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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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SF HRC Hearing: US Law Enforcement Profiling&Surveillance of Muslims-Arabs-South Asians (PREVIEW)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FvyROeYv1A
SFPD and the FBI are collaborating in a "Joint Terrorism Task Force"
you read between the lines...
In a Sanctuary City, we can't let our police act like FBI agents. Let's make sure they play by the rules!
Community testimony at a past Human Rights Commission hearing helped document that Arab, Muslim and South Asian community members are facing consistent interrogation, surveillance, harassment, and infiltration by federal law enforcement personnel (including FBI, CBP, and ICE). This occurs at homes, places of worship, and workplaces as well as traveling. ending racial and religious profiling of our communities, particularly in the context of National Security policies.
Now, SF Police & FBI are forced to respond to concerns of Profiling & Surveillance of Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern and South Asian Communities.
A Joint San Francisco Police Commission & Human Rights Commission Public Hearing
Wednesday May 18, 2011
San Francisco City Hall
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA
Board of Supervisors Chambers
HOW TO HELP: Please come to the hearing to show your support for Civil and Human Rights!
We are looking for community members to testify about their experience of being profiled or spied upon because of their race, religion, political activity or national origin. We are also looking for experts or attorneys and legal workers with clients who have experienced any of the following:
intrusive questioning or detainment while traveling
questioning by SFPD JTTF officers or SFPD officers
visits or approaches from the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
discrimination by law enforcement
(contact info below for questions)
EVEN IF YOU DON'T PLAN TO TESTIFY, HELP US BY PACKING THE HEARING ROOM!
More information:
On September 23, 2011, the Coalition for Safe San Francisco, a growing alliance of civil rights organizations & community helped sponsor an important hearing of the City of San Francisco Human Rights Commission: "Community Concerns of Racial and Religious Profiling, Surveillance of Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian Communities and the Potential Reactivation of SFPD Intelligence Gathering."
SEE 5 MINUTE YouTUBE Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FvyROeYv1A
To address these concerns the SF HRC issued and adopted a report with a series of recommendations to help end any existing abuses. The SF Board of Supervisors unanimously endorsed this report on Tuesday April 5, 2011.
SEE REPORT HERE: http://www.sf-hrc.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=983
Now the HRC and Police Commission are holding a public hearing to respond to community concerns & questions regarding SFPD policies and practices around possible surveillance and profiling they may be engaged in via collaborations with the FBI, or external actors or internally.
About the Hearing
This hearing will primarily be a forum for law enforcement officials to reply to community concerns and answer commissioner questions. However, there will then be a public comment portion where individuals will be allotted 2 minutes to testify. If you would like to comment, please let us know by contacting:
Summer Hararah | ASIAN LAW CAUCUS (415) 848-7714
OR
Nour Chammas | ARAB RESOURCE AND ORGANIZING CENTER (415) 861-7444
OR Emailing Us at safesf@yahoo.com
Anonymous or emailed stories are welcome.
ABOUT THE COALITION: www.safeSF.org
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Save the Date!
NATIONAL LABOR-COMMUNITY CONFERENCE TO DEFEAT THE CORPORATE AGENDA AND FIGHT FOR A WORKING PEOPLE'S AGENDA
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio
June 24-26, 2011
Working people across the country -- from Wisconsin and Ohio to New York, Oregon, and California -- are facing unprecedented attacks by corporations and the rich with the help of the federal, state and local politicians that they fund.
The corporate agenda is clear: It is to bust unions and cut workers' pay and benefits -- both in the private and public sectors. It is to erode and privatize Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It is to dismantle the public sector and social services by denying funds for job creation, education, health care, environmental protection, and rebuilding the infrastructure. It is to ensure that taxes on the wealthy are constantly lowered while the bite on workers and the poor is constantly increased. It is to perpetuate U.S. wars and occupations whenever it serves the interests of the multinationals. It is to divide the working class by race, gender, national origin, religion, and sexual orientation. It is also to limit and restrict constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties. The list goes on.
In state capitals, communities and workplaces across the country, workers are fighting back. But if we're going to be successful in pushing back the attacks on collective bargaining, stopping the budget cuts and concessions, creating jobs, and defending social services and education, we need to build unity within our movement, including forging stronger ties with labor's allies: communities of color, students and youth, single-payer advocates, environmentalists, antiwar activists, immigrant rights supporters, and other progressive forces.
Relying on politicians to defend us -- the so-called "friends of labor" -- has proven to be disastrous. During the past three decades, working people have suffered a dramatic decline in their standard of living while the rich have amassed an unprecedented amount of wealth at the top, regardless of which of the major parties was running the government. We have had every combination imaginable: Republicans occupying the White House with a majority in Congress, Democrats occupying the White House with a majority in Congress, or some kind of "divided government." But in each case the result for working people has been the same: conditions got worse for workers while the corporations prospered even more. Why should we continue this vicious cycle?
The working class has the power to put an end to this situation. And as the debate over the debt and the deficit intensifies, the need has never been greater for an organized campaign to demand "No Cuts, No Concessions!" whether in regard to social programs or workers' wages and benefits. We say place the burden for solving the financial crises squarely where it belongs: on the rich. They caused the crisis, let them pay for it!
The Emergency Labor Network (ELN) was initiated earlier this year at a historic meeting of 100 union leaders and activists from around the country. Join us June 24-26, 2011 at Kent State University in Ohio for a national labor-community conference to spur the campaign to build a more militant fight-back movement and to launch a national campaign for an alternative agenda for working people. Together we can move forward on both fronts.
This conference is open to all who agree with its purpose, as explained in this Call. To register for the conference, please go to our website at www.laborfightback.org. If you prefer to register offline, write emergencylabor@aol.com or call 216-736-4715 for a registration form.
For more information, e-mail emergencylabor@aol.com or call 216-736-4715.
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Oct. 7 - Protest, March & Die-In on 10th Anniversary of Afghanistan War
Friday, Oct. 7, 2011, 4:30-6:30pm
New Federal Building, 7th & Mission Sts, SF
Protest & Die-In on 10th Anniversary of Afghanistan War
End All the Wars & Occupations-Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Haiti . . .
Money for Jobs, Healthcare & Schools-Not for the Pentagon
Friday, October 7, 2011 will be the exact 10th anniversary of the U.S./NATO war on the people of Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of Afghani people have been killed, wounded and displaced, and thousands of U.S. and NATO forces killed and wounded. The war costs more than $126 billion per year at a time when social programs are being slashed.
The true and brutal character of the U.S. strategy to "win hearts and minds" of the Afghani population was described by a Marine officer, quoted in a recent ANSWER Coalition statement:
"You can't just convince them [Afghani people] through projects and goodwill," another Marine officer said. "You have to show up at their door with two companies of Marines and start killing people. That's how you start convincing them." (To read the entire ANSWER statement, click here)
Mark your calendar now and help organize for the October 7 march and die-in in downtown San Francisco. There are several things you can do:
1. Reply to this email to endorse the protest and die-in.
2. Spread the word and help organize in your community, union, workplace and campus.
3. Make a donation to help with organizing expenses.
Only the people can stop the war!
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545
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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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Labor Beat: May Day Weekend
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiitdOiO6kA
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Paradise Gray Speaks At Jordan Miles Emergency Rally 05/06/2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJOLz1EYDYE&feature=player_embedded
Police Reassigned While CAPA Student's Beatdown Investigated
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK-6IsP3dUg&NR=1&feature=fvwp
Pittsburgh Student Claims Police Brutality; Shows Hospital Photos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_j_AVsTXZc&feature=relmfu
Justice For Jordan Miles
By jasiri x
http://justiceforjordanmiles.com/
Monday, May 9, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Even though Pittsburgh Police beat Jordan Miles until he looked like this: (Photo at website)
And even though Jordan Miles, an honor student who plays the viola, broke no laws and committed no crimes, the Federal Government decided not to prosecute the 3 undercover Pittsburgh Police officers who savagely beat him.
To add insult to injury, Pittsburgh's Mayor and Police Chief immediately reinstated the 3 officers without so much as a apology. An outraged Pittsburgh community called for an emergency protest to pressure the local District Attorney to prosecute these officers to the fullest extent of the law.
Below is my good friend, and fellow One Hood founding member Paradise Gray (also a founding member of the Blackwatch Movement and the legendary rap group X-Clan) passionately demanding Justice for Jordan Miles and speaking on the futility of a war of terror overseas while black men are terrorized in their own neighborhoods.
For more information on how you can help get Justice For Jordan Miles go to http://justiceforjordanmiles.com/
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Nation Behind Bars Mass Incarceration And Political Prisoners In the U.S. - Efia Nwangaza, Malcolm X Center for Self-Determination
Black is Back Conference on the Other Wars, March 26, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBKfFEqaoSs&feature=email
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Tier Systems Cripple Middle Class Dreams for Young Workers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09pQW6TW8m4&feature=youtu.be
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Cindy Sheehan has turned her grief into an anti-war crusade, even questioning the death of Osama bin Laden. From HLN's Dr. DREW Show Thurs. 5/5/11:
http://911blogger.com/news/2011-05-06/cindy-sheehan-mothers-war-war
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Epidemiologist, Dr. Steven Wing, Discusses Global Radiation Exposures and Consequences with Gundersen
Epidemiologist, Dr. Steven Wing and nuclear engineer, Arnie Gundersen, discuss the consequences of the Fukushima radioactive fallout on Japan, the USA, and the world. What are the long-term health effects? What should the government(s) do to protect citizens?
http://vimeo.com/22706805
Epidemiologist, Dr. Steven Wing, Discusses Global Radiation Exposures and Consequences with Gundersen from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
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New Video - Lupe Fiasco ft. Skylar Grey - 'Words I Never Said'
Thu, Apr 28 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22l1sf5JZD0
Lupe Fiasco addresses some heavy issues in the latest video for his new single, 'Words I Never Said,' featuring Skylar Grey. In the 5 minute and 45 second dose of reality, Lupe tackles issues such as the war on terrorism, devastation, conspiracy theories, 9/11 and genocide. From the opening lyrics of "I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullsh*t", Lupe doesn't hold back as he voices his socio-political concerns.
