Monday, February 21, 2011

BAUAW NEWSLETTER - MONDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2011

Solidarity Forever

"Solidarity Forever," the unofficial anthem of the American labor movement, was written in 1915 by a little-known poet named Ralph Chaplin and set to the civil war tune "John Brown's Body." Since then, it has been sung in union halls, jails and on picket lines across the country. Even now, at a time when labor rolls are down, the song endures.

Lyrics to 'Solidarity Forever'

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.
CHORUS:
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong.
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.
It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;
But the union makes us strong.
All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.
-National Public Radio, February 19, 2011
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4830828

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Saturday, March 19, 2011: Resist the War Machine!
8th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq
In San Francisco, people will gather at 12 noon for a rally at UN Plaza (7th & Market Sts.) followed by a march to Lo. 2 boycotted hotels. The theme of the March 19 march and rally will be "No to War & Colonial Occupation - Fund Jobs, Healthcare & Education - Solidarity with SF Hotel Workers!" 12,000 SF hotel workers, members of UNITE-HERE Local 2, have been fighting for a new contract that protects their healthcare, wages and working conditions.
http://www.answercoalition.org/sf/index.html

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RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.

THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.

WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.

WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!

WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.

WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.

WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.

Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace

TRADUCCION:

Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior

Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.

Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.

Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.

Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.

Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.

VICTORY IN EGYPT!
U.S. Hands off the Ongoing Egyptian Revolution!
End US Military Aid to Egypt and Israel!
A Statement by the United National Antiwar Committee

On Friday, February 11th, the heroic Egyptian people won a historic victory with the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. Now they are proceeding to secure this victory by moving on to eliminate the rest of this hated regime, and to win the freedom, jobs, equality and dignity which has motivated their revolution from the start.

The announcement of Mubarak's resignation was coupled with news that the officers of the Armed Forces are now running the country. This comes as more and more rank and file soldiers and lower-level officers were joining the protests, and as others stood by as protesters blockaded the state TV, parliament and other government facilities.

We can be sure that the military hierarchy in alliance with what's left of the old regime will do everything in their power to stop the blossoming revolution in its tracks, to tell the protesters they must go home now and wait for gifts from on high.

AND THE DANGER IS REAL THAT WHEN THE MASSES SAY NO THAT THE MILITARY WILL DO WHAT IT DOES BEST.

We can be equally sure that Washington will give its full blessing and backing to these efforts of the remnants of the old regime and the military. Obama has made clear that he is solidly committed to the new face of the Egyptian regime, Omar Suleiman, who has proven over the years that he will collaborate with Washington in its torture and rendition policies. Meanwhile Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted in the New York Times saying that Washington would help organize political parties for future elections in Egypt - a typical maneuver used to subvert revolutions.

The United National Antiwar Committee has repeatedly urged supporters to mobilize for demonstrations called by Egyptian organizations in the US in solidarity with the revolution in Egypt and against US military and diplomatic intervention. UNAC hails the call for today's march in Washington, DC by Egyptian groups, and takes this opportunity to point out the special obligations of antiwar activists in the US given Washington's multifaceted efforts to obstruct the wishes of the majority of the Egyptian people.

The $1.3 billion a year in military aid which the US gives to Egypt must be cut off immediately. All US soldiers serving in Egypt, such as those in the Multinational Force in the Sinai, must be immediately withdrawn. And the US warships headed for Egypt must be immediately turned around.

UNAC has from its founding opposed all US aid to Israel. That position takes on particular importance given the real danger that as the Egyptian revolution advances, Israel will intervene to derail it - or launch new attacks against Lebanon, Gaza, or elsewhere, as a diversionary tactic.

Amidst the euphoria in Cairo, Al Jazeera interviewed a young woman in the crowd, who said:

"Its not just about Mubarak stepping down. It is about the process of bringing the people to power... The issue of women, the issue of Palestine, now everything seems possible."

WE MUST ENSURE THOSE POSSIBILITIES STAY ALIVE! UNAC ENCOURAGES ALL ANTIWAR ACTIVISTS AND ORGANIZATIONS TO STEP UP SUPPORT FOR RALLIES PLANNED BY THE EGYPTIAN COMMUNITY, AND TO INITIATE THEM WHERE NONE ARE PLANNED.

Finally, we urge all supporters of the Egyptian people to redouble efforts to build the national antiwar marches called by UNAC for April 9th in New York and April 10th in San Francisco. These marches, called to demand an end to US wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, an end to support for Israeli occupation, and in favor of social justice and jobs, take on ever more importance with the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere throughout the Arab world and Washington's attempts to crush or derail them.

SUPPORT THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY AND AGAINST EXPLOITATION AND OPPRESSION THROUGHOUT THE ARAB WORLD!

BUILD THE NATIONAL ANTIWAR MARCHES ON APRIL 9TH AND 10TH!
For more information: In SF: UNACNorthernCalifornia@gmail.com; (415) 49 NO War; www.unacpeace.org, unacpeace@gmail.com. For NYC information: unac-nyc@juno.com

San Franciscans/Northern California: Next UNAC Organizing Meeting: Sunday February 20 at 1 PM, Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street, (between 15th and 16th Streets second floor in the rear) SF

SAVE THE DATE: Sunday, APRIL 10, Mass antiwar/social justice march and rally, Assemble: 11 AM Dolores Park, 19th and Dolores; Rally Noon; March at 1:30 pm.

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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. ARTICLES IN FULL

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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

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MEDIA RELEASE from Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists (BFUU)

A Benefit Evening to Support Bradley Manning

Thursday, Feb 24, 2011 7 - 9 pm

Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists

Fellowship Hall address: 1924 Cedar Street , Berkeley CA 94709

Sponsored by: Courage To Resist, Social Justice Committee of the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists & Code Pink Golden Gate

Wheelchair Accessible. Suggested Donation is $5 - 10. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Dr. Caroline Knowles of the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists will give the welcoming remarks.

Daniel Ellsberg will speak. As the "Pentagon Papers" whistle-blower of the Vietnam War era, he is in a unique position to put the the current issues into historical context.

http://www.ellsberg.net

Senator Mike Gravel has been referencing the damage to a democratic society that excessive secrecy and media manipulation has had on the ability of citizens to exercise informed judgment. All the while the government has passed more repressive laws since the 9/11 attacks that intrude on citizen privacy and rights.

http://www.mikegravel.us

Jeff Patterson of "Courage To Resist" will provide an overview of the issues and the history of Bradley Manning's case.

http://www.couragetoresist.org

Cynthia Papermaster of Code Pink Golden Gate chapter will MC. She will offer views on the treatment of Bradley Manning and will report on her recent experience at the demonstration on MLK DAY at Fort Quantico Prison where Bradley Manning is being held in solitary confinement.

http://www.codepinkgoldengate.org

Details of the event can be found at BFUU Upcoming Events Webpage.
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists

Fellowship Hall address: 1924 Cedar Street , Berkeley CA 94709
Phone: 510-841-4824
www.bfuu.org
office@bfuu.org

Submitted by
Shirley Adams
404-245-7977 (cell)
BFUU Membership Team
The only gift is a portion of thyself.- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Saturday, March 19, 2011: Resist the War Machine!
8th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq
In San Francisco, people will gather at 12 noon for a rally at UN Plaza (7th & Market Sts.) followed by a march to Lo. 2 boycotted hotels. The theme of the March 19 march and rally will be "No to War & Colonial Occupation - Fund Jobs, Healthcare & Education - Solidarity with SF Hotel Workers!" 12,000 SF hotel workers, members of UNITE-HERE Local 2, have been fighting for a new contract that protects their healthcare, wages and working conditions.


Come to Washington, D.C., on March 19 for veterans-led civil resistance at the White House

March 19 is the 8th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Iraq today remains occupied by nearly 50,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of foreign mercenaries.

Saturday, March 19, 2011, the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, will be an international day of action against the war machine.

The war in Afghanistan is raging. The U.S. is invading and bombing Pakistan. The U.S. is financing endless atrocities against the people of Palestine, relentlessly threatening Iran and bringing Korea to the brink of a new war.

While the United States will spend $1 trillion for war, occupation and weapons in 2011, 30 million people in the United States remain unemployed or severely underemployed, and cuts in education, housing and healthcare are imposing a huge toll on the people.

Actions of civil resistance are spreading.

Last Dec. 16, a veterans-led civil resistance at the White House played an important role in bringing the anti-war movement from protest to resistance. Enduring hours of heavy snow, 131 veterans and other anti-war activists lined the White House fence and were arrested.

In Washington, D.C., on March 19 there will be an even larger veterans-led civil resistance at the White House initiated by Veterans for Peace. People from all over the country are joining together for a Noon Rally at Lafayette Park, followed by a march on the White House where the veterans-led civil resistance will take place.

Many people coming to Washington, D.C., will be also participating in the Sunday, March 20 demonstration at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia to support PFC Bradley Manning. Quantico is one hour from D.C. Manning is suspected of leaking Iraq and Afghan war logs to Wikileaks. For the last eight months, he has been held in solitary confinement, pre-trial punishment, rather than pre-trial detention.

The ANSWER Coalition is fully mobilizing its east coast and near mid-west chapters and activist networks to be at the White House.

In Los Angeles, the March 19 rally and march will gather at 12 noon at Hollywood and Vine.

A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org/
info@AnswerCoalition.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
Boston: 857-334-5084 | New York City: 212-694-8720 | Chicago: 773-463-0311
San Francisco: 415-821-6545| Los Angeles: 213-251-1025 | Albuquerque: 505-268-2488

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Are you joining us on April 8 at the Pentagon in a climate chaos protest codenamed "Operation Disarmageddon?" It has been decided that affinity groups will engage in nonviolent autonomous actions. Do you have an affinity group? Do you have an idea for an action?

So far these are some of the suggested actions:

Send a letter to Sec. of War Robert Gates demanding a meeting to disclose the Pentagon's role in destroying the planet. He will ignore the letter, so a delegation would then go to the Metro Entrance to demand a meeting.

Use crime tape around some area of the Pentagon. The idea of crime/danger taping off the building could be done just outside the main Pentagon reservation entrance (intersection of Army/Navy) making the Alexandria PD the arresting authority (if needed) and where there is no ban on photography. Hazmat suits, a 'converted' truck (or other vehicle) could be part of the street theater. The area where I am thinking is also almost directly below I-95 and there is a bridge over the intersection - making a banner drop possible. Perhaps with the hazmat/street closure at ground level with a banner from above. If possible a coordinated action could be done at other Pentagon entrances and / or other war making institutions.

A procession onto the Pentagon reservation, without reservations, and set up a camp on one of the lawns surrounding The Pentagon. This contingent would reclaim the space in the name of peace and Mother Earth. This contingent would plan to stay there until The Pentagon is turned into a 100% green building using sustainable energy employing people who work for peace and the abolishment of war and life-affirming endeavors.

Bring a potted tree to be placed on the Pentagon's property to symbolize the need to radically reduce its environmental destructiveness.

Since the Pentagon is failing to return to the taxpayers the money it has misappropriated, "Foreclose on the Pentagon."

Banner hanging from a bridge.

Hand out copies of David Swanson's book WAR IS A LIE. Try to deliver a copy to Secretary of War Robert Gates.

Have short speeches in park between Pentagon and river; nice photo with Pentagon in background.

Die-in and chalk or paint outlines of victim's bodies everywhere that remain after the arrest to point to where real crimes are really being committed.

Establish command center, Peacecom? Paxcom? Put several people in white shirts and ties plus a few generals directing their armies for "Operation Disarmageddon."

Make the linkage between the tax dollars going to the Pentagon and war tax resistance. Use the WRL pie chart and carry banners "foreclose on war" and "money for green jobs not war jobs."

Hold a rally with representative speakers before going to the Pentagon Reservation. This would be an opportunity to speak out against warmongering and the Pentagon's role in destroying the environment.

As part of "Operation Disarmageddon," we will take a tree and plant it on the reservation. Our sign reads, "Plant trees not landmines."

Use crime tape on Army/Navy Drive to declare the Pentagon a crime scene. Do street theater there as well. Other affinity groups could go to selected entrances.

Establish a Peace Command Center at the Pentagon. Hold solidarity actions at federal buildings and corporate offices.

What groups have you contacted to suggest joining us at the Pentagon? See below for those who plan to be at the Pentagon on April 8 and for what groups have been contacted.

Kagiso,

Max

April 8, 2011 participants

Beth Adams
Ellen Barfield
Tim Chadwick
Joy First
Jeffrey Halperin
Malachy Kilbride
Max Obuszewski
David Swanson

April 8 Outreach

Beth Adams -- Earth First, Puppet Underground, Emma's Revolution, Joe Gerson-AFSC Cambridge, Code Pink(national via Lisa Savage in Maine), Vets for Peace, FOR, UCC Justice & Witness Ministries, Traprock, Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist Order, (National-INt'l) Vets for Peace and WILPF, Pace e Bene, Christian Peace Witness & UCC Justice & Witness (Cleveland).

Tim Chadwick -- Brandywine, Lepoco, Witness against Torture, Vets for Peace (Thomas Paine Chapter Lehigh Valley PA), and Witness for Peace DC.

Jeffrey Halperin -- peace groups in Saratoga Spring, NY

Jack Lombardo - UNAC will add April 8 2011 to the Future Actions page on our blog, and make note in upcoming E-bulletins, but would appreciate a bit of descriptive text from the organizers and contact point to include when we do - so please advise ASAP! Also, we'll want to have such an announcement for our next print newsletter, which will be coming out in mid-December.

Max Obuszewski - Jonah House & Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore

Bonnie Urfer notified 351 individuals and groups on the Nukewatch list

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RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.

THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.

WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.

WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!

WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.

WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.

WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.

Next organizing meeting Sunday, February 20, 1:00 P.M., Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street (between 15th and 16th Streets, San Francisco)

Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace

TRADUCCION:

Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior

Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.

Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.

Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.

Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.

Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.

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B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:
[Some of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:
http://bauaw.blogspot.com/ or bauaw.org ...bw]

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solidarity

'We Stand With You as You Stood With Us': Statement to Workers of Wisconsin by Kamal Abbas of Egypt's Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services
February 20th, 2011 3:45 PM

About Kamal Abbas and the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services:

Kamal Abbas is General Coordinator of the CTUWS, an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt. The CTUWS, which was awarded the 1999 French Republic's Human Rights Prize, suffered repeated harassment and attack by the Mubarak regime, and played a leading role in its overthrow. Abbas, who witnessed friends killed by the regime during the 1989 Helwan steel strike and was himself arrested and threatened numerous times, has received extensive international recognition for his union and civil society leadership.

KAMAL ABBAS: I am speaking to you from a place very close to Tahrir Square in Cairo, "Liberation Square", which was the heart of the Revolution in Egypt. This is the place were many of our youth paid with their lives and blood in the struggle for our just rights.

From this place, I want you to know that we stand with you as you stood with us.

I want you to know that no power can challenge the will of the people when they believe in their rights. When they raise their voices loud and clear and struggle against exploitation.

No one believed that our revolution could succeed against the strongest dictatorship in the region. But in 18 days the revolution achieved the victory of the people. When the working class of Egypt joined the revolution on 9 and 10 February, the dictatorship was doomed and the victory of the people became inevitable.

We want you to know that we stand on your side. Stand firm and don't waiver. Don't give up on your rights. Victory always belongs to the people who stand firm and demand their just rights.

We and all the people of the world stand on your side and give you our full support.

As our just struggle for freedom, democracy and justice succeeded, your struggle will succeed. Victory belongs to you when you stand firm and remain steadfast in demanding your just rights.

We support you. we support the struggle of the peoples of Libya, Bahrain and Algeria, who are fighting for their just rights and falling martyrs in the face of the autocratic regimes. The peoples are determined to succeed no matter the sacrifices and they will be victorious.

Today is the day of the American workers. We salute you American workers! You will be victorious. Victory belongs to all the people of the world, who are fighting against exploitation, and for their just rights.




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[For subtitles, press the little red cc at the bottom, right of the screen.]

Sout Al Horeya Amir Eid - Hany Adel - Hawary On Guitar & Sherif On Keyboards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgw_zfLLvh8

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Hymn of Egyptian revolution on Youtube with EN subtitels "Saut al Hurria" (Voice of the revolution)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ5CqhL5X4o



First Responders

Wednesday, February 16th, in the State Capitol, Madison, Wisconsin, well over ten thousand citizens representing many others (teachers and students, nurses, custodial workers, firefighters, parents, families, community members and staunch union supporters) gathered to say NO! to Governor Scott Walker's so-called "Repair Bill"

The message was unequivocal and clear: no rolling back workers collective bargaining rights and to NEGOTIATE not LEGISLATE our way toward a better future.

