The family wants to share this video here with you who support justice for Oscar Grant.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/21/18611878.php
WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT!
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Urgent: Ahmad Sa'adat transferred to isolation in Ramon prison!
http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org/
The Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat
http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org
info@freeahmadsaadat.org
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Troy Anthony Davis is an African American man who has spent the last 18 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses have recanted. New evidence and new testimony have been presented to the Georgia courts, but the justice system refuses to consider this evidence, which would prove Troy Davis' innocence once and for all.
Sign the petition and join the NAACP, Amnesty International USA, and other partners in demanding justice for Troy Davis!
http://www.iamtroy.com/
For Now, High Court Punts on Troy Davis, on Death Row for 18 Years
By Ashby Jones
Wall Street Journal Law Blog
June 30, 2009
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/06/30/for-now-high-court-punts-on-troy-davis-on-death-row-for-18-years/
Take action now:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=12361&ICID=A0906A01&tr=y&auid=5030305
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Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
New videos from April 24 Oakland Mumia event
http://abu-jamal-news.com/article?name=jlboak
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation (indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501(c)(3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Obama's Nobel Remarks
[You got to have war if you want peace! Silly! You got to read it to believe it!....bw]
Text
December 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/world/europe/11prexy.text.html
2) New U.S. Jobless Claims Rise, Trade Gap Narrows
By REUTERS
December 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/12/10/business/business-us-usa-economy.html
3) Judge Finds Pentagon in Contempt in Gitmo Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/12/10/us/politics/AP-US-Gitmo-Contempt.html
4) Poll Finds Slim Majority Back More Afghanistan Troops
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and DALIA SUSSMAN
December 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/world/asia/10poll.html?ref=world
5) Petraeus Warns of a Long and Expensive Mission in Afghanistan
By MARK LANDLER
December 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/world/asia/10policy.html?ref=world
6) Iraq Accepts Bids for 2 More Oil Fields
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html?hpw
7) Illegal Immigrant Students Publicly Take Up a Cause
By JULIA PRESTON
December 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/us/11student.html?hpw
8) 26 Students Arrested in Protest Over Tuition Increases
By MALIA WOLLAN
December 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/education/11arrest.html?hpw
9) New Incidents Test Immunity to Terrorism on U.S. Soil
By SCOTT SHANE
News Analysis
[New York Times begins new terror campaign against U.S. Muslims...bw]
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/us/12assess.html?hp
10) Protesters Gather to Urge Action on Climate Change
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
December 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/science/earth/13climate.html?hp
11) Catch-2009
By CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
Op-Ed Contributor
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/opinion/12buckley.html?hp
12) Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics
By DUFF WILSON
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/health/12medicaid.html?hp
13) Poland: Pact on U.S. Troops Signed
By NICHOLAS KULISH
World Briefing | Europe
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/world/europe/12briefs-Poland.html?ref=world
14) Immigration Officials Arrest 300 in California
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/us/12immig.html?ref=us
15) California: More Arrests in University Protest
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | West
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/us/12brfs-MOREARRESTSI_BRF.html?_r=1&ref=us
16) US Cutting Gaza Lifeline
By Ann Wright
December 10, 2009
http://intifada-palestine.com/2009/12/11/us-cutting-gaza-lifeline/
See 2.:21 min video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzhUcShtkSk&feature=player_embedded
17) Legislator Sees Echoes of Vietnam in Afghan War
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
December 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/us/politics/13obey.html?_r=1&hp
18) Gang Violence Grows on an Indian Reservation
By ERIK ECKHOLM
December 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/us/14gangs.html
19) New York Finds Extreme Crisis in Youth Prisons
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
December 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/nyregion/14juvenile.html?ref=nyregion
20) Menopause, as Brought to You by Big Pharma
By NATASHA SINGER and DUFF WILSON
December 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/business/13drug.html?ref=health
21) Veterans Group Calls On Soldiers to Refuse Orders to Deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq
Monday 14 December 2009
By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Report
http://www.truthout.org/1214091
22) Judging Our Children
By JONATHAN LIPPMAN
Op-Ed Contributor
December 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/opinion/15lippman.html?_r=1
23) Poll Reveals Trauma of Joblessness in U.S.
By MICHAEL LUO and MEGAN THEE-BRENAN
December 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/us/15poll.html?ref=us
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1) Obama's Nobel Remarks
[You got to have war if you want peace! Silly!....bw]
Text
December 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/world/europe/11prexy.text.html
Following is the transcript of President Obama's speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo on Wednesday, as released by the White House:
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of America, and citizens of the world:
I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations -- that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.
And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. (Laughter.) In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who've received this prize -- Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela -- my accomplishments are slight. And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women -- some known, some obscure to all but those they help -- to be far more deserving of this honor than I.
But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 42 other countries -- including Norway -- in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.
Still, we are at war, and I'm responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict -- filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.
Now these questions are not new. War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease -- the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.
And over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers and clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a "just war" emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when certain conditions were met: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.
Of course, we know that for most of history, this concept of "just war" was rarely observed. The capacity of human beings to think up new ways to kill one another proved inexhaustible, as did our capacity to exempt from mercy those who look different or pray to a different God. Wars between armies gave way to wars between nations -- total wars in which the distinction between combatant and civilian became blurred. In the span of 30 years, such carnage would twice engulf this continent. And while it's hard to conceive of a cause more just than the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis powers, World War II was a conflict in which the total number of civilians who died exceeded the number of soldiers who perished.
In the wake of such destruction, and with the advent of the nuclear age, it became clear to victor and vanquished alike that the world needed institutions to prevent another world war. And so, a quarter century after the United States Senate rejected the League of Nations -- an idea for which Woodrow Wilson received this prize -- America led the world in constructing an architecture to keep the peace: a Marshall Plan and a United Nations, mechanisms to govern the waging of war, treaties to protect human rights, prevent genocide, restrict the most dangerous weapons.
In many ways, these efforts succeeded. Yes, terrible wars have been fought, and atrocities committed. But there has been no Third World War. The Cold War ended with jubilant crowds dismantling a wall. Commerce has stitched much of the world together. Billions have been lifted from poverty. The ideals of liberty and self-determination, equality and the rule of law have haltingly advanced. We are the heirs of the fortitude and foresight of generations past, and it is a legacy for which my own country is rightfully proud.
And yet, a decade into a new century, this old architecture is buckling under the weight of new threats. The world may no longer shudder at the prospect of war between two nuclear superpowers, but proliferation may increase the risk of catastrophe. Terrorism has long been a tactic, but modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale.
Moreover, wars between nations have increasingly given way to wars within nations. The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos. In today's wars, many more civilians are killed than soldiers; the seeds of future conflict are sown, economies are wrecked, civil societies torn asunder, refugees amassed, children scarred.
I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war. What I do know is that meeting these challenges will require the same vision, hard work, and persistence of those men and women who acted so boldly decades ago. And it will require us to think in new ways about the notions of just war and the imperatives of a just peace.
We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.
I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.
But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower.
But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions -- not just treaties and declarations -- that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.
So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another -- that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier's courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.
So part of our challenge is reconciling these two seemingly inreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly. Concretely, we must direct our effort to the task that President Kennedy called for long ago. "Let us focus," he said, "on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions." A gradual evolution of human institutions.
What might this evolution look like? What might these practical steps be?
To begin with, I believe that all nations -- strong and weak alike -- must adhere to standards that govern the use of force. I -- like any head of state -- reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that adhering to standards, international standards, strengthens those who do, and isolates and weakens those who don't.
The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense. Likewise, the world recognized the need to confront Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait -- a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression.
Furthermore, America -- in fact, no nation -- can insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we don't, our actions appear arbitrary and undercut the legitimacy of future interventions, no matter how justified.
And this becomes particularly important when the purpose of military action extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor. More and more, we all confront difficult questions about how to prevent the slaughter of civilians by their own government, or to stop a civil war whose violence and suffering can engulf an entire region.
I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That's why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.
America's commitment to global security will never waver. But in a world in which threats are more diffuse, and missions more complex, America cannot act alone. America alone cannot secure the peace. This is true in Afghanistan. This is true in failed states like Somalia, where terrorism and piracy is joined by famine and human suffering. And sadly, it will continue to be true in unstable regions for years to come.
The leaders and soldiers of NATO countries, and other friends and allies, demonstrate this truth through the capacity and courage they've shown in Afghanistan. But in many countries, there is a disconnect between the efforts of those who serve and the ambivalence of the broader public. I understand why war is not popular, but I also know this: The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice. That's why NATO continues to be indispensable. That's why we must strengthen U.N. and regional peacekeeping, and not leave the task to a few countries. That's why we honor those who return home from peacekeeping and training abroad to Oslo and Rome; to Ottawa and Sydney; to Dhaka and Kigali -- we honor them not as makers of war, but of wagers -- but as wagers of peace.
Let me make one final point about the use of force. Even as we make difficult decisions about going to war, we must also think clearly about how we fight it. The Nobel Committee recognized this truth in awarding its first prize for peace to Henry Dunant -- the founder of the Red Cross, and a driving force behind the Geneva Conventions.
Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. (Applause.) And we honor -- we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard.
I have spoken at some length to the question that must weigh on our minds and our hearts as we choose to wage war. But let me now turn to our effort to avoid such tragic choices, and speak of three ways that we can build a just and lasting peace.
First, in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior -- for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure -- and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one.
One urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them. In the middle of the last century, nations agreed to be bound by a treaty whose bargain is clear: All will have access to peaceful nuclear power; those without nuclear weapons will forsake them; and those with nuclear weapons will work towards disarmament. I am committed to upholding this treaty. It is a centerpiece of my foreign policy. And I'm working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia's nuclear stockpiles.
But it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system. Those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted. Those who care for their own security cannot ignore the danger of an arms race in the Middle East or East Asia. Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war.
The same principle applies to those who violate international laws by brutalizing their own people. When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma -- there must be consequences. Yes, there will be engagement; yes, there will be diplomacy -- but there must be consequences when those things fail. And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression.
This brings me to a second point -- the nature of the peace that we seek. For peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict. Only a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting.
It was this insight that drove drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War. In the wake of devastation, they recognized that if human rights are not protected, peace is a hollow promise.
And yet too often, these words are ignored. For some countries, the failure to uphold human rights is excused by the false suggestion that these are somehow Western principles, foreign to local cultures or stages of a nation's development. And within America, there has long been a tension between those who describe themselves as realists or idealists -- a tension that suggests a stark choice between the narrow pursuit of interests or an endless campaign to impose our values around the world.
I reject these choices. I believe that peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please; choose their own leaders or assemble without fear. Pent-up grievances fester, and the suppression of tribal and religious identity can lead to violence. We also know that the opposite is true. Only when Europe became free did it finally find peace. America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens. No matter how callously defined, neither America's interests -- nor the world's -- are served by the denial of human aspirations.
So even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries, America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal. We will bear witness to the quiet dignity of reformers like Aung Sang Suu Kyi; to the bravery of Zimbabweans who cast their ballots in the face of beatings; to the hundreds of thousands who have marched silently through the streets of Iran. It is telling that the leaders of these governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation. And it is the responsibility of all free people and free nations to make clear that these movements -- these movements of hope and history -- they have us on their side.
Let me also say this: The promotion of human rights cannot be about exhortation alone. At times, it must be coupled with painstaking diplomacy. I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. But I also know that sanctions without outreach -- condemnation without discussion -- can carry forward only a crippling status quo. No repressive regime can move down a new path unless it has the choice of an open door.
In light of the Cultural Revolution's horrors, Nixon's meeting with Mao appeared inexcusable -- and yet it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies. Pope John Paul's engagement with Poland created space not just for the Catholic Church, but for labor leaders like Lech Walesa. Ronald Reagan's efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the Soviet Union, but empowered dissidents throughout Eastern Europe. There's no simple formula here. But we must try as best we can to balance isolation and engagement, pressure and incentives, so that human rights and dignity are advanced over time.
Third, a just peace includes not only civil and political rights -- it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want.
It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine and shelter they need to survive. It does not exist where children can't aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within.
And that's why helping farmers feed their own people -- or nations educate their children and care for the sick -- is not mere charity. It's also why the world must come together to confront climate change. There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, more famine, more mass displacement -- all of which will fuel more conflict for decades. For this reason, it is not merely scientists and environmental activists who call for swift and forceful action -- it's military leaders in my own country and others who understand our common security hangs in the balance.
Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development. All these are vital ingredients in bringing about the evolution that President Kennedy spoke about. And yet, I do not believe that we will have the will, the determination, the staying power, to complete this work without something more -- and that's the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there's something irreducible that we all share.
As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that we're all basically seeking the same things; that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families.
And yet somehow, given the dizzying pace of globalization, the cultural leveling of modernity, it perhaps comes as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities -- their race, their tribe, and perhaps most powerfully their religion. In some places, this fear has led to conflict. At times, it even feels like we're moving backwards. We see it in the Middle East, as the conflict between Arabs and Jews seems to harden. We see it in nations that are torn asunder by tribal lines.
And most dangerously, we see it in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam, and who attacked my country from Afghanistan. These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded. But they remind us that no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint -- no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one's own faith. Such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace, but I believe it's incompatible with the very purpose of faith -- for the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
Adhering to this law of love has always been the core struggle of human nature. For we are fallible. We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best of intentions will at times fail to right the wrongs before us.
But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached -- their fundamental faith in human progress -- that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.
For if we lose that faith -- if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace -- then we lose what's best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.
Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness' of man's present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal 'oughtness' that forever confronts him."
Let us reach for the world that ought to be -- that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls. (Applause.)
Somewhere today, in the here and now, in the world as it is, a soldier sees he's outgunned, but stands firm to keep the peace. Somewhere today, in this world, a young protestor awaits the brutality of her government, but has the courage to march on. Somewhere today, a mother facing punishing poverty still takes the time to teach her child, scrapes together what few coins she has to send that child to school -- because she believes that a cruel world still has a place for that child's dreams.