"If you turn on TV all you see's a bunch of what the f-ks'
Dude is dating so and so blabbering bout such and such
And that ain't Jersey Shore, homie that's the news
And these the same people that supposed to be telling us the truth
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say s-t
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either
I'm a part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful."
Skylar Grey (who also lends her vocals to Dirty money's 'Coming Home' and Eminem's 'I Need A Doctor') does an excellent job of complementing the Alex Da Kid produced track.
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BREAKING ALERT: Mass Arrests, Tear Gas, Sound Weapons used Against WIU Students
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufKv-5t0t4E
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Union Town by Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ZT71DxLuM&feature=player_embedded
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MAY DAY 1886-International Workers Day
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SF-ADtNerPM&feature=player_embedded
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Labor Beat: We Are One - Illinois
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOntwNsWHac
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BRADLEY MANNING "BROKE THE LAW" SAYS OBAMA!
"He broke the law!" says Obama about Bradley Manning who has yet to even be charged, let alone, gone to trial and found guilty. How horrendous is it for the President to declare someone guilty before going to trial or being charged with a crime! Justice in the U.S.A.!
Obama on FREE BRADLEY MANNING protest... San Francisco, CA. April 21, 2011-Presidential remarks on interrupt/interaction/performance art happening at fundraiser. Logan Price queries Barack after org. FRESH JUICE PARTY political action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfmtUpd4id0&feature=youtu.be
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More troops join anti-government protests in Yemen
More soldiers have been joining anti-government protests on the streets of the capital Sana'a.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6658
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W.E. A.L.L. B.E.: Miss. Medical Examiner Dr. Adel Shaker On Frederick Carter Hanging (4/19/2011)
http://blip.tv/file/5057532
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Egyptian Soldiers Join Protest Demanding End to Military Dictatorship
Adam Hanieh: Class struggle in Egypt enters a new stage
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6626
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Row over Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning treatment (12Apr11)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv8xyHhDKkY&feature=related
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AP writer--State Department on Human Rights Abuse of Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUctxdsKk9Q
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Max Romeo - Socialism Is Love
http://youtu.be/eTvUs4rY4to
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Cuba: The Accidental Eden
http://video.pbs.org/video/1598230084/
[This is a stunningly beautiful portrait of the Cuban natural environment as it is today. However, several times throughout, the narrator tends to imply that if it werent for the U.S. embargo against Cuba, Cuba's natural environmet would be destroyed by the influx of tourism, ergo, the embargo is saving nature. But the Cuban scientists and naturalists tell a slightly different story. But I don't want to spoil the delightfully surprising ending. It's a beautiful film of a beautiful country full of beautiful, articulate and well-educated people....bw]
Watch the full episode. See more Nature.
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VIDEO: SWAT Team Evicts Grandmother
Take Back the Land- Rochester Eviction Defense March 28, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2axN1zsZno&feature=player_embedded
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B. D. S. [Boycott, Divest, Sanction against Israel]
(Jackson 5) Chicago Flashmob
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4tXe2HKqqs&feature=player_embedded
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Afghans for Peace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ror0qPcasM&NR=1
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The Kill Team
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses - and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon
Rolling Stone
March 27, 3011
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327
Afghans respond to "Kill Team"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3guxWIorhdA
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END THE U.S./UN/NATO KILL TEAM NOW!
WARNING: THESE ARE HORRIFIC, DISGUSTING, VIOLENT CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE U.S. MILITARY MAKING THE UPCOMING APRIL 10 [APRIL 9 IN NEW YORK] MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS A FIRST PRIORITY FOR WE, THE PEOPLE OF THE U.S. WE DEMAND OUT NOW! END THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND EVERYWHERE! BRING ALL THE TROOPS, UN/NATO/US/ and CONTRACTORS HOME NOW!
The Kill Team Photos More war crime images the Pentagon doesn't want you to see
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327
'Death Zone' How U.S. soldiers turned a night-time airstrike into a chilling 'music video'
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/death-zone-20110327
'Motorcycle Kill' Footage of an Army patrol gunning down two men in Afghanistan
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/motorcyle-kill-20110327
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BOB MARLEY - WAR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73zaNwyhXn0&playnext=1&list=PLA467527F8DD7DE1F
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LOWKEY - TERRORIST? (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBnvajSfWU
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Frederick Alexander Meade on The Prison Industrial Complex
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vqzfEYo6Lo
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BP Oil Spill Scientist Bob Naman: Seafood Still Not Safe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3VdxvMnDls
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Exclusive: Flow Rate Scientist : How Much Oil Is Really Out There?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsHl3kn63ZA&NR=1
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Iraq Veterans Against the War in Occupied Capitol, Madison, WI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7K0wn73uJU
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Stop LAPD Stealing of Immigrant's Cars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0lf4kENkxo
On Februrary 19, 2011 Members of the Southern California Immigration Coalition (SCIC) organized and engaged in direct action to defend the people of Los Angeles, CA from the racist LAPD "Sobriety" Checkpoints that are a poorly disguised trap to legally steal the cars from working class people in general and undocumented people in particular. Please disseminate this link widely.
Venceremos,
SCIC
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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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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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Free Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4eNzokgRIw&feature=player_embedded
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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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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded
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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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"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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Mumia Wins Decision Against Re-Imposition Of Death Sentence, But...
The Battle Is Still On To
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610
www.laboractionmumia.org
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ELLA BAKER CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
CLOSE PRISONS NOT SCHOOLS!
https://secure3.convio.net/ebc/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=164&utm_campaign=bnb_close_prisons_not_schools&utm_source=email-action&utm_medium=email&s_src=bnb_close_prisons_not_schools&s_subsrc=email-action&autologin=true&JServSessionIdr004=k3sp4vh2j4.app332b
Carlos* was only 14 years when he was locked up in a California youth prison. Growing up in a rough neighborhood in Northern CA, there were few resources for him or his younger brothers. Carlos was swept up by gangs and ended up serving a 10 year sentence in Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), leaving his siblings and childhood behind.
For 10 long years, our state spent millions of dollars to lock him up in a cell. Meanwhile, the state spent a tiny fraction of that amount providing an inadequate education to his younger brothers.
When Carlos was finally released earlier this year, he returned to a neighborhood that hasn't changed. Resources for youth are still scarce. He worries about his little brothers growing up in a society that would rather lock them up than invest in their educations and future.
Carlos' experience is only one example of why California ranks near the bottom in education spending and performance, but we're #1 in prison spending. DJJ drains much-needed resources from California's schools and the vital community programs that would help our State thrive. It's time to close the expensive, abusive DJJ and redirect those resources into our schools.
Join Books Not Bars in calling on Governor Brown to protect our schools by closing the Division of Juvenile Justice.
On May 10, join Books Not Bars, teachers, students, and other concerned Californians at the Capitol to save our schools. For more information or if you plan on attending, please contact Jennifer Kim at Jennifer@ellabakercenter.org, or (510) 285-8234.
If you can't join us in person, take action now, then sign up for join our online rally next Tuesday by sending Gov. Brown an email now.
Justice for families.
Sumayyah Waheed
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
*Carlos' name has been changed to protect his privacy.
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
www.ellabakercenter.org | 510.428.3939
1970 Broadway, Suite 450 | Oakland, CA | 94612
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U.S. Attorney Escalates Attacks on Civil Liberties of Anti-War,
Palestinian Human Rights Activists
Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald first thing Monday morning! (contact info at bottom of this email)
On Friday, May 6, the U.S. government froze the bank accounts of Hatem Abudayyeh and his wife, Naima. This unwarranted attack on a leading member of the Palestinian community in Chicago is the latest escalation of the repression of anti-war and Palestinian community organizers by the FBI, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Hatem Abudayyeh is one of 23 activists from Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in Chicago, and his home was raided by the FBI in September of last year. Neither Hatem Abudayyeh nor Naima Abudayyeh have been charged with any crime.
One of the bank accounts frozen was exclusively in Naima Abudayyeh's name. Leaders of the national Committee to Stop FBI Repression, as well as Chicago's Coalition to Protect People's Rights are appalled at the government's attempt to restrict the family's access to its finances, especially so soon before Mothers' Day. Not only does the government's action seriously disrupt the lives of the Abudayyehs and their five-year-old daughter, but it represents an attack on Chicago's Arab community and activist community and the fundamental rights of Americans to freedom of speech.
The persecution of the Abudayyeh family is another example of the criminalization of Palestinians, their supporters, and their movement for justice and liberation. There has been widespread criticism of the FBI and local law enforcement for their racial profiling and scapegoating of Arab and Muslim Americans. These repressive tactics include infiltration of community centers and mosques, entrapment of young men, and the prominent case of 11 students from the University of California campuses at Irvine and Riverside who have been subpoenaed to a grand jury and persecuted for disrupting a speech by Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the US. The government's attempt to conflate the anti-war and human rights movements with terrorism is a cynical attempt to capitalize on the current political climate in order to silence Palestinians and other people of conscience who exercise their First Amendment rights in a manner which does not conform to the administration's foreign policy agenda in the Middle East.
The issuance of subpoenas against the 23 activists has been met with widespread opposition and criticism across the country. Six members of the U.S. Congress, including five in the past month, have sent letters to either Holder or President Obama, expressing grave concern for the violations of the civil liberties and rights of the 23 activists whose freedom is on the line. Three additional U.S. representatives have also promised letters, as thousands of constituents and other people of conscience across the U.S. have demanded an end to this assault on legitimate political activism and dissent. Over 60 Minnesota state legislators also issued a resolution condemning the subpoenas.