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WikiLeaks Mirrors

Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.

In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.

Go to
http://wikileaks.ch/Mirrors.html

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Streaming TV from Egypt
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/spotlight/anger-in-egypt/

Mr. ElBaradei, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for his work as the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on Friday: "The Egyptian people will take care of themselves. The Egyptian people will be the ones who will make the change. We are not waiting for help or assistance from the outside world, but what I expect from the outside world is to practice what you preach, is to defend the rights of the Egyptian to their universal values."





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Labor Beat: Labor Stands with Subpoenaed Activists Against FBI Raids and Grand Jury Investigation of antiwar and social justice activists.
"If trouble is not at your door. It's on it's way, or it just left."
"Investigate the Billionaires...Full investigation into Wall Street..." Jesse Sharkey, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNUSIGZCMQ



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Oil Spill Commission Final Report: Catfish Responds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3ZRdsccMsM







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New music video by tommi avicolli mecca of the song "stick and stones," which is about bullying in high school, is finished and up on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of_twpu3-Nw

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New antiwar song that's bound to be a classic:

box
http://www.youtube.com/user/avimecca

by tommi avicolli mecca
(c) 2009
Credits are:
Tommi Avicolli Mecca, guitar/vocals
John Radogno, lead guitar
Diana Hartman, vocals, kazoo
Chris Weir, upright bass
Produced and recorded by Khalil Sullivan

I'm the recruiter and if truth be told/ I can lure the young and old

what I do you won't see/ til your kid's in JROTC

CHO ooh, put them in a box drape it with a flag and send them off to mom and dad

send them with a card from good ol' uncle sam, gee it's really just so sad

I'm the general and what I do/ is to teach them to be true

to god and country flag and oil/ by shedding their blood on foreign soil

CHO

I'm the corporate boss and well I know/ war is lots of dough dough dough

you won't find me over there/ they just ship the money right back here

CHO

last of all it's me the holy priest/ my part is not the least

I assure them it's god's will/ to go on out and kill kill kill

CHO

it's really just so sad

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You might enjoy a bit of history:

William Buckley Show with Socialist Workers Party Presidential Candidates
http://vimeo.com/18611069

William Buckley Show with Socialist Workers Party Presidential Candidates from asi somburu on Vimeo.



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Wall Street Fat-Cats Flip Public Service Workers the Bird
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTcSOygSBBM



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Free Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4eNzokgRIw&feature=player_embedded






Song for Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_eood7DUwI



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Supermax Prison Cell Extraction - Maine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jUfK5i_lQs&feature=player_embedded

Warning, this is an extremely brutal video. What do you think? Is this torture?



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Did You Know?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY



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These videos refer to what happened at the G-20 Summit in Toronto June 26-27 of this year. The importance of this is that police were caught on tape and later confirmed that they sent police into the demonstration dressed as "rioting" protesters. One cop was caught with a large rock in his hand. Clearly, this is proof of police acting as agent provocatours. And we should expect this to continue and escalate. That's why everyone should be aware of these facts...bw

police accused of attempting to incite violence at G20 summ
Protestors at Montebello are accusing police of trying to incite violence. Video on YouTube shows union officials confronting three men that were police officers dressing up as demonstrators. The union is demanding to know if the Prime Minister's Office was involved in trying to discredit the demonstrators.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWbgnyUCC7M



quebec police admit going undercover at montebello protests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfzUOx53Rg&feature=related



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Published on Thursday, December 16, 2010 by Countdown With Keith Olbermann
Quantico, the New Gitmo
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/12/16-0

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Domestic Espionage Alert - Houston PD to use surveillance drone in America!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpstrc15Ogg

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15 year old Tells Establishment to Stick-it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U_gHUiL4P8&feature=player_embedded#

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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded

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LOWKEY - TERRORIST? (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBnvajSfWU

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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded

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Flashmob: Cape Town Opera say NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElyrFOnKPk

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Video of massive French protest -- inspiring!
http://www.dailymotion.com/Talenceagauchevraiment

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"Don't F*** With Our Activists" - Mobilizing Against FBI Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyG3dIUGQvQ

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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS

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MECA Middle East Children's Alliance
Howard & Roslyn Zinn Presente! Honor Their Legacy By Providing Clean Water for Children in Gaza
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=13

Howard Zinn supported the work of the Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA) from the beginning. Over the years, he lent his name and his time countless times to support our work. Howard and Roz were both personal friends of mine and Howard helped MECA raise funds for our projects for children in Palestine by coming to the Bay Area and doing events for us.

On the first anniversary of Howard's passing, I hope you will join MECA in celebrating these two extraordinary individuals.

- Barbara Lubin, Executive Director
YES! I want to help MECA build a water purification and desalination unit at the Khan Younis Co-ed Elementary School for 1,400 students in Gaza in honor of Howard & Roslyn Zinn.
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=13

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Call for EMERGENCY RESPONSE Action if Assange Indicted,

Dear Friends:

We write in haste, trying to reach as many of you as possible although the holiday break has begun.......This plan for an urgent "The Day After" demonstration is one we hope you and many, many more organizations will take up as your own, and mobilize for. World Can't Wait asks you to do all you can to spread it through list serves, Facebook, twitter, holiday gatherings.

Our proposal is very very simple, and you can use the following announcement to mobilize - or write your own....

ANY DAY NOW . . . IN THE EVENT THAT THE U.S. INDICTS JULIAN ASSANGE

An emergency public demonstration THE DAY AFTER any U.S. criminal indictment is announced against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Spread the word and call people to come out, across the whole range of movements and groups: anti-war, human rights, freedom of information/freedom of the press, peace, anti-torture, environmental, students and youth, radicals and revolutionaries, religious, civil liberties, teachers and educators, journalists, anti-imperialists, anti-censorship, anti-police state......

At the Federal Building in San Francisco, we'll form ourselves into a human chain "surrounding" the government that meets the Wikileaked truth with repression and wants to imprison and silence leakers, whistleblowers and truthtellers - when, in fact, these people are heroes. We'll say:

HANDS OFF WIKILEAKS! FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING!

Join the HUMAN CHAIN AROUND THE FEDERAL BUILDING!
New Federal Building, 7th and Mission, San Francisco (nearest BART: Civic Center)
4:00-6:00 PM on The Day FOLLOWING U.S. indictment of Assange

Bring all your friends - signs and banners - bullhorns.

Those who dare at great risk to themselves to put the truth in the hands of the people - and others who might at this moment be thinking about doing more of this themselves -- need to see how much they are supported, and that despite harsh repression from the government and total spin by the mainstream media, the people do want the truth told.

Brad Manning's Christmas Eve statement was just released by his lawyer: "Pvt. Bradley Manning, the lone soldier who stands accused of stealing millions of pages secret US government documents and handing them over to secrets outlet WikiLeaks, wants his supporters to know that they've meant a lot to him. 'I greatly appreciate everyone's support and well wishes during this time,' he said in a Christmas Eve statement released by his lawyer...." Read more here:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/mannings-message-christmas-eve-i-gr/

Demonstrations defending Wikileaks and Assange, and Brad Manning, have already been flowering around the world. Make it happen here too.
Especially here . . .

To join into this action plan, or with questions, contact World Can't Wait or whichever organization or listserve you received this message from.

World Can't Wait, SF Bay
415-864-5153
sf@worldcantwait.org

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Email received from Lynne Stewart:
12/19/10; 12:03pm

Dear Folks:
Some nuts and bolts and trivia,

1. New Address
Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054
Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127

2. Visiting is very liberal but first I have to get people on my visiting list Wait til I or the lawyers let you know. The visits are FRI, SAT, SUN AND MON for 4 hours and on weekends 8 to 3. Bring clear plastic change purse with lots of change to buy from the machines. Brief Kiss upon arrival and departure, no touching or holding during visit (!!) On visiting forms it may be required that you knew me before I came to prison. Not a problem for most of you.

3. One hour time difference

4. Commissary Money is always welcome It is how I pay for the phone and for email. Also need it for a lot that prison doesn't supply in terms of food and "sundries" (pens!) A very big list that includes Raisins, Salad Dressing , ankle sox, mozzarella (definitely not from Antonys--more like a white cheddar, Sanitas Corn Chips but no Salsa etc. To add money, you do this by using Western Union and a credit card by phone or you can send a USPO money order or Business or Govt Check. The negotiable instruments (PAPER!) need to be sent to Federal Bureau of Prisons , 53504-054, Lynne Stewart, PO Box 474701, Des Moines Iowa 50947-001 (Payable to Lynne Stewart, 53504-054) They hold the mo or checks for 15 days. Western Union costs $10 but is within 2 hours. If you mail, your return address must be on the envelope. Unnecessarily complicated ? Of course, it's the BOP !)

5. Food is vastly improved. Just had Sunday Brunch real scrambled eggs, PORK sausage, Baked or home fried potatoes, Butter(sweet whipped M'God !!) Grapefruit juice Toast , orange. I will probably regain the weight I lost at MCC! Weighing against that is the fact that to eat we need to walk to another building (about at far as from my house to the F Train) Also included is 3 flights of stairs up and down. May try to get an elevator pass and try NOT to use it.

6. In a room with 4 bunks(small) about two tiers of rooms with same with "atrium" in middle with tv sets and tables and chairs. Estimate about 500 on Unit 2N and there are 4 units. Population Black, Mexicano and other spanish speaking (all of whom iron their underwear, Marta), White, Native Americans (few), no orientals or foreign speaking caucasians--lots are doing long bits, victims of drugs (meth etc) and boyfriends. We wear army style (khaki) pants with pockets tee shirts and dress shirts long sleeved and short sleeved. When one of the women heard that I hadn't ironed in 40 years, they offered to do the shirts for me. (This is typical of the help I get--escorted to meals and every other protection, explanations, supplies, etc. Mostly from white women.) One drawback is not having a bathroom in the room---have to go about 75 yards at all hours of the day and night --clean though.

7. Final Note--the sunsets and sunrises are gorgeous, the place is very open and outdoors there are pecan trees and birds galore (I need books for trees and birds (west) The full moon last night gladdened my heart as I realized it was shining on all of you I hold dear.

Love Struggle
Lynne

The address of her Defense Committee is:

Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information:
718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759

Please make a generous contribution to her defense.

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Help end the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning!

Bradley Manning Support Network. December 22, 2010

The Marine Brig at Quantico, Virginia is using "injury prevention" as a vehicle to inflict extreme pre-trial punishment on accused Wikileaks whistleblower Army PFC Bradley Manning (photo right). These "maximum conditions" are not unheard-of during an inmate's first week at a military confinement facility, but when applied continuously for months and with no end in sight they amount to a form of torture. Bradley, who just turned 23-years-old last week, has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest in late May. We're now turning to Bradley's supporters worldwide to directly protest, and help bring a halt to, the extremely punitive conditions of Bradley's pre-trial detention.

We need your help in pressing the following demands:

End the inhumane, degrading conditions of pre-trial confinement and respect Bradley's human rights. Specifically, lift the "Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order". This would allow Bradley meaningful physical exercise, uninterrupted sleep during the night, and a release from isolation. We are not asking for "special treatment". In fact, we are demanding an immediate end to the special treatment.

Quantico Base Commander
Colonel Daniel Choike
3250 Catlin Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-2707 (phone)

Quantico Brig Commanding Officer
CWO4 James Averhart
3247 Elrod Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-4242 (fax)

Background

In the wake of an investigative report last week by Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com giving evidence that Bradley Manning was subject to "detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries", Bradley's attorney, David Coombs, published an article at his website on Saturday entitled "A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning". Mr. Coombs details the maximum custody conditions that Bradley is subject to at the Quantico Confinement Facility and highlights an additional set of restrictions imposed upon him under a Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order.

Usually enforced only through a detainee's first week at a confinement facility, or in cases of violent and/or suicidal inmates, the standing POI order has severely limited Manning's access to exercise, daylight and human contact for the past five months. The military's own psychologists assigned to Quantico have recommended that the POI order and the extra restrictions imposed on Bradley be lifted.

Despite not having been convicted of any crime or even yet formally indicted, the confinement regime Bradley lives under includes pronounced social isolation and a complete lack of opportunities for meaningful exercise. Additionally, Bradley's sleep is regularly interrupted. Coombs writes: "The guards are required to check on Manning every five minutes [...] At night, if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure he is okay."

Denver Nicks writes in The Daily Beast that "[Bradley Manning's] attorney [...] says the extended isolation - now more than seven months of solitary confinement - is weighing on his client's psyche. [...] Both Coombs and Manning's psychologist, Coombs says, are sure Manning is mentally healthy, that there is no evidence he's a threat to himself, and shouldn't be held in such severe conditions under the artifice of his own protection."

In an article to be published at Firedoglake.com later today, David House, a friend of Bradley's who visits him regularly at Quantico, says that Bradley "has not been outside or into the brig yard for either recreation or exercise in four full weeks. He related that visits to the outdoors have been infrequent and sporadic for the past several months."

In an average military court martial situation, a defense attorney would be able to bring these issues of pre-trial punishment to the military judge assigned to the case (known as an Article 13 hearing). However, the military is unlikely to assign a judge to Bradley's case until the pre-trial Article 32 hearing is held (similar to an arraignment in civilian court), and that is not expected until February, March, or later-followed by the actual court martial trial months after that. In short, you are Bradley's best and most immediate hope.

What can you do?

Contact the Marine Corps officers above and respectfully, but firmly, ask that they lift the extreme pre-trial confinement conditions against Army PFC Bradley Manning.
Forward this urgent appeal for action widely.
Sign the "Stand with Brad" public petition and letter campaign at www.standwithbrad.org - Sign online, and we'll mail out two letters on your behalf to Army officials.

Donate to Bradley's defense fund at www.couragetoresist.org/bradley
References:

"The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention", by Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com, 15 December 2010

"A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning", by attorney David E. Coombs, 18 December 2010

"Bradley Manning's Life Behind Bars", by Denver Nicks for the Daily Beast, 17 December 2010

Bradley Manning Support Network

Courage To Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org

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KOREA: Emergency Response Actions Needed

The United National Antiwar Committee urges the antiwar movement to begin to plan now for Emergency 5pm Day-of or Day-after demonstrations, should fighting break out on the Korean Peninsula or its surrounding waters.

As in past war crisis and U.S. attacks we propose:
NYC -- Times Square, Washington, D.C. -- the White House
In Many Cities - Federal Buildings

Many tens of thousands of U.S., Japanese and South Korean troops are mobilized on land and on hundreds of warships and aircraft carriers. The danger of a general war in Asia is acute.

China and Russia have made it clear that the scheduled military maneuvers and live-fire war "exercises" from an island right off the coast of north Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) by South Korea are very dangerous. The DPRK has made it clear that they consider these live-fire war exercises to be an act of war and they will again respond if they are again fired on.

The U.S. deployment of thousands of troops, ships, and aircraft in the area while South Korea is firing thousands of rounds of live ammunition and missiles is an enormously dangerous provocation, not only to the DPRK but to China. The Yellow Sea also borders China. The island and the waters where the war maneuvers are taking place are north of the Korean Demilitarized Zone and only eight miles from the coast of the DPRK.

On Sunday, December 19 in a day-long emergency session, the U.S. blocked in the UN Security Council any actions to resolve the crisis.

UNAC action program passed in Albany at the United National Antiwar Conference, July 2010 of over 800 antiwar, social justice and community organizations included the following Resolution on Korea:

15. In solidarity with the antiwar movements of Japan and Korea, each calling for U.S. Troops to Get Out Now, and given the great increase in U.S. military preparations against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, National Peace Conference participants will organize immediate protests following any attack by the U.S. on Korea. U.S. war preparations include stockpiling hundreds of bunker-busters and conducting major war games near the territorial waters of China and Korea. In keeping with our stand for the right of self-determination and our demand of Out Now, the National Peace Conference calls for Bringing All U.S. Troops Home Now!

UNAC urges the whole antiwar movement to begin to circulate messages alerts now in preparation. Together let's join together and demand: Bring all U.S. Troops Home Now! Stop the Wars and the Threats of War.

The United National Antiwar Committee, www.UNACpeace.org

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In earnest support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
http://readersupportednews.org/julian-assange-petition
rsn:Petition

We here undersigned express our support for the work and integrity of Julian Assange. We express concern that the charges against the WikiLeaks founder appear too convenient both in terms of timing and the novelty of their nature.

We call for this modern media innovator, and fighter for human rights extraordinaire, to be afforded the same rights to defend himself before Swedish justice that all others similarly charged might expect, and that his liberty not be compromised as a courtesy to those governments whose truths he has revealed have embarrassed.