Let us live by their example. We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace. We can do that -- for that is the story of human progress; that's the hope of all the world; and at this moment of challenge, that must be our work here on Earth.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
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2) New U.S. Jobless Claims Rise, Trade Gap Narrows
By REUTERS
December 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/12/10/business/business-us-usa-economy.html
Filed at 1:22 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits rose more than expected last week, but a surprise narrowing in the trade gap in October indicated the economy remained firmly on a steady growth path.
Initial claims for state unemployment insurance rose 17,000 to 474,000 last week, after five straight weeks of declines, the Labor Department said on Thursday.
The rise in claims was blamed on seasonal layoffs in industries such as construction and a rebound in applications that had been held back during the Thanksgiving holiday week.
Analysts, who had expected claims to climb but only to 460,000, said the gain did not alter the trend toward labor market stability. Instead, they focused on a 14th straight drop in a four-week average of claims, which hit the lowest since September last year.
In another report, the Commerce Department said the U.S. trade deficit shrank 7.6 percent to $32.9 billion in October as a weak dollar helped boost exports. Analysts had expected the gap to widen to about $36.8 billion.
"The recovery is sustaining its moderate momentum. The concern has been it would lose momentum and relapse in the way of a double-dip recession. I don't see anything in this or recent data suggesting this," said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh.
The reports helped lift U.S. stock prices. In afternoon trade, the blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average <.DJI> was up about 60 points or nearly 0.6 percent.
In another boost to the economy, U.S. households' net worth -- the difference between the value of assets and liabilities -- rose $2.7 trillion to $53.4 trillion in the third quarter, Federal Reserve data showed.
The second consecutive quarterly increase in household wealth could be a confidence booster for consumers shouldering the burden of high unemployment.
"The increase in household net worth will prove to have a positive psychological impact on households that will likely lead to more spending in 2010," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group in Princeton, New Jersey.
Analysts said the unexpected narrowing in the trade gap, combined with a report on Wednesday showing wholesalers started restocking in October, improved the chances of the economy expanding at a more brisk pace in the fourth quarter than the 2.8 percent annualized rate seen in the July-September period.
Paul Dales, a U.S. economist at Capital Economics in Toronto, said trade could contribute around 1 percentage point to fourth quarter gross domestic product after subtracting 0.8 percentage point in the third quarter.
WORLD TRADE GROWING
In a sign that world trade is slowly shaking off the effects of the global financial crisis, U.S. exports of goods and services hit their highest level since November 2008. Imports also touched their highest point since last December.
The smaller-than-expected trade gap is good news for the Obama administration, which sees export growth as an avenue for creating jobs.
With the U.S. unemployment rate hovering at its highest levels in a quarter century, the weak jobs market is a political sore point for Obama and his fellow Democrats.
Still, the jobs market does appear to be recovering. A report last week showed the jobless rate edged down to 10 percent in November from a 26-1/2-year high of 10.2 percent, while employers cut the fewest jobs since recession struck in December 2007.
Even though jobless claims rose last week, applications for benefits have dropped from lofty levels in March. The four-week average, which provides a better view of underlying trends, dropped to 473,750 last week from 481,500 the prior week.
Analysts said that was a clear signal the economy would soon start creating the much needed jobs to fuel the recovery.
"I believe when we get down below 450,000, you are in a position where you're going to get some payrolls jobs growth. We are on the cusp," said PNC Financial Services' Hoffman.
The number of workers still collecting benefits after an initial week of aid dropped 303,000 to 5.16 million in the week ended November 28, the lowest level since February. The decline, however, was largely due to people exhausting their benefits and moving to emergency unemployment programs.
"These developments seem to be consistent with the broad sense that new layoffs are slowing significantly, but those who lost their jobs during the recession are still finding it very difficult to get work,' said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at RBS in Greenwich, Connecticut.
"The labor market is starting to stabilize, but the level of unemployment is very high."
The insured unemployment rate, which measures the percentage of the insured labor force that is jobless, fell to 3.9 percent in the week ended November 28 -- the lowest since February -- from 4.1 percent the previous week.
(Editing by James Dalgleish)
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3) Judge Finds Pentagon in Contempt in Gitmo Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/12/10/us/politics/AP-US-Gitmo-Contempt.html
Filed at 2:08 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal judge on Thursday ruled the Defense Department in contempt of court for failing to videotape the testimony of a Guantanamo Bay detainee so that the public and the news media could see it.
U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler is demanding a detailed explanation of why the Pentagon failed to follow her directions and tape the testimony of Mohammed Al-Adahi of Yemen. He testified June 23 in a challenge to his indefinite detention at the prison in Cuba.
In court papers, the government said the Defense Department inadvertently failed to tell the command at Guantanamo Bay to videotape the proceedings.
In August, Kessler ordered the government to ''take all necessary and appropriate diplomatic steps'' to facilitate Al-Adahi's release. The government is appealing Kessler's decision.
The judge said she wanted the testimony videotaped so as much of it as possible could be provided to the public and the news media.
Al-Adahi testified that he attended al-Qaida's Al Farouq training camp for seven to 10 days out of curiosity and was expelled for disobeying rules.
Al-Adahi readily acknowledged having met Osama bin Laden on two occasions and admitted that perhaps his relatives were bodyguards and enthusiastic followers of bin Laden, the judge wrote in her ruling in August.
The judge said, however, that ''sensational and compelling as it may appear,'' that does not constitute reliable evidence to justify the government detaining Al-Adahi, who has been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002.
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4) Poll Finds Slim Majority Back More Afghanistan Troops
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and DALIA SUSSMAN
December 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/world/asia/10poll.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - A bare majority of Americans support President Obama's plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, but many are skeptical that the United States can count on Afghanistan as a partner in the fight or that the escalation would reduce the chances of a domestic terrorist attack, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
In the wake of the president's address last week explaining his decision, the poll found a 10 percentage point increase in public approval of Mr. Obama's handling of the war in Afghanistan since last month, to 48 percent. But the shift reflects a twist on the political polarization that has marked much of Mr. Obama's first year in office: Republican and independent voters are rallying behind Mr. Obama as he presses for the troop escalation, while Democrats remain decidedly cool to his war plans.
The poll showed a steady slide in support for Mr. Obama as he approaches the end of his first year in office. His job approval rating has now hit 50 percent, the lowest yet in this poll; it was 68 percent at its peak in April. The percentage of Americans who approve of his handling of the economy has dropped to 47 percent from 54 percent in October. And 42 percent approve of the way he is handling health care, down five percentage points in the last few months.
Mr. Obama has spent much of the past three months trying to rally support for a health care bill and formulating a plan for Afghanistan. But in the poll, 12 percent of respondents said health care was the biggest problem facing the nation, while just 2 percent named Afghanistan. Nearly 50 percent listed the economy or jobs.
Questioning for the survey began on Friday, the day the government announced a decline in the unemployment rate to 10 percent from 10.2 percent and a sharp drop-off in the rate of job loss in November, and as the White House embarked on an effort to present Mr. Obama as focused on the economy and jobs.
The support for Mr. Obama's Afghanistan policy is decidedly ambivalent, and the nation's appetite for any intervention is limited. Over all, Americans support sending the troops in by 51 percent to 43 percent, while 55 percent said setting a date to begin troop withdrawals was a bad idea.
Nearly 6 in 10 respondents said they did not want troops to remain there for more than two years; that includes 32 percent who said troops should leave within a year. Mr. Obama said that he would begin withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan in July 2011, but the administration has said the time it takes to withdraw would be contingent on conditions on the ground.
Just under half thought the United States would succeed in what Mr. Obama said was a central mission: preventing terrorists from using Afghanistan as a base of support, while 39 percent said they thought an increased effort in Afghanistan would make the United States safer from a domestic terrorist attack.
The poll also found that despite Mr. Obama's address to the nation last week, in which he sought to lay out a justification for the mission, nearly half of the respondents said that he had not clearly explained his plan.
The poll underscores the extent to which Mr. Obama has defied Democrats on the war. About two-thirds of Republicans support the troop escalation, while 53 percent of Democrats oppose it. Conversely, most Republicans oppose Mr. Obama's proposal to set a date to start pulling out troops, while Democrats applaud it.
The percentage of Republicans who approve of Mr. Obama's Afghanistan policy has increased 19 percentage points since November to 42 percent; 55 percent of Democrats approved, little-changed since last month.
The poll was conducted by telephone from Friday through Tuesday night, with 1,031 respondents, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
The poll suggested a divide between Democrats who approve of Mr. Obama's job performance over all, even as they are upset with Afghanistan, and Republicans who disapprove of Mr. Obama's job performance over all, even if they are happy with what he is doing in Afghanistan.
"We've got to chase the Taliban out and end the war in Afghanistan, and we can't do that unless we have more troops there than we have now," Elizabeth Ledwith, 77, a Republican from Glenside, Pa., said in a follow-up interview.
But, Ms. Ledwith added: "Over all, I disapprove because Obama is putting us in terrible debt for years down the road by giving away all this money. Whenever anything happens, he throws a few more billion dollars at it."
By contrast, Karen Herald, 67, a Democrat from Corvallis, Ore., said she liked that Mr. Obama was "not George Bush."
"I think he presents a really good face for America," Ms. Herald said.
But, she said: "I think he's dealing with the kind of situation that no amount of military troops will help. I'm uneasy about sending more troops because I think the war is probably not winnable."
More than 80 percent of Democrats said they approved of Mr. Obama's job performance, compared with 19 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of independents.
Nearly 70 percent of Republicans said the United States was doing the right thing by fighting in Afghanistan; fewer than half of the Democrats shared that view. Over 60 percent of Republicans said the additional troops would make the United States safer from terrorism, compared with 28 percent of Democrats.
Megan Thee-Brennan and Marina Stefan contributed reporting.
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5) Petraeus Warns of a Long and Expensive Mission in Afghanistan
By MARK LANDLER
December 10, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/world/asia/10policy.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - America's involvement in Afghanistan could stretch on for years and cost upward of $10 billion annually just to finance an adequate Afghan security force, the overall commander in the region told Congress on Wednesday.
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, one of the military's most influential generals, estimated that building and maintaining a combined army and police force of 400,000 - a size that American commanders believe may eventually be needed to fully secure the country - would cost more than $10 billion a year.
"There's no question, as President Karzai was highlighting yesterday, that Afghanistan will require substantial international funding for years to come in a whole host of different areas, not the least of which is their security forces," said General Petraeus, the commander of the military's Central Command, which oversees operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan and other regional trouble spots.
On Tuesday, President Hamid Karzai, at a news conference with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, said Afghanistan would not be able to pay for its own security until at least 2024, an assertion that surprised Mr. Gates and drew expressions of concern from senators of both parties.
"We're talking about $150 billion, just on the security side, before we get to the development side," said Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey. He pressed the general on whether he concurred with Mr. Karzai's timetable, but the general did not give a clear-cut answer.
"That depends on how rapidly, obviously, they can generate more revenue," he said. "But certainly it is going to be years before they can handle the bulk of the security tasks and allow the bulk of our troopers to redeploy."
This was General Petraeus's first appearance before Congress to defend the new Afghanistan policy, and he referred several times to his experience in Iraq, where he was the architect of the so-called surge.
"Achieving progress in Afghanistan will be hard, and the progress there will likely be slower in developing than was the progress in Iraq," General Petraeus said. But, he insisted, "Afghanistan is no more hopeless than Iraq was when I took command there in February 2007."
The general testified with the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, Jacob J. Lew, who helps direct the civilian effort in Afghanistan, and the American ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W. Eikenberry. Ambassador Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general, testified on Tuesday with the American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.
The two diplomats defended the administration's development efforts in Afghanistan, saying they would hold Mr. Karzai to his promises to crack down on corruption by steering aid to ministries or district officials with a proven record of good conduct.
But Mr. Lew, under tough questioning by Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland, conceded that there were limits to the ability of the United States to change the behavior of Mr. Karzai or other leaders. "Holding them accountable does not mean that a year from now or five years from now there will be zero corruption in Afghanistan," Mr. Lew said.
The committee's chairman, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, pressed General Petraeus and Mr. Lew about how the United States planned to develop closer links to the Pakistani military and government.
"What happens in Pakistan, particularly near the Afghan border, will do more to determine the outcome in Afghanistan than any increase in troops or shift in strategy," he said.
But none of the three offered many concrete examples of how the administration could exercise leverage over the Pakistani military or government.
General Petraeus acknowledged that pouring more troops into Afghanistan would raise the risk of driving more militants across the border into Pakistan, where they could further destabilize that country.
"That is why we're working very hard to coordinate our operations more effectively with our Pakistani partners, so that they know what our operational campaign plan is, and can anticipate and be there with a catcher's mitt, or an anvil, whatever it may be, to greet these individuals," he said.
Mr. Lew laid out an extensive program of civilian assistance, including earthquake relief aid and efforts to strengthen the Pakistani electrical grid. He also said the United States wanted to forge closer ties with provincial officials, something it had not done adequately in the past.
It was left to General Petraeus to answer a blunt question from Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut: Is Pakistan's embattled president, Asif Ali Zardari, in danger of being forced from office?
"I don't see the prospect or the desire for anyone to change civilian rule," the general said.
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6) Iraq Accepts Bids for 2 More Oil Fields
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html?hpw
BAGHDAD - Three days after a series of coordinated bombings killed more than 100 people in the capital, Iraq's government held a public auction Friday during which it sold development rights to two of its largest untapped oil fields to fund the growing costs of security and reconstruction.