The Midwest activists have been expecting indictments for some time. The freezing of the Abudayyeh family's bank accounts suggests that the danger of indictments is imminent.
Take action:
Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300.
Then dial 0 (zero) for the operator and ask to leave a message with the Duty Clerk.
Demand Fitzgerald
-- Unfreeze the bank accounts of the Abudayyeh family and
-- Stop repression against Palestinian, anti-war and international solidarity activists.
In solidarity,
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression and
The Coalition to Protect People's Rights
For more info go to StopFBI.net
follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend
Copyright (c) 2011 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55415
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Abolish the Death Penalty Blog
http://www.ncadp.org/blog.cfm?postID=165
Abolish the Death Penalty is a blog dedicated to...well, you know. The purpose of Abolish is to tell the personal stories of crime victims and their loved ones, people on death row and their loved ones and those activists who are working toward abolition. You may, from time to time, see news articles or press releases here, but that is not the primary mission of Abolish the Death Penalty. Our mission is to put a human face on the debate over capital punishment.
You can also follow death penalty news by reading our News page and by following us on Facebook and Twitter.
1 Million Tweets for Troy! April 12, 2011
Take Action! Tweet for Troy!
The state of Georgia is seeking to change the drugs they use to carry out executions so they can resume scheduling execution dates, including that of Troy Davis, a man with a strong claim of innocence. Doubts in the case persist, including the fact that no physical evidence links him to the murder, most of the witnesses have recanted or contradicted their testimony and newer testimony implicates a different person (including an eyewitness account).
The Davis case has already generated hundreds of thousands of emails, calls, and letters in support of clemency, including from leaders such as the Pope, Jimmy Carter and former FBI chief Bill Sessions. We need to continue to amass petitions in support of clemency, demonstrating the widespread concern about this case and what it represents.
Please help us send a message to Georgia officials that they can do the right thing - they can intervene as the final failsafe by commuting Davis' sentence. Please help us generate 1 million tweets for Troy Davis!
Share this tweet alert with your friends and family that care about justice and life as soon as you can.
More information about the case is available at www.justicefortroy.org
Here are some sample tweets:
When in doubt, don't execute!! Sign the petition for #TroyDavis! www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
Too much doubt! Stop the execution! #TroyDavis needs us! www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
No room for doubt! Stop the execution of #TroyDavis . Retweet, sign petition www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
Case not "ironclad", yet Georgiacould execute #TroyDavis ! Not on our watch! Petition: www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
No murder weapon. No physical evidence. Stop the execution! #TroyDavis petition: www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
7 out of 9 eyewitnesses recanted. No physical evidence. Stop the execution of Troy Davis www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition #TroyDavis
Thanks!
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FREE BRADLEY MANNING! HANDS OFF JULIAN ASSANGE!
In a recent New York Daily News Poll the question was asked:
Should Army pfc Bradley Manning face charges for allegedly stealing classified documents and providing them for WikiLeaks?
New York Daily News Poll Results:
Yes, he's a traitor for selling out his country! ...... 28%
No, he's a hero for standing up for what's right! ..... 62%
We need to see more evidence before passing judgment.. 10%
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/03/05/2011-03-05_wikileaks_private_loses_his_underwear.html?r=news
Sign the Petition:
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
Stand with Bradley!
A 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Manning faces decades in prison for allegedly leaking a video of a US helicopter attack that killed at least eleven Iraqi civilians to the website Wikileaks. Among the dead were two working Reuters reporters. Two children were also severely wounded in the attack.
In addition to this "Collateral Murder" video, Pfc. Manning is suspected of leaking the "Afghan War Diaries" - tens of thousands of battlefield reports that explicitly describe civilian deaths and cover-ups, corrupt officials, collusion with warlords, and a failing US/NATO war effort.
"We only know these crimes took place because insiders blew the whistle at great personal risk ... Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal," noted Barack Obama while on the campaign trail in 2008. While the President was referring to the Bush Administration's use of phone companies to illegally spy on Americans, Pfc. Manning's alleged actions are just as noteworthy. If the military charges against him are accurate, they show that he had a reasonable belief that war crimes were being covered up, and that he took action based on a crisis of conscience.
After nearly a decade of war and occupation waged in our name, it is odd that it apparently fell on a young Army private to provide critical answers to the questions, "What have we purchased with well over a trillion tax dollars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan?" However, history is replete with unlikely heroes.
If Bradley Manning is indeed the source of these materials, the nation owes him our gratitude. We ask Secretary of the Army, the Honorable John M. McHugh, and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General George W. Casey, Jr., to release Pfc. Manning from pre-trial confinement and drop the charges against him.
http://standwithbrad.org/
Bulletin from the cause: Bradley Manning Support Network
Go to Cause
Posted By: Tom Baxter
To: Members in Bradley Manning Support Network
A Good Address for Bradley!!!
We have a good address for Bradley,
"A Fort Leavenworth mailing address has been released for Bradley Manning:
Bradley Manning 89289
830 Sabalu Road
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027
The receptionist at the military barracks confirmed that if someone sends Bradley Manning a letter to that address, it will be delivered to him."
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/update-42811
This is also a Facebook event
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=207100509321891#!/event.php?eid=207100509321891
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The Arab Revolutions:
Guiding Principles for Peace and Justice Organizations in the US
Please email endorsement to ekishawi@yahoo.com
We, the undersigned, support the guiding principles and demands listed in this statement. We call on groups who want to express solidarity with the Arab revolutions to join our growing movement by signing this statement or keeping with the demands put forward herewith.
Background
The long-awaited Arab revolution has come. Like a geologic event with the reverberations of an earthquake, the timing and circumstances were unpredictable. In one Arab country after another, people are taking to the street demanding the fall of monarchies established during European colonial times. They are also calling to bring down dictatorships supported and manifested by neo-colonial policies. Although some of these autocratic regimes rose to power with popular support, the subsequent division and subjugation of the Arab World led to a uniform repressive political order across the region. The Arab masses in different Arab countries are therefore raising a uniform demand: "The People Want to Topple the Regimes!"
For the past two decades, the Arab people witnessed the invasion and occupation of Iraq with millions killed under blockade and occupation, Palestinians massacred with the aim to crush the anti-Zionist resistance, and Lebanon repeatedly invaded with the purposeful targeting of civilians. These actions all served to crush resistance movements longing for freedom, development, and self-determination. Meanwhile, despotic dictatorships, some going back 50 years, entrenched themselves by building police states, or fighting wars on behalf of imperialist interests.
Most Arab regimes systematically destroyed the social fabric of civil society, stifled social development, repressed all forms of political dissent and democratic expression, mortgaged their countries' wealth to foreign interests and enriched themselves and their cronies at the expense of impoverishing their populations. After pushing the Arab people to the brink, populations erupted.
The spark began in Tunisia where a police officer slapped and spat on Mohammad Bou Azizi, flipping over his produce cart for not delivering a bribe on time. . Unable to have his complaint heard, he self-immolated in protest, igniting the conscience of the Tunisian people and that of 300 million Arabs. In less than a month, the dictator, Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, was forced into exile by a Tunisian revolution. On its way out, the regime sealed its legacy by shooting at unarmed protestors and burning detention centers filled with political prisoners. Ben Ali was supported by the US and Europe in the fight against Islamic forces and organized labor.
Hosni Mubarak's brutal dictatorship fell less than a month after Tunisia's. The revolution erupted at a time when one half of the Egyptian population was living on less than $2/day while Mubarak's family amassed billions of dollars. The largest population recorded in Egyptian history was living in graveyards and raising their children among the dead while transportation and residential infrastructure was crumbling. Natural gas was supplied to Israel at 15% of the market price while the Rafah border was closed with an underground steel wall to complete the suffocation of the Palestinians in Gaza. Those who were deemed a threat swiftly met the fate of Khalid Said. 350 martyrs fell and 2,000 people were injured.
After Egypt and Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan exploded in protest. Some governments quickly reshuffled faces and ranks without any tangible change. Some, like Bahrain and Yemen, sent out their security forces to massacre civilians. Oman and Yemen represent strategic assets for the US as they are situated on the straits of Hormuz and Aden, respectively. Bahrain is an oil country that hosts a US military base, situated in the Persian Gulf. A new round of US funded blood-letting of Arab civilians has begun!
Libyan dictator Qaddafi did not prove to be an exception. He historically took anti-imperialist positions for a united Arab World and worked for an African Union. He later transformed his regime to a subservient state and opened Libya to British Petroleum and Italian interests, working diligently on privatization and political repression. He amassed more wealth than that of Mubarak. In the face of the Libyan revolution, Qaddafi exceeded the brutality of Ben Ali and Mubarak blind-folding and executing opponents, surrounding cities with tanks, and bombing his own country. Death toll is expected to be in the thousands.
Qaddafi's history makes Libya an easy target for imperialist interests. The Obama administration followed the Iraq cookbook by freezing Libyan assets amounting to 30% of the annual GDP. The White House, with the help of European governments, rapidly implemented sanctions and called for no-fly zones. These positions were precipitated shortly after the US vetoed a resolution condemning the illegal Israeli colonization of the West Bank. Special operations personnel from the UK were captured by the revolutionary commanders in Ben Ghazi and sent back. The Libyan revolutionary leadership, the National Council clearly stated: "We are completely against foreign intervention. The rest of Libya will be liberated by the people ... and Gaddafi's security forces will be eliminated by the people of Libya."
Demands of the Solidarity Movement with Arab Revolutions
1. We demand a stop to US support, financing and trade with Arab dictatorships. We oppose US policy that has favored Israeli expansionism, war, US oil interest and strategic shipping routes at the expense of Arab people's freedom and dignified living.
2. We support the people of Tunisia and Egypt as well as soon-to-be liberated nations to rid themselves of lingering remnants of the deposed dictatorships.