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GAP Inc: End Your Relationship with Supplier that Allows Workers to be Burned Alive
http://humanrights.change.org/blog/view/workers_burned_alive_making_clothes_for_the_gap

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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT! FREE KEVIN COOPER!

Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper
Chronicle Editorial
Monday, December 13, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL

Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's death row!

http://www.savekevincooper.org/
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255

URGENT ACTION APPEAL
- From Amnesty International USA
17 December 2010
Click here to take action online:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084

To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to
http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success

For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):
http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf

Kevin Cooper, who has been on death row in California for 25 years, is asking the outgoing state governor to commute his death sentence before leaving office on 2 January 2011. Kevin Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence of the four murders for which he was sentenced to death. Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.

On the night of 4 June 1983, Douglas and Peggy Ryen were hacked and stabbed to death in their home in Chino Hills, California, along with their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and 11-year-old houseguest Christopher Hughes. The couple's eight-year-old son, Joshua Ryen, was seriously wounded, but survived. He told investigators that the attackers were three or four white men. In hospital, he saw a picture of Kevin Cooper on television and said that Cooper, who is black, was not the attacker. However, the boy's later testimony - that he only saw one attacker - was introduced at the 1985 trial. The case has many other troubling aspects which call into question the reliability of the state's case and its conduct in obtaining this conviction (see http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/013/2004/en).

Kevin Cooper was less than eight hours from execution in 2004 when the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted a stay and sent the case back to the District Court for testing on blood and hair evidence, including to establish if the police had planted evidence. The District Court ruled in 2005 that the testing had not proved Kevin Cooper's innocence - his lawyers (and five Ninth Circuit judges) maintain that it did not do the testing as ordered. Nevertheless, in 2007, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit upheld the District Court's ruling. One of the judges described the result as "wholly discomforting" because of evidence tampering and destruction, but noted that she was constrained by US law, which places substantial obstacles in the way of successful appeals.

In 2009, the Ninth Circuit refused to have the whole court rehear the case. Eleven of its judges dissented. One of the dissenting opinions, running to more than 80 pages and signed by five judges, warned that "the State of California may be about to execute an innocent man". On the question of the evidence testing, they said: "There is no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing and...imposed unreasonable conditions on the testing" ordered by the Ninth Circuit. They pointed to a test result that, if valid, indicated that evidence had been planted, and they asserted that the district court had blocked further scrutiny of this issue.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had already denied clemency in 2004 when the Ninth Circuit issued its stay. At the time, he had said that the "courts have reviewed this case for more than eighteen years. Evidence establishing his guilt is overwhelming". Clearly, a notable number of federal judges disagree. The five judges in the Ninth Circuit's lengthy dissent in 2009 stated that the evidence of Kevin Cooper's guilt at his trial was "quite weak" and concluded that he "is probably innocent of the crimes for which the State of California is about to execute him".

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
On 2 June 1983, two days before the Chino Hills murders, Kevin Cooper had escaped from a minimum security prison, where he was serving a four-year term for burglary, and had hidden in an empty house near the Ryen home for two nights. After his arrest, he became the focus of public hatred. Outside the venue of his preliminary hearing, for example, people hung an effigy of a monkey in a noose with a sign reading "Hang the Nigger!!" At the time of the trial, jurors were confronted by graffiti declaring "Die Kevin Cooper" and "Kevin Cooper Must Be Hanged". Kevin Cooper pleaded not guilty - the jury deliberated for seven days before convicting him - and he has maintained his innocence since then. Since Governor Schwarzenegger denied clemency in 2004, more evidence supporting Kevin Cooper's claim of innocence has emerged, including for example, testimony from three witnesses who say they saw three white men near the crime scene on the night of the murders with blood on them.

In 2007, Judge Margaret McKeown was the member of the Ninth Circuit's three-judge panel who indicated that she was upholding the District Court's 2005 ruling despite her serious concerns. She wrote: "Significant evidence bearing on Cooper's guilt has been lost, destroyed or left unpursued, including, for example, blood-covered coveralls belonging to a potential suspect who was a convicted murderer, and a bloody t-shirt, discovered alongside the road near the crime scene. The managing criminologist in charge of the evidence used to establish Cooper's guilt at trial was, as it turns out, a heroin addict, and was fired for stealing drugs seized by the police. Countless other alleged problems with the handling and disclosure of evidence and the integrity of the forensic testing and investigation undermine confidence in the evidence". She continued that "despite the presence of serious questions as to the integrity of the investigation and evidence supporting the conviction, we are constrained by the requirements of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA)". Judge McKeown wrote that "the habeas process does not account for lingering doubt or new evidence that cannot leap the clear and convincing hurdle of AEDPA. Instead, we are left with a situation in which confidence in the blood sample is murky at best, and lost, destroyed or tampered evidence cannot be factored into the final analysis of doubt. The result is wholly discomforting, but one that the law demands".

Even if it is correct that the AEDPA demands this result, the power of executive clemency is not so confined. Last September, for example, the governor of Ohio commuted Kevin Keith's death sentence because of doubts about his guilt even though his death sentence had been upheld on appeal (see http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/079/2010/en). Governor Ted Strickland said that despite circumstantial evidence linking the condemned man to the crime, "many legitimate questions have been raised regarding the evidence in support of the conviction and the investigation which led to it. In particular, Mr Keith's conviction relied upon the linking of certain eyewitness testimony with certain forensic evidence about which important questions have been raised. I also find the absence of a full investigation of other credible suspects troubling." The same could be said in the case of Kevin Cooper, whose lawyer is asking Governor Schwarzenegger to commute the death sentence before he leaves office on 2 January 2011. While Kevin Cooper does not yet have an execution date, it is likely that one will be set, perhaps early in 2011.

More than 130 people have been released from death rows on grounds of innocence in the USA since 1976. At the original trial in each case, the defendant had been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It is clear beyond any dispute that the USA's criminal justice system is capable of making mistakes. International safeguards require that the death penalty not be imposed if guilt is not "based upon clear and convincing evidence leaving no room for an alternative explanation of the facts". Amnesty International opposes all executions regardless of the seriousness of the crime or the guilt or innocence of the condemned.

California has the largest death row in the USA, with more than 700 prisoners under sentence of death out of a national total of some 3,200. California accounts for 13 of the 1,234 executions in the USA since judicial killing resumed there in 1977. There have been 46 executions in the USA this year. The last execution in California was in January 2006.

RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:
- Acknowledging the seriousness of the crime for which Kevin Cooper was sentenced to death;
- Urging Governor Schwarzenegger to take account of the continuing doubts about Kevin Cooper's guilt, including as expressed by more than 10 federal judges since 2004, when executive clemency was last requested;
- Urging the Governor to commute Kevin Cooper's death sentence.

APPEALS TO:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol Building, Sacramento, CA 95814, USA
Fax: 1 916-558-3160
Email: governor@governor.ca.gov or via http://gov.ca.gov/interact#contact
Salutation : Dear Governor

PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY.
Check with the AIUSA Urgent Action office if sending appeals after 2 January 2011.

Tip of the Month:
Write as soon as you can. Try to write as close as possible to the date a case is issued.

** POSTAGE RATES **
Within the United States:
$0.28 - Postcards
$0.44 - Letters and Cards (up to 1 oz.)
To Canada:
$0.75 - Postcards
$0.75 - Airmail Letters and Cards (up to 1 oz.)
To Mexico:
$0.79 - Postcards
$0.79 - Airmail Letters and Cards (up to 1 oz.)
To all other destination countries:
$0.98 - Postcards
$0.98 - Airmail Letters and Cards (up to 1 oz.)

Amnesty International is a worldwide grassroots movement that promotes and defends human rights.

This Urgent Action may be reposted if kept intact, including contact information and stop action date (if applicable). Thank you for your help with this appeal.

Urgent Action Network
Amnesty International USA
600 Pennsylvania Ave SE 5th fl
Washington DC 20003
Email: uan@aiusa.org
http://www.amnestyusa.org/urgent/
Phone: 202.509.8193
Fax: 202.675.8566

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Free the Children of Palestine!
Sign Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html

Published by Al-Awda, Palestine Right to Return Coalition on Dec 16, 2010
Category: Children's Rights
Region: GLOBAL
Target: President Obama
Web site: http://www.al-awda.org

Background (Preamble):

According to Israeli police, 1200 Palestinian children have been arrested, interrogated and imprisoned in the occupied city of Jerusalem alone this year. The youngest of these children was seven-years old.

Children and teen-agers were often dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, taken in handcuffs for questioning, threatened, humiliated and many were subjected to physical violence while under arrest as part of an ongoing campaign against the children of Palestine. Since the year 2000, more than 8000 have been arrested by Israel, and reports of mistreatment are commonplace.

Further, based on sworn affidavits collected in 2009 from 100 of these children, lawyers working in the occupied West Bank with Defense Children International, a Geneva-based non governmental organization, found that 69% were beaten and kicked, 49% were threatened, 14% were held in solitary confinement, 12% were threatened with sexual assault, including rape, and 32% were forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not understand.

Minors were often asked to give names and incriminate friends and relatives as a condition of their release. Such institutionalized and systematic mistreatment of Palestinian children by the state of Israel is a violation international law and specifically contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Israel is supposedly a signatory.

Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html

We, the undersigned call on US President Obama to direct Israel to

1. Stop all the night raids and arrests of Palestinian Children forthwith.

2. Immediately release all Palestinian children detained in its prisons and detention centers.

3. End all forms of systematic and institutionalized abuse against all Palestinian children.

4. Implement the full restoration of Palestinian children's rights in accordance with international law including, but not limited to, their right to return to their homes of origin, to education, to medical and psychological care, and to freedom of movement and expression.

The US government, which supports Israel to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars a year while most ordinary Americans are suffering in a very bad economy, is bound by its laws and international conventions to cut off all aid to Israel until it ends all of its violations of human rights and basic freedoms in a verifiable manner.

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"Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority, which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests."..."Publishing State Secrets" By Leon Trotsky
Documents on Soviet Policy, Trotsky, iii, 2 p. 64
November 22, 1917
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/foreign-relations/1917/November/22.htm

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING! STOP THE FBI RAIDS NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!

To understand how much a trillion dollars is, consider looking at it in terms of time:

A million seconds would be about eleven-and-one-half days; a billion seconds would be 31 years; and a trillion seconds would be 31,000 years!

From the novel "A Dark Tide," by Andrew Gross

Now think of it in terms of U.S. war dollars and bankster bailouts!

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MIDDLE EAST CHILDREN'S ALLIANCE
Your Year-End Gift for the Children
Double your impact with this matching gift opportunity!

Dear Friend of the Children,

You may have recently received a letter from me via regular mail with a review of the important things you helped MECA accomplish for the children in 2010, along with a special Maia Project decal.

My letter to you also included an announcement of MECA's first ever matching gift offer. One of our most generous supporters will match all gifts received by December 31. 2010 to a total of $35,000.

So, whether you are a long time supporter, or giving for the first-time... Whether you can give $10 or $1,000... This is a unique opportunity to double the impact of your year-end gift!

Your contribution will be matched dollar for dollar, making it go twice as far so that MECA can:

* Install twenty more permanent drinking water units in Gaza schools though our Maia Project
* Continue our work with Playgrounds for Palestine to complete a community park in the besieged East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, where violent Israeli settlers attack children and adults, Israeli police arrest the victims, and the city conducts "administrative demolitions" of Palestinian homes.
* Send a large medical aid shipment to Gaza.
* Renew support for "Let the Children Play and Heal," a program in Gaza to help children cope with trauma and grief through arts programs, referrals to therapists, educational materials for families and training for mothers.

Your support for the Middle East Children's Alliance's delivers real, often life-saving, help. And it does more than that. It sends a message of hope and solidarity to Palestine-showing the people that we are standing beside them as they struggle to bring about a better life for their children.

With warm regards,
Barbara Lubin
Founder and Director

P.S. Please give as much as you possible can, and please make your contribution now, so it will be doubled. Thank you so much.

P.S.S. If you didn't receive a MAIA Project decal in the mail or if you would like another one, please send an email message to meca@mecaforpeace.org with "MAIA Project decal" in the subject line when you make your contribution.

To make a gift by mail send to:
MECA, 1101 8th Street, Berkley, CA 94710

To make a gift by phone, please call MECA's off at: 510-548-0542

To "GO PAPERLESS" and receive all your MECA communications by email, send a message to meca@mecaforpeace.org with "Paperless" in the subject line.

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For Immediate Release
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
12/2/2010
For more information: Joe Lombardo, 518-281-1968,
UNACpeace@gmail.org, NationalPeaceConference.org

Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.

The United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) calls for the release of Bradley Manning who is awaiting trial accused of leaking the material to Wikileaks that has been released over the past several months. We also call for an end to the harassment of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and we call for an independent, international investigation of the illegal activity exposed through the material released by Wikileaks.

Before sending the material to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning tried to get his superiors in the military to do something about what he understood to be clear violations of international law. His superiors told him to keep quiet so Manning did the right thing; he exposed the illegal activity to the world.

The Afghan material leaked earlier shows military higher-ups telling soldiers to kill enemy combatants who were trying to surrender. The Iraq Wikileaks video from 2007 shows the US military killing civilians and news reporters from a helicopter while laughing about it. The widespread corruption among U.S. allies has been exposed by the most recent leaks of diplomatic cables. Yet, instead of calling for change in these policies, we hear only a call to suppress further leaks.

At the national antiwar conference held in Albany in July, 2010, at which UNAC was founded, we heard from Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers on the ground during the helicopter attack on the civilians in Iraq exposed by Wikileaks (see: http://www.mediasanctuary.org/movie/1810 ). He talked about removing wounded children from a civilian vehicle that the US military had shot up. It affected him so powerfully that he and another soldier who witnessed the massacre wrote a letter of apology to the families of the civilians who were killed.

We ask why this material was classified in the first place. There were no state secrets in the material, only evidence of illegal and immoral activity by the US military, the US government and its allies. To try to cover this up by classifying the material is a violation of our right to know the truth about these wars. In this respect, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be held up as heroes, not hounded for exposing the truth.

UNAC calls for an end to the illegal and immoral policies exposed by Wikileaks and an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to threats against Iran and North Korea.

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Courage to Resist needs your support
By Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist.

It's been quite a ride the last four months since we took up the defense of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning. Since then, we helped form the Bradley Manning Support Network, established a defense fund, and have already paid over half of Bradley's total $100,000 in estimated legal expenses.

Now, I'm asking for your support of Courage to Resist so that we can continue to support not only Bradley, but the scores of other troops who are coming into conflict with military authorities due to reasons of conscience.

Please donate today:
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590

"Soldiers sworn oath is to defend and support the Constitution. Bradley Manning has been defending and supporting our Constitution."
-Dan Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower

Iraq War over? Afghanistan occupation winding down? Not from what we see. Please take a look at, "Soldier Jeff Hanks refuses deployment, seeks PTSD help" in our December newsletter. Jeff's situation is not isolated. Actually, his story is only unique in that he has chosen to share it with us in the hopes that it may result in some change. Jeff's case also illustrates the importance of Iraq Veterans Against the War's new "Operation Recovery" campaign which calls for an end to the deployment of traumatized troops.

Most of the folks who call us for help continue to be effected by Stoploss, a program that involuntarily extends enlistments (despite Army promises of its demise), or the Individual Ready Reserve which recalls thousands of former Soldiers and Marines quarterly from civilian life.

Another example of our efforts is Kyle Wesolowski. After returning from Iraq, Kyle submitted an application for a conscientious objector discharge based on his Buddhist faith. Kyle explains, "My experience of physical threats, religious persecution, and general abuse seems to speak of a system that appears to be broken.... It appears that I have no other recourse but to now refuse all duties that prepare myself for war or aid in any way shape or form to other soldiers in conditioning them to go to war." We believe he shouldn't have to walk this path alone.

Sincerely,
Jeff Paterson
Project Director, Courage to Resist
First US military service member to refuse to fight in Iraq
Please donate today.

https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590

P.S. I'm asking that you consider a contribution of $50 or more, or possibly becoming a sustainer at $15 a month. Of course, now is also a perfect time to make a end of year tax-deductible donation. Thanks again for your support!

Please click here to forward this to a friend who might
also be interested in supporting GI resisters.
http://ymlp.com/forward.php?id=lS3tR&e=bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com

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Add your name! We stand with Bradley Manning.

"We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad... We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning."