A partnership of Royal Dutch Shell and Petronas, a state-owned Malaysian company, won the largest field put out for bid, Majnoon, in southern Iraq, which contains an estimated 12.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
The second field, Halfiya, also in southern Iraq, was won by a consortium led by China National Petroleum Company that included Petronas and Total of France. The field is believed to have about 4.1 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
Three other fields up for auction, located in unstable parts of the country, received little interest from oil companies, and their development rights were not sold.
The auction, which is scheduled to continue with five more fields Saturday, has taken place during a particularly unstable time.
Political squabbling has delayed critical national elections from January until March, even as American troops are scheduled to continue withdrawing from Iraq in large numbers.
And because the country's Parliament has been unable to approve a national oil law, it is unclear whether agreements reached with oil companies before the March 7 election will be recognized by a new government if Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki fails to win re-election.
Still, the auction, the second since the 2003 United States-led invasion, attracted representatives of dozens of the world's largest oil companies despite government fears that Tuesday's bombings would dissuade oil executives from traveling to Baghdad.
The event, televised live on Iraqi's state-owned television channel, was held inside a theater in the Oil Ministry under tight security - even by Baghdad's heavily policed standards.
Helicopters circled overhead; thousands of police officers and soldiers patrolled roadways; streets within a mile of the ministry were closed to vehicular traffic with the exception of convoys of armored S.U.V.s carrying oil executives to the auction; and everyone who made it inside was subjected to multiple body searches.
Prime Minister Maliki, who gave introductory remarks, thanked oil executives for attending the auction, adding that their presence signaled their "confidence" in Iraq.
Mr. Maliki played down recent violence in Baghdad as an aberration.
"There is no security deterioration in Iraq, even if a security breach occurred," Mr. Maliki said. "Iraq is on its way to removing all its obstacles."
But this week's bombings were the third in a series of large-scale attacks in the capital since August that have killed more than 400 people and wounded some 2,200 others.
If the presence of executives from companies including ExxonMobil, British Petroleum and Russia's Lukoil was any indication, however, the fear of being outflanked by a rival petroleum company trumped concerns about personal safety.
"I was nervous when I was sitting there," said Mounir Bouaziz, a vice president at Shell, after he submitted the winning bid for Majnoon, the largest field offered Friday. "We are pleased and relieved to have won this. It has taken a lot of work to get this, including months and months of study and discussions."
Shell's main competition came from Total, the oil company that is most familiar with the field.
Total signed an agreement with Saddam Hussein in the 1990s to develop Majnoon, a pact that was annulled by Mr. Hussein in 2002. Two years ago, Total and Chevron signed an agreement with the government to explore the field.
But Friday, while Total and its partner, the Chinese National Petroleum Company, offered to accept a $1.75 fee from the Oil Ministry for each barrel of oil they produced at the field, the partnership of Shell and Petronas submitted a bid to accept $1.39 for each barrel.
And while the Shell group gave a guarantee that it would produce 1.8 million barrels a day from Majnoon, the Total group said its output would be only about 1.4 million barrels.
Total was not entirely shut out Friday, however. The company was part of a second group that won the rights for Halfaya field, which like Majnoon, is a largely undeveloped field located in southern Iraq.
Total's partners for the Halfaya field are Petronas and C.N.P.C. The Chinese company has a 50 percent stake in the consortium, while the French and Malaysian firms have shares of 25 percent each.
If the consortium eventually signs a development contract with the Iraqi government, it would be the third Iraqi oil field development deal won by C.N.P.C. during the past year.
In November 2008, C.N.P.C. signed a contract to develop Ahdab field southwest of Baghdad. Last month, the Chinese company agreed to develop the 17.8 billion barrel Rumalia field as part of a consortium with British Petroleum.
The three oil fields that had no winning bidders Friday are located in areas where attacks remain relatively commonplace, including East Baghdad field, which lies beneath the Sadr City district. Earlier this week, a bombing killed several schoolchildren there.
Duraid Adnan and Mohammed Hussein contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Jad Mouawad from New York.
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7) Illegal Immigrant Students Publicly Take Up a Cause
By JULIA PRESTON
December 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/us/11student.html?hpw
It has not been easy for the Obama administration to deport Rigoberto Padilla, a Mexican-born college student in Chicago who has been an illegal immigrant in this country since he was 6.
On Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said they would delay Mr. Padilla's deportation for one year.
Mr. Padilla's case had seemed straightforward to immigration agents who detained him for deportation in January after he was arrested by the Chicago police for running a stop sign and charged with driving under the influence.
But since then, students held two street rallies on his behalf and sent thousands of e-mail messages and faxes to Congress. The Chicago City Council passed a resolution calling for a stay of his deportation and five members of Congress from Illinois came out in support of his cause. One of them was Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat, who offered a private bill to cancel his removal.
Obama administration officials said they would review cases like Mr. Padilla's as they arose. They said the situation of Mr. Padilla, 21, pointed to the need for an immigration overhaul that would include a path to legal status for people in the United States illegally.
"We are committed to confronting these problems in practical, effective ways, using the current tools at our disposal while we work with Congress to enact comprehensive reform," said Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
Behind Mr. Padilla's case - and others in Florida of students who fought off deportation - is activism by young immigrants, many of them illegal, which has become increasingly public and coordinated across the country, linked by Web sites, text messages and a network of advocacy groups. Spurred by President Obama's promises of legislation to grant them legal status, and frustration that their lives have stalled without it, young illegal immigrants are joining street protests despite the risk of being identified by immigration agents.
With many illegal immigrants lying low to avoid a continuing crackdown, immigrant students have become the most visible supporters of a legislative overhaul, which Mr. Obama has pledged to take up early next year. In the meantime, their protests are awkward for the administration, with young, often high-achieving illegal immigrants asking defiantly why the authorities continue to detain and deport them.
"Maybe our parents feel like immigrants, but we feel like Americans because we have been raised here on American values," said Carlos Saavedra, national coordinator of a network of current and former students called United We Dream.
"Then we go to college and we find out we are rejected by the American system. But we are not willing to accept that answer," said Mr. Saavedra, 23, a Peruvian who lived here illegally until he gained legal status two years ago.
Young people who were brought to the United States by illegal immigrant parents draw a certain degree of sympathy even from some opponents of broader legalization programs. Roy Beck, the executive director of NumbersUSA, a group that has staunchly opposed a legal path for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, said in an interview that he could support legal status for some young immigrant students. Mr. Beck said he would do so, however, only if Congress eliminated the current immigration system based on family ties and imposed mandatory electronic verification of immigration status for all workers - conditions that Democrats in Congress are not likely to accept.
The students' goal is to gain passage of legislation that would give permanent resident status to illegal immigrants who had been brought to the United States before they were 15, if they have been here for at least five years, have graduated from high school and attend college or serve in the military for two years.
Known to its supporters as the Dream Act, it has been offered in the Senate by Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana. An effort to bring it to the Senate floor was defeated in 2007, and proponents now consider it part of a package that includes a path to legal status for illegal immigrants in general, an estimated 12 million people. Mr. Beck said he continued to oppose that proposal.
Many illegal immigrant students who were brought to the United States as children receive a shock when they get ready to go to college. They are generally not eligible for lower in-state tuition rates or government financial aid. In most states they cannot get drivers' licenses.
In recent years, student groups joined battles in several states for in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, some successful and some not. This year, student organizers said, they worked to tie those state efforts into a national network, hoping to match the mobilization networks of opponents of the immigration overhaul, which proved far superior in the past.
The troubles for Mr. Padilla began when he drove home after watching a football game and drinking beer with friends. He ran the stop sign, and the traffic police arrested him because he did not have a driver's license and had been drinking. Eventually, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Immigration agents found him in the county jail.
Mr. Padilla, now enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago, had no prior record and had been an honors student and president of the Latino student organization at Harold Washington College, which he attended for two years. Friends from both schools mobilized after his arrest.
Similar rallies took place in November in Miami, when immigration agents detained two brothers from Venezuela who were illegal immigrants - Jesús Reyes Mendoza, 21, a former student government president at Miami Dade College, and his brother Guillermo, 25. Students from the college held a protest in front of the immigrant detention center where the brothers were held.
"The undocumented youth are losing our fear of being undocumented," said Carlos Roa, an illegal immigrant student from Venezuela who joined that rally. "I'm public with this. I'm not hiding anymore."
Miami Dade College, with 170,000 students, has become a center for immigrant activism. After the protests, and letters from Eduardo Padron, the college president, the immigration authorities on Nov. 8 deferred the deportation of the Reyes brothers for one year.
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8) 26 Students Arrested in Protest Over Tuition Increases
By MALIA WOLLAN
December 11, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/education/11arrest.html?hpw
SAN FRANCISCO - Twenty-six students were arrested at San Francisco State University before dawn on Thursday after some students barricaded themselves inside a building to protest budget cuts and tuition increases across the state's public university system.
"The doors were locked with chains from the inside so police broke through a window to get in," a university spokeswoman, Ellen Griffin, said. "We're approaching final exams and the end of the semester, and as many as 3,200 students have classes in that building."
On Wednesday, classes in the building were canceled after the occupation began.
Along with indignation over budget cuts, a blog listing the protesters' demands included forgiveness of all student loans and ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. With demands far beyond the purview of school administrators, negotiations with the students was nearly impossible, Ms. Griffin said.
The students occupied the three-story building for about 24 hours before the police took them into custody. They were charged with misdemeanors and released, Ms. Griffin said. Thirteen students were arrested inside the administration and classroom building, and 13 were arrested protesting outside.
The arrests came after months of growing student anger that followed a steep decline in state financing for public universities. Fees for students at the 23 California State University campuses, including San Francisco State, increased 30 percent this school year. In November, the University of California's Board of Regents approved a 32 percent increase in undergraduate student fees, which resulted in protests across the 10 campuses.
Students on at least three campuses, including Berkeley, took over buildings and dozens were arrested in the days after the fee increase. Those protesting also took issue with layoffs, faculty furloughs and other cuts.
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9) New Incidents Test Immunity to Terrorism on U.S. Soil
By SCOTT SHANE
News Analysis
[New York Times begins new terror campaign against U.S. Muslims...bw]
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/us/12assess.html?hp
WASHINGTON - As the years passed after Sept. 11, 2001, without another major attack on American soil and with no sign of hidden terrorist cells, many counterterrorism specialists reached a comforting conclusion: Muslims in the United States were not very vulnerable to radicalization.
American Muslims, the reasoning went, were well assimilated in diverse communities with room for advancement. They showed little of the alienation often on display among their European counterparts, let alone attraction to extremist violence.
But with a rash of recent cases in which Americans have been accused of being drawn into terrorist scheming, the rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., last month and now the alarming account of five young Virginia men who went to Pakistan and are suspected of seeking jihad, the notion that the United States has some immunity against homegrown terrorists is coming under new scrutiny.
It is a concern that President Obama noted in passing in his address on the decision to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, and one that has grown as the Afghan war and the hunt for Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan intensifies.
"These events certainly call the consensus into question," said Robert S. Leiken, who studies terrorism at the Nixon Center, a Washington policy institute, and wrote the forthcoming book "Europe's Angry Muslims."
"The notion of a difference between Europe and United States remains relevant," Mr. Leiken said. But the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the American operations like drone strikes in Pakistan, are fueling radicalization at home, he said.
"Just the length of U.S. involvement in these countries is provoking more Muslim Americans to react," Mr. Leiken said.
Concern over the recent cases has profoundly affected Muslim organizations in the United States, which have renewed pledges to campaign against extremist thinking.
"Among leaders, there's a recognition that there's a challenge within our community that needs to be addressed," said Alejandro J. Beutel, government liaison at the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington, and main author of a report by the council on radicalization and how to combat it.
Mr. Beutel, a Muslim convert from New Jersey, said the council started a grass-roots counterradicalization effort in 2005, but acknowledged that "for a while it was on the back burner." He said, "Now we're going to revive it."
F.B.I. investigators were in Pakistan on Friday questioning the five Virginia men. But it remained unclear whether the men would be deported to the United States, and whether they had broken any laws in either Pakistan or the United States.
At a news conference Friday at the small Virginia mosque where the men had been youth group regulars, mosque officials expressed bewilderment at claims that the men wanted to join the jihad against American troops in Afghanistan.
"I never observed any extreme behavior from them," said Mustafa Maryam, who runs the youth group and said he had known the young men since 2006. "They were fun-loving, career-focused children. They had a bright future before them."
Also at the press briefing, asked about reports that the five men had contacted a Pakistani militant via the Web, Mahdi Bray, the head of the Freedom Foundation of the Muslim American Society, told reporters that YouTube and social networking sites had become a dangerous recruiting tool for militants.
"We are determined not to let religious extremists exploit the vulnerability of our children through this slick, seductive propaganda on the Internet," said Mr. Bray, who is organizing a youth meeting later this month in Chicago to address the issue.
"Silence in cyberspace is not an option for us," he said.
The detention of the Virginia men - ranging in age from late teens to mid-20s - would have prompted soul-searching no matter when it occurred. But it comes after a series of disturbing cases that already had terror experts speculating about a trend.
There were the November shootings that took 13 lives at Fort Hood, with murder charges pending against Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an American-born Muslim and an Army psychiatrist.
There was the arrest of Najibullah Zazi, born in Afghanistan but the seeming model of the striving immigrant as a popular coffee vendor in Manhattan, accused of going to Pakistan for explosives training with the intention of attacking in the United States.
There was David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American living in Chicago, accused of helping plan the killings in Mumbai, India, last year and of plotting attacks in Denmark.
There was Bryant Neal Vinas, a Muslim convert from Long Island who participated in a rocket attack on American troops in Afghanistan and used his knowledge of commuter trains in New York to advise Al Qaeda about potential targets.
There were the Somali-Americans from Minnesota who had traveled to Somalia to join a violent Islamist movement.
And there were cases of would-be terrorists who plotted attacks in Texas, Illinois and North Carolina with conspirators who turned out to be F.B.I. informants.