3. We support the Arab people's right to sovereignty and self-determination. We demand that the US government stop its interference in the internal affairs of all Arab countries and end subsidies to wars and occupation.
4. We support the Arab people's demands for political, civil and economic rights. The Arab people's movement is calling for:
a. Deposing the unelected regimes and all of its institutional remnants
b. Constitutional reform guaranteeing freedom of organizing, speech and press
c. Free and fair elections
d. Independent judiciary
e. National self-determination.
5. We oppose all forms of US and European military intervention with or without the legitimacy of the UN. Standing in solidarity with the revolution against Qaddafi, or any other dictator, does not equate to supporting direct or indirect colonization of an Arab country, its oil or its people. We therefore call for:
a. Absolute rejection of military blockades, no-fly zones and interventions.
b. Lifting all economic sanctions placed against Libya and allowing for the formation of an independent judiciary to prosecute Qaddafi and deposed dictators for their crimes.
c. Immediately withdrawing the US and NATO troops from the Arab region.
6. We support Iraq's right to sovereignty and self determination and call on the US to immediately withdraw all occupation personnel from Iraq.
7. We recognize that the borders separating Arab nations were imposed on the Arab people by the colonial agreements of Sykes-Picot and the Berlin Conference on Africa. As such, we support the anti-Zionist nature of this revolution in its call for:
a. Ending the siege and starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza
b. Supporting the right of the Palestinian people to choose their own representation, independent of Israeli and US dictates
c. Supporting the right of the Lebanese people to defend their country from Israeli violations and their call to end vestiges of the colonial constitution constructed on the basis of sectarian representation
d. Supporting the right of the Jordanian people to rid themselves of their repressive monarchy
e. Ending all US aid to Israel.
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY -- ANY DAY
to Fitzgerald, Holder and Obama
The Grand Jury is still on its witch hunt and the FBI is still
harassing activists. This must stop.
Please make these calls:
1. Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300 . Then dial 0
(zero) for operator and ask to leave a message with the Duty Clerk.
2. Call U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder 202-353-1555
3. Call President Obama at 202-456-1111
Suggested text: "My name is __________, I am from _______(city), in
______(state). I am calling _____ to demand he call off the Grand Jury
and stop FBI repression against the anti-war and Palestine solidarity
movements. I oppose U.S. government political repression and support
the right to free speech and the right to assembly of the 23 activists
subpoenaed. We will not be criminalized. Tell him to stop this
McCarthy-type witch hunt against international solidarity activists!"
If your call doesn't go through, try again later.
Update: 800 anti-war and international solidarity activists
participated in four regional conferences, in Chicago, IL; Oakland,
CA; Chapel Hill, NC and New York City to stop U.S. Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald's Grand Jury repression.
Still, in the last few weeks, the FBI has continued to call and harass
anti-war organizers, repressing free speech and the right to organize.
However, all of their intimidation tactics are bringing a movement
closer together to stop war and demand peace.
We demand:
-- Call Off the Grand Jury Witch-hunt Against International Solidarity
Activists!
-- Support Free Speech!
-- Support the Right to Organize!
-- Stop FBI Repression!
-- International Solidarity Is Not a Crime!
-- Stop the Criminalization of Arab and Muslim Communities!
Background: Fitzgerald ordered FBI raids on anti-war and solidarity
activists' homes and subpoenaed fourteen activists in Chicago,
Minneapolis, and Michigan on September 24, 2010. All 14 refused to
speak before the Grand Jury in October. Then, 9 more Palestine
solidarity activists, most Arab-Americans, were subpoenaed to appear
at the Grand Jury on January 25, 2011, launching renewed protests.
There are now 23 who assert their right to not participate in
Fitzgerald's witch-hunt.
The Grand Jury is a secret and closed inquisition, with no judge, and
no press. The U.S. Attorney controls the entire proceedings and hand
picks the jurors, and the solidarity activists are not allowed a
lawyer. Even the date when the Grand Jury ends is a secret.
So please make these calls to those in charge of the repression aimed
against anti-war leaders and the growing Palestine solidarity
movement.
Email us to let us know your results. Send to info@StopFBI.net
**Please sign and circulate our 2011 petition at http://www.stopfbi.net/petition
In Struggle,
Tom Burke,
for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression
FFI: Visit www.StopFBI.net or email info@StopFBI.net or call
612-379-3585 .
Copyright (c) 2011 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights
reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55415
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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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DEFEND LYNNE STEWART!
Write to Lynne Stewart at:
Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054
Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127
Visiting Lynne:
Visiting is very liberal but first she has to get people on her visiting list; wait til she 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.
Commissary Money:
Commissary Money is always welcome It is how Lynne pay for the phone and for email. Also 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 !)
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.
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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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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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
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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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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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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/
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D. ARTICLES IN FULL (Unless otherwise noted)
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1) Blue Cross names UAW's King, Ashton to board
Melissa Burden
The Detroit News
Last Updated: May 11. 2011 4:27PM
http://detnews.com/article/20110511/BIZ/105110420/Blue-Cross-names-UAW-s-King--Ashton-to-board
2) Greeks Stage Protests Against Spending Cuts and Tax Increases
By NIKI KITSANTONIS and SUZANNE DALEY
May 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/world/europe/12greece.html?ref=world
3) A Year After Israeli Raid, 2nd Flotilla to Set Sail for Gaza
By SUSANNE GÜSTEN
May 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/world/middleeast/12iht-M12-TURK-FLEET.html?ref=world
4) In America Being Poor is a Criminal Offense
By: Rania Khalek
Friday May 13, 2011 9:50 pm
http://my.firedoglake.com/raniakhalek/2011/05/13/in-america-being-poor-is-a-criminal-offense/
5) Supporter of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning sues government over laptop seizure
The Boston Globe
By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff
May 13, 2011 03:29 PM
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2011/05/supporter_of_wi.html?p1=News_links
6) Health Insurers Making Record Profits as Many Postpone Care
By REED ABELSON
May 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/business/14health.html?_r=1&hp
7) Japanese Worker's Death Not Linked to Radiation
By MARTIN FACKLER
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/asia/15japan.html?hp
8) Tension After Palestinian Boy's Death
By ETHAN BRONNER
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/middleeast/15mideast.html?hp
9) For Second Time in 3 Days, Afghan Child Killed by NATO
By SHARIFULLAH SAHAK and ALISSA J. RUBIN
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/asia/15afghan.html?hp
10) Connecticut Unions Agree to $1.6 Billion in Givebacks
By PETER APPLEBOME
May 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/nyregion/connecticut-reaches-deal-with-unions-to-close-budget-shortfall.html?ref=us
11) In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights
By MICHELLE ALEXANDER
Columbus, Ohio
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15alexander.html?hp
12) Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater's Founder
By MARK MAZZETTI and EMILY B. HAGER
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/middleeast/15prince.html?hp
13) 9 Killed as Israel Clashes With Palestinians on Four Borders
By ETHAN BRONNER
May 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/world/middleeast/16mideast.html?hp
14) Credit Error? It Pays to Be on V.I.P. List
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/your-money/credit-scores/15credit.html?hp
15) For Second Time in 3 Days, NATO Raid Kills Afghan Child
By SHARIFULLAH SAHAK and ALISSA J. RUBIN
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/asia/15afghan.html?ref=world
16) Tortured to Death in the US
By Liliana Segura, The Nation
Posted on May 12, 2011, Printed on May 16, 2011
AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/150931/tortured_to_death_in_the_us
17) IOF Kill Palestinian Child in Cold Blood in Occupied Jerusalem
PCHR (Palestinian Centre for Human Rights)
May 15, 2011
For more information please call PCHR office in Gaza , Gaza Strip, on +972 8 2824776 - 2825893
PCHR, 29 Omer El Mukhtar St., El Remal, PO Box 1328 Gaza, Gaza Strip. E-mail: pchr@pchrgaza.org, Webpage http://www.pchrgaza.org
18) The Renewable Future
Sunday 15 May 2011
by: Achim Steiner, Helen Clark and Kandeh K. Yumkella, Project Syndicate
http://www.truth-out.org/renewable-future/1305474409
19) 'White phosphorous used in Afghan war'
Press TV
Sat May 14, 2011 2:26PM
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/179875.html
20) Israeli Troops Fire as Marchers Breach Borders
By ETHAN BRONNER
May 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/world/middleeast/16mideast.html?ref=world
21) Money Troubles Take Personal Toll in Greece
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
May 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/business/global/16drachma.html?ref=world
22) Despite City Crackdown, Immigrants Still Are Often Cheated by Job Agencies
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
May 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/nyregion/immigrants-often-cheated-by-job-agencies-in-new-york.html?ref=nyregion
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1) Blue Cross names UAW's King, Ashton to board
Melissa Burden
The Detroit News
Last Updated: May 11. 2011 4:27PM
http://detnews.com/article/20110511/BIZ/105110420/Blue-Cross-names-UAW-s-King--Ashton-to-board
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan today announced its board of directors has appointed United Auto Workers President Bob King and UAW Vice President Joe Ashton to seats on its 35-member board.
The state's largest health insurer also said its board re-elected Gregory A. Sudderth of Gladstone, president of Executive Labor-Management Services Inc., as chairman and re-elected Spencer C. Johnson of Okemos, president of the Michigan Health & Hospital Association, as vice chair.
King replaces former UAW secretary-treasurer Elizabeth Bunn, who resigned late last year. King's term runs to April 2013.
Ashton, whose term runs to April 2012, is filling the seat of Cal Rapson, who resigned in March.
Blue Cross' board includes 22 seats filled from customers, while eight seats are slated for medical professionals, four are appointed by the governor and the Blues' CEO holds a nonvoting seat.
mburden@detnews.com
(313) 222-2319
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2) Greeks Stage Protests Against Spending Cuts and Tax Increases
By NIKI KITSANTONIS and SUZANNE DALEY
May 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/world/europe/12greece.html?ref=world
ATHENS - Tens of thousands of Greeks took to the streets here on Wednesday for a largely peaceful protest against the debt-ridden government's austerity drive, as a general strike called by labor unions disrupted transport services and closed schools and other public services.