Dear All,

The Bradley Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist are launching a new campaign, and we wanted to give you a chance to be among the first to add your name to this international effort. If you sign the letter online, we'll print out and mail two letters to Army officials on your behalf. With your permission, we may also use your name on the online petition and in upcoming media ads.

Read the complete public letter and add your name at:
http://standwithbrad.org/

Courage to Resist (http://couragetoresist.org)
on behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network (http://bradleymanning.org)
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559

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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414

Dear Friend,

On Friday, September 24th, the FBI raided homes in Chicago and Minneapolis, and turned the Anti-War Committee office upside down. We were shocked. Our response was strong however and we jumped into action holding emergency protests. When the FBI seized activists' personal computers, cell phones, and papers claiming they were investigating "material support for terrorism", they had no idea there would be such an outpouring of support from the anti-war movement across this country! Over 61 cities protested, with crowds of 500 in Minneapolis and Chicago. Activists distributed 12,000 leaflets at the One Nation Rally in Washington D.C. Supporters made thousands of calls to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Solidarity statements from community organizations, unions, and other groups come in every day. By organizing against the attacks, the movement grows stronger.

At the same time, trusted lawyers stepped up to form a legal team and mount a defense. All fourteen activists signed letters refusing to testify. So Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox withdrew the subpoenas, but this is far from over. In fact, the repression is just starting. The FBI continues to question activists at their homes and work places. The U.S. government is trying to put people in jail for anti-war and international solidarity activism and there is no indication they are backing off. The U.S. Attorney has many options and a lot of power-he may re-issue subpoenas, attempt to force people to testify under threat of imprisonment, or make arrests.

To be successful in pushing back this attack, we need your donation. We need you to make substantial contributions like $1000, $500, and $200. We understand many of you are like us, and can only afford $50, $20, or $10, but we ask you to dig deep. The legal bills can easily run into the hundreds of thousands. We are all united to defend a movement for peace and justice that seeks friendship with people in other countries. These fourteen anti-war activists have done nothing wrong, yet their freedom is at stake.

It is essential that we defend our sisters and brothers who are facing FBI repression and the Grand Jury process. With each of your contributions, the movement grows stronger.

Please make a donation today at stopfbi.net (PayPal) on the right side of your screen. Also you can write to:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414

This is a critical time for us to stand together, defend free speech, and defend those who help to organize for peace and justice, both at home and abroad!

Thank you for your generosity! Tom Burke

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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.

"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"

http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html

(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)

[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]

Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012

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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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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/

18) A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and DAVID E. SANGER
February 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests.html?hp

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D. ARTICLES IN FULL (Unless otherwise noted)

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1) The Human Cost of Budget Cutting
By BOB HERBERT
February 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/opinion/20herbert.html?hp

2) At Church's Urging, Cuba Frees 7 More Dissidents
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/world/americas/20cuba.html?ref=world

3) Dueling Protests in a Capital as Nothing Much Gets Done
"All around the Capitol square, tens of thousands of union supporters chanted, as they have for days: "Kill the bill! Kill the bill!" In one corner, a far smaller contingent of demonstrators, many of whom described themselves as Tea Party members, chanted: "Pass the bill! Pass the bill!"
By MONICA DAVEY and A. G. SULZBERGER
February 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20wisconsin.html?ref=us

4) Protests Start for 6th Day at Wisconsin Capitol
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/20/business/AP-US-Wisconsin-Budget-Unions.html?src=busln

5) 10 Developments in the Huge Story of Wisconsin's Uprising
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on February 21, 2011, Printed on February 21, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149986/

6) Qaddafi's Grip on Power Seems to Ebb as Forces Retreat
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MONA EL-NAGGAR
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22libya.html?hp

7) Wisconsin Power Play
By PAUL KRUGMAN
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opinion/21krugman.html?hp

8) Watching Protesters Risk It All
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opinion/21kristof.html?hp

9) Oil Companies Plan Evacuations From Libya
By JULIA WERDIGIER and RACHEL DONADIO
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22oil.html?hp

10) Warplanes and Militia Fire on Protesters in Libyan Capital
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MONA EL-NAGGAR
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22libya.html?ref=world

11) Yemen President Struggles to Quell Protests
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/20/world/middleeast/AP-ML-Yemen.html?ref=world

12) Reform Lawyer Says Tunisia Risks Anarchy
By THOMAS FULLER
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22tunisia.html?ref=world

13) Chinese Government Responds to Call for Protests
"The messages calling people to action urged protesters to shout, 'We want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness,' an ostensible effort to tap into popular discontent over inflation and soaring real estate prices."
By ANDREW JACOBS
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/asia/21china.html?ref=world

14) NATO Airstrike Is Said to Kill Afghan Civilians
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/asia/21afghan.html?ref=world

15) Looking for a Credit Card? It Pays to Be Rich
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/21/business/AP-US-Credit-Cards-The-New-Terms.html?src=busln

16) 'We Stand With You as You Stood With Us': Statement to Workers of Wisconsin by Kamal Abbas of Egypt's Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services
February 20th, 2011 3:45 PM
MichaelMoore.com, February 20, 2011
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/statement-kamal-abbas

17) American Held in Pakistan Shootings Worked With the C.I.A.
By MARK MAZZETTI, ASHLEY PARKER, JANE PERLEZ and ERIC SCHMITT
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/asia/22pakistan.html?hp

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1) The Human Cost of Budget Cutting
By BOB HERBERT
February 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/opinion/20herbert.html?hp

John Drew believes, quaintly, that we are our brother's keeper.

President Obama does not seem to believe this quite as strongly. And, of course, many of the Republicans in Congress do not believe it at all.

Mr. Drew is the president of Boston's antipoverty agency, called Action for Boston Community Development, which everyone calls ABCD. In today's environment, people who work with the poor can be forgiven if they feel like hunted criminals. Government officials at all levels are homing in on them and disrupting their efforts, sometimes for legitimate budget reasons, sometimes not.

The results are often heartbreaking.

Community action agencies like ABCD are not generally well known but they serve as a lifeline, all across the country, to poor individuals and families who desperately need the assistance provided by food pantries, homeless shelters, workers who visit the homebound elderly, and so forth. They offer summer jobs for young people and try to ward off the eviction of the jobless and their dependents.

More than 20 million people receive some kind of assistance from community action agencies over the course of a year. This winter an elderly man in Boston was found during a routine visit to be suffering in his home from frostbite of the hands and feet. The visit most likely saved his life.

We should keep in mind the current extent of economic suffering in the U.S. as we consider President Obama's misguided plan to impose a crippling 50 percent reduction in the community service block grants that serve as the crucial foundation for community action agencies. The cuts will undoubtedly doom many of the programs. (The Republicans in the House would eliminate the block grants entirely.)

It's a measure of where we are as a country that this has not been a bigger news story.

"I've been like 40 years on the front lines here and never saw anything quite like what we're going through now," said Mr. Drew. "I go back to when President Nixon tried to put us out of business. Reagan tried to push us off the table. They didn't succeed. Quite frankly, I didn't expect that at this stage of the game we'd be facing these kinds of cuts from a President Obama. And the Republicans in the House - well, they're just nihilistic. I don't know where the moral center of the universe is anymore."

Community action agencies were established decades ago to undergird the fight against poverty throughout the U.S., in big cities, small towns, rural areas - wherever there were people in trouble. It's the only comprehensive antipoverty effort in the country, and the need for them has only grown in the current long and terrible economic climate.

President Obama's proposal to cut the approximately $700 million grant by 50 percent is an initiative with no upside. The $350 million reduction is meaningless in terms of the federal budget deficits, but it is enough to wreck many of these fine programs and hurt an awful lot of people, including children and the elderly.

It seemed like just a moment ago that these programs were held in high esteem by the president, a former community organizer himself. Community action agencies received $5 billion in stimulus funds to train people to weatherize homes. They ended up being ranked eighth out of 200 federal programs that got stimulus money in terms of the number of jobs created.

Now, suddenly, these agencies are dispensable.

The block grant money from the federal government is highly leveraged. The agencies secure additional public and private funds that enable them to support a wide network of programs that offer an astonishing array of important services. These include Head Start, job training and child care programs, legal services, affordable housing for the elderly, domestic violence intervention, and on and on.

When these kinds of programs are zeroed out, the impact is profound. Jobs are eliminated and vital services are no longer available. Poverty and its associated costs to governments increase. In terms of budgets, it's the definition of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. ABCD, for example, has been very effective in preventing evictions, working diligently with landlords, tenants and others to keep individuals and families from becoming homeless. When such efforts are successful, they not only keep individuals and families in their homes, they keep taxpayers from having to foot the very expensive bill of housing individuals and families in shelters.

President Obama may be trying to score a few political points by presenting himself as a budget cutter willing to attack programs that he has said he favors. But the price of those points in potential human suffering is much too high.

The president's budget director, Jacob Lew, said in The New York Times: "The budget is not just a collection of numbers, but an expression of our values and aspirations."

I couldn't agree more.

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2) At Church's Urging, Cuba Frees 7 More Dissidents
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/world/americas/20cuba.html?ref=world

HAVANA (AP) - Cuba's government has agreed to free seven more prisoners, the Roman Catholic Church announced on Saturday.

Six of the prisoners, who were charged with crimes against state security, would be sent to Spain, the church said. The seventh prisoner said he planned to stay in Cuba.

The government has recently released dozens of prisoners, most of them political dissidents, at the behest of the church. Almost all of them have been quickly sent into exile.

But the Havana archbishop's office said that Ivan Hernández, one of the men on the latest list or freed prisoners, had refused exile. Mr. Hernández, an independent journalist, was among 75 people arrested in a crackdown on dissidents in 2003. The inmates who have vowed to remain in Cuba have been the last to leave prison.

"This is what we have been waiting for so long!" Asunción Carrillo, Mr. Hernández's mother, said from her home in Matanzas, about 85 miles east of Havana.

The archbishop's office said the other six prisoners on the list released on Saturday were Roger Cardoso, Yoan José Navalon, Yosnel Batista, Juan Antonio Bermudez, Marco Antonio Zayas and Reinier Concepción.

Mr. Bermudez had been serving a four-year sentence for carrying out attacks and causing damage, and Mr. Zayas and Mr. Concepción had been sentenced to eight years for terrorism, according to the independent Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, which keeps a list of political detainees.

The commission's president, Elizardo Sanchez, said that Mr. Cardoso was serving a 20-year sentence, and Mr. Navalon and Mr. Batista had been sentenced to prison for piracy - a category that often includes people who seize boats in an attempt to leave the island.

Ms. Carrillo said that the archbishop, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, called her on Friday to say her son "would be freed in the coming hours. He did not say when or how, but I am very happy. Imagine it!"

She said her son later called and told her that Cardinal Ortega had also told him that he was about to be released.

"It is great joy, but my son also confirmed that he is maintaining his decision not to leave Cuba, to stay in his country," Ms. Carrillo said. Mr. Hernández, 39, had been serving a 25-year sentence.

The government arrested 75 dissidents in 2003 and accused them of working with the United States to undermine Cuba's communist system. The dissidents have denied the accusations.

Fifty-two of the dissidents were still in prison last year when the church announced that the Cuban government had promised to free them all.

Most have been sent to Spain with a few relatives, but a small group has refused to leave Cuba, and their releases have been delayed.

Last week, however, the government freed Ángel Moya and Héctor Maseda, whose wives had crusaded for their release as part of the Ladies in White group that staged weekly demonstrations in Havana. Only 6 of the 75 original dissidents remain in prison.

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3) Dueling Protests in a Capital as Nothing Much Gets Done
"All around the Capitol square, tens of thousands of union supporters chanted, as they have for days: "Kill the bill! Kill the bill!" In one corner, a far smaller contingent of demonstrators, many of whom described themselves as Tea Party members, chanted: "Pass the bill! Pass the bill!"
By MONICA DAVEY and A. G. SULZBERGER
February 19, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20wisconsin.html?ref=us

MADISON, Wis. - In a capital city overrun for much of the past week by union supporters, state employees and students - all objecting to the Republican governor's plan to cut collective bargaining rights and benefits for public workers - a new element was introduced on Saturday: opposition to the opposition.

All around the Capitol square, tens of thousands of union supporters chanted, as they have for days: "Kill the bill! Kill the bill!" In one corner, a far smaller contingent of demonstrators, many of whom described themselves as Tea Party members, chanted: "Pass the bill! Pass the bill!"

The two groups sometimes mixed together - at one point, a "Don't Tread on Me" flag poked out from a sea of union signs - in what became a continuous parade around the square.

Initially, lawmakers and others here seemed worried about how the events might play out, and scores of officers were on hand, along with barricades, temporary fences and even police snipers.

One legislator had deemed the scene "dangerous," but police officials said there were no serious problems as the day went on. The obvious tensions seemed to be playing out with only an occasional exchange of angry words, hand gestures and spittle.

"You don't care about this country! Shame on you, you're selfish," one supporter of Gov. Scott Walker's proposal told union supporters, wagging his finger as he spoke. Moments later, a union supporter addressed the other side: "What's wrong with you people?"

If anything, union presence at the Capitol seemed to be larger than it had been all week. The protests have become something of a galvanizing point for Democrats - in Wisconsin and beyond - after demoralizing defeats in last year's elections.

The demonstrations have been more organized than organic, with some of the Democratic Party's top strategists in Madison and Washington helping to assemble giant crowds. Labor unions, along with the Democratic National Committee and the White House, see this moment as an opportunity to begin rallying troops for the next election.

Despite their smaller numbers, supporters of the bill said they were pleased, at last, to be present. They had grown tired, they said, of watching the union protests mount each day with no response.

"We're not here to argue or anything, just to support our governor and his decision," said Olivia Peach, 20, a Tea Party supporter who drove two hours to reach Madison.

They gathered on a corner to hear speeches from local Tea Party leaders and others like Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, who is better known as Joe the Plumber.

One of the counterdemonstration's organizers read a statement from former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska: "Union brothers and sisters, this is the wrong fight at the wrong time."

At times, the two sides seemed to talk past each other. The governor's supporters said state workers needed to accept increases in their pension and health care costs, just as other Americans have.

Many in the union crowd said they were willing to accept the proposed cuts - and labor leaders have expressed willingness to do so as well - but would not agree to the bill's broader provisions. Those measures would prohibit unions from bargaining over issues other than wages, stop them from having dues deducted from state paychecks and require them to hold annual elections to stay in existence.

"It's been an intentional framing of the issue so that it's hard for people to hear each other," said Barb Sullivan, a fourth-grade teacher who said she was willing to accept what would amount to less money in her pocket.

For the moment, a standoff prevailed in Madison, which has been transformed into a battleground for a national debate over public workers and union rights. Mr. Walker had hoped to have the bill passed by Saturday, in time for a budget presentation next week. But Democratic state senators, who are a minority, have refused to come to the Capitol, blocking a vote from taking place.

On Saturday, Republican senators waited in frustration, Democratic senators showed no inclination to return and Mr. Walker put off the release of his budget proposal, with no end to the battle in sight.

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4) Protests Start for 6th Day at Wisconsin Capitol
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/20/business/AP-US-Wisconsin-Budget-Unions.html?src=busln

Filed at 12:58 p.m. EST

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - As union supporters moved inside for a sixth straight day of protests at the Wisconsin Capitol, Gov. Scott Walker reiterated Sunday that he wouldn't compromise on the issue that had mobilized them, a bill that would eliminate most of public employees' collective bargaining rights.

Democratic lawmakers have said they and union members would agree to financial concessions that the Republican governor wants in exchange for workers keeping their collective bargaining rights. But Walker said he wasn't willing to budge, and he expected the bill to pass as is.

"We're willing to take this as long as it takes because in the end we're doing the right thing," he told Fox News from Madison.

The controversial measure led to massive protests that started Tuesday and have gained steam each day. An estimated 68,000 people turned out Saturday. Most opposed the bill, but the day marked the first time that a significant contingent of Walker supporters showed up to counter-protest.

Hundreds of protesters gathered inside the Capitol on Sunday, as snow turned into freezing rain that made walking outside the building a challenge. The demonstrators banged on drums and danced in the Capitol Rotunda while they chanted, "This is what Democracy looks like" and "union busting!"

Jacob Cedillotootalian, a 27-year-old University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student and teaching assistant, said Sunday was the third night that he slept in the Capitol as part of a union representing teaching assistants and he didn't see an end coming anytime soon. He said he was worried about paying more for his health insurance and tuition, but what kept him protesting was the possibility of losing the union.

"Normalcy would be nice," the English instructor said. "But it seems the governor and the state Republicans are intent on taking these rights away."