Bruce Hoffman, who studies terrorism at Georgetown University, said the recent cases only confirmed that it was "myopic" to believe "we could insulate ourselves from the currents affecting young Muslims everywhere else."
Like many other specialists, Mr. Hoffman pointed to the United States' combat in Muslim lands as the only obvious spur to many of the recent cases, especially those with a Pakistani connection.
"The longer we've been in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said, "the more some susceptible young men are coming to believe that it's their duty to take up arms to defend their fellow Muslims."
A few analysts, in fact, argue that Mr. Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan - intended to prevent a terrorist haven there - could backfire.
Robert A. Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist, contends that suicide attacks are almost always prompted by resentment of foreign troops, and that escalation in Afghanistan will fuel more plots.
"This new deployment increases the risk of the next 9/11," he said. "It will not make this country safer."
Yet amid the concern about the five Virginia men and the impact of the wars on Muslim opinion, Audrey Kurth Cronin of the National War College in Washington said she found something to take comfort in.
"To me, the most interesting thing about the five guys is that it was their parents that went immediately to the F.B.I.," she said. "It was members of the American Muslim community that put a stop to whatever those men may have been planning."
Janie Lorber contributed reporting from Alexandria, Va.
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10) Protesters Gather to Urge Action on Climate Change
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
December 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/science/earth/13climate.html?hp
COPENHAGEN - Thousands of protesters from around the globe converged in a square here Saturday for what was expected to be the largest demonstration during two weeks of talks on a global strategy to combat climate change.
The police said they anticipated that 60,000 people would join a long march southward from Christiansborg Slotsplads, or Castle Square, toward the Bella Center, the sprawling and heavily fortified convention center where delegates and observers from nearly 200 nations are gathered to try to seek a consensus.
A coalition of hundreds of environmental groups, human rights campaigners, climate activists, anti-capitalists and freelance protesters from dozens of countries - along with Copenhagen residents, young and old - gathered in the early afternoon for a veritable circus of eco-themed signs, chants, speeches and costumes.
By 1 p.m., a rolling sea of flags and banners undulated across the square, most with climate slogans or pleas for world leaders to resolve the vast differences that still make a global climate agreement elusive as talks here move into the second and final week.
"Bla, Bla, Bla," said one popular sign. "Act Now!"
Another said, "Nature Doesn't Compromise."
On a stage at the eastern edge of the square, a succession of speakers stoked a cheering crowd, their voices booming over loudspeakers. "My words cannot replace action," said Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the leader of Denmark's Social Democrats, the leading opposition party here. "We are here to show leaders that what is made by man, can be changed by man."
In the crowd was 26-year-old Jemimah Maitei, dressed in traditional clothing from her native Kenya. Watching the stage eagerly, she said she had traveled to Copenhagen to be part of a delegation representing indigenous peoples at the talks, which are overseen by the United Nations.
"I came here to give my views on how climate change is impacting my community," Ms. Maitei said. She cited relentless droughts that had made growing crops, among other things, increasingly difficult for the Masai, the ethnic group to which she belongs.
The vast demonstration was not the exclusive province of climate campaigners, however. Groups of diverse social and political pedigree took advantage of the huge gathering to advance their agendas, too.
One sign urged the overthrow of the Iranian government. Another, with the words "Earth in Need: Delete Meat," was one of many promoting vegetarian diets.
People calling for a "Free Tibet" were well represented, and a small contingent of climate skeptics and libertarians opposed to caps on heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions derided the United Nations talks.
"We want to be able to live our lives like we've always led them before - as free citizens in free democracies," said David Pontoppidan, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Copenhagen, who addressed passers-by through a megaphone over the chatter of two helicopters hovering far above.
"We want free debate; we want to be able to be taken seriously even though we don't agree with the U.N.," he said.
By midafternoon, as people made their way over the canal and southward toward the Bella Center, small bands of black-clad youths chanting anti-capitalist slogans and carrying sticks and rocks could be seen infiltrating the otherwise peaceful crowd.
At around 3:30, dozens of Danish police officers penetrated the parade near its tail, surrounding a group of the more radical protesters. Several arrests were made, while the remainder of the column of demonstrators was guided around the scene to rejoin those making their way for the demonstration's terminus at Vejlands Alle, just north of the convention center.
Although there have been scattered skirmishes between the police and protesters during the first week of the United Nations conference, most of these have been isolated, and Danish law enforcement officials have made it broadly known that they would have low tolerance for unruly behavior.
Jesper Frandsen, a police officer keeping watch at an area behind the stage at the outset of the demonstration, said the police force wanted to ensure that visitors enjoyed themselves and that their environmental concerns were heard.
"We want to keep the focus on the environmental debate and make sure the radical activists don't steal the attention," he said.
Leading the march from the square this afternoon, a man in blue coveralls, with vaudevillian face paint and a faux Cyrano nose, could be seen sweeping the street and peering into a rolling trash bin painted to resemble the planet. It emitted plumes of white dust and mournful musical notes.
"This is our comment on global warming," said the sweeper, Jens Kloft, a Danish performance artist. "We want to have an international compromise on global warming - a better climate, but two more months of summer in Denmark please. Because it's too cold to be out here."
Andrew C. Revkin and Lars Kroldrup contributed reporting.
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11) Catch-2009
By CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
Op-Ed Contributor
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/opinion/12buckley.html?hp
LET me interrupt normal programming about climate change, White House party crashers, Tiger Woods's late-night driving habits, the deficit and the public option to note the 10th anniversary of the death of Joseph Heller.
The author of "Catch-22" and I became friends after I wrote a respectful but not altogether favorable review of the sequel to his 1961 masterpiece. I was stunned to receive a handwritten note thanking me for the review. I wrote back. A friendship ensued. Five years later, by the time Joe died, we'd accumulated a correspondence of several hundred letters, most transmitted by fax. (Remember faxes?)
Joe was 76 when he died the night of Dec. 12, 1999. I remember the date because the last fax I had from him was dated Dec. 11. It's thumb-tacked to the bulletin board over my desk.
I was writing him back when a newspaper rang and asked if I might "write something about Joe Heller."
"Any particular reason?" I asked.
"He died last night."
I had to hang up and compose myself. The letter I'd been on the verge of writing included an extract that I'd found in his 1986 memoir, "No Laughing Matter," about his ordeal with Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Mario [Puzo] had called George Mandel to say he'd heard Joe was paralyzed. "No, Mario .... He's got something called Guillain-Barré." "My God," Mario blurted out. "That's terrible!" A surprised George murmured, "Hey, Mario, you know about Guillain-Barré?" "No, I never heard nothing about it," Mario replied. "But when they name any disease after two guys, it's got to be terrible!"
I thought it was delightful. Now it didn't seem very funny. (An odd coincidence: Joe learned he had Guillain-Barré on Dec. 13, 1981. I wonder if the chronological symmetry in those two calamities would have amused him.)
The death of any friend leaves a hole. In this case, a succession of holes, for I've often found myself wondering over the last 10 years, "What would Joe have made of this?" Having died just before the start of a tumultuous - to say the least - decade, the author of a landmark 20th-century satire missed, or perhaps another way to put it, avoided:
• the Florida recount
• 9/11
• weapons of mass destruction
• Saddam Hussein's hanging, available on cellphone and YouTube
• Dick Cheney shooting his lawyer
• Hurricane Katrina
• John Kerry, war hero, being depicted as a Swift-boating wimp
• Lady Gaga
• A.I.G. bonuses
• Bernard Madoff
• the election of Barack Obama
• Glenn Beck
• the "controversy" over Barack Obama's birth certificate
• Sarah Palin, best-selling author.
I'd love to have heard his take on all this over our ritual martinis. Joe was not a manufacturer of bons mots. Au contraire - as he himself would have gleefully put it. His conversation was non-ornamental. He did not strive to be witty or to dazzle. He was amused but mostly repelled by professional talking heads, those conveyor belts of forced insight.
But behind the warm smile, he had a switchblade-sharp mind, and his fraud-detector (what Hemingway called, in somewhat saltier terms, the writer's most indispensable tool) was as fine-tuned as a Predator drone. He could spot phoniness at a thousand yards and destroy it with a single Hellfire-missile glance.
For all that, he was playful and avuncular. He provided one of my books with a blurb. The subsequent Publisher's Weekly review was decidedly mixed. I faxed it to him with a sigh. He drew lines through the decidedly mixed portions and wrote at the bottom, "Now it's a total rave."
So this Dec. 12, I mark a sad anniversary, and wonder, among so many other things, what "Catch-22's" author would have had to say about President Obama's accepting the Nobel Peace Prize shortly after ordering 30,000 more Americans to war.
Christopher Buckley is the editor at large of ForbesLife magazine.
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12) Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics
By DUFF WILSON
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/health/12medicaid.html?hp
New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.
Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them - but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?
The questions go beyond the psychological impact on Medicaid children, serious as that may be. Antipsychotic drugs can also have severe physical side effects, causing drastic weight gain and metabolic changes resulting in lifelong physical problems.
On Tuesday, a pediatric advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration met to discuss the health risks for all children who take antipsychotics. The panel will consider recommending new label warnings for the drugs, which are now used by an estimated 300,000 people under age 18 in this country, counting both Medicaid patients and those with private insurance.
Meanwhile, a group of Medicaid medical directors from 16 states, under a project they call Too Many, Too Much, Too Young, has been experimenting with ways to reduce prescriptions of antipsychotic drugs among Medicaid children.
They plan to publish a report early next year.
The Rutgers-Columbia study will also be published early next year, in the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs. But the findings have already been posted on the Web, setting off discussion among experts who treat and study troubled young people.
Some experts say they are stunned by the disparity in prescribing patterns. But others say it reinforces previous indications, and their own experience, that children with diagnoses of mental or emotional problems in low-income families are more likely to be given drugs than receive family counseling or psychotherapy.
Part of the reason is insurance reimbursements, as Medicaid often pays much less for counseling and therapy than private insurers do. Part of it may have to do with the challenges that families in poverty may have in consistently attending counseling or therapy sessions, even when such help is available.
"It's easier for patients, and it's easier for docs," said Dr. Derek H. Suite, a psychiatrist in the Bronx whose pediatric cases include children and adolescents covered by Medicaid and who sometimes prescribes antipsychotics. "But the question is, 'What are you prescribing it for?' That's where it gets a little fuzzy."
Too often, Dr. Suite said, he sees young Medicaid patients to whom other doctors have given antipsychotics that the patients do not seem to need. Recently, for example, he met with a 15-year-old girl. She had stopped taking the antipsychotic medication that had been prescribed for her after a single examination, paid for by Medicaid, at a clinic where she received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.
Why did she stop? Dr. Suite asked. "I can control my moods," the girl said softly.
After evaluating her, Dr. Suite decided she was right. The girl had arguments with her mother and stepfather and some insomnia. But she was a good student and certainly not bipolar, in Dr. Suite's opinion.
"Normal teenager," Dr. Suite said, nodding. "No scrips for you."
Because there can be long waits to see the psychiatrists accepting Medicaid, it is often a pediatrician or family doctor who prescribes an antipsychotic to a Medicaid patient - whether because the parent wants it or the doctor believes there are few other options.
Some experts even say Medicaid may provide better care for children than many covered by private insurance because the drugs - which can cost $400 a month - are provided free to patients, and families do not have to worry about the co-payments and other insurance restrictions.
"Maybe Medicaid kids are getting better treatment," said Dr. Gabrielle Carlson, a child psychiatrist and professor at the Stony Brook School of Medicine. "If it helps keep them in school, maybe it's not so bad."
In any case, as Congress works on health care legislation that could expand the nation's Medicaid rolls by 15 million people - a 43 percent increase - the scope of the antipsychotics problem, and the expense, could grow in coming years.
Even though the drugs are typically cheaper than long-term therapy, they are the single biggest drug expenditure for Medicaid, costing the program $7.9 billion in 2006, the most recent year for which the data is available.
The Rutgers-Columbia research, based on millions of Medicaid and private insurance claims, is the most extensive analysis of its type yet on children's antipsychotic drug use. It examined records for children in seven big states - including New York, Texas and California - selected to be representative of the nation's Medicaid population, for the years 2001 and 2004.
The data indicated that more than 4 percent of patients ages 6 to 17 in Medicaid fee-for-service programs received antipsychotic drugs, compared with less than 1 percent of privately insured children and adolescents. More recent data through 2007 indicates that the disparity has remained, said Stephen Crystal, a Rutgers professor who led the study. Experts generally agree that some characteristics of the Medicaid population may contribute to psychological problems or psychiatric disorders. They include the stresses of poverty, single-parent homes, poorer schools, lack of access to preventive care and the fact that the Medicaid rolls include many adults who are themselves mentally ill.
As a result, studies have found that children in low-income families may have a higher rate of mental health problems - perhaps two to one - compared with children in better-off families. But that still does not explain the four-to-one disparity in prescribing antipsychotics.
Professor Crystal, who is the director of the Center for Pharmacotherapy at Rutgers, says his team's data also indicates that poorer children are more likely to receive antipsychotics for less serious conditions than would typically prompt a prescription for a middle-class child.
But Professor Crystal said he did not have clear evidence to form an opinion on whether or not children on Medicaid were being overtreated.
"Medicaid kids are subject to a lot of stresses that lead to behavior issues which can be hard to distinguish from more serious psychiatric conditions," he said. "It's very hard to pin down."
And yet Dr. Mark Olfson, a psychiatry professor at Columbia and a co-author of the study, said at least one thing was clear: "A lot of these kids are not getting other mental health services."
The F.D.A. has approved antipsychotic drugs for children specifically to treat schizophrenia, autism and bipolar disorder. But they are more frequently prescribed to children for other, less extreme conditions, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, aggression, persistent defiance or other so-called conduct disorders - especially when the children are covered by Medicaid, the new study shows.
Although doctors may legally prescribe the drugs for these "off label" uses, there have been no long-term studies of their effects when used for such conditions.