The one-day strike came as the government - still struggling to get its financial house in order - is about to unveil yet another raft of spending cuts and tax increases. But many experts are increasingly skeptical of Greece's ability to find a path to solvency without further aid from its European partners.
Greece's economy has shrunk far more than experts originally expected last year, when the government needed a $140 billion rescue package to avoid bankruptcy. It shrank 4.5 percent last year, and is likely to contract by an additional 3 percent, according to Greece's Central Bank. The national debt - now at about 140 percent of G.D.P. - is forecast to hit nearly 160 percent by 2012.
Just how that debt would be restructured to keep Greece from falling even further behind remains an open question. So far, Greek and European officials have said a restructuring that would cause bondholders to suffer a haircut - a loss on their holdings - is out of the question. But that does not preclude softer options, like longer maturity dates on the loans in the rescue package and perhaps even a lower interest rate.
Experts believe proposals are likely to come after the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund complete an audit of Greece's progress in executing various reforms it agreed to in exchange for the emergency loans last May. That report is due next month. But despite Greece's grim finances and the appeals of labor unions, the demonstration Wednesday drew a modest turnout by Greek standards, with the police and the unions putting the figures at 20,000 and 40,000, respectively.
Prime Minister George Papandreou continues to outpoll his rivals, though he is facing some disorder in his own party. He held an emergency cabinet meeting on Tuesday after one of his most popular and visible ministers, Andreas Loverdos, criticized his government for "mixed policy messages."
Mr. Loverdos, the health minister, was referring to months of cabinet in-fighting that has delayed an austerity package and a $70 billion privatization program, which the European Union and the International Monetary Fund are demanding be in place before any further talk of new aid.
During the demonstrations, tensions flared up outside Athens University when hundreds of youths pelted the police with stones and bottles. Officers responded by firing tear gas that sent passers-by scurrying into side streets. Maria Kalimeri, a 48-year-old teacher, sheltering from the tear gas under a bus stop, said she had had enough of austerity, and of protests. "It's not enough that we've had our salaries cut, they treat us like trash," she said. "I'm not an anarchist, I'm a taxpayer. Are they going to arrest me for demonstrating?"
A statement posted on the police's Web site on Wednesday night said that 12 people had been detained and that 15 officers had been injured. The statement did not give an overall figure for injured demonstrators but confirmed reports on local news Web sites that a 30-year-old man had suffered serious head injuries during the skirmishes.
The labor unions that organized Wednesday's strike want the government to revoke wage cuts and tax increases. They are particularly opposed to a privatization plan to raise up to $71.3 billion by 2015 through the sale of state utilities and venues built for the Athens Olympic Games in 2004.
Ordinary Greeks seem less outraged, despite the indignant slogans at rallies. By early afternoon the crowds in central Athens had thinned, and tourists were photographing the riot police stationed in front of Parliament.
Niki Kitsantonis reported from Athens, and Suzanne Daley from New York.
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3) A Year After Israeli Raid, 2nd Flotilla to Set Sail for Gaza
By SUSANNE GÜSTEN
May 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/world/middleeast/12iht-M12-TURK-FLEET.html?ref=world
Riding the ripples of the Golden Horn, the Mavi Marmara tugs at its moorings in the shipyard where it is being readied to head back into troubled waters.
A flotilla of 15 ships carrying humanitarian aid and activists from 100 countries will sail for Gaza next month, in a second attempt to break the Israeli blockade of the Palestinian territory, organizers announced this week.
Almost a year ago, Israeli naval commandos stormed a previous flotilla sailing to Gaza, killing nine pro-Palestinian activists on the Mavi Marmara, one of six ships in the fleet. The plan to send a new flotilla to Gaza raises the specter of a fresh confrontation between Turkey and Israel.
"Freedom Flotilla II will leave during the third week of June, with ships departing from various European ports," a coalition of 22 nongovernmental organizations said after a meeting in Paris on Monday.
The Mavi Marmara, which was released by Israel in July, was towed back to Turkey and arrived in Istanbul to a hero's welcome in December, after which it was taken in for repairs.
Now tied up under the Istanbul skyline for some last preparations, the ship should be seaworthy again by the end of the month, its owners said.
"The Mavi Marmara has become a symbol for the Gaza cause in the whole world," Gulden Sonmez of the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, the Turkish nongovernmental organization that owns the ship, said in an interview this week. "So we are planning to set forth again with the same ship."
At dawn on May 31 last year, Ms. Sonmez stood on the observation deck of the Mavi Marmara, shouting orders as Israeli helicopters hovered overhead and commandos boarded the ship. Her colleague Cevdet Kiliclar, who managed the relief foundation's Web site, was shot and killed while taking photographs "just three or four steps away from me," she recounted.
Now Ms. Sonmez, who is on the board of the foundation, plans to embark on the Mavi Marmara once again and will be one of 150 activists making the trip.
Within 48 hours of application forms being posted on the foundation's Web site last week, some 2,000 people had volunteered to partake in the journey, she said.
Although Israel has warned that it will continue to enforce its Gaza blockade, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation does not expect another raid on its ship, Ms. Sonmez said.
"I don't think Israel will make the same mistake again," she said. "I think Israel knows that it has isolated itself."
Not everyone agrees with her.
"If the ship sails, it will be a disaster," said Osman Bahadir Dincer, a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs at the International Strategic Research Organization in Ankara. "In this atmosphere in the Middle East, we do not need a provocation," Mr. Dincer said by telephone this week. "This would absolutely be a provocation."
Relations between Turkey and Israel have not yet recovered from the crisis over the last flotilla. "We are waiting for our basic demands to be met, an apology and compensation," a senior Turkish official, who asked not to be identified, said this week.
"Since Turkey and Israel are not at war, the Israeli Defense Forces killed innocent civilian citizens of a friendly country."
A report by the U.N. Human Rights Council found that Israeli interception of the ship on the high seas was "clearly unlawful" and that its treatment of passengers "constituted a grave violation of human rights law and international humanitarian law."
But the report, published in September, also noted "a certain tension between the political objectives of the flotilla and its humanitarian objectives," finding that the primary motive of the nongovernmental organizations was political.
"We hope to be able to put this behind us and we have the will to do so," the senior Turkish official said. "But Israel should move forward as well."
"Turkey would like to preserve its relations with Israel and once our expectations are met, we will start normalizing our relations," he said.
For the moment, however, there is little prospect of this, said Mr. Dincer, the Middle East expert. Elections on June 12 prevent Turkey from taking a step forward, while Israel has been hampered by its volatile government coalition, Mr. Dincer added. "Both sides cannot go forward," he said.
The flotilla crisis last year followed a series of conflicts that had soured relations between the two countries.
Turkey and Israel had long prided themselves for being the only Western-style democracies in the Middle East. But ties began to unravel after the Israeli intervention in Gaza, when the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stormed off the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2009 after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres. A year later, another quarrel erupted when an Israeli official humiliated the Turkish ambassador by seating him on a lower chair and dressing him down in front of TV cameras.
These incidents are the symptoms, not the cause, of fundamental changes in the relationship between the two countries and within Turkey itself, Mr. Dincer said. "Turkey is no longer the country it was in the 1990s or the 2000s," when relations with Israel were based on "elite relations" between the military and political leaderships, Mr. Dincer said.
"Turkey is more democratic now, and society plays a much more important role in Turkish politics," he said, arguing that it was no longer possible to maintain bilateral relations from the top down. "Instead, we must build relations between the two societies, involving civil society and the media and nongovernmental organizations."
Meanwhile, the Mavi Marmara must not sail, Mr. Dincer warned.
"They have to be stopped, somehow, by someone," he said about the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, asking that the group consider Turkish national interests. Another attack at sea would fuel attempts to "isolate Turkey from the West," Mr. Dincer argued.
The Turkish government, while at pains to distance itself from the flotilla, has made it clear that it will not intervene to bar the convoy from sailing.
Israeli allegations that Turkey is behind the flotilla do not reflect the truth, the senior Turkish official said. But in a free society, he added, nongovernmental organizations can do as they like, within legal limits.
"We believe that such initiatives as this convoy will cease only when Israel's unlawful blockade on the Gaza Strip is lifted, as the situation in Gaza disturbs the conscience of all humanity," the official said. "It doesn't seem possible for Israel to reach lasting security as long as the unlawful blockade remains in place."
Turkey has warned Israel not to attack the ship again, the official said. "Last year, we had notified Israel a multitude of times that it should avoid by all means resorting to force, and act responsibly," he said. "We are reiterating these warnings once again today."
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4) In America Being Poor is a Criminal Offense
By: Rania Khalek
Friday May 13, 2011 9:50 pm
http://my.firedoglake.com/raniakhalek/2011/05/13/in-america-being-poor-is-a-criminal-offense/
It takes a special kind of bully to target the most vulnerable and neediest families in society, which millionaire politicians like to argue are draining America's treasury. I am referring to Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA), who recently introduced a bill that would require states to implement drug testing of applicants for and recipients of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. This is reminiscent of Sen. Orrin Hatch's (R-UT) failed legislation last summer to drug test the unemployed and those receiving other forms of government cash assistance, which ultimately died in the Senate. So far, Boustany's proposal is following the same fate as Hatch's, but around the country states are taking matters into their own hands.
In at least 30 state Legislatures across America, predominately wealthy politicians are quite impressed with themselves for considering bills that would limit the meager amount of state help given to needy families struggling to make ends meet. Many have proposed drug testing with some even extending it to recipients of other public benefits as well, such as unemployment insurance, medical assistance, and food assistance, in an attempt to add more obstacles to families' access to desperately needed aid.