The bill would require government workers to contribute more to their health care and pension costs and limit collective bargaining to pay increases less than the Consumer Price Index. Walker says the measure is needed to deal with the state's projected $3.6 billion budget shortfall.

Drenched in rain, former Democratic Party Chairman Joe Wineke arrived Sunday to protest. A former state senator, Wineke said he was impressed by the 14 Democratic state senators who fled Wisconsin on Thursday to delay a vote on the bill. They remained gone over the weekend, leaving the Legislature one vote short of the number needed to take action.

"This thing is going to end badly for Scott Walker," Wineke predicted. "He underestimated the resolve of the public."

Meanwhile, Walker told Fox News he thought the senators would return to work early this week.

"Democracy means you show up and participate and they failed to do that," he said. "They're walking out on their job."

Sen. Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Sunday that the senators weren't likely to come back until the governor was willing to compromise.

Erpenbach said he remained at a Chicago hotel and his colleagues were "scattered" out of state. They had a conference call Saturday night, and Erpenbach said they remained united in their effort to stall the bill.

"It's trying to slow this train down," he said. "It's making sure that obviously everybody in the state knows what we're dealing with here. It's an opportunity for the governor to calm down, take a step back, realize what he's asking for with this legislation and hopefully come to his senses."

Erpenbach said Democrats have reached out to Walker's administration but have not had their phone calls returned. He said it may take a coalition of moderate Republicans in the Senate to try to negotiate an end to the stalemate.

One of them, Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, has proposed suspending collective bargaining rights temporarily to get through the state's two-year budget, but then restoring them in 2013. That idea was endorsed Sunday by the Wisconsin State Journal, the state's second largest newspaper.

Erpenbach called Schultz brave for bucking Walker's administration with the proposal. Asked whether Democrats could accept Schultz's plan, Erpenbach said workers should not lose their rights since they have agreed to make concessions by paying more for their health care and pensions.

On Sunday, cornerback Charles Woodson, a member of the NFL Players Association, became the latest Green Bay Packer to back the public employees' cause. NFL owners and the players' union are locked in their own fight over a collective bargaining agreement. Along with Woodson, seven other current and former Packers have expressed support for the protesters.

Associated Press writer Dinesh Ramde in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

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5) 10 Developments in the Huge Story of Wisconsin's Uprising
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on February 21, 2011, Printed on February 21, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149986/

The drama unfolding in Wisconsin enters its second week, and as tens of thousands of workers and their supporters ring the state's capitol expressing outrage over Union-busting Republican Governor Scott Walker's bill, the impasse doesn't appear to be headed towards a resolution anytime soon. AlterNet has stayed on top of this momentous story, and here are the latest developments.

1. Democratic Lawmakers in Exile Want Fair Negotiations

According to the Huffington Post, the Democratic lawmakers who crossed state lines last week to block the passage of Walker's bill aren't going to return until the governor agrees to sit down and negotiate in good faith. Monday is the fifth day of their self-imposed exile. "We'll be here until Gov. Walker decides that he wants to talk," Sen. Tim Carpenter (D) told Amanda Terkel on Saturday.

He added that so far, the governor refuses to meet with them or even return the phone calls from members of the Democratic caucus.

"He's just hard-lined -- will not talk, will not communicate, will not return phone calls," said Carpenter. "In a democracy, I thought we were supposed to talk. But the thing is, he's been a dictator, and just basically said this is the only thing. No amendments, and it's going to be that way."

On Sunday, AlterNet posted video of Wisconsin State Rep. Gordon Hintz, D-Oshkosh, angrily chastising the GOP majority for pushing Scott Walker's union-busting bill through without giving lawmakers time to read it or allowing for public hearings of any kind. You can watch it here.

2. Massive Crowds for State Workers as a Handful of Tea Partiers Arrive

Last week, Mother Jones reported that masses of Tea Partiers would be bussed in by American Majority, a corporate-backed right-wing astro-turf operation, causing many progressive commenters to note the irony of the Tea Party's new-found devotion to Big Government. As it turned out, approximately 2,000 arrived -- along with Andrew Breitbart -- only to find themselves out-numbered by pro-union demonstrators by a ratio as high as 35 to 1.

Fox "News" spent the whole weekend advancing the specter of thuggish unionists "rioting" at the capitol, which as usual turned out to be wrong. The Madison police Department issued a release after Saturday's protests praising the demonstrators:

On behalf of all the law enforcement agencies that helped keep the peace on the Capitol Square Saturday, a very sincere thank you to all of those who showed up to exercise their First Amendment rights. You conducted yourselves with great decorum and civility, and if the eyes of the nation were upon Wisconsin, then you have shown how democracy can flourish even amongst those who passionately disagree.

According to MPD, there were a few minor scuffles, but no major incidents and no arrests through Saturday night. Kristine Mattis, who blogs at "Rebelpleb," added that "rumblings that protesters have "trashed" the capitol...[are] completely false. Members of unions, particularly the Teaching Assistants' Association (TAA) and the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants' Association (MGAA), have been regularly organizing volunteer crews to clean up trash and litter." Mattis adds that a sign in the Capitol Building informing visitors that firearms aren't permitted within "only emerged, after five days of entirely peaceful protests, when the Tea Party arrived."

3. Wisconsin Uprising Part of a Larger Awakening

On Sunday, economist Robert Kuttner wrote that "something important that was largely missing has been kindled. Popular protest against financial abuses, top-down class warfare, clueless Republicans, and misplaced austerity is finally in the air. The labor movement is leading, and even non-union Americans are realizing why organized labor is all about protecting the middle class generally."

Wisconsin appears to be the beginning of a larger movement, and for good reason. According to CBS News, "Nine other Republican governors from Nevada to New Jersey are also targeting unions with various proposals: decreasing wages and bargaining power in some cases, increasing what workers contribute to pensions and benefits in others."

On Sunday, we reported that America's labor movement is readying for a second show-down with union-busting legislators on Monday, as Indiana considers a so-called "right to work" law similar to that proposed by Wisconsin's governor. A South Bend Tribune editorial warned hoosiers to "beware of the 'right-to-work' hoax that politicians and CEOs are pushing. A right-to-work law won't help business and it won't help workers." Organizers are preparing to do battle in Ohio and Florida as well.

On February 26, US Uncut -- a grassroots coalition that's modeled on the movement that faced tuition hikes in the UK and has been called a liberal answer to the Tea Parties -- is organizing protests across the country. The theme: no austerity while corporate tax dodgers game the system. Find out more about US Uncut here -- find a local protest and mark the date.

Also, in case you missed it, check out Naomi Klein's interview with Chris Hayes here -- the two discuss why Wisconsin is so important, and touch on Uncut US's upcoming mobilization.

4. It's a Ginned-Up "Crisis," but Scott Walker Isn't Entirely to Blame for Wisconsin's Budget Gap

It's been widely reported, including on AlterNet, that Scott Walker inherited a $120 million budget surplus, and then promptly created a budget deficit in order to break the backs of Wisconsin's public employees' unions.

Politifact did an analysis of this issue which shows that Walker in fact inherited a manageable, long-term budget gap and then spun it as an imminent crisis that must be addressed this year.

The reports stem from a a Jan. 31, 2011 memo prepared by Robert Lang, the director of the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau, that was picked up by the Associated Press and a number of other outlets. It does state that Wisconsin was on course for a surplus this year, which the media reported that in good faith. The issue is what Politifact refers to as the memo's "fine print."

[It] outlines $258 million in unpaid bills or expected shortfalls in programs such as Medicaid services for the needy ($174 million alone), the public defender's office and corrections. Additionally, the state owes Minnesota $58.7 million under a discontinued tax reciprocity deal.

The result, by our math and Lang's, is the $137 million shortfall.

It's important to understand that this doesn't change the fact that Walker dishonestly portrayed his union-busting bill as a budget fix, which, as you'll see below, it is not.

5. More Evidence that Walker's Bill Has Nothing to do With Wages, Benefits and the State's Budget Gap

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has a long history trying to break public sector unions. But last week, as the Milwaukee Business Times reported, he insisted that "his bill was strictly based on the need to cut the budget and was not based on any political agenda." Indeed, the bill was introduced by the governor as an "emergency measure... needed to balance the state budget and give government the tools to manage during economic crisis."

But, as we reported on Sunday, a close reading of the governor's own press release announcing the measure shows just how misleading that claim really is.

Here's the problem, according to Walker's release:

The state of Wisconsin is facing an immediate deficit of $137 million for the current fiscal year which ends July 1. In addition, bill collectors are waiting to collect over $225 million for a prior raid of the Patients' Compensation Fund.

There is a $137 million shortfall for this year. Regarding the Patients' Compensation Fund, Politifact reports that "a court ruling is pending in that matter, so the money might not have to be transferred until next budget year."

But here are three important points from the governor's release that show quite clearly that this bill has nothing at all to do with closing Wisconsin's budget gap in the near-term -- as an emergency measure that wasn't even subject to public debate.

1. "The budget repair will also restructure the state debt, lowering the state's interest rate, saving the state $165 million." That's right, restructuring the state's outstanding debt yields more savings than the projected shortfall, and nobody is objecting to that provision.

2. "It will require state employees to pay about 5.8% toward their pension (about the private sector national average) and about 12% of their healthcare benefits (about half the private sector national average). These changes will help the state save $30 million in the last three months of the current fiscal year." Yes, those give-backs would yield less than 20 percent of what the debt restructuring would bring in. And, as I mentioned earlier, the public employees' unions offered to make those concessions in exchange for losing the provision that would bar them from negotiating their benefits package in the future, and the GOP flatly refused the offer.

3. The collective bargaining provision wouldn't kick in until after the current contracts expire, meaning that the measure would yield exactly zero savings in the current budget.

Random Lengths News' Paul Rosenberg caught this, and adds that Walker is also sitting on an "unused cache of $73 million" in the state's economic development fund -- "more than twice what's being sought from public sector workers."

Samuel Smith at Scholars and Rogues has more detail.

AlterNet also reported over the weekend that while far too many pundits continue to buy Scott Walker's spin that the Wisconsin uprising is a response to the state's public employees being asked to shoulder more of the burden for their health-care and pension costs, the reality is that it's really all about the union-busting.

According to the Milwaukee Business Times, the unions have in fact agreed to all of the GOP's demands on wages and benefits, in exchange for Republicans dropping the provision that would strip them of the right to negotiate in the future:

Although union leaders and Wisconsin Democratic Senators are offering to accept the wage and benefit concessions Gov. Scott Walker is demanding, Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) said today a bill taking away collective bargaining rights from public employees is not negotiable.

Democrats and union leaders said they're willing to agree to the parts of Walker's budget repair bill that would double their health insurance contributions and require them to contribute 5.8 percent of their salary to their pensions. However, the union leaders want to keep their collective bargaining rights.

"I have been informed that all state and local public employees - including teachers - have agreed to the financial aspects of Governor Walker's request," Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-Waunakee) said. "This includes Walker's requested concessions on public employee health care and pension. In return they ask only that the provisions that deny their right to collectively bargain are removed. This will solve the budget challenge. This is a real opportunity for us to come together and resolve the issue and move on. It is incumbent upon Governor Walker to seriously consider and hopefully accept this offer as soon as possible."

However, Fitzgerald said the terms of the bill are not negotiable, and he called upon Democrats who left the state this week to stall a vote on the bill to return to the Capitol.

On a related note, Business Insider, citing research by economist Menzie Chinn, reported that "Wisconsin's public sector workers get paid LESS than the private sector." Almost 5 percent less, even including healthcare and retirement benefits.

Now, we have some quick hits:

6. Bubba Arriving on the Scene?

Mike Elk reports that rumors are swirling around the capitol that Bill Clinton may be headed to Wisconsin as an act of solidarity with the unions that helped Hillary's presidential campaign.

7. Foxed

Crooks and Liars highlighted a bogus smear being pushed by Fox "News" -- one that originated, naturally, with one of ACORN-killer James O'Keefe's former associates.

Raw Story reported that "protesters shouted 'Fox lies! Fox lies!' throughout a Fox News segment on the demonstration in Wisconsin Friday."

8. Business Community Unhappy With Walker?

Mike Elk also reported that Wisconsin's local business community is showing signs of turning against Scott Walker.

9. Rage Against the Machine

The Wisconsin State Journal reports that "Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Wayne Kramer, Street Dogs and other musicians just announced they'll join pro-union protesters at the Capitol" today.

10. Egyptian Workers Express Solidarity with Wisconsin's Public Workers

Michael Moore.com has posted a statement of support, "from a place very close to Tahrir Square in Cairo," by Kamal Abbas, the General Coordinator of the CTUWS, which is "an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt." We posted this picture over the weekend:

What You Can Do -- Big Weeks Ahead

The Wisconsin Uprising appears to be an opening shot in a genuinely grassroots push-back against the corporate Right's attack on the labor movement and, more broadly, our social safety net. We'll continue following events as they unfold.

You can offer your solidarity in a number of ways. Check out US Uncut, get out and make your voice heard.

In the meantime, you can send the protesters in Wisconsin a pizza! On Sunday, Ian's Pizza on State Street announced on its Facebook page that it was suspending its normal in-store and delivery operations "to keep up with the high volume of calls it was receiving from people all over the country and the world seeking to buy pizza for the protesters at the Capitol." According to New York Magazine, "Ian's gave away 1,057 donated slices yesterday and delivered more than 300 pizzas. The blackboard behind the counter now has a running list of places where donations have come from, and it includes China and Egypt."

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

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6) Qaddafi's Grip on Power Seems to Ebb as Forces Retreat
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MONA EL-NAGGAR
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22libya.html?hp

CAIRO - The 40-year-rule of the Libyan strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi appeared to teeter Monday as his security forces retreated to a few buildings in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, fires burned unchecked and senior government officials and diplomats announced defections. The country's second-largest city remained under the control of rebels.

Security forces loyal to Mr. Qaddafi defended a handful of strategic locations, including the state television headquarters and the presidential palace, witnesses reported from Tripoli. Fires from the previous night's rioting burned at many intersections, most stores were shuttered, and long lines were forming for a chance to buy bread or gas.

In a sign of growing cracks within the government, several senior officials - including the justice minister and members of the Libyan mission to the United Nations - announced their resignations. And protesters in Benghazi, the second-largest city where the revolt began and more than 200 were killed, issued a list of demands calling for a secular interim government led by the army in cooperation with a council of Libyan tribes.

Mr. Qadaffi's security forces waved green flags as they rallied in Tripoli's central Green Square Monday under the protection of a handful of police, witnesses said. They constituted one of the few visible signs of government authority around the capital. The ubiquitous posters of Colonel Qaddafi around the capital had been torn down or burned, witnesses said.

Colonel Qaddafi's whereabouts were not known, but residents feared that forces loyal to him might still fight back. Residents reported hearing airplanes and helicopters flying above the capital, but it was not clear if they were firing on protesters. They also reported seeing fighters they described as mercenaries roaming the capital and shooting at crowds.

Tripoli descended into chaos in less than 24 hours as a six-day-old revolt suddenly spread from Benghazi across the country on Sunday. The revolt shaking Libya is the latest and most violent turn in a rebellion across the Arab world that seemed unthinkable just two months ago and that has already toppled autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia.

The Libyan government has tried to impose a blackout on the country. Foreign journalists cannot enter. Internet access has been almost totally severed, though some protesters appear to be using satellite connections or to be phoning information to news services outside the country.

In a rambling, disjointed address delivered about 1 a.m. on Monday, Mr. Qaddafi's son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, played down the uprising sweeping the country, which witnesses and rights activists say has left more than 220 people dead and hundreds wounded from gunfire by security forces. He repeated several times that "Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt, " neighbors to the east and west.

The United States condemned the Qaddafi government's lethal use of force.

Witnesses in Tripoli interviewed by telephone on Monday said protesters had converged on the capital's central Green Square and clashed with heavily armed riot police for several hours after Mr. Qaddafi's speech, apparently enraged by it. Young men armed themselves with chains around their knuckles, steel pipes and machetes, as well as police batons, helmets and rifles commandeered from riot squads. Security forces moved in, shooting randomly.

By the morning, businesses and schools remained closed in the capital, the witnesses said. There were several government buildings on fire - including the Hall of the People, where the legislature meets - and reports of looting.

News agencies reported that several foreign oil and gas companies were moving on Monday to evacuate their workers from the country. The Portuguese government sent a plane to Libya to pick up its citizens and other residents of the European Union, while Turkey sent two ferries for its construction workers in the strife-torn country, The Associated Press reported.

The Quryna newspaper, which has ties to Colonel Qaddafi's son Seif, said that protests have occurred in Ras Lanuf, an oil town where some workers were being assembled to defend a refinery complex from attacks.