The Rutgers-Columbia study found that Medicaid children were more likely than those with private insurance to be given the drugs for off-label uses like A.D.H.D. and conduct disorders. The privately insured children, in turn, were more likely than their Medicaid counterparts to receive the drugs for F.D.A.-approved uses like bipolar disorder.
Even if parents enrolled in Medicaid may be reluctant to put their children on drugs, some come to rely on them as the only thing that helps.
"They say it's impossible to stop now," Evelyn Torres, 48, of the Bronx, said of her son's use of antipsychotics since he received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder at age 3. Seven years later, the boy is now also afflicted with weight and heart problems. But Ms. Torres credits Medicaid for making the boy's mental and physical conditions manageable. "They're helping with everything," she said.
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13) Poland: Pact on U.S. Troops Signed
By NICHOLAS KULISH
World Briefing | Europe
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/world/europe/12briefs-Poland.html?ref=world
Poland and the United States signed an agreement in Warsaw on Friday that would govern the legal status of American troops on Polish soil. The status of forces agreement is necessary for American soldiers to support a battery of Patriot missiles expected to be deployed there in 2010.
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14) Immigration Officials Arrest 300 in California
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/us/12immig.html?ref=us
LOS ANGELES - Nearly 300 illegal immigrants who had committed serious crimes were deported or detained this week by federal agents in a demonstration of what immigration officials pledged was a new resolve to zero in on the most egregious lawbreakers.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials called the three-day sweep in California their largest operation ever aimed at illegal immigrants with criminal records.
More than 80 percent had convictions for serious or violent crimes and at least 100 have been removed from the country, with the others awaiting deportation proceedings.
John Morton, an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security who is in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Friday that focusing on serious criminals helped improve public safety.
"These are not people who we want walking our streets," Mr. Morton said at a news conference here, a day after Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano made much the same point at a Congressional hearing.
The Department of Homeland Security has been criticized by immigrant advocates and civil libertarians in recent years for rounding up hundreds of people whose only offense was being in the country without proper documents, sometimes at the cost of breaking up families.
President Obama had campaigned on a promise of a more compassionate approach to immigration enforcement that would focus on ridding the country of felons and cracking down on employers who deliberately hire illegal workers.
Mr. Morton, citing limited resources, said, "We are going to focus on those people who choose to pursue a life of crime in the United States rather than pursue the American dream of education, hard work and success."
Last year, 136,126 illegal immigrants with criminal records were deported, a record number, officials said. While department officials trumpeted the mass arrests this week, they could not say how many serious criminal offenders who are in the country illegally remain on the streets.
The Immigrants' Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union reacted skeptically to the announcement, noting that despite assurances that serious criminals were the target, previous sweeps have turned out to capture large numbers of people with no such records.
"We would welcome more effective targeting than in the past but it is not yet clear that is the case here," said Caroline Cincotta, a fellow at the project, who also questioned whether the swift deportations had allowed people to have full due process.
ICE officials said just six of those arrested had no record at all, and they sought to play up the serious nature of the offenses of those who were apprehended.
Those arrested included a Guatemalan man with ties to a Los Angeles gang who had committed first-degree robbery, a Mexican man convicted of lewd acts with a child and a Mexican man with a rape conviction.
Of the 286 people arrested, 63 had previously been deported. At least 17 face prosecution for re-entering the country without proper documents.
The agents and officers tracked down most of those arrested through tips and a review of immigration files, court and public records. Many people arrested this week were never deported after serving prison time for their offenses because they fell through the cracks.
Mr. Morton said the immigration agency was improving cooperation with local and state jailers, and is rolling out a "Secure Communities" program that by 2012 is expected to permit all local jails nationwide to check the immigration status of inmates.
The deportees represented 31 countries, though the majority, 207, were from Mexico.
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15) California: More Arrests in University Protest
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | West
December 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/12/us/12brfs-MOREARRESTSI_BRF.html?_r=1&ref=us
Sixty-five protesters, including about 40 students, were arrested inside a classroom building that has been partially taken over for several days at the University of California, Berkeley, by demonstrators opposed to cuts in state financing. The protesters had said they would leave Friday night, but after they began breaking into locked classrooms and publicizing an all-night hip-hop party, the police arrested them on misdemeanor trespassing charges.
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16) US Cutting Gaza Lifeline
By Ann Wright
December 10, 2009
http://intifada-palestine.com/2009/12/11/us-cutting-gaza-lifeline/
See 2.:21 min video at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzhUcShtkSk&feature=player_embedded
No doubt at the instigation of the Israeli government, the Obama administration has authorized the United States Army Corps of Engineers to design a vertical underground wall under the border between Egypt and Gaza.
In March, 2009 the United States provided the government of Egypt with $32 million in March, 2009 for electronic surveillance and other security devices to prevent the movement of food, merchandise and weapons into Gaza. Now details are emerging about an underground steel wall that wil be 6-7 miles long and extend 55 feet straight down into the desert sand.
The steel wall will be made of super-strength steel put together in a jigsaw puzzle fashion. It will be bomb proof and can not be cut or melted. It will be "impenetrable," and reportedly will take 18 months to construct. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8405020.stm)
The steel wall is intended to cut the tunnels that go between Gaza and Egypt.
The tunnels are the lifelines for Gaza since the international community agreed to a blockade of Gaza to collectively punish the citizens of Gaza for their having elected in Parliamentary elections in 2006 sufficient Hamas Parliamentarians that Hamas became the government of Gaza. The United States and other western countries have placed Hamas on the list of terrorist organizations.
The underground steel wall is intended to strengthen international governmental efforts to imprison and starve the people of Gaza into submission so they will throw out the Hamas government.
Just as the steel walls of the US Army Corps of Engineers at the base of the levees of New Orleans were unable to contain Hurricane Katrina, the US Army Corps of Engineers' underground steel walls that will attempt to build an underground cage of Gaza will not be able to contain the survival spirit of the people of Gaza.
America's super technology will again be laughed at by the world, as young men dedicated to the survival of their people, will again outwit technology by digging deeper, and most likely penetrating the "impenetrable" in some novel, simple, low-tech way.
I have been to Gaza 3 times this year following the 22-day Israeli military attack on Gaza that killed 1,440, wounded 5,000, left 50,000 homeless and destroyed much of the infrastructure of Gaza. The disproportionate use of force and targeting of the civilian population by the Israeli military is considered by international law and human rights experts as as violations of the Geneva conventions.
When our governments participate in illegal actions, it is up to the citizens of the world to take action. On December 31, 2009, 1,400 international citizens from 42 countries will march in Gaza with 50,000 Gazans in the Gaza Freedom March to end the siege of Gaza. They will take back to their countries the stories of spirit and survival of the pople of Gaza and will return home committed to force their governments to stop these inhuman actions against the people of Gaza.
Just as American smart bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq have not conquered the spirit of Aghans and Iraqis, America's underground walls in Gaza will never conquer the courage of those who are fighting for the survival of their families.
One more time, the American government and the Obama administration has been an active participant in the continued inhumane treatment of the people of Gaza and should be held accountable, along with Israel and Egypt for violations of human rights of the people of Gaza.
SOURCE: Information Clearing House
Ann Wright
Ann Wright is a retired US Army Reserve Colonel and a former U.S. diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She served in as a US diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She is the co-author of "Dissent: Voices of Conscience" . Her March 19, 2003 letter of resignation can be read at http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0303/032103wright.htm.
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17) Legislator Sees Echoes of Vietnam in Afghan War
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
December 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/us/politics/13obey.html?_r=1&hp
WASHINGTON - David R. Obey has served in Congress since Barack Obama was in grade school. He does not waste time with pleasantries, and he does not mince words. So when President Obama called Representative Obey recently to talk about Afghanistan, the congressman raised a topic sure to make the young commander in chief uncomfortable: Vietnam.
"I came here in '69, and I determined that I would give Nixon a year to see what he could do, because he had inherited the war, so I bit my tongue for a year," Mr. Obey said, recounting how he reminded the current president of the mistakes of that earlier war. "I said the same thing with Obama."
In fact, Mr. Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat, did not wait quite a year - Mr. Obama has been in office just 11 months. And his is not an isolated complaint. As the third-most senior member of the House, Mr. Obey gives voice to what Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls the "serious unrest" in her caucus over Mr. Obama's troop buildup plan for Afghanistan. And as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, which controls how tax money is spent, he is in a position to constrain the president through the power of the purse.
With the president estimating that the buildup will cost $30 billion, Mr. Obey is proposing a "war surtax." The idea is unlikely to pass, but it is already reminding the nation of the high cost of an increasingly unpopular war. At the White House, officials are bracing for the president's first real battle with fellow Democrats.
"We have some work to do," conceded Rob Nabors, a former top aide to Mr. Obey who is now the deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. "Other people talk about forcing the administration to jump through hoops. Mr. Obey is not going to force us to jump through hoops, but he is going to force us to confront some of the most uncomfortable questions having to do with Afghanistan, and he'll force us to do it in a very public setting."
The debate could get its first real airing on Capitol Hill this week, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates appear before members of the appropriations panel to testify on the new Afghanistan strategy and its cost. The hearing will be led by Representative John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who, like Mr. Obey, supports a war tax.
"Obama is going to have to do a real sales job," said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who spent years as a senior aide on Capitol Hill. "You have people who are uncomfortable with the policy, and people who are uncomfortable with how to pay for it. And Obey, as chairman of the committee that holds the purse strings, is uncomfortable with both."
At 71, Mr. Obey (pronounced OH-bee), who represents the rural northwest corner of Wisconsin, is something of a character on Capitol Hill. With a beard and bifocals, he has the slightly rumpled look of the college professor he once aspired to be. (He was pursuing a graduate degree in Russian studies when he left academia for politics.) When he is animated, as is often the case, he tends to squint and lace his conversation with mild profanity, as in, "I am damn tired of a situation in which only military families are asked to pay any price whatsoever for this war."
Even his friends call him prickly, and he is prone to scuffles with colleagues. Once, Mr. Obey so irritated Tom DeLay, the former House Republican leader, that Mr. DeLay shoved him. "Pushing me," Mr. Obey said wryly, "is not the worst thing Tom DeLay ever did for this institution."
He relaxes by playing the harmonica (he is in a band called the Capitol Offenses); his rendition of "Amazing Grace" at a friend's funeral "had everybody in tears," said Gov. James E. Doyle of Wisconsin. His aides are fiercely loyal. "People around him put up with his peculiarities," said Scott Lilly, who spent nearly 30 years with Mr. Obey, "because they really do like him."
In Congress, Mr. Obey has spent decades championing federal spending on health, education and social programs, an agenda rooted in his Catholic faith, which, he has said, demands that he try to "make this an equal society for everybody." A campaign poster of Franklin Roosevelt - "my hero," he says - looks over his shoulder in his sun-streaked Capitol office, where a window offers testimony to his power: a view of the Washington monument.
"The main thing for Obey is his longstanding commitment to the domestic policies that he cares about, especially when the competition for the money is a war he disagrees with," said David Canon, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin.
So at a time when Congress "has been lectured ad nauseam" about paying for a health care overhaul without raising the deficit, Mr. Obey says the same standard must be applied to the war. He knows he will have difficulty getting his surtax passed; Ms. Pelosi opposes it. But he will have little trouble getting Democrats to scrutinize the president's war budget request.
"His questions are very similar to those within our caucus: Do we have credible partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan? What is the mission? What's the risk?" said Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat and member of the House leadership. She sees the surtax as Mr. Obey's way of forcing the nation to think about "shared sacrifice," adding, "He's a smart, savvy legislator."
But Mr. Obey is also a loyal Democrat, which puts him in a ticklish position. Before he proposed the surtax, he called Mr. Nabors to give the president a heads-up. That resulted in the president's call. Mr. Obey used the conversation to ask the president if he had seen a documentary by the public television journalist Bill Moyers featuring archival audiotapes of President Lyndon B. Johnson wrestling with escalating the Vietnam War.
"It is stunning," he remembers telling Mr. Obama, "to listen to Johnson talk to Dick Russell, the conservative old wise head in the Senate from Georgia - it is terrible, gut-wrenching to listen to them both say, 'Well, we know this is damn near a fool's errand, but we don't have any choice.' "
If Mr. Obama objected, he did not say. But in a speech at West Point outlining his Afghanistan strategy, he pointedly rejected the Vietnam analogy, saying it "depends on a false reading of history."
Mr. Obey came away from the speech unconvinced that Mr. Obama's strategy could succeed - not because he doubts the president, he said, but because he has little faith in the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan. After 40 years in Congress, a career that has spanned eight presidents, he is not about to quit asking questions now.
"I didn't come here to be Richard Nixon's congressman, Reagan's congressman, Obama's congressman," Mr. Obey said. "I'm here representing the Seventh District of Wisconsin."
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18) Gang Violence Grows on an Indian Reservation
By ERIK ECKHOLM
December 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/us/14gangs.html
PINE RIDGE, S.D. - Richard Wilson has been a pallbearer for at least five of his "homeboys" in the North Side Tre Tre Gangster Crips, a Sioux imitation of a notorious Denver gang.
One 15-year-old member was mauled by rivals. A 17-year-old shot himself; another, on a cocaine binge and firing wildly, was shot by the police. One died in a drunken car wreck, and another, a founder of the gang named Gaylord, was stabbed to death at 27.
"We all got drunk after Gaylord's burial, and I started rapping," said Mr. Wilson, who, at 24, is practically a gang elder. "But I teared up and couldn't finish."
Mr. Wilson is one of 5,000 young men from the Oglala Sioux tribe involved with at least 39 gangs on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The gangs are being blamed for an increase in vandalism, theft, violence and fear that is altering the texture of life here and in other parts of American Indian territory.
This stunning land of crumpled prairie, horse pastures turned tawny in the autumn and sunflower farms is marred by an astonishing number of roadside crosses and gang tags sprayed on houses, stores and abandoned buildings, giving rural Indian communities an inner-city look.