Florida's Legislature has passed a bill that will require welfare applicants to take drug tests before they can receive state aid. Once signed into law by Republican Gov. Rick Scott, which is likely, all adult recipients of federal cash benefits will be required to pay for the drug tests, which are typically around $35. In Maine, Republican lawmakers introduced two proposals that would impose mandatory drug testing on Maine residents who are enrolled in MaineCare, the state's Medicaid program for low-income and disabled residents. Under a similar bill that passed both the House and Senate in Missouri, recipients found to be on drugs will still be eligible for benefits only if they enter drug treatment programs, though the state wouldn't pick up the tab for their recovery.
In Massachusetts -where about 450,000 households receive cash or food assistance - a bill introduced by state Rep. Daniel B. Winslow (R-Norfolk) would set up a program requiring those seeking benefits to disclose credit limits and assets such as homes and boats, as well as the kind of car they drive. His reasoning is "If you have two cars and a snowmobile, then you aren't poor. If we do this, we will be able to preserve our limited resources for those who are truly in need and weed out fraud, because we know there's fraud and we're not looking for it." State Rep. Daniel K. Webster (R-Pembroke) filed a budget amendment requiring the state to verify immigration status of those seeking public benefits. Webster made it clear that his proposal does not mean he dislikes poor people or immigrants, but "this is all unsustainable and the system is being abused."
This is rather shocking because I can't recall any Republicans or Democrats demanding that the CEO of Bank of America or JP Morgan disclose inventory of their vacation homes, private jets, and yachts before bailing them out in what amounts to corporate welfare. Nor did they insist that these CEOs submit to alcohol and drug screenings before receiving taxpayer money. No objections were made regarding the immigration status of the people running these companies or whether they happen to employ undocumented workers for cheap labor.
Some would argue that corporations are different, in that they create jobs. To that I will point out that corporations are making record profits, even as they layoff workers and pay next to nothing in Federal income taxes. And this doesn't even begin to scratch at the surface of corporate abuse by the very entities that are soaked in taxpayer money. Just contrast these proposals with the way the rich are treated in this country with billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks.
This is simply an extension of a conversation that began in 1996, when President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich passed bipartisan welfare reform, whose results have been tragic to say the least. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act authorized, but did not require, states to impose mandatory drug testing as a prerequisite to receiving state welfare assistance. Back then, unproven allegations of criminal behavior and drug abuse among welfare recipients were the rationales cited by those in support of the bill's many punitive measures that were infused with race, class, and gender bias.
The majority of the proposals for drug testing require no suspicion of drug use whatsoever. Instead they rest on the assumption that the poor are inherently inclined to immoral and illegal behavior, and therefore unworthy of privacy rights as guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment. These proposals simply reaffirm the longstanding concept of the poor as intrinsically prone to and deserving of their predicament. Jordan C. Budd, in his superb analysis Pledge Your Body for Your Bread: Welfare, Drug Testing, and the Inferior Fourth Amendment, demonstrates how the drug testing of welfare recipients is part of what's called a "poverty exception" to the Constitution, particularly the Fourth Amendment, a bias that renders much of the Constitution irrelevant at best, and hostile at worst, to the American poor.
Kaaryn Gustafson extensively documents the trend toward the criminalization of poverty. She demonstrates how, in her words "welfare applicants are treated as presumptive liars, cheaters, and thieves," which is "rooted in the notion that the poor are latent criminals and that anyone who is not part of the paid labor force is looking for a free handout." I would argue that given the disdain that has been shown for "entitlements" over the years, it won't be long before this treatment extends to Social Security, Medicare, and even Financial Aid recipients.
The notion that the poor are more prone to drug use has no basis in reality. Research shows that substance use is no more prevalent among people on welfare than it is among the working population, and is not a reliable indicator of an individual's ability to secure employment. Furthermore, imposing additional sanctions on welfare recipients will disproportionately harm children, since welfare sanctions and benefit decreases have been shown to increase the risk that children will be hospitalized and face food insecurity. In addition, analysis shows that drug testing would be immensely more expensive than the acquired savings in reduced benefits for addicts
With regard to welfare legislation, it's beneficial to highlight where on the class ladder members of Congress stand. According to a study by the Center for Responsive Politics released late last year, nearly half of the members in congress - 261 - were millionaires, compared to about 1 percent of Americans. The study also pointed out that 55 of these congressional millionaires had an average calculated wealth in 2009 of $10 million dollars and up, with eight in the $100 million-plus range. A more recent study released in March, found that 60 percent of Senate freshman and more than 40 percent of House freshmen of the 112th congress are millionaires.
Why is this so important? Because very few of our lawmakers understand what it's like to struggle financially. Millionaires can generally afford healthcare without grappling with unemployment, foreclosure, or an empty refrigerator. The majority of our representatives haven't a clue what the daily lives of the people they represent are like, let alone the constant struggle of single mothers living below the poverty line. They are constantly arguing that we all must sacrifice with our pensions, our wages, our education, the security of our communities, and with the belly's of our children, while they sit atop heavily guarded piles of money.
With the ranks of the underclass growing and the unemployment level at a staggering 9%, it's more clear than ever that the wealth divide between "we the people" and our representatives has caused a dangerous disconnect. State and federal legislators claim to be acting fiscally responsible, but they support budgets that create unimaginably difficult circumstances for the lives of the most vulnerable people, especially children. There is no question that these newest proposals amount to class warfare, and the longer we ignore it, the more it will spread.
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5) Supporter of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning sues government over laptop seizure
The Boston Globe
By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff
May 13, 2011 03:29 PM
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2011/05/supporter_of_wi.html?p1=News_links
The co-founder of a group supporting an Army private accused of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks filed a federal lawsuit today accusing the Department of Homeland Security of violating his civil rights by seizing his laptop without a warrant when he passed through security at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.
David House, 24, a former MIT researcher from Cambridge, alleges in the suit filed in US District Court in Boston that federal agents seized his laptop, USB storage device, video camera, and cellphone when he arrived at the airport on Nov. 3 after a vacation in Mexico, then kept him from catching a connecting flight to Boston while they interrogated him about his association with Private First Class Bradley Manning.
The suit, filed on House's behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union, says House "was asked no questions relating to border control, customs, trade, immigration, or terrorism,'' yet agents kept his laptop, USB device, and camera for 49 days while they reviewed personal and private information as part of an investigation into his work for the Bradley Manning Support Network. The electronics were returned to him Dec. 22, a day after the ACLU faxed a letter to government officials demanding their immediate return.
"If the government had legitimate reason for wanting to seize my laptop ... they could obtain a warrant,'' House said during a telephone interview. "Instead they wait for me to cross the border so they can claim this nebulous authority.''
He accused the government of launching a "fishing expedition'' in an effort to find out who was supporting Manning and said it has had a chilling impact on his group's legal efforts to raise money for Manning because supporters fear they will also be targeted by the government. Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, has been imprisoned by the military for a year on charges of leaking classified information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were posted on WilkiLeaks
Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to comment on the suit, saying, "As a matter of policy, we do not comment on pending litigation."
Federal agents routinely search laptops of travelers entering and leaving the country at airports and other border crossings. The government maintains it's the same as searching suitcases and is done to protect national security.
The suit alleges that House was targeted by the government solely because of his association with the Bradley Manning Support Network, which raises funds for Manning's legal defense.
"Targeting people for searches and seizures based on their lawful associations is unconstitutional,'' said Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts.
The suit alleges that the government violated House's First Amendment right to freedom of association and Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. It seeks the return or destruction of any of House's personal data that is still being held by the government and urges the court to order the Department of Homeland Security to disclose whether it has shared the information with other agencies.
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6) Health Insurers Making Record Profits as Many Postpone Care
By REED ABELSON
May 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/business/14health.html?_r=1&hp
The nation's major health insurers are barreling into a third year of record profits, enriched in recent months by a lingering recessionary mind-set among Americans who are postponing or forgoing medical care.
The UnitedHealth Group, one of the largest commercial insurers, told analysts that so far this year, insured hospital stays actually decreased in some instances. In reporting its earnings last week, Cigna, another insurer, talked about the "low level" of medical use.
Yet the companies continue to press for higher premiums, even though their reserve coffers are flush with profits and shareholders have been rewarded with new dividends. Many defend proposed double-digit increases in the rates they charge, citing a need for protection against any sudden uptick in demand once people have more money to spend on their health, as well as the rising price of care.
Even with a halting economic recovery, doctors and others say many people are still extremely budget-conscious, signaling the possibility of a fundamental change in Americans' appetite for health care.
"I am noticing my patients with insurance are more interested in costs," said Dr. Jim King, a family practice physician in rural Tennessee. "Gas prices are going up, food prices are going up. They are deciding to put some of their health care off." A patient might decide not to drive the 50 miles necessary to see a specialist because of the cost of gas, he said.
But Dr. King said patients were also being more thoughtful about their needs. Fewer are asking for an MRI as soon as they have a bad headache. "People are realizing that this is my money, even if I'm not writing a check," he said.
For someone like Shannon Hardin of California, whose hours at a grocery store have been erratic, there is simply no spare cash to see the doctor when she isn't feeling well or to get the $350 dental crowns she has been putting off since last year. Even with insurance, she said, "I can't afford to use it." Delaying care could keep utilization rates for insurers low through the rest of the year, according to Charles Boorady, an analyst for Credit Suisse. "The big question is whether it is going to stay weak or bounce back," he said. "Nobody knows."
Significant increases in how much people have to pay for their medical care may prevent a solid rebound. In recent years, many employers have sharply reduced benefits, while raising deductibles and co-payments so people have to reach deeper into their pockets.
In 2010, about 10 percent of people covered by their employer had a deductible of at least $2,000, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group, compared with just 5 percent of covered workers in 2008.