Quryna also reported that Mr. Qaddafi's justice minister, Mustafa Abud Al Jeleil, had resigned in protest over the deadly response to the anti-government demonstrations.

Al-Manara, an opposition website, reported that a senior military official, Col. Abdel Fattah Younes in Benghazi, resigned, and the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Colonel Qaddafi ordered that one of his top generals, Abu Bakr Younes, be put under house arrest after disobeying an order to use force against protesters in several cities.

Abdel Monem Al-Howni, Libya's representative to the Arab League, also resigned. "I no longer have any links to this regime which lost all legitimacy," he said in a statement reported by news agencies . He also called what is happening in Libya "genocide."

Protesters remained in control of Benghazi on Monday. Online videos showed protesters flying an independence flag over the roof top of a building in Benghazi, and a crowd celebrating what they called "the fall of the regime in their city."

The younger Mr. Qaddafi blamed Islamic radicals and Libyans in exile for the uprising. He offered a vague package of reforms in his televised speech, potentially including a new flag, national anthem and confederate structure. But his main theme was to threaten Libyans with the prospect of civil war over its oil resources that would break up the country, deprive residents of food and education, and even invite a Western takeover.

"Libya is made up of tribes and clans and loyalties," he said. "There will be civil war."

With little shared national experience aside from brutal Italian colonialism, Libyans tend to identify themselves as members of tribes or clans rather than citizens of a country, and Colonel Qaddafi has governed in part through the mediation of a "social leadership committee" composed of about 15 representatives of various tribes, said Diederik Vandewalle, a Dartmouth professor who has studied the country.

In addition, Mr. Vandewalle noted, most of the tribal representatives on the committee are also military officers, who each represent a tribal group within the military. So, unlike the Tunisian or Egyptian militaries, the Libyan military lacks the cohesion or professionalism that might enable it to step in to resolve the conflict with the protesters or to stabilize the country.

Over the last three days Libyan security forces have killed at least 223 people, according to a tally by the group Human Rights Watch. Several people in Benghazi hospitals, reached by telephone, said they believed that as many as 200 had been killed and more than 800 wounded there on Saturday alone, with many of the deaths from machine gun fire.

After protesters marched in a funeral procession on Sunday morning, the security forces again opened fire, killing at least 60 more, Human Rights Watch said.

The deputy ambassador and more than a dozen members of the Libyan mission to the United Nations called upon Colonel Qaddafi to step down and leave the country in a letter drafted on Monday.

"He has to leave as soon as possible," the deputy ambassador, Ibrahim Dabbashi, said, paraphrasing the letter. "He has to stop killing the Libyan people."

He urged other nations to join in that request, saying he feared there could be a large-scale massacre in Tripoli and calling on "African nations" to stop sending what he called "mercenaries" to fight on behalf of Qaddafi's government.

Mr. Dabbashi said he had not seen the Libyan ambassador since Friday and did not know his whereabouts or whether he shared the opinion of many in his mission.

But, Mr. Dabbashi said, the United Nations mission represents the people, not Colonel Qaddafi.

The man who was the government's chief spokesman until a month ago, Mohamed Bayou, called on Libya's leadership to begin a dialogue with the opposition and discuss drawing up a Constitution. On Monday, Reuters reported that Mr. Bayou issued a statement referring to Seif Qaddafi: "I hope he will change his speech to acknowledge the existence of an internal popular opposition."

Sharon Otterman and Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from Cairo, and Nada Bakri from Beirut, Lebanon, and Colin Moynihan from New York.


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7) Wisconsin Power Play
By PAUL KRUGMAN
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opinion/21krugman.html?hp

Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin's new union-busting governor, Scott Walker - demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday - Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: "It's like Cairo has moved to Madison."

It wasn't the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn't mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did - after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.

In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what's happening in Wisconsin isn't about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker's pretense that he's just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin - and eventually, America - less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that's why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators' side.

Some background: Wisconsin is indeed facing a budget crunch, although its difficulties are less severe than those facing many other states. Revenue has fallen in the face of a weak economy, while stimulus funds, which helped close the gap in 2009 and 2010, have faded away.

In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

But Mr. Walker isn't interested in making a deal. Partly that's because he doesn't want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers' ability to bargain.

The bill that has inspired the demonstrations would strip away collective bargaining rights for many of the state's workers, in effect busting public-employee unions. Tellingly, some workers - namely, those who tend to be Republican-leaning - are exempted from the ban; it's as if Mr. Walker were flaunting the political nature of his actions.

Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state's budget prospects even in the long run: contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there's not much room for further pay squeezes.

So it's not about the budget; it's about the power.

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we're a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we're more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Given this reality, it's important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

You don't have to love unions, you don't have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they're among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years - which it has - that's to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.

And now Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to get rid of public-sector unions, too.

There's a bitter irony here. The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America's oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.

So will the attack on unions succeed? I don't know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn't.

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8) Watching Protesters Risk It All
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opinion/21kristof.html?hp

Manama, Bahrain

As democracy protests spread across the Middle East, we as journalists struggle to convey the sights and sounds, the religion and politics. But there's one central element that we can't even begin to capture: the raw courage of men and women - some of them just teenagers - who risk torture, beatings and even death because they want freedoms that we take for granted.

Here in Bahrain on Saturday, I felt almost physically ill as I watched a column of pro-democracy marchers approach the Pearl Roundabout, the spiritual center of their movement. One day earlier, troops had opened fire on marchers there, with live ammunition and without any warning. So I flinched and braced myself to watch them die.

Yet, astonishingly, they didn't. The royal family called off the use of lethal force, perhaps because of American pressure. The police fired tear gas and rubber bullets, but the protesters marched on anyway, and the police fled.

The protesters fell on the ground of the roundabout and kissed the soil. They embraced each other. They screamed. They danced. Some wept.

"We are calling it 'Martyrs' Roundabout' now," Layla, a 19-year-old university student, told me in that moment of stunned excitement. "One way or another, freedom has to come," she said. "It's not something given by anybody. It's a right of the people."

Zaki, a computer expert, added: "If Egypt can do it, then we can do it even better."

(I'm withholding family names. Many people were willing for their full names to be published, but at a hospital I was shaken after I interviewed one young man who had spoken publicly about seeing the police kill protesters - and then, he said, the police kidnapped him off the street and beat him badly.)

To me, this feels like the Arab version of 1776. And don't buy into the pernicious whisper campaign from dictators that a more democratic Middle East will be fundamentalist, anti-American or anti-women. For starters, there have been plenty of women on the streets demanding change (incredibly strong women, too!).

For decades, the United States embraced corrupt and repressive autocracies across the Middle East, turning a blind eye to torture and repression in part because of fear that the "democratic rabble" might be hostile to us. Far too often, we were both myopic and just plain on the wrong side.

Here in Bahrain, we have been in bed with a minority Sunni elite that has presided over a tolerant, open and economically dynamic country - but it's an elite that is also steeped in corruption, repression and profound discrimination toward the Shia population. If you parachute into a neighborhood in Bahrain, you can tell at once whether it is Sunni or Shia: if it has good roads and sewers and is well maintained, it is Sunni; otherwise, it is Shia.

A 20-year-old medical student, Ghadeer, told me that her Sunni classmates all get government scholarships and public-sector jobs; the Shiites pay their own way and can't find work in the public sector. Likewise, Shiites are overwhelmingly excluded from the police and armed forces, which instead rely on mercenaries from Sunni countries. We give aid to these oligarchs to outfit their police forces to keep the Shiites down; we should follow Britain's example and immediately suspend such transfers until it is clear that the government will not again attack peaceful, unarmed protesters.

We were late to side with "people power" in Tunisia and Egypt, but Bahrainis are thrilled that President Obama called the king after he began shooting his people - and they note that the shooting subsequently stopped (at least for now). The upshot is real gratitude toward the United States.

The determination of protesters - in Bahrain, in Iran, in Libya, in Yemen - is such that change is a certainty. At one hospital, I met a paraplegic who is confined to a wheelchair. He had been hit by two rubber bullets and was planning to return to the democracy protests for more.

And on the roundabout on Sunday, I met Ali, a 24-year-old on crutches, his legs swathed in bandages, limping painfully along. A policeman had fired on him from 15 feet away, he said, and he was still carrying 30 shotgun pellets that would eventually be removed when surgeons weren't so busy with other injuries. Ali flinched each time he moved - but he said he would camp at the roundabout until democracy arrived, or die trying.

In the 1700s, a similar kind of grit won independence for the United States from Britain. A democratic Arab world will be a flawed and messy place, just as a democratic America has been - but it's still time to align ourselves with the democrats of the Arab world and not the George III's.

I invite you to comment on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me while I am in Bahrain on Twitter.

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9) Oil Companies Plan Evacuations From Libya
By JULIA WERDIGIER and RACHEL DONADIO
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22oil.html?hp

LONDON - Global oil companies said Monday that they were making plans to evacuate employees in Libya after some operations there were disrupted by political unrest. Libya holds the largest crude oil reserves in Africa, and the moves drove some stock prices down and a crucial oil benchmark to a three-year high.

The largest and most established foreign energy producer in Libya, Eni of Italy, said in a statement that it had begun repatriating "nonessential personnel" and the families of its employees.

The Norwegian energy company Statoil, which operates in Libya in partnership with Repsol of Spain and Total of France, said that it would close its office in Tripoli and that a handful of foreign workers were leaving. "The safety of our personnel is our main priority," said a spokesman, Bard Glad Pedersen.

OMV of Austria, which produces about 34,000 barrels of oil a day in Libya, said it planned to evacuate 11 workers and their families, leaving only essential staff.

Shares in Eni and OMV dropped Monday, while the price of Brent crude, an important benchmark for oil traded in London, rose to $104.60 a barrel, the highest level since 2008.

"We're concerned, and of course we'd like to see a solution sooner rather than later," said Jason Kenney, an analyst with ING Financial Markets. "It's very difficult to see how this is going to go. The oil price will be volatile."

The British oil company BP, which has only exploration operations in Libya, said it was planning to evacuate some of its 40 foreign workers, mostly from Tripoli, where the unrest spread to Sunday. It also said it had suspended preparations for a drilling project because employees of a contractor had been evacuated.

"We, like everyone, are watching this very, very carefully," BP's chief executive, Robert Dudley, said. "We have operations there that are very limited. We remain committed to doing business there."

For many years, Libya was shunned by most foreign oil companies because of its anti-American government and ties to terrorist organizations. Eni was an exception, with operations there since 1959, and current major stakes in four fields.

Ever since Italy's brief colonial adventure in Libya in the early 20th century, the country has been a cornerstone of Italian foreign policy. In recent years, Italian blue-chip companies including Unicredit and Eni have come to rely on infusions of Libyan capital.

In 2003, when Libya struck a deal with the United States and Britain in which it promised not to develop weapons of mass destruction, international sanctions against it were lifted, and Eni was joined by other foreign oil companies.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Libya holds about 44 billion barrels of oil reserves and 54 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves. Total oil production of crude and liquids was about 1.8 million barrels a day in 2009.

In Egypt, where protests led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11, oil companies said operations had returned to normal. Statoil and BP said most employees who had left Egypt were back on the job.

Julia Werdigier reported from London and Rachel Donadio from Rome.

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10) Warplanes and Militia Fire on Protesters in Libyan Capital
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MONA EL-NAGGAR
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22libya.html?ref=world

CAIRO - The faltering government of the Libyan strongman Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi struck back at mounting protests against his 40-year rule, as helicopters and warplanes besieged parts of the capital Monday, according to witnesses and news reports from Tripoli.

By Monday afternoon, a witness saw armed militiamen firing on protesters who were clashing with riot police. As a group of protesters and the police faced off in a neighborhood near Green Square, in the center of the capital, ten or so Toyota pickup trucks carrying more than 20 men - many of them apparently from other African countries in mismatched fatigues - arrived at the scene.

Holding small automatic weapons, they started firing in the air, and then started firing at protesters, who scattered, the witness said. "It was an obscene amount of gunfire," said the witness. "They were strafing these people. People were running in every direction." The police stood by and watched, the witness said, as the militiamen, still shooting, chased after the protesters.

The escalation of the conflict came after Colonel Qaddafi's security forces had earlier in the day retreated to a few buildings in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, fires burned unchecked, and senior government officials and diplomats announced defections. The country's second-largest city remained under the control of rebels.

Security forces loyal to Mr. Qaddafi defended a handful of strategic locations, including the state television headquarters and the presidential palace, witnesses reported from Tripoli. Fires from the previous night's rioting burned at many intersections, most stores were shuttered, and long lines were forming for a chance to buy bread or gas.

In a sign of growing cracks within the government, several senior officials - including the justice minister and members of the Libyan mission to the United Nations - broke with Mr. Qaddafi. And protesters in Benghazi, the second-largest city, where the revolt began and more than 200 were killed, issued a list of demands calling for a secular interim government led by the army in cooperation with a council of Libyan tribes.

Mr. Qaddafi's security forces waved green flags as they rallied in Tripoli's central Green Square on Monday under the protection of a handful of police, witnesses said. They constituted one of the few visible signs of government authority around the capital. The once ubiquitous posters of Colonel Qaddafi around the capital had been torn down or burned, witnesses said.

Colonel Qaddafi's whereabouts were not known.

Tripoli descended into chaos in less than 24 hours as a six-day-old revolt suddenly spread from Benghazi across the country on Sunday. The revolt shaking Libya is the latest and most violent turn in a rebellion across the Arab world that seemed unthinkable just two months ago and that has already toppled autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia.

The Libyan government has tried to impose a blackout on the country. Foreign journalists cannot enter. Internet access has been almost totally severed, though some protesters appear to be using satellite connections or to be phoning information to news services outside the country.

In a rambling, disjointed address delivered about 1 a.m. on Monday, Mr. Qaddafi's son Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi played down the uprising sweeping the country, which witnesses and rights activists say has left more than 220 people dead and hundreds wounded from gunfire by security forces. He repeated several times that "Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt, " neighbors to the east and west.

The United States condemned the Qaddafi government's lethal use of force.

Witnesses in Tripoli interviewed by telephone on Monday said protesters had converged on the capital's central Green Square and clashed with heavily armed riot police for several hours after Mr. Qaddafi's speech, apparently enraged by it. Young men armed themselves with chains around their knuckles, steel pipes and machetes, as well as police batons, helmets and rifles commandeered from riot squads. Security forces moved in, shooting randomly.

By the morning, businesses and schools remained closed in the capital, the witnesses said. There were several government buildings on fire - including the Hall of the People, where the legislature meets - and reports of looting.

News agencies reported that several foreign oil and gas companies were moving on Monday to evacuate some workers from the country. The Portuguese government sent a plane to Libya to pick up its citizens and other residents of the European Union, while Turkey sent two ferries for its construction workers, The Associated Press reported.

The Quryna newspaper, which has ties to Seif al-Islam Qaddafi, said that protests have occurred in Ras Lanuf, an oil town where some workers were being assembled to defend a refinery complex from attacks.

Quryna also reported that the justice minister, Mustafa Abud al-Jeleil, had resigned in protest over the deadly response to the demonstrations.

Al Manara, an opposition Web site, reported that a senior military official, Col. Abdel Fattah Younes in Benghazi, resigned, and the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Colonel Qaddafi ordered that one of his top generals, Abu Bakr Younes, be put under house arrest after disobeying an order to use force against protesters in several cities.

Abdel Monem Al-Howni, Libya's representative to the Arab League, also resigned. "I no longer have any links to this regime which lost all legitimacy," he said in a statement reported by news agencies . He also called what is happening in Libya "genocide."

Protesters remained in control of Benghazi on Monday. Online videos showed protesters flying an independence flag over the roof top of a building in Benghazi, and a crowd celebrating what they called "the fall of the regime in their city."

The younger Mr. Qaddafi blamed Islamic radicals and Libyans in exile for the uprising. He offered a vague package of reforms in his televised speech, potentially including a new flag, national anthem and confederate structure. But his main theme was to threaten Libyans with the prospect of civil war over its oil resources that would break up the country, deprive residents of food and education, and even invite a Western takeover.

"Libya is made up of tribes and clans and loyalties," he said. "There will be civil war."

With little shared national experience aside from brutal Italian colonialism, Libyans tend to identify themselves as members of tribes or clans rather than citizens of a country, and Colonel Qaddafi has governed in part through the mediation of a "social leadership committee" composed of about 15 representatives of various tribes, said Diederik Vandewalle, a Dartmouth professor who has studied the country.