Groups like Wild Boyz, TBZ, Nomads and Indian Mafia draw children from broken, alcohol-ravaged homes, like Mr. Wilson's, offering brotherhood, an identity drawn from urban gangsta rap and self-protection.
Some groups have more than a hundred members, others just a couple of dozen. Compared with their urban models, they are more likely to fight rivals, usually over some minor slight, with fists or clubs than with semiautomatic pistols.
Mr. Wilson, an unemployed school dropout who lives with assorted siblings and partners in his mother's ramshackle house, without running water, displayed a scar on his nose and one over his eye. "It's just like living in a ghetto," he said. "Someone's getting beat up every other night."
The Justice Department distinguishes the home-grown gangs on reservations from the organized drug gangs of urban areas, calling them part of an overall juvenile crime problem in Indian country that is abetted by eroding law enforcement, a paucity of juvenile programs and a suicide rate for Indian youth that is more than three times the national average.
If they lack the reach of the larger gangs after which they style themselves, the Indian gangs have emerged as one more destructive force in some of the country's poorest and most neglected places.
While many crimes go unreported, the police on the Pine Ridge reservation have documented thousands of gang-related thefts, assaults - including sexual assaults - and rising property crime over the last three years, along with four murders. Residents are increasingly fearful that their homes will be burglarized or vandalized. Car windows are routinely smashed out.
"Tenants are calling in and saying 'I'm scared,' " Paul Iron Cloud, executive officer of the Oglala Sioux (Lakota) Housing Authority, told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in July at a special hearing on the increase of gang activity.
"It seems that every day we're getting more violence," Mr. Iron Cloud said.
Perhaps unique to reservations, rivals sometimes pelt one other with cans of food from the federal commodity program, a practice called "commod-squadding."
As federal grants to Pine Ridge have declined over the last decade, the tribal police force has shrunk by more than half, with only 12 to 20 officers per shift patrolling an area the size of Rhode Island, said John Mousseau, chairman of the tribe's judiciary committee.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has proposed large increases in money for the police, courts and juvenile programs, and for fighting rampant domestic and sexual violence on reservations.
Christopher M. Grant, who used to head a police antigang unit in Rapid City, S.D., and is now a consultant on gangs to several tribes and federal agencies, has noted the "marked increase in gang activity, particularly on reservations in the Midwest, the Northwest and the Southwest" over the last five to seven years.
The Navajo Nation in Arizona, for example, has identified 225 gang units, up from 75 in 1997.
One group that reaches across reservations in Minnesota, called the Native Mob, is more like the street gangs seen in cities, with hierarchical leadership and involvement in drug and weapons trafficking, Mr. Grant said.
Many of the gangs in Pine Ridge, like the Tre Tre Crips, were started by tribal members who encountered them in prison or while living off the reservation; others have taken their names and colors from movies and records.
Even as they seek to bolster policing, Pine Ridge leaders see their best long-term hope for fighting gangs in cultural revival.
"We're trying to give an identity back to our youth," said Melvyn Young Bear, the tribe's appointed cultural liaison. "They're into the subculture of African-Americans and Latinos. But they are Lakota, and they have a lot to be proud of."
Mr. Young Bear, 42, is charged with promoting Lakota rituals, including drumming, chanting and sun dances. He noted that some Head Start programs were now conducted entirely in Lakota.
Michael Little Boy Jr., 30, of the village of Evergreen, said he had initially been tempted by gang life, but with rituals and purifying sweat lodges, "I was able to turn myself around." He is emerging as a tribal spiritual leader, working with youth groups to promote native traditions.
Mr. Grant said a survey of young men in South Dakota reservations found that the approach might be helping.
Mr. Wilson, the 24-year-old gang member, said he regretted not learning the Sioux language when he was young and now wondered about his own future.
"I still get drunk and hang with my homeboys, but not like I used to," he said.
His car, its windows shattered, sits outside his house, so he cannot get to the G.E.D. class he says he would like to attend. His goal is to run a recording studio where his younger half-brother, Richard Lame, 18, could make rap songs. Mr. Lame is finishing high school and says he wants to go to college.
But he admits that he still joined 30 or so homeboys in town to party any chance he got - "for the rush, the thrill." As he spoke, he was dressed in the dark colors of his set, the Black Wall Street Boyz; his tiny bedroom was decorated with movie posters of Al Pacino as the megalomaniacal drug dealer Tony Montana in "Scarface," and he wore a black bandanna.
He pulled out a thick sheaf of his rap lyrics and gave an impromptu performance.
Ever since birth
I been waitin' for death ...
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19) New York Finds Extreme Crisis in Youth Prisons
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
December 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/nyregion/14juvenile.html?ref=nyregion
ALBANY - New York's system of juvenile prisons is broken, with young people battling mental illness or addiction held alongside violent offenders in abysmal facilities where they receive little counseling, can be physically abused and rarely get even a basic education, according to a report by a state panel.
The problems are so acute that the state agency overseeing the prisons has asked New York's Family Court judges not to send youths to any of them unless they are a significant risk to public safety, recommending alternatives, like therapeutic foster care.
"New York State's current approach fails the young people who are drawn into the system, the public whose safety it is intended to protect, and the principles of good governance that demand effective use of scarce state resources," said the confidential draft report, which was obtained by The New York Times.
The report, prepared by a task force appointed by Gov. David A. Paterson and led by Jeremy Travis, president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, comes three months after a federal investigation found that excessive force was routinely used at four prisons, resulting in injuries as severe as broken bones and shattered teeth.
The situation was so serious the Department of Justice, which made the investigation, threatened to take over the system.
But according to the task force, the problems uncovered at the four prisons are endemic to the entire system, which houses about 900 young people at 28 facilities around the state.
While some prisons for violent and dangerous offenders should be preserved, the report calls for most to be replaced with a system of smaller centers closer to the communities where most of the families of the youths in custody live.
The task force was convened in 2008 after years of complaints about the prisons, punctuated by the death in 2006 of an emotionally disturbed 15-year-old boy at one center after two workers pinned him to the ground. The task force's recommendations are likely to help shape the state's response to the federal findings.
"I was not proud of my state when I saw some of these facilities," Mr. Travis said in an interview on Friday. "New York is no longer the leader it once was in the juvenile justice field."
New York's juvenile prisons are both extremely expensive and extraordinarily ineffective, according to the report, which will be given to Mr. Paterson on Monday. The state spends roughly $210,000 per youth annually, but three-quarters of those released from detention are arrested again within three years. And though the median age of those admitted to juvenile facilities is almost 16, one-third of those held read at a third-grade level.
The prisons are meant to house youths considered dangerous to themselves or others, but there is no standardized statewide system for assessing such risks, the report found.
In 2007, more than half of the youths who entered detention centers were sent there for the equivalent of misdemeanor offenses, in many cases theft, drug possession or even truancy. More than 80 percent were black or Latino, even though blacks and Latinos make up less than half the state's total youth population - a racial disparity that has never been explained, the report said.
Many of those detained have addictions or psychological illnesses for which less restrictive treatment programs were not available. Three-quarters of children entering the juvenile justice system have drug or alcohol problems, more than half have had a diagnosis of mental health problems and one-third have developmental disabilities.
Yet there are only 55 psychologists and clinical social workers assigned to the prisons, according to the task force. And none of the facilities employ psychiatrists, who have the authority to prescribe the drugs many mentally ill teenagers require.
While 76 percent of youths in custody are from the New York City area, nearly all the prisons are upstate, and the youths' relatives, many of them poor, cannot afford frequent visits, cutting them off from support networks.
"These institutions are often sorely underresourced, and some fail to keep their young people safe and secure, let alone meet their myriad service and treatment needs," according to the report, which was based on interviews with workers and youths in custody, visits to prisons and advice from experts. "In some facilities, youth are subjected to shocking violence and abuse."
Even before the task force's report is released, the Paterson administration is moving to reduce the number of youths held in juvenile prisons.
Gladys Carrión, the commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, the agency that oversees the juvenile justice system, has recommended that judges find alternative placements for most young offenders, according to an internal memorandum issued Oct. 28 by the state's deputy chief administrative judge.
Ms. Carrión also advised court officials that New York would not contest the Justice Department findings, according to the memo, and that officials were negotiating a settlement agreement to remedy the system.
Peter E. Kauffmann, a spokesman for Mr. Paterson, said the governor "looks forward to receiving the recommendations of the task force as we continue our efforts to transform the state's juvenile justice system from a correctional-punitive model to a therapeutic model."
The report contends that smaller facilities would place less strain on workers, helping reduce the use of physical force, and would be better able to tailor rehabilitation programs.
New York is not unique in using its juvenile prisons to house mentally ill teenagers, particularly as many states confront huge budget shortfalls that have resulted in significant cuts to mental health programs. Still, some states are trying to shift to smaller, community-based programs.
The report by New York's task force does not say how much money would be needed to overhaul the system, but as Mr. Paterson and state lawmakers try to close a $3.2 billion deficit, cost could become a major hurdle.
Ms. Carrión has faced resistance from some prison workers, who accuse her of making them scapegoats for the system's problems and minimizing the dangerous conditions they face. State records show a significant spike in on-the-job injuries, for which some workers blame Ms. Carrión's efforts to limit the use of force.
"We embrace the idea of moving towards a more therapeutic model of care, but you can't do that without more training and more staff," said Stephen A. Madarasz, a spokesman for the Civil Service Employees Association, the union that represents prison workers. "You're not dealing with wayward youth. In the more secure facilities, you're dealing with individuals who have been involved in pretty serious crimes."
Advocates have credited Ms. Carrión, who was appointed in 2007 by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, with instituting significant reforms, including installing cameras in some of the more troubled prisons and providing more counseling.
But the state has a long way to go, many advocates say.
"Even the kids that are not considered dangerous are shackled when they are being transferred from their homes to the centers upstate - hands and feet, sometimes even belly chains," said Clara Hemphill, a researcher and author of a report on the state's youth prisons published in October by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.
"It really is barbaric," she added, "the way they treat these kids."
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20) Menopause, as Brought to You by Big Pharma
By NATASHA SINGER and DUFF WILSON
December 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/business/13drug.html?ref=health
MILLIONS of American women in the 1990s were told they could help their bodies ward off major illness by taking menopausal hormone drugs. Some medical associations said so. Many gynecologists and physicians said so. Respected medical journals said so, too.
Along the way, television commercials positioned hormone drugs as treatments for more than hot flashes and night sweats - just two of the better-known symptoms of menopause, which is technically defined as commencing one year after a woman's last menstrual cycle.
One commercial about estrogen loss by the drug maker Wyeth featured a character named Dr. Heartman in a white coat discussing research into connections between menopause and heart disease, Alzheimer's disease and blindness.
"When considering menopause, consider the entire body of evidence," Dr. Heartman said. "Speak to your doctor about what you can do to help protect your health during and after menopause."
Connie Barton, then a medical office assistant in Peoria, Ill., was one woman who responded to such messages. She says she took Prempro, a hormone drug made by Wyeth, from 1997, when she was 53, until 2002, when she received a diagnosis of breast cancer. As part of her cancer treatment, she had a mastectomy to remove her left breast.
Now Ms. Barton, who said in an interview that she used Prempro in part because her doctor told her it could help prevent heart disease and dementia, is one of more than 13,000 people who have sued Wyeth over the last seven years, claiming in courts across the country that its menopause drugs caused breast cancer and other problems.
The suits also assert, based on recently unsealed court documents, that Wyeth oversold the benefits of menopausal hormones and failed to properly warn of the risks.
In October, a jury in a Pennsylvania state court awarded Ms. Barton $75 million in punitive damages from Wyeth on top of compensatory damages of $3.75 million.
The drug giant Pfizer, which absorbed Wyeth and its hormone drugs in a merger this year, says that Prempro is a safe, federally approved drug that did not cause Ms. Barton's breast cancer. Chris Loder, a Pfizer spokesman, says Wyeth acted responsibly by including a clear warning about a breast cancer risk on Prempro labels and by updating the warning as new evidence emerged.
Mr. Loder also notes that Pfizer plans to appeal every product-liability case on menopausal drugs it loses, including Ms. Barton's.
While Wyeth has faced periodic complaints about its blockbuster menopause drugs, the latest lawsuits have turned the company's menopausal hormone franchise into the kind of case study dissected at Ivy League business schools. Lawyers have made some documents public in the suits, and The New York Times and the nonprofit Public Library of Science filed successful motions to unseal thousands of documents in July.
To be sure, even some doctors who think hormone therapy has risks say it is the most effective treatment for symptoms directly associated with menopause.
The documents that have surfaced in the Wyeth cases offer a rare glimpse inside the file cabinets and hard drives of a major drug company. And the cases demonstrate the importance of litigation in detailing exactly how drug makers operate their businesses, says Dr. Jerome L. Avorn, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who has written about the subject in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
"The information coming out in litigation helps us understand how a belief in a 'protective benefit' of estrogens on the heart was able to spread like wildfire through the medical community," says Dr. Avorn, who is not involved in the Wyeth litigation.
"Thousands of doctors prescribed the drugs for millions of women on that basis," he says, adding that studies later contradicted the belief. "It will be very interesting to see whether the courts are able to connect the dots and make it clear whether this was a kind of medical ventriloquism on Wyeth's part."
PREMPRO is a combination of Premarin, an estrogen drug derived from the urine of pregnant mares and first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1942, with an additional hormone, progestin.
Part of the Premarin saga shows how a drug maker successfully and cannily expanded a franchise whose central ingredient is horse estrogens into a billion-dollar panacea for aging women. Yet several hundred pages of court documents also raise questions about another aspect of Premarin's trajectory: how Wyeth worked over decades to maintain the image and credibility of its hormone drugs even as the products were repeatedly under siege.