Doctors, for one, say patients' attitudes are changing. "Because it's from Dollar 1 to Dollar 2,000, they are being really conscious of how they spend their money," said Dr. James Applegate, a family physician in Grand Rapids, Mich. For example, patients question the need for annual blood work.
High deductibles also can be daunting. David Welch, a nurse in California whose policy has a $4,000 deductible, said he was surprised to realize he had delayed going to the dermatologist, even though he had a history of skin cancer. Mr. Welch, who has been a supporter of the need to overhaul insurance industry practices for the California Nurses Association union, said he hoped his medical training would help him determine when to go to the doctor. "I underestimated how much that cost would affect my behavior," he said.
Dr. Rebecca Jaffe, a family practice doctor in Wilmington, Del., said more patients were asking for the generic alternatives to brand-name medicines, because of hefty co-payments. "Now, all of a sudden, they want the generic, when for years, they said they couldn't take it," she said.
The insurers, which base what they charge in premiums largely on what they expect to pay out in future claims, say they still expect higher demand for care later this year. "I think there's a real concern about a bounce-back, a rebound, in utilization," said Dr. Lonny Reisman, the chief medical officer for Aetna.
Because they say they expect costs to rebound, insurers have not been shy about asking for higher rates. In Oregon, for example, Regence BlueCross BlueShield, a nonprofit insurer that is the state's largest, is asking for a 22 percent increase for policies sold to individuals. In California, regulators have been resisting requests from insurers to raise rates by double digits.
Some observers wonder if the insurers are simply raising premiums in advance of the full force of the health care law in 2014. The insurers' recent prosperity - big insurance companies have reported first-quarter earnings that beat analysts expectations by an average of 30 percent - may make it difficult for anyone, politicians and industry executives alike, to argue that the industry has been hurt by the federal health care law. Insurers were able to raise premiums to cover the cost of the law's early provisions, like insuring adult children up to age 26, and federal and state regulators have largely proved to be accommodating.
But 2014 and 2015 are likely to be far more challenging, as insurers are forced to adjust to the law's greatest changes, like providing coverage to everyone regardless of whether they have an expensive pre-existing condition. "I think they're going to go through a winter," said Paul H. Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, a research unit of the consulting firm Deloitte.
And while the slowing down of demand is good for insurers, at least in the short term, the concern is that patients may be tempted to skip important tests like colonoscopies or mammograms. The new health care law will eventually prevent most policies from charging patients for certain kinds of preventive care, but some plans still require someone to pay $500 toward a colonoscopy.
In recent times, insurers have prospered by pricing policies above costs, said Robert Laszewski, a former health insurance executive who is now a consultant in Alexandria, Va. The industry goes through underwriting cycles where the companies are better able to predict costs and make room for profits. "They're benefiting from a very positive underwriting cycle," he said.
"Maybe managed care is finally working," he said. "Maybe this is the new normal."
Still, he emphasized, health care costs, even if they are rising at 6 percent or 7 percent a year, are increasing at a much faster pace than overall inflation. "We haven't solved the problem," Mr. Laszewski said.
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7) Japanese Worker's Death Not Linked to Radiation
By MARTIN FACKLER
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/asia/15japan.html?hp
TOKYO - A worker at Japan's crippled nuclear plant died Saturday of causes that appeared to be unrelated to radiation, the plant's operator said.
The operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said the contract worker, who was in his 60s, died after carrying heavy equipment in a waste disposal building of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The company said that he was wearing radiation-protection clothing and a mask when he collapsed, and that his body did not show high levels of radioactive contamination.
Japanese news media reports later quoted a doctor at the plant as saying the man had apparently suffered a heart attack. The death is the first by one of the workers struggling to bring the Fukushima Daiichi plant under control since it lost power and cooling functions after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
The waste disposal building has been used to store radiation-contaminated runoff taken from the plant's damaged reactor buildings. The runoff was created by efforts to cool the reactors by pouring tons of water on them, but it now obstructs efforts by workers to repair cooling systems.
Tons of contaminated water remain in the reactor buildings. On Saturday, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said that it had found more than 12 feet of water in the basement of Reactor No. 1.
Another power company announced on Saturday that it had completed the shutdown of a nuclear plant elsewhere in Japan, honoring a request by the prime minister to suspend operations at the plant for safety reasons.
The company, Chubu Electric Power, said it had halted operations of the last active reactor at the Hamaoka plant, which many in Japan consider the nation's most dangerous plant because it sits atop a major fault line. The plant is about 120 miles west of Tokyo, close enough that radioactive materials from a leak could reach the Japanese capital in less than a day.
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8) Tension After Palestinian Boy's Death
By ETHAN BRONNER
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/middleeast/15mideast.html?hp
JERUSALEM - Tensions were high in East Jerusalem on Saturday as hundreds of Palestinians buried a 17-year-old demonstrator and preparations were under way for rallies on Sunday to mark the founding of Israel 63 years ago, an event that Palestinians call the "nakba," Arabic for catastrophe.
The dead teenager, Milad Ayyash, was shot in the stomach on Friday during stone-throwing demonstrations in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan and died in the hospital on Saturday. A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said police officers had not used live fire and were investigating the cause of his death.
Witnesses said the gunshot came from inside Beit Yonatan, a Jewish-owned building in Silwan, either from a security guard or a resident. The teenager's family declined to allow a police autopsy, Mr. Rosenfeld said.
On Saturday, mourners carried the boy's body through East Jerusalem. When the procession passed Beit Yonatan, they threw rocks at the building. The police arrested four people and used stun grenades, causing several light injuries. The burial took place without further disturbance.
The police presence is expected to be heavy across Israel on Sunday, the 63rd anniversary of independence. "Obviously what happened yesterday and today will influence how we deploy tomorrow," Mr. Rosenfeld said.
After Israel declared independence on May 15, 1948, armies from neighboring Arab states attacked the new nation; during the war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes by Israeli forces. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were also destroyed. The refugees and their descendants remain a central issue of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to the Hebrew calendar, Israel celebrated its independence last Tuesday.
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9) For Second Time in 3 Days, Afghan Child Killed by NATO
By SHARIFULLAH SAHAK and ALISSA J. RUBIN
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/asia/15afghan.html?hp
KABUL, Afghanistan - For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy.
A NATO spokesman apologized for the child's death, which took place early Saturday in western Nangahar Province in the Hesarek District, a remote poppy-growing area close to Kabul Province and Logar Province. There has been almost no NATO presence there throughout the war, and the area is thought to be heavily penetrated by the Taliban.
The district governor, Abdul Khalid, said he had feared a Taliban attack on the government center and had called for help from local Afghan security forces. At the same time, there was a raid, he said. "American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him," he said.
"People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes," Mr. Khalid said.
The boy was the son of an Afghan National Army soldier, according to Noor Alam, the headmaster of the school the student attended. Although the boy was 15, like many rural Afghans, he was in a lower grade because he had not been able to go to school regularly, local residents said.
When morning came, an angry crowd gathered in Narra, the boy's village, and more than 200 people marched with his body to the district center. Some of the men were armed and confronted the police, shouting anti-American slogans and throwing rocks at police vehicles and the Hesarek government center, according to the district governor and the headmaster.
The police opened fire in an effort to push back the crowd to stop its advance to the district center. A 14-year-old boy was killed, and at least one other person was wounded, Mr. Khalid said.
"The police had to defend themselves; therefore, they fired some warning shots," he said.
On Thursday, a night raid by international forces in Nangahar Province resulted in the death of a 12-year-old girl and her uncle, who was a member of the Afghan National Police.
Elsewhere in eastern Afghanistan, there was a car bombing directed at a joint Afghan and coalition patrol on Saturday. The explosion, in Yaqoubi District, injured eight civilians, including six children, according to Faisal Mohammed, a doctor in the public health hospital in Khost City.
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10) Connecticut Unions Agree to $1.6 Billion in Givebacks
By PETER APPLEBOME
May 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/nyregion/connecticut-reaches-deal-with-unions-to-close-budget-shortfall.html?ref=us
HARTFORD - Threatened with nearly 5,000 layoffs, representatives for 45,000 unionized state employees agreed Friday to $1.6 billion in concessions over two years to help balance a budget that Gov. Dannel P. Malloy says includes pain for everyone: record tax increases, substantial program cuts and worker givebacks in health care, pension benefits and wages.
Mr. Malloy announced the deal after two months of negotiations and the passage of a budget last week that assumed concessions before they were accepted by the unions. He said the deal, which is still subject to ratification by workers, would save Connecticut taxpayers $21.5 billion over 20 years through structural changes in employee compensation.
The governor, a Democrat who won election in November with strong union support, has carved out a national niche as a politician seeking an approach to state governance different from the confrontational stances taken by Republican counterparts like Chris Christie in New Jersey and Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Despite layoff notices that started going out this week, Mr. Malloy and labor leaders maintained a cordial public tone throughout the bargaining.
Mr. Malloy hailed the deal as "historic because of the way we achieved it - we respected the collective-bargaining process and we respected each other, negotiating in good faith, without fireworks and without anger." He also called the deal "the most significant agreement with state employees in Connecticut history" for its long-term approach.
Republicans were far less impressed; the party's chairman, Chris Healy, called the agreement a "budget charade," with insufficient work force cuts because of Mr. Malloy's close ties to employee unions.
The agreement includes a provision that no unionized employees will be laid off for four years and a two-year freeze on wages for all employees. Mr. Malloy said he nevertheless planned to reduce the size of the government through attrition and the elimination of managerial positions.
The concessions fall $400 million short of the $2 billion Mr. Malloy sought, a difference that will be made up with more spending cuts and revenues that are higher than had been anticipated.
But no further details are being released as negotiators take the agreement to 34 bargaining units at 15 unions; it needs 14 of those unions and 80 percent of the voting members to approve it. Union officials said they would send details to members immediately, and planned to make them public at the beginning of next week.