In addition, Mr. Vandewalle noted, most of the tribal representatives on the committee are also military officers, who each represent a tribal group within the military. So, unlike the Tunisian or Egyptian militaries, the Libyan military lacks the cohesion or professionalism that might enable it to step in to resolve the conflict with the protesters or to stabilize the country.

Over the last three days Libyan security forces have killed at least 223 people, according to a tally by the group Human Rights Watch. Several people in Benghazi hospitals, reached by telephone, said they believed that as many as 200 had been killed and more than 800 wounded there on Saturday alone, with many of the deaths from machine gun fire.

After protesters marched in a funeral procession on Sunday morning, the security forces again opened fire, killing at least 60 more, Human Rights Watch said.

The deputy ambassador and more than a dozen members of the Libyan mission to the United Nations called upon Colonel Qaddafi to step down and leave the country in a letter drafted on Monday.

"He has to leave as soon as possible," the deputy ambassador, Ibrahim Dabbashi, said, paraphrasing the letter. "He has to stop killing the Libyan people."

He urged other nations to join in that request, saying he feared there could be a large-scale massacre in Tripoli and calling on "African nations" to stop sending what he called "mercenaries" to fight on behalf of Qaddafi's government.

Mr. Dabbashi said he had not seen the Libyan ambassador since Friday and did not know his whereabouts or whether he shared the opinion of many in his mission.

But, Mr. Dabbashi said, the United Nations mission represents the people, not Colonel Qaddafi.

The man who was the government's chief spokesman until a month ago, Mohamed Bayou, called on Libya's leadership to begin a dialogue with the opposition and discuss drawing up a Constitution. On Monday, Reuters reported that Mr. Bayou issued a statement referring to Seif Qaddafi: "I hope he will change his speech to acknowledge the existence of an internal popular opposition."

Reporting was contributed by Sharon Otterman and Neil MacFarquhar from Cairo; Nada Bakri from Beirut, Lebanon; and Colin Moynihan from New York.

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11) Yemen President Struggles to Quell Protests
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/20/world/middleeast/AP-ML-Yemen.html?ref=world

Filed at 2:21 p.m. EST

SANAA, Yemen (AP) - Yemen's embattled president on Sunday sought a way out of the political crisis gripping his impoverished Arab nation, offering to oversee a dialogue between the ruling party and the opposition to defuse the standoff with protesters demanding his ouster.

The offer by the U.S.-backed Ali Abdullah Saleh - which opposition groups swiftly rejected - came as protests calling for his ouster continued in at least four cities around the country for the 11th straight day.

A 17-year-old demonstrator was killed Sunday evening in the port city of Aden when the army opened fire to disperse a march there, bringing the death toll to nine since the protests began.

Much is at stake in Yemen - a deeply troubled nation strategically located at the mouth of the Red Sea and next door to the world's largest oil reserves. Saleh's weak government is already under pressure from a southern separatist movement and disaffected tribesmen around the country.

The U.S., however, is most worried about an al-Qaida offshoot that has taken root in Yemen's mountains to plot attacks beyond the country's borders, including the failed attempt to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner in December 2009.

Saleh - in power for three decades - is quietly cooperating with the U.S. in efforts to battle the al-Qaida franchise, but his government exercises limited control in the tribal areas beyond the capital. The U.S. gives Yemen military aid and training.

Saleh's rule continues to show signs of resilience in the face of the sustained protests that have seen security forces and regime supporters battling demonstrators, mostly university students.

Yemen is a tribal society where almost every adult male has a firearm. A decision by the country's major tribes to take sides in the standoff between Saleh and his critics could decide the president's fate.

Protests continued Sunday, with 3,000 university students marching in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. Demonstrations were also held in a number of districts near Aden, the town of Taiz and the province of al-Hadida.

The protests pose the most serious challenge to Saleh's rule to date.

He has already made a series of concessions, pledging that his son would not succeed him and that he would not seek another term in office. On Sunday, he repeated his offer for negotiations.

"Dialogue is the best means, not sabotage or cutting off roads," Saleh told a news conference. "I am ready to sit on the negotiating table and meet their demands if they are legitimate," said the Yemeni leader, who warned against "infiltrators" seeking to divide Yemenis and sabotage their country.

A group of opposition parties refused to engage in dialogue while security forces continued to suppress demonstrations.

"No dialogue with bullets, clubs and thuggery," the group said in a statement Sunday.

The protesters have been inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

Marching students on Sunday burned the flag of Saleh's party and tore up photos of the president. Some wrote "Get out! Get out!" on the sidewalk, while others carried signs reading "Get out Ali for the sake of future generations."

Riot police surrounded them to keep them in a square in front of the university but did not intervene. On Sunday evening, more than 1,000 protesters remained in the square, saying they'd remain until the regime fell.

In the southern city of Aden, demonstrators led a number of small protests. A health official said one 17-year-old marcher was killed when the army fired to disperse about 100 protesters, bringing the city's death toll to five in recent days.

Security officials and activists both said about 80 people had been arrested in the city.

Officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

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12) Reform Lawyer Says Tunisia Risks Anarchy
By THOMAS FULLER
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/africa/22tunisia.html?ref=world

TUNIS - The head of a Tunisian government commission on political reform warned on Monday that the country risked falling into "anarchy" as it passed through what he described as a very dangerous post-revolutionary transition toward multi-party democracy.

"We might lose our freedom because we become too drunk on freedom," said Yadh Ben Achour, a prominent lawyer who is the head of Tunisia's Higher Political Reform Commission. "The risk is that everyone says what they want and does not think of the common good."

Mr. Ben Achour's commission is tasked with dismantling the repressive laws of the authoritarian government of former President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who fled the country in January, leaving a vacuum of power.

Tunisia faces enormous challenges rebuilding its political system. The country's caretaker government has been confronted with nearly daily protests by a variety of groups and the police force has been badly weakened by mass desertions and the firing of top officials. Provincial government offices remain dysfunctional and the judicial system is hobbled by its links to the ousted regime.

Abdelrazek Kilani, president of the Tunisian Bar Association, estimated that "about 100 judges are totally corrupt" and need to be removed. "They took bribes and followed orders from the Ministry of Justice," Mr. Kilani said in an interview. "They convicted people because the ministry told them to."

"Our worry is that the Ben Ali system is still in place," he said.

Mr. Ben Achour of the commission on political reform said Tunisia would miss the two-month deadline stipulated in its Constitution for a presidential election to replace Mr. Ben Ali. "Every judicial system knows the concept of force majeure," he said. It would be impossible to organize elections before March 15 deadline, he said.

Tunisians cannot on agree whether to change the current Constitution or discard it and elect a constitutional assembly that would write a new one, he said.

"We need to decide as soon as we can," he said. "The public is tired of waiting."

The commission may also help draft a new constitution, a process, he said, that risked being bogged down by politicians focusing on narrow interests and not the future of the country.

"This is what risks moving us toward anarchy," Mr. Ben Achour said. "And we know that anarchy always leads to dictatorship - theocratic or military dictatorship."

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13) Chinese Government Responds to Call for Protests
"The messages calling people to action urged protesters to shout, 'We want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness,' an ostensible effort to tap into popular discontent over inflation and soaring real estate prices."
By ANDREW JACOBS
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/asia/21china.html?ref=world

BEIJING - Skittish domestic security officials responded with a mass show of force across China on Sunday after anonymous calls for protesters to stage a Chinese "Jasmine Revolution" went out over social media and microblogging outlets.

Although there were no reports of large demonstrations, the outsize government response highlighted China's nervousness at a time of spreading unrest in the Middle East aimed at overthrowing authoritarian governments.

The words "Jasmine Revolution," borrowed from the successful Tunisian revolt, were blocked on sites similar to Twitter and on Internet search engines, while cellphone users were unable to send out text messages to multiple recipients. A heavy police presence was reported in several Chinese cities.

In recent days, more than a dozen lawyers and rights activists have been rounded up, and more than 80 dissidents have reportedly been placed under varying forms of house arrest. At least two lawyers are still missing, family members and human rights advocates said Sunday.

In Beijing, a huge crowd formed outside a McDonald's in the heart of the capital on Sunday after messages went out listing it as one of 13 protest sites across the country. It is not clear who organized the campaign, but it first appeared Thursday on Boxun, a Chinese-language Web site based in the United States, and then spread through Twitter and other microblogging services.

By 2 p.m., the planned start of the protests, hundreds of police officers had swarmed the area, a major shopping district popular with tourists.

At one point, the police surrounded a young man who had placed a jasmine flower on a planter outside the McDonald's, but he was released after the clamor drew journalists and photographers.

In Shanghai, three people were detained during a skirmish in front of a Starbucks, The Associated Press reported. One post on Twitter described a heavily armed police presence on the subways of Shenzhen, and another claimed that officials at Peking University in Beijing had urged students to avoid any protests, but those reports were impossible to verify Sunday.

The messages calling people to action urged protesters to shout, "We want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness," an ostensible effort to tap into popular discontent over inflation and soaring real estate prices.

In a sign of the ruling Communist Party's growing anxiety, President Hu Jintao summoned top leaders to a special "study session" on Saturday and urged them to address festering social problems before they became threats to stability.

"The overall requirements for enhancing and innovating social management are to stimulate vitality in the society and increase harmonious elements to the greatest extent, while reducing inharmonious factors to the minimum," he told the gathering, according to Xinhua, the official news agency. Mr. Hu also urged those gathered to step up Internet controls and to better "guide public opinion," a reference to efforts aimed at shaping attitudes toward the government through traditional propaganda and online commentators who masquerade as ordinary users.

Human rights advocates said they were especially concerned by the recent crackdown on rights defenders, which intensified Saturday after at least 15 well-known lawyers and activists were detained or placed under house arrest. Several of them reached by phone, including Pu Zhiqiang and Xu Zhiyong, said they were in the company of security agents and unable to talk, while many others were unreachable on Sunday evening. Two of the men, Tang Jitian and Jiang Tianyong, remain missing.

Many of those subjected to house arrest had met in Beijing on Wednesday to discuss the case of Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer under strict house arrest in rural Shandong Province. The plight of Mr. Chen and his family gained widespread attention last week after a video he and his wife made about his arrest emerged on the Internet.

Mr. Jiang, one of the missing lawyers, was forced into an unmarked van on Saturday night, his second abduction in recent days, his wife, Jin Bianling, said by telephone. She said the police had also searched the couple's home and confiscated his computer and briefcase.

In an interview after his first detention on Wednesday, Mr. Jiang said that he was taken to a police station and assaulted.

Most of those who thronged the McDonald's in Wangfujing, the Beijing shopping district, said they had no idea what the commotion was about. Some thought that perhaps a celebrity had slipped into the restaurant for a hamburger. But a young man, a Web page designer in his late 20s, quietly acknowledged that he was drawn by word of the protest.

Despite the absence of any real action, the man, who gave only his family name, Cui, said he was not disappointed by the outcome, in which police officers tried in vain to determine who was a potential troublemaker and who was simply a gawker. He predicted that many people, emboldened by the fact that an impromptu gathering had coalesced at all, would use social networking technology to stage similar events in the future.

"It's very difficult to do this in China, but this is a good start," he said. "I'm thankful to be able to participate in this moment in history."

Zhang Jing, Jon Kaiman and Jonathan Ansfield contributed research.

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14) NATO Airstrike Is Said to Kill Afghan Civilians
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
February 20, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/world/asia/21afghan.html?ref=world

JALALABAD, Afghanistan - NATO airstrikes killed at least 35 people in a remote mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan last week in an attack that NATO officers say was a successful mission against Taliban insurgents, but that Afghan officials have condemned as causing mass civilian casualties.

A joint NATO and Afghan assessment team will go to the area Monday to investigate the casualty allegations.

Meanwhile the death toll rose to 40 in the attack on a bank in Jalalabad on Saturday where soldiers and police officers were lining up to collect their pay. Officials said three of the seven gunmen were from Pakistan, and the one assailant who was captured said he was trained by the Haqqani network, a Pakistan-based terrorist group allied with the Taliban.

The NATO airstrike accused of causing civilian casualties involved helicopters and F-15 jets and took place late Thursday night and into the early morning on Friday in the Ghaziabad district of Kunar Province.

NATO and Afghan officials agree that the area is heavily infiltrated by insurgents. Beyond that, their accounts differ on almost every aspect of the raid.

The Kunar governor, Said Fazlullah Wahidi, said that officials had not been able to visit the area to independently evaluate the casualty claims because it was too insecure, but that reports from residents indicated that women and children were killed as well as some insurgents.

"According to our information 64 people were killed: 13 armed opposition, 22 women, 26 boys and 3 old men," Mr. Wahidi said.

President Hamid Karzai strongly condemned the attack, saying he had spoken with provincial authorities and elders several times in the last two days and was told that the dead and wounded included women and children.

Dr. Asadullah Fazli, the chief doctor at the provincial hospital in the capital, Asadabad, said the hospital had received at least nine wounded people from the area who had been hurt in fighting there, including three women, four children and two men. There were several other military operations in the area over the last few days, so it was not clear which one caused those injuries.

One of the patients, Mirajedi, a 2-year-old girl, had to have her leg amputated because of shrapnel injuries, Mirza Mohammed Khan, a doctor at the hospital, said Sunday.

Another patient there, Hamidullah, 21, who like many Afghans uses only one name, described an air attack and subsequent occupation of his village, Haigal, by Afghan Army soldiers over the last three days and said that 26 of his family members were killed or wounded. He conceded that the area had been used to launch attacks on NATO convoys.

"I am not sad that I lost my family members," he said. "They died for God, and I am also willing to die. If the infidels kill me, then it is something that God wishes. These people will, I am sure, God willing, be defeated. I hope God destroys Americans."

The NATO account said the assault began around 7 p.m. Thursday and lasted for five hours. The target was Taliban fighters who were gathering on a hillside, said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, the strategic communications chief. After reviewing footage of the assault and intelligence, he said that he saw no sign that civilians or civilian houses were attacked, but that it was not possible to rule it out entirely.

"What you see on the footage is that this is a very remote area, an area along steep inclines and away from any built up village or structures," he said. "I saw no evidence to suggest there were any children there," he said. "A group of individuals, Taliban, had gotten together for a meeting and as the assault was under way they dispersed down the hillside and into the nooks and crannies in the valley.

"What you see on the helicopter footage is teams: four individuals with weapons taken out; another group of 10 to 12, as if they are getting up together for a meeting; then a series of ones and twos and threes. They disperse and then regroup."

He said that in the course of the assault, eavesdropping equipment captured the fighters' conversations and they discussed calling local authorities and telling them there were civilian casualties, so that they would prevail on the coalition to stop shooting. "That's where the civilian casualty thing came from," Admiral Smith said.

Meanwhile in Jalalabad, it was a day of shock and mourning as the full measure of the bank attack began to become clear. The vast majority of the 40 victims were members of the police, the army and the border police, who were at the Kabul Bank branch here to collect their monthly salary.

At a news conference here on Sunday, officials displayed photographs taken by the bank's security cameras that showed the seven gunmen picking out security personnel and shooting them at close range. Police officers, soldiers and civilians can be seen crawling on their hands and knees trying to escape; a border policeman lies flattened on the floor as a gunman trains his weapon on him and pulls the trigger.

In addition to the three Pakistanis, three assailants were from Afghanistan - one each from Nangarhar, Kunar and Laghman Provinces - Gul Agha Shirzai, the governor of Nangarhar Province, said at the news conference. He did not mention the origin of the seventh assailant. Six of the attackers were killed at the scene.

The one caught by the police appeared at the news conference in a blood-stained salwar kameez, the traditional loose pants and tunic, his hair uncombed and a glazed look in his eyes. It was unclear if the blood was from wounds he had received during the attack or if he had been beaten during his capture or interrogation.

Sounding affectless and exhausted, he said his name was Zar Hajam Khan and that he came from North Waziristan, a tribal area of Pakistan where the Haqqani network is based. "I studied in the Haqqani madrasa for three months and they trained and equipped me and my friend," he said.

He named at least three people who had helped him prepare for the attack, including the man who brought him to the bank on Saturday.

He said he first came to Jalalabad several weeks ago when a man who helped organize the attack took him to observe the bank. "They gave us training and instructions about how to enter and how to attack, and they gave us the A.N.A. uniforms," he said, referring to the Afghan Army uniforms the attackers wore.

Then he went to Peshawar, Pakistan, and only returned to Afghanistan on Wednesday, crossing the border at Torkham without being searched, he said.

As the attack was taking place, he said, he was wounded and asked a comrade for advice. The comrade told him to leave his gun and try to escape.

Mr. Khan walked down the bank's stairs, still wearing a suicide vest, and was caught by the police.