Pfizer representatives say court documents paint an unfair picture of Wyeth's practices and that plaintiffs' lawyers have cherry-picked documents for out-of-context comments to sway juries.
Still, the documents offer a snapshot of Wyeth's efforts. Taken together, they depict a company that over several decades spent tens of millions of dollars on influential physicians, professional medical societies, scientific publications, courses and celebrity ads, inundating doctors and patients with a sea of positive preventive health messages that plaintiffs' lawyers say deflected users' attention from cancer concerns.
Even as evidence mounted of an association of the drugs with cancer - first in the 1970s with Premarin and endometrial cancer, then in the 1990s with Prempro and breast cancer - Wyeth tried to contain the concerns, the court documents show. (A note handwritten in 1996 by a Wyeth employee responding to a new report of breast cancer risks associated with hormone therapy said: "Dismiss/distract.")
In 2002, researchers halted the largest clinical trial ever conducted of women's health because participants who took certain combined hormones had an increased risk of breast cancer - as well as a higher risk of heart attack, stroke and blood clots in the lungs - compared with those taking a placebo.
Other parts of the same federal study, called the Women's Health Initiative, later found that hormone drugs increased the risk of dementia in a subset of participants, those age 65 and older.
Sales of Wyeth's hormone drugs peaked at about $2 billion in 2001, but after results of the 2002 study came out sales plummeted.
Pfizer is now fighting the Prempro litigation along with lawsuits over its progestin drug, Provera. Mr. Loder, the Pfizer spokesman, says Pfizer and Wyeth had fully informed patients, doctors and regulators of the risks of their menopause drugs, based on the best available science at the time of the disclosures.
"They provided accurate warnings, performed studies on benefits and risks, and kept the F.D.A. fully informed," he says.
But last month, a federal appellate court in St. Louis ruled in the case of a plaintiff named Donna Scroggin that Wyeth's inaction over accumulating evidence - and the company's attempts to mitigate cancer concerns by trying to undermine unfavorable scientific reports - could allow a jury to find Wyeth guilty of malicious conduct and award punitive damages.
For its part, Pfizer contends that two state judges in Pennsylvania have reached the opposite conclusion: that juries should not be allowed to award punitive damages because there was insufficient evidence of corporate misconduct.
Whichever direction the different cases ultimately follow, the court papers associated with them illustrate a pattern in the history of hormone therapy. First, many doctors enthusiastically prescribe hormone therapy drugs. Then a few researchers publish studies cautioning about risks, causing sales to fall. And finally, some doctors start prescribing a new iteration of hormone drugs.
For example, Prempro now comes in lower doses. Prempro labels say the drug should be prescribed for the shortest duration appropriate for the treatment goals and risks of the individual woman; previous labels on Wyeth's hormone drugs for decades gave the same advice. The current label also says that using estrogens, with or without progestins, may increase a woman's chance of heart attack, stroke, breast cancer and blood clots.
MENOPAUSAL hormone therapy has long been pitched as a way to stave off what some doctors viewed as the undesirable aspects of female aging.
In the popular 1966 book "Feminine Forever," Dr. Robert A. Wilson, a gynecologist, used disparaging descriptions of aging women ("flabby," "shrunken," "dull-minded," "desexed") to upend the prevailing idea of menopause as a normal stage of life. Women and their physicians, Dr. Wilson wrote, should regard menopause as a degenerative disease that could be prevented or cured with the use of hormone drugs.
"No woman can be sure of escaping the horror of this living decay," Dr. Wilson wrote. "There is no need for either valor or pretense. The need is for hormones."
Premarin had been available for decades, but Dr. Wilson's book propelled the idea of hormone "replacement" into the popular consciousness and onto physicians' prescription pads. The revivifying drugs promised to inhibit the ravages of time on the appearance and the psyche, Dr. Wilson wrote.
As the popularity of estrogen grew, an increasing number of women developed cancer of the uterine lining, the endometrium. In 1975, an F.D.A. panel concluded there was a link between Premarin and endometrial cancer. The company then sent a letter to doctors trying to mitigate such concerns, documents show.
"Dear Doctor," wrote Dr. John B. Jewell, at the time the medical director of Ayerst, the Wyeth predecessor. "It would be simplistic indeed to attribute an apparent increase in the diagnosis of endometrial carcinoma solely to estrogen therapy." Women may still receive "proven benefits," he wrote, by using "the lowest maintenance dose needed to control the menopausal symptoms." He added that the company planned to study the issue further.
F.D.A. officials then met with company officials, saying they were "incensed" that the letter was "intended to obfuscate the issues," according to a 1976 memo signed by the F.D.A. and the company. The F.D.A. said it would issue a bulletin saying there was a clear link between estrogen therapy and endometrial cancer. In 1976, the maker of Premarin added a warning to the label about the risk of endometrial cancer.
But the company never conducted further studies on the risk of developing endometrial cancer, according to the St. Louis appeals court decision.
The company instead focused its risk research on the possibility of breast cancers associated with hormone replacement therapy. But two studies published in the mid-1970s in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that taking estrogen therapy had increased the risk of endometrial cancer by at least five times.
Reports in 1975 about endometrial cancer "resulted in a precipitous decrease in estrogen use," according to a history of hormone therapy in The American Journal of Medicine in 2005.
In 1980, researchers at Boston University Medical Center estimated that the use of hormone therapy had caused more than 15,000 cases of endometrial cancer in the United States between 1971 and 1975 alone.
"This represents one of the largest epidemics of serious iatrogenic disease" - meaning disease caused by physician-administered treatments - "that has ever occurred in this country," the authors wrote. (Mr. Loder said Pfizer was not familiar with that report.)
Today, physicians prescribe Premarin to women who have had hysterectomies and therefore are not at risk for endometrial cancer.
BY the mid-1990s, after a few studies had reported a protective effect of hormone drugs on the heart, Wyeth had begun to reposition menopausal hormone therapy as a preventive health choice that could help inhibit heart disease and other maladies, according to court documents.
That marketing strategy coincided with the introduction of Wyeth's new combination hormone drug Prempro, which included a progestin hormone to keep estrogen from causing excessive cell growth in the uterine lining.
In one commercial from a Wyeth research institute, the model Lauren Hutton runs down a beach and warns of the health risks of estrogen loss.
"My doctor said if you don't replace estrogen that you lose at menopause, your risk for certain age-related diseases could increase," Ms. Hutton said in the commercial. In a voice-over, a narrator told viewers about studies looking into the connections between menopause and heart disease, memory loss and sight loss.
"Believe me," Ms. Hutton said, "the time to protect your future is now."
Sally Beatty, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, said this was a "help seeking" ad, of the type encouraged by the F.D.A. She added that the promotion did not mention any specific drugs, not did it suggest that drugs could cure the ailments described.
The labels for Premarin and Prempro at the time said the drugs were approved to treat moderate to severe symptoms of menopause like hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness and to prevent osteoporosis.
But Wyeth also positioned its menopausal hormone drugs as having larger protective benefits, court documents show.
Wyeth used proxies to promote a wide range of health benefits from hormone therapy, paying millions of dollars to influential doctors and medical groups and helping them develop abstracts for medical conferences and articles for medical journals, according to court documents.
The company also paid $12 million to sponsor continuing medical education programs from 2002 through 2006 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The programs, including an assertion that the Women's Health Initiative and another heart-risk study "miss the mark on quality of life," reached thousands of doctors.
Doctors were aware in the 1990s that hormone therapy could increase a woman's risk of breast cancer, says Dr. Carol Bates, the director of the primary care program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
But based on the results of observational studies that had been published, many physicians, herself included, believed that the drugs' ostensible ability to reduce heart attacks and perhaps Alzheimer's would outweigh a breast cancer risk, she says.
"In the 1990s, there was actually tremendous pressure to put women on hormone therapy, and it came from a good place," Dr. Bates says. "But it was taken a bit to the extreme."
HORMONE therapy - aimed at the symptoms it effectively treats and with full disclosure about its possible risks - has many advocates. Dr. Lynne T. Shuster, the director of the women's health clinic at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., says such regimens can be very worthwhile for treating hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness associated with menopause.
And some users agree.
Irene Fisher, a kitchen and bath designer in Baldwin, N.Y., says she has been taking Prempro for 16 years to control hot flashes and night sweats.
"I always feel good when I take it," she says. The benefits are worth a small risk, Ms. Fisher says, adding that she has an annual mammogram to check for breast cancer and that "I think you have to know your own body."
But many women were not so fully informed in the 1990s.
In 1996, for example, a federal study reported that breast cancer risk may have been "substantially underestimated." Wyeth reacted with plans to dismiss it as "just one more paper," and try to "overshadow" it by directing journalists to other studies, according to documents cited in the court of appeals decision in Missouri.
In 1997, Wyeth began working with DesignWrite, a company in Princeton, N.J., that is paid by drug makers to develop manuscripts for publication in medical journals. The specific objective of a publication plan for Premarin was to "increase physician awareness on the multitude of benefits that hormone replacement therapy provides" and "diminish the negative perceptions associated with estrogens and cancer," according to a 1997 DesignWrite proposal prepared for Wyeth.
Over the next decade, Wyeth paid DesignWrite to prepare at least 60 articles for publication in medical journals on the potential benefits of hormone therapy for cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, colon cancer, vision loss and other health problems, the court documents show.
In response to an e-mail query, Michael Platt, president of DesignWrite, wrote that the articles were all medically and scientifically accurate and valid and peer reviewed.
But Wyeth's and DesignWrite's effort hit an obstacle in 2002 when researchers reported the results of the Women's Health Initiative.
The National Institutes of Health ultimately decided to start using the term "menopausal hormone therapy" instead of "hormone replacement therapy," says Marcia L. Stefanick, a professor of medicine at the Stanford University medical school who was principal investigator on the Women's Health Initiative study at her institution.
While the drugs are effective at treating symptoms like hot flashes, she says, the word "replacement" implies that women need hormone drugs after menopause. "But there is no good evidence that women need this after menopause," Professor Stefanick says.
In 2003, Wyeth added a "black box" warning to the label saying Prempro should not be prescribed to prevent cardiovascular disease.
The same year, the F.D.A. approved a lower dose version of Prempro so women would have more options.
Today, many doctors who once offered hormone therapy to women without symptoms like hot flashes limit the use of the drug to those with symptoms, prescribing low doses for a short time.
"Right now, the big difference is we do not recommend hormone therapy for good health or health promotion or anti-aging," says Dr. Shuster of the Mayo Clinic.
And even with lower-dose hormones, doctors do not have a uniform view on what constitutes the optimal duration.
Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, an associate professor at the medical school of Georgetown University, considers both Premarin and Prempro examples of drugs that gained widespread popularity before science had established the full extent of their risks.
"Where there has always been a push is where there isn't data," says Dr. Fugh-Berman, who has been a paid expert witness for plaintiffs in the hormone litigation. "Now, low-dose hormones are being pushed."
LIKE Dr. Wilson, the gynecologist in the 1960s who identified the evils of menopause, contemporary voices are advocating hormones as an anti-aging treatment.
The actress Suzanne Somers, for example, has identified her own lineup of maladies, which she calls the Seven Dwarves of Menopause: "Itchy. Bitchy. Sweaty. Sleepy. Bloated. Forgetful. All Dried Up."
In books with titles like "The Sexy Years" and "Ageless," Ms. Somers has promoted the use of "bio-identical" hormones, which can be prescribed by doctors in customized doses and can be prepared individually by pharmacies.
But Dr. Shuster of the Mayo Clinic says the hormones have not been extensively studied for safety and efficacy. And, unlike branded hormone therapy, she says, they have not been approved by the F.D.A.
Women, Dr. Shuster says, should not assume that compounded hormones are safer than F.D.A.-approved menopausal hormone drugs. Nevertheless, with sales of more than two million books, Ms. Somers has become a menopause guru to millions.
"I think I had a lot to do with making the word 'menopause' mentionable," Ms. Somers, 63, said in a phone interview last week. She said the compounded hormones were safe, and she sent some articles from medical journals to back up her point.
In fact, much of Ms. Somers's description of menopause as a deficiency that can be rebalanced with hormones sounds like a modern take on "Feminine Forever."
"Hormones," Ms. Somers said last week, "are the juice of life."
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21) Veterans Group Calls On Soldiers to Refuse Orders to Deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq
Monday 14 December 2009
By Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Report
http://www.truthout.org/1214091
In response to President Barack Obama's announcement on December 1 to deploy 30,000 additional troops to the occupation of Afghanistan, the organization March Forward!, comprising both veterans and active-duty members of the US military, has called on all soldiers to refuse their orders to deploy.
"March Forward! calls on all service members to refuse orders to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq," reads a press release from the group from December 3. "We offer our unconditional support and solidarity. Join us in the fight to ensure that no more soldiers or civilians lose their lives in these criminal wars."
Michael Prysner, a former corporal in the Army who served from 2001-2005 and a veteran of the occupation of Iraq, co-founded the group with another Iraq war veteran, James Circello.
Truthout asked Prysner how he responds to those who believe a soldier should always follow orders, no matter what.
"In my experience the majority of people joining the military today join out of necessity, like money, jobs, help for their family, etc., so most don't join for ideological or patriotic reasons. Most are driven into the military by economic conditions. We see this playing out now, as people are joining in droves because of the economy."
Prysner added, "Yes, people do sign a contract to follow orders, but those orders are wrong and unlawful. We want to educate people to the fact that these are immoral orders, and they [soldiers] are being used as muscle for corporations, to colonize the developing world, and it's not legitimate. People who join and take this oath seriously who think they are in [the military] to defend the US, this is not what we are being used for in the military today."
Prysner has written about his experience in Iraq, "... there was no computer screen separating me from the suffering civilian population. I spent 12 months in Iraq, doing everything from prisoner interrogations, to ground surveillance missions, to home raids. It was my firsthand experiences in Iraq that radicalized me. I believed I was going to Iraq to help liberate and better the lives of an oppressed people, but I soon realized that my purpose in Iraq was to be the oppressor, and to clear the way for US corporations with no regard for human life."