Larry Dorman, a spokesman for the unions, said it was hard to predict how members would react, but the deal should be evaluated in terms of contentious anti-union sentiments and turmoil in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere. "I hate to say if it's good or bad," he said, "but we stand behind it and think it's the right thing to do in these difficult times."
Republicans said it was impossible to assess the package fully without more specifics, but said the amicable dealings between Mr. Malloy and union leaders were not necessarily a good sign.
"A lot of people have asked where's the outrage, the kind of outrage you saw in Wisconsin and around the country where various governors, especially Republican governors, have wanted to make changes," the House Republican leader, Larry Cafero, said.
Mr. Cafero said the $40.1 billion, two-year budget approved by the Democratic-controlled Legislature relied too much on tax increases and not enough on reducing the size of government. The promise of no layoffs, he said, would leave the state in a precarious position if the economy again plummeted.
State officials said the agreement did not contain any furlough days or reductions in hours for permanent employees. Other details were scarce, but The Hartford Courant reported that provisions include wage increases of 3 percent for each of three years after the two-year freeze, and a rise in the retirement age by three years for state employees who retire after 2017.
Mr. Malloy said, "This is the definition of structural savings: these savings are real, and they provide relief to Connecticut taxpayers now and into the future for years to come."
In an antitax era, the new budget depends in large part on almost $1.5 billion in increased taxes on personal income, corporations and an array of purchases and services, from yachts to inexpensive clothing, to plug a deficit once estimated between $3.2 billion and $3.5 billion.
And while the confrontational approach has made Governor Christie of New Jersey a hot property, there is no early indication that what Mr. Malloy calls "shared sacrifice" is working as well for him. A Quinnipiac University poll in March put his approval rating at 35 percent.
The Republican Senate leader, John McKinney, said that in addition to the no-layoff provision, he was concerned with how long the clauses on pensions and health benefits would last: through 2022. He said that committed future legislators to a deal that might no longer make sense.
And Mr. Cafero said the shared sacrifice was mostly borne by taxpayers. "We're not spending less on government next year, and we've foisted on the public the largest tax increase in the history of the state," he said. "I don't call that balanced. He's defined sacrifice within the four corners of the budget and is saying everyone has to say ouch a little bit. Well, the taxpayers are saying ouch a lot."
Roy Occhiogrosso, a Malloy spokesman, disputed Republican claims and defended the agreement. "Taxpayers are saving $1.6 billion over the next two years, and there will be no layoffs," he said. "This is the most fiscally responsible budget in the country."
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11) In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights
By MICHELLE ALEXANDER
Columbus, Ohio
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15alexander.html?hp
THE legal scholar Derrick A. Bell foresaw that mass incarceration, like earlier systems of racial control, would continue to exist as long as it served the perceived interests of white elites.
Thirty years of civil rights litigation and advocacy have failed to slow the pace of a racially biased drug war or to prevent the emergence of a penal system of astonishing size. Yet a few short years of tight state budgets have inspired former "get tough" true believers to suddenly denounce the costs of imprisonment. "We're wasting tax dollars on prisons," they say. "It's time to shift course."
Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, shocked many earlier this year when he co-wrote an essay for The Washington Post calling on "conservative legislators to lead the way in addressing an issue often considered off-limits to reform: prisons."
Republican governors had already been sounding the same note. As California was careering toward bankruptcy last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger lamented that more money was being spent on prisons than on education. Priorities "have become out of whack over the years," he said. "What does it say about any state that focuses more on prison uniforms than on caps and gowns?" Another Republican governor, John R. Kasich of Ohio, recently announced support for reducing penalties for nonviolent drug offenders as part of an effort to slash the size of the state's prison population.
A majority of those swept into our nation's prison system are poor people of color, but the sudden shift away from the "get tough" rhetoric that has dominated the national discourse on crime has not been inspired by a surge in concern about the devastating human toll of mass incarceration. Instead, as Professor Bell predicted, the changing tide is best explained by perceived white interests. In this economic climate, it is impossible to maintain the vast prison state without raising taxes on the (white) middle class.
Given this political reality, it is hardly a surprise to read a headline that says, "N.A.A.C.P. Joins With Gingrich in Urging Prison Reform," rather than the other way around. If there were ever an illustration of Professor Bell's theory that whites will support racial justice only to the extent that it is in their interests, this would seem to be it.
Of course, in the late 1970s, when Professor Bell, who now teaches at New York University School of Law, first advanced his theories, our prison population was much smaller. The Reagan revolution had not yet taken hold. No one knew that the war on drugs and the "get tough" movement would unleash a wave of punitiveness that would trap generations in ghettoes, and brand them criminals and felons. No one foresaw the caste-like system that would emerge, the millions who would be stripped of basic civil and human rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement - the right to vote, to serve on juries, and to be free of discrimination in employment, housing, education and public benefits.
Today, 2.3 million Americans are behind bars; the United States has the world's highest rate of incarceration. Convictions for non-violent crimes and relatively minor drug offenses - mostly possession, not sale - have accounted for the bulk of the increase in the prison population since the mid-1980s.
African-Americans are far more likely to get prison sentences for drug offenses than white offenders, even though studies have consistently shown that they are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites.
What to do now? Understandably, civil rights advocates and criminal justice reformers are celebrating this moment of what Professor Bell calls "interest convergence." They say we must catch the wave and ride it. Many have given up all hope of persuading the white electorate that they should care about the severe racial disparities in the criminal justice system or the racial politics that birthed the drug war. It's possible now, they say, to win big without talking about race or "making it an issue." Public relations consultants like the FrameWorks Institute - which dedicates itself to "changing the public conversation about social problems" - advise advocates to speak in a "practical tone" and avoid discussions of "fairness between groups and the historical legacy of racism."
Surely the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have rejected that advice.
In 1963, in his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," he chastised white ministers for their indifference to black suffering: "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.' "
He continued: "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." Such language would not have tested well in a focus group. Yet it helped to change the course of history.
Those who believe that righteous indignation and protest politics were appropriate in the struggle to end Jim Crow, but that something less will do as we seek to dismantle mass incarceration, fail to appreciate the magnitude of the challenge. If our nation were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970s, we would have to release 4 out of 5 people behind bars. A million people employed by the criminal justice system could lose their jobs. Private prison companies would see their profits vanish. This system is now so deeply rooted in our social, political and economic structures that it is not going to fade away without a major shift in public consciousness.
Yes, some prison downsizing is likely to occur in the months and years to come. But we ought not fool ourselves: we will not end mass incarceration without a recommitment to the movement-building work that was begun in the 1950s and 1960s and left unfinished. A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch. If we fail to rise to the challenge, and push past the politics of momentary interest convergence, future generations will judge us harshly.
Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, is the author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."
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12) Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater's Founder
By MARK MAZZETTI and EMILY B. HAGER
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/middleeast/15prince.html?hp
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates - Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand.
The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.
Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.
The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.
The U.A.E.'s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country's biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials.
In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries - the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators - the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.
The United Arab Emirates - an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state - are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.
"The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don't have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help," said one Obama administration official who knew of the operation. "They might want to show that they are not to be messed with."
Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States' official blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department.
Mark C. Toner, a spokesman for the department, would not confirm whether Mr. Prince's company had obtained such a license, but he said the department was investigating to see if the training effort was in violation of American laws. Mr. Toner pointed out that Blackwater (which renamed itself Xe Services ) paid $42 million in fines last year for training foreign troops in Jordan and other countries over the years.
The U.A.E.'s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for Mr. Prince also did not comment.
For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.
To help fulfill his ambitions, Mr. Prince's new company, Reflex Responses, obtained another multimillion-dollar contract to protect a string of planned nuclear power plants and to provide cybersecurity. He hopes to earn billions more, the former employees said, by assembling additional battalions of Latin American troops for the Emiratis and opening a giant complex where his company can train troops for other governments.
Knowing that his ventures are magnets for controversy, Mr. Prince has masked his involvement with the mercenary battalion. His name is not included on contracts and most other corporate documents, and company insiders have at times tried to hide his identity by referring to him by the code name "Kingfish." But three former employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements, and two people involved in security contracting described Mr. Prince's central role.
The former employees said that in recruiting the Colombians and others from halfway around the world, Mr. Prince's subordinates were following his strict rule: hire no Muslims.
Muslim soldiers, Mr. Prince warned, could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims.
A Lucrative Deal
Last spring, as waiters in the lobby of the Park Arjaan by Rotana Hotel passed by carrying cups of Turkish coffee, a small team of Blackwater and American military veterans huddled over plans for the foreign battalion. Armed with a black suitcase stuffed with several hundred thousand dollars' worth of dirhams, the local currency, they began paying the first bills.
The company, often called R2, was licensed last March with 51 percent local ownership, a typical arrangement in the Emirates. It received about $21 million in start-up capital from the U.A.E., the former employees said.
Mr. Prince made the deal with Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. The two men had known each other for several years, and it was the prince's idea to build a foreign commando force for his country.
Savvy and pro-Western, the prince was educated at the Sandhurst military academy in Britain and formed close ties with American military officials. He is also one of the region's staunchest hawks on Iran and is skeptical that his giant neighbor across the Strait of Hormuz will give up its nuclear program.
"He sees the logic of war dominating the region, and this thinking explains his near-obsessive efforts to build up his armed forces," said a November 2009 cable from the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi that was obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
For Mr. Prince, a 41-year-old former member of the Navy Seals, the battalion was an opportunity to turn vision into reality. At Blackwater, which had collected billions of dollars in security contracts from the United States government, he had hoped to build an army for hire that could be deployed to crisis zones in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He even had proposed that the Central Intelligence Agency use his company for special operations missions around the globe, but to no avail. In Abu Dhabi, which he praised in an Emirati newspaper interview last year for its "pro-business" climate, he got another chance.
Mr. Prince's exploits, both real and rumored, are the subject of fevered