Sharifullah Sahak and an Afghan employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.

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15) Looking for a Credit Card? It Pays to Be Rich
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/21/business/AP-US-Credit-Cards-The-New-Terms.html?src=busln

Filed at 1:49 p.m. EST

NEW YORK (AP) - It pays to be rich if you need a credit card.

A year after sweeping credit card regulations upended the industry, banks are showering perks and rewards on big spenders with sterling credit scores. And they're socking customers with spottier histories with higher interest rates, lower credit limits and new annual fees. In some cases the riskiest customers are being dropped altogether.

"When you look at the regulations, it's a net positive for consumers," says Peter Garuccio, a spokesman for the American Bankers Association. "But there have been some trade-offs."

The widening differences between how customers are treated is largely the result of new constraints on card issuers. The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, or the CARD Act, was signed into law with great fanfare at a time when borrowers across the country were struggling to make payments. It swept away several practices that for years had grated on cardholders.

A key change is that issuers can no longer hike rates on existing balances or in the first year an account is open. The penalty charge for late payments is also capped at $25 per violation. And monthly statements must also clearly spell out the projected interest costs of making only minimum payments.

The regulations are already transforming the cards on the market. To make up for the drop in revenue, banks are imposing new annual fees and hiking interest rates - but mostly for those with the lowest credit scores. The best customers are more prized than ever.

Here's how credit card offers are changing for consumers in three credit brackets:

The A-list (excellent credit): A clean payment history and a healthy appetite for spending put these customers at the top of the credit pyramid.

And the courtship of this group is intensifying. Prior to the recession, 44 percent of all credit card offers were mailed to this group. Now they receive 64 percent of all mailings, according to market researcher Synovate.

The terms are getting sweeter too:

-Customers can earn rewards at five times the standard rate with a premium card being tested by Bank of America. The acceleration applies to select purchases, and the $75 annual fee is waived for those who have at least $50,000 with the bank.

-Generous balance transfer options abound. Think 0 percent interest for up to a year on new purchases, and as long as 18 months on transfers.

-Foreign transaction fees are a source of annoyance for the well-to-do, who travel abroad more often. American Express, Chase and Citi have all announced they're doing away with the fees on select cards marketed to their wealthiest customers.

In other cases, banks are going all out with enhanced perks. With Citi's new ThankYou Prestige card, customers who book airline tickets get one complimentary ticket for a companion each year. The card's annual fee is $500. That underscores another attractive trait among these customers - the willingness to pay handsomely for premium services.

This group's propensity to spend is also attractive because issuers collect fees of 1 to 2 percent from merchants whenever their cardholders make purchases.

The B-list (good to fair credit): The next swath of consumers have solid credit histories, but may have more modest spending habits or make an occasional late payment. Many of these customers are seeing an uptick in offers for rewards cards, but the terms aren't dramatically different.

A few rungs down the credit ladder, however, are those with spottier records. These customers make late payments often enough to raise red flags or regularly carry balances close to their credit limits. They may not be financial disasters, but they're not entirely reliable either.

Most of these B-listers still won't have any trouble getting approved for a new credit card, but they'll have to agree to higher interest rates and annual fees, even for plain-vanilla cards.

Consider the following:

-A new $59 annual fee is being imposed on select Bank of America customers. Notice of the fee was mailed out this month to cardholders who fit certain risk profiles, such as carrying a balance close to their credit limit or regularly making late payments. Customers were also targeted if they didn't have any other relationship with the bank, such as a checking account or mortgage.

-The move by Bank of America isn't unusual. Most credit cards marketed to this group now have annual fees of about $39 to $59. A year ago, the same customers could easily find similar cards with no fees.

-The average interest rate offered to those with merely fair credit scores is 22.57 percent, up from 19.07 percent about a year ago, according to CardHub.com.

The higher prices make sense in light of the new limits on penalty fees and rate hikes, which make these B-list customers far less profitable.

Consumer advocates say knowing the costs upfront is nevertheless an improvement to the bait-and-switch tactics employed before the regulations took effect. In the past, introductory interest rates could quickly escalate and catch cardholders off guard.

The prices are simply more transparent now, says Ruth Susswein of Consumer Action.

The D-List (poor credit): For the riskiest consumers with an established streak of defaults and late payments, the recession isn't the only reason the options have dried up.

The CARD Act means banks can no longer freely raise rates or impose fees to manage their default risk, says Dennis Moroney, a credit card analyst with TowerGroup. So when they issue cards, "they have to have their ducks in a row from a risk point of view."

There's no doubt the riskiest customers have become toxic in this environment. In 2009 alone, banks wrote off a record $83.27 billion in credit card debt.

It's no wonder that card issuers have slashed available credit overall since 2007 by nearly a third, or $1.5 trillion, according to TowerGroup.

With bigger issuers such as Capital One the choices for customers with tarnished credit are pretty much limited to secured credit cards. These cards are intended to help borrowers rebuild credit, but require deposits and offer small credit limits. There are often activation fees as well.

Another telltale sign of the industry's growing reluctance to wade into this market? First Premier, a long-time player in the subprime credit arena, is no longer offering new unsecured lines of credit.

After the CARD Act took effect, the bank tested a card that charged $75 in first-year fees for a $300 credit line. It had a 79.9 percent interest rate. Those terms apparently haven't been a success.

It's unclear whether First Premier will resume offering unsecured credit cards. If not, consumer advocates say the disappearance of such easy-to-get, high-cost cards wouldn't be such a terrible development for those struggling to dig out of debt.

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16) 'We Stand With You as You Stood With Us': Statement to Workers of Wisconsin by Kamal Abbas of Egypt's Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services
February 20th, 2011 3:45 PM
MichaelMoore.com, February 20, 2011
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/must-read/statement-kamal-abbas

About Kamal Abbas and the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services:

Kamal Abbas is General Coordinator of the CTUWS, an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt. The CTUWS, which was awarded the 1999 French Republic's Human Rights Prize, suffered repeated harassment and attack by the Mubarak regime, and played a leading role in its overthrow. Abbas, who witnessed friends killed by the regime during the 1989 Helwan steel strike and was himself arrested and threatened numerous times, has received extensive international recognition for his union and civil society leadership.

KAMAL ABBAS: I am speaking to you from a place very close to Tahrir Square in Cairo, "Liberation Square", which was the heart of the Revolution in Egypt. This is the place were many of our youth paid with their lives and blood in the struggle for our just rights.

From this place, I want you to know that we stand with you as you stood with us.

I want you to know that no power can challenge the will of the people when they believe in their rights. When they raise their voices loud and clear and struggle against exploitation.

No one believed that our revolution could succeed against the strongest dictatorship in the region. But in 18 days the revolution achieved the victory of the people. When the working class of Egypt joined the revolution on 9 and 10 February, the dictatorship was doomed and the victory of the people became inevitable.

We want you to know that we stand on your side. Stand firm and don't waiver. Don't give up on your rights. Victory always belongs to the people who stand firm and demand their just rights.

We and all the people of the world stand on your side and give you our full support.

As our just struggle for freedom, democracy and justice succeeded, your struggle will succeed. Victory belongs to you when you stand firm and remain steadfast in demanding your just rights.

We support you. we support the struggle of the peoples of Libya, Bahrain and Algeria, who are fighting for their just rights and falling martyrs in the face of the autocratic regimes. The peoples are determined to succeed no matter the sacrifices and they will be victorious.

Today is the day of the American workers. We salute you American workers! You will be victorious. Victory belongs to all the people of the world, who are fighting against exploitation, and for their just rights.

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17) American Held in Pakistan Shootings Worked With the C.I.A.
By MARK MAZZETTI, ASHLEY PARKER, JANE PERLEZ and ERIC SCHMITT
February 21, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/asia/22pakistan.html?hp

This article was written by Mark Mazzetti, Ashley Parker, Jane Perlez and Eric Schmitt.

WASHINGTON — The American arrested in Pakistan after shooting two men at a crowded traffic stop was part of a covert, C.I.A.-led team of operatives conducting surveillance on militant groups deep inside the country, according to American government officials.

Working from a safe house in the eastern city of Lahore, the detained American contractor, Raymond A. Davis, a retired Special Forces soldier, carried out scouting and other reconnaissance missions as a security officer for a Central Intelligence Agency task force of case officers and technical surveillance experts, the officials said.

Mr. Davis’s arrest and detention, which came after what American officials have described as a botched robbery attempt, has inadvertently pulled back the curtain on a web of covert American operations inside Pakistan, part of a secret war run by the C.I.A. It has exacerbated already frayed relations between the American intelligence agency and its Pakistani counterpart, created a political dilemma for the weak, pro-American Pakistani government, and further threatened the stability of the country, which has the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenal.

Without describing Mr. Davis’s mission or intelligence affiliation, President Obama last week made a public plea for his release. Meanwhile, there have been a flurry of private phone calls to Pakistan from Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all intended to persuade the Pakistanis to release the secret operative. Mr. Davis has worked for years as a C.I.A. contractor, including time at Blackwater Worldwide, the controversial private security firm (now called Xe) that Pakistanis have long viewed as symbolizing a culture of American gun slinging overseas.

The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold information about Mr. Davis’s ties to the agency at the request of the Obama administration, which argued that disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk. Several foreign news organizations have disclosed some aspects of Mr. Davis’s work with the C.I.A.. On Monday, American officials lifted their request to withhold publication, though George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, declined any further comment.

Since the United States is not at war in Pakistan, the American military is largely restricted from operating in the country. So the Central Intelligence Agency has taken on an expanded role, operating armed drones that kill militants inside the country and running covert operations, sometimes without the knowledge of the Pakistanis.

Several American and Pakistani officials said that the C.I.A. team in Lahore with which Mr. Davis worked was tasked with tracking the movements of various Pakistani militant groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, a particularly violent group that Pakistan uses as a proxy force against India but that the United States considers a threat to allied troops in Afghanistan. For the Pakistanis, such spying inside their country is an extremely delicate issue, particularly since Lashkar has longstanding ties to Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

Still, American and Pakistani officials use Lahore as a base of operations to investigate the militant groups and their madrasas in the surrounding area.

The officials gave various accounts of the makeup of the covert task force and of Mr. Davis, who at the time of his arrest was carrying a Glock pistol, a long-range wireless set, a small telescope and a headlamp. An American and a Pakistani official said in interviews that operatives from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command had been assigned to the group to help with the surveillance missions. Other American officials, however, said that no military personnel were involved with the task force.

Special operations troops routinely work with the C.I.A. in Pakistan. Among other things, they helped the agency pinpoint the location of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy Taliban commander who was arrested in January 2010 in Karachi.

Even before his arrest, Mr. Davis’s C.I.A. affiliation was known to Pakistani authorities, who keep close tabs on the movements of Americans. His visa, presented to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in late 2009, describes his job as a “regional affairs officer,” a common job description for officials working with the agency.

According to that application, Mr. Davis carried an American diplomatic passport and was listed as “administrative and technical staff,” a category that typically grants diplomatic immunity to its holder.

American officials said that with Pakistan’s government trying to clamp down on the increasing flow of Central Intelligence Agency officers and contractors trying to gain entry to Pakistan, more of these operatives have been granted “cover” as embassy employees and given diplomatic passports.

As Mr. Davis languishes in a jail cell in Lahore — the subject of an international dispute at the highest levels — new details are emerging of what happened in a dramatic daytime scene on the streets of central Lahore, a sprawling city, on Jan. 27.

By the American account, Mr. Davis was driving alone in an impoverished area rarely visited by foreigners, and stopped his car at a crowded intersection. Two Pakistani men brandishing weapons hopped off motorcycles and approached. Mr. Davis killed them with the Glock, an act American officials insisted was in self-defense against armed robbers.

But on Sunday, the text of the Lahore Police Department’s crime report was published in English by a prominent daily newspaper, The Daily Times, and it offered a somewhat different account.

It is based in part on the version of events Mr. Davis told Pakistani authorities, and it seems to raise doubts about his claim that the shootings were in self-defense.

According to that report, Mr. Davis told the police that after shooting the two men, he stepped out of the car to take photographs of one of them, then called the United States Consulate in Lahore for help.

But the report also said that the victims were shot several times in the back, a detail that some Pakistani officials say proves the killings were murder. By this account, after firing at the men through his windshield, Mr. Davis stepped out of the car and continued firing. The report said that Mr. Davis then got back in his car and “managed to escape,” but that the police gave chase and “overpowered” him at a traffic circle a short distance away.

In a bizarre twist that has further infuriated the Pakistanis, a third man was killed when an unmarked Toyota Land Cruiser racing to Mr. Davis’s rescue, drove the wrong way down a one-way street and ran over a motorcyclist, killing him. As the Land Cruiser drove “recklessly” back to the consulate, the report said, items fell out of the vehicle, including 100 bullets, a black mask and a piece of cloth with the American flag.

Pakistani officials have demanded that the Americans in the S.U.V. be turned over to local authorities, but American officials say they have already left the country.

Mr. Davis and the other Americans were heavily armed and carried sophisticated equipment, the report said.

The Pakistani Foreign Office, generally considered to work under the guidance of the ISI, has declined to grant Mr. Davis what it calls the “blanket immunity” from prosecution that diplomats enjoy. In a setback for Washington, the Lahore High Court last week gave the Pakistani government until March 14 to decide on the issue of Mr. Davis’s immunity.

The pro-American government led by President Asif Ali Zardari, fearful for its survival in the face of a surge of anti-American sentiment, has resisted strenuous pressure from the Obama administration to release Mr. Davis to the United States. Some militant and religious groups have demanded that Mr. Davis be tried in the Pakistani courts and hanged.

Relations between the two spy agencies were tense even before the episode on the streets of Lahore. In December, the C.I.A.’s top clandestine officer in Pakistan hurriedly left the country after his identity was revealed. Some inside the agency believe that ISI operatives were behind the disclosure — retribution for the head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, being named in a New York City lawsuit filed in connection with the 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, in which members of his agency are believed to have played a role. I.S.I. officials denied that was the case.

One senior Pakistani official close to the ISI said Pakistani spies are particularly infuriated over the Davis episode because it was such a public spectacle. Besides the three Pakistanis who died at the scene, the widow of one of the victims committed suicide by swallowing rat poison.

Moreover, the official said, the case was embarrassing for the ISI for its flagrancy, revealing how much freedom American spies have to roam around the country.

“We all know the spy-versus-spy games, we all know it works in the shadows,” the official said, “but you don’t get caught, and you don’t get caught committing murders.”

Mr. Davis, burly at 36, appears to have arrived in Pakistan in late 2009 or early 2010. American officials said he operated as part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Global Response Staff in various parts of the country, including Lahore and Peshawar.

Documents released by Pakistan’s foreign office show that Mr. Davis was paid $200,000 a year, including travel expenses and insurance.

He is a native of rural, southwest Virginia, described by those who know him as an unlikely figure to be at the center of international intrigue.

He grew up in Big Stone Gap, a small town named after the gap in the mountains where the Powell River emerges.

The youngest of three children, Mr. Davis enlisted in the military after graduating from Powell Valley High School in 1993.

“I guess about any man’s dream is to serve his country,” said his sister Michelle Wade.

Shrugging off the portrait of him as an international spy comfortable with a Glock, Ms. Wade said: “He would always walk away from a fight. That’s just who he is.”

His high school friends remember him as good-natured, athletic, respectful. He was also a protector, they said, the type who stood up for the underdog.

“Friends with everyone, just a salt of the earth person,” said Jennifer Boring, who graduated from high school with Mr. Davis.

Mr. Davis served in the infantry in Europe — including a short tour as a peacekeeper in Macedonia — before joining the Third Special Forces Group in 1998, where he remained until he left the Army in 2003. The Army Special Forces —known as the Green Berets — are an elite group trained in foreign languages and cultures and weapons.

It is unclear when Mr. Davis began working for the C.I.A., but American officials said that in recent years he worked for the spy agency as a Blackwater contractor and later founded his own small company, Hyperion Protective Services.

Mr. Davis and his wife have moved frequently, living in Las Vegas, Arizona and Colorado.

One neighbor in Colorado, Gary Sollee, said that Mr. Davis described himself as “former military,” adding that “he’d have to leave the country for work pretty often, and when he’s gone, he’s gone for an extended period of time.”

Mr. Davis’s sister, Ms. Wade, said she has been praying for her brother’s safe return.

“The only thing I’m going to say is I love my brother,” she said. “I love my brother, God knows, I love him. I’m just praying for him.”

Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, Jane Perlez from Pakistan and Ashley Parker from Big Stone Gap, Va. Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan, and Waqar Gillani from Lahore, Pakistan.

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