After he separated from the Army in 2005, Prysner "understood that the occupation I was a part of was a crime against humanity. I understood that illegal conquering of Iraq was for profit, carried out by a system that serves a tiny class of super-rich whose endless drive for wealth is at the expense of working people in the United States and abroad."
According to Prysner, the lessons he learned from being part of the US occupation of Iraq taught him that, "I still had the same drive to fight for freedom, justice and equality as I did when I joined, and I understood that fighting for those things meant fighting against the US government, not on behalf of it."
To those who call him and his organization "anti-American" and/or "unpatriotic," Prysner has this to say:
"I would say that I have more in common with my sisters and brothers in Iraq and Afghanistan than I do with these people in DC who've sent us to war. If that's unpatriotic, then yes, I am. But patriotism and racism are the only things the military has to fall back on to convince people to do the things we are being asked to do today."
March Forward! was founded in 2008, and the aim of the organization is "to unite all those who have served and who currently serve in the US military, and who want to stand up for our rights and for that which is right."
"We are new and growing," Prysner explained. "We have seen somewhat consistent growth, and we're expecting this to accelerate now."
The group's statement from December 3 adds, "On December 1, we got a clear order from President Obama. For many more years, we will be sent to kill, to die, to be maimed and wounded, in a war where 'victory' is impossible, against a people who are not our enemies. For over eight years, we have come home in coffins, in wheelchairs, with our skin burned and with our days and nights haunted by the trauma of war. We return home to a VA whose services are so inadequate that active duty soldiers who succumb to suicide outnumber those killed in combat."
James Circello is a former Army sergeant and veteran of the US occupation of Iraq. Circello, who joined the military in 2001, describes his experience in Iraq as follows:
"During the occupation of Iraq, the truth about what the United States government has done to the country of Iraq became more apparent. Open wastewater flowed through neighborhood streets where children played soccer. Families were thrown out of their homes with simple accusations from others. Vehicles were taken on sight by the military if individuals couldn't provide proper documents claiming they own the vehicle. These events and others helped in strengthening my opposition to the so-called 'War on Terror.'"
In April 2007, Circello left his base in Vicenza, Italy, and went absent without leave (AWOL) in protest of US policy in the Middle East. In November 2007, he turned himself in to the military at Fort Knox and was discharged within three days.
Circello has remained very active with his work against US Foreign Policy, having worked with Iraq Veterans Against the War and the group Courage to Resist before joining March Forward!.
Circello's decision to go AWOL was his way of refusing to deploy to Afghanistan.
I had been fighting myself internally after my time in Iraq, about whether to deploy again," he explained to Truthout, "I ended up back in my old unit that was preparing to deploy, so at that moment I took it into my hands, and decided I wasn't going to go kill Afghans that had done nothing to me, or the American people. It was a defining moment for me."
According to Pentagon figures, since October 2001, more than 50,000 soldiers from all branches of the military have gone AWOL.
John Raughter is the communications director for the American Legion, an organization that describes itself as "a patriotic, war-time veterans organization, devoted to mutual helpfulness," according to its web site.
Raughter is clear about his stance on the rights of soldiers. "We have an all-volunteer force," he explained to Truthout, "These are not draftees. They swore an oath to obey the orders of the Commander in Chief."
According to Raughter, the American Legion does not, in any way, support AWOL soldiers or those who refuse to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. "Within reason, the military should be able to enforce obedience. Obedience and order are critical for the military to do its mission. People can't pick and choose which orders to obey and which not to [obey]. If it's a lawful order, they are obliged to obey."
Yet the oath enlisted soldiers must take before being deployed, reads:
"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, is the co-author of "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent" with Kathleen Gilberd. In the book, they write, "Rules of Engagement limit forms of combat, levels of force, and legitimate enemy targets, defining what is legal in warfare and what is not. (They're also) defined by an established body of international (and US) law that leaves no ambiguity."
Cohn and Gilberd argue that every US war since WWII has been illegal. Article 51 of the UN Charter only permits the "right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member ... until the Security Council has taken measures to maintain international peace and security."
In addition, Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 (the war powers clause) of the US Constitution authorizes only both houses of Congress, not the president, to declare war. Nonetheless, that process has been followed only five times in our history and last used on December 8, 1941, after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
Nevertheless, Raughter believes soldiers who are dissenting against the occupations should have never joined the ranks. "If they are ethically opposed to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I would say that most of these people have enlisted or reenlisted since the beginning of the war. These wars were occurring when they made this oath of enlistment. It should have come to their minds."
Circello's response to those who refer to their tactic of encouraging soldiers to refuse deployment orders as being "unpatriotic or un-American?
"This is a tactic of demonization and we reject it," he explained, "The corporations profiting in these wars don't care about America or the American people. Is providing mercenaries to kill innocent people overseas, and bombs to kill innocent people, is that American and patriotic? The people who use these terms are demagogues. We can't forget that America was a land of institutionalized slavery, slavery was American, and folks like Dr. Martin Luther King, when they stood up to racism were called un-American ... so the same thing happens today. When you protest war, or call on soldiers to desert based on their own interest, you are called un-American."
Prysner and Circello's organization has stated, "March Forward! supports the right of all service members to refuse illegal and immoral orders. Orders to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq are just that: illegal and immoral. We have no reason to fight in these wars, and we have every right to refuse to be a part of them."
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22) Judging Our Children
By JONATHAN LIPPMAN
Op-Ed Contributor
December 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/opinion/15lippman.html?_r=1
A NEW report issued by a state panel formed to investigate New York's juvenile detention centers has found that they "fail to keep their young people safe and secure, let alone meet their myriad service and treatment needs," and that "youth are subjected to shocking violence and abuse." This news, which comes on the heels of a federal study that also documented squalid conditions, makes plain to the world what many of us inside the state's justice system have been saying for years: we need a fundamental rethinking of how we respond to troubled young people.
A consensus is emerging among juvenile justice policymakers, including prosecutors, that New York must limit the number of young people sent to expensive prison-like residential facilities. The goal should be to create more community-based intervention programs, which have proved less expensive and more effective at reducing crime.
There will be no progress, however, until sentencing judges have confidence that the probation departments charged with supervising young people have adequate financing and can connect youths to the services they need. This requires a relatively simple but bold step: making the juvenile probation system an arm of the courts, rather than of the executive branch, as it is now.
It costs an estimated $210,000 per year to confine a juvenile in a state residential facility. The return on this investment - which is roughly 10 times the cost of the most expensive community-based intervention - is shockingly poor. The most recent estimates are that 89 percent of boys placed in these facilities go on to commit further crimes.
While many of the 1,600 young people sent to New York residential facilities each year are there for committing serious felony-level offenses, the majority are not. The sad truth is that a judge's decision to confine a young person often has much to do with the severity of the offense and more to do with whether the county is able to provide the services needed to deal with chaotic home situations, addictions and mental health problems.
New York's judges, however, have already shown that they can play an important role in connecting troubled individuals with needed services. Over the last decade, we have made it a priority to link nonviolent adult offenders - mostly those involved in drug cases - to community-based drug and mental health treatment instead of jailing them. By engaging judges in monitoring defendants in treatment, we have become a national model for reducing both substance abuse and recidivism.
Why not apply this model to juvenile probation? Each year, family court judges in New York sentence about 4,500 young people to probation. These sentences are administered by local juvenile probation departments, which are overburdened and underfinanced, in large part because the probation system has no strong advocate in Albany. Two decades ago, state dollars made up about 47 percent of county probation budgets; today that figure is below 20 percent.
If our goal is to reduce the number of young people behind bars, we will inevitably increase the number of them on juvenile probation. This will make it ever harder for financially ailing county probation departments to carry out a judge's sentence. But having the state judiciary assume oversight would not only ensure that judges could do a better job of holding young defendants accountable, but also give the juvenile probation system a champion in state government.
We have reached a crisis: the state agency overseeing juvenile facilities has asked New York's family court judges not to institutionalize young offenders unless they are a significant risk to public safety. But this is just a Band-Aid. A real solution requires a strategy for reducing incarceration and crime.
The experience of New York's adult drug courts indicates that it is possible to do both - if judges feel confident that alternative sanctions are meaningful and rigorous. Having the judicial branch itself oversee juvenile probation would be an important step in limiting the number of youths incarcerated, protecting public safety, closing unneeded residential facilities and saving money.
Jonathan Lippman is the chief judge of the State of New York.
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23) Poll Reveals Trauma of Joblessness in U.S.
By MICHAEL LUO and MEGAN THEE-BRENAN
December 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/us/15poll.html?ref=us
More than half of the nation's unemployed workers have borrowed money from friends or relatives since losing their jobs. An equal number have cut back on doctor visits or medical treatments because they are out of work.
Almost half have suffered from depression or anxiety. About 4 in 10 parents have noticed behavioral changes in their children that they attribute to their difficulties in finding work.
Joblessness has wreaked financial and emotional havoc on the lives of many of those out of work, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll of unemployed adults, causing major life changes, mental health issues and trouble maintaining even basic necessities.
The results of the poll, which surveyed 708 unemployed adults from Dec. 5 to Dec. 10 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points, help to lay bare the depth of the trauma experienced by millions across the country who are out of work as the jobless rate hovers at 10 percent and, in particular, as the ranks of the long-term unemployed soar.
Roughly half of the respondents described the recession as a hardship that had caused fundamental changes in their lives. Generally, those who have been out of work longer reported experiencing more acute financial and emotional effects.
"I lost my job in March, and from there on, everything went downhill," said Vicky Newton, 38, of Mount Pleasant, Mich., a single mother who had been a customer-service representative in an insurance agency.
"After struggling and struggling and not being able to pay my house payments or my other bills, I finally sucked up my pride," she said in an interview after the poll was conducted. "I got food stamps just to help feed my daughter."
Over the summer, she abandoned her home in Flint, Mich., after she started receiving foreclosure notices. She now lives 90 minutes away, in a rental house owned by her father.
With unemployment driving foreclosures nationwide, a quarter of those polled said they had either lost their home or been threatened with foreclosure or eviction for not paying their mortgage or rent. About a quarter, like Ms. Newton, have received food stamps. More than half said they had cut back on both luxuries and necessities in their spending. Seven in 10 rated their family's financial situation as fairly bad or very bad.
But the impact on their lives was not limited to the difficulty in paying bills. Almost half said unemployment had led to more conflicts or arguments with family members and friends; 55 percent have suffered from insomnia.
"Everything gets touched," said Colleen Klemm, 51, of North Lake, Wis., who lost her job as a manager at a landscaping company last November. "All your relationships are touched by it. You're never your normal happy-go-lucky person. Your countenance, your self-esteem goes. You think, 'I'm not employable.' "
A quarter of those who experienced anxiety or depression said they had gone to see a mental health professional. Women were significantly more likely than men to acknowledge emotional issues.
Tammy Linville, 29, of Louisville, Ky., said she lost her job as a clerical worker for the Census Bureau a year and a half ago. She began seeing a therapist for depression every week through Medicaid but recently has not been able to go because her car broke down and she cannot afford to fix it.
Her partner works at the Ford plant in the area, but his schedule has been sporadic. They have two small children and at this point, she said, they are "saving quarters for diapers."
"Every time I think about money, I shut down because there is none," Ms. Linville said. "I get major panic attacks. I just don't know what we're going to do."
Nearly half of the adults surveyed admitted to feeling embarrassed or ashamed most of the time or sometimes as a result of being out of work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the traditional image of men as breadwinners, men were significantly more likely than women to report feeling ashamed most of the time.
There was a pervasive sense from the poll that the American dream had been upended for many. Nearly half of those polled said they felt in danger of falling out of their social class, with those out of work six months or more feeling especially vulnerable. Working-class respondents felt at risk in the greatest numbers.
Nearly half of respondents said they did not have health insurance, with the vast majority citing job loss as a reason, a notable finding given the tug of war in Congress over a health care overhaul. The poll offered a glimpse of the potential ripple effect of having no coverage. More than half characterized the cost of basic medical care as a hardship.
Many in the ranks of the unemployed appear to be rethinking their career and life choices. Just over 40 percent said they had moved or considered moving to another part of the state or country where there were more jobs. More than two-thirds of respondents had considered changing their career or field, and 44 percent of those surveyed had pursued job retraining or other educational opportunities.
Joe Whitlow, 31, of Nashville, worked as a mechanic until a repair shop he was running with a friend finally petered out in August. He had contemplated going back to school before, but the potential loss in income always deterred him. Now he is enrolled at a local community college, planning to study accounting.
"When everything went bad, not that I didn't have a choice, but it made the choice easier," Mr. Whitlow said.
The poll also shed light on the formal and informal safety nets that the jobless have relied upon. More than half said they were receiving or had received unemployment benefits. But 61 percent of those receiving benefits said the amount was not enough to cover basic necessities.
Meanwhile, a fifth said they had received food from a nonprofit organization or religious institution. Among those with a working spouse, half said their spouse had taken on additional hours or another job to help make ends meet.
Even those who have stayed employed have not escaped the recession's bite. According to a New York Times/CBS News nationwide poll conducted at the same time as the poll of unemployed adults, about 3 in 10 people said that in the past year, as a result of bad economic conditions, their pay had been cut.
In terms of casting blame for the high unemployment rate, 26 percent of unemployed adults cited former President George W. Bush; 12 percent pointed the finger at banks; 8 percent highlighted jobs going overseas and the same number blamed politicians. Only 3 percent blamed President Obama.
Those out of work were split, however, on the president's handling of job creation, with 47 percent expressing approval and 44 percent disapproval.
Unemployed Americans are divided over what the future holds for the job market: 39 percent anticipate improvement, 36 percent expect it will stay the same, and 22 percent say it will get worse.
Marina Stefan and Dalia Sussman contributed reporting.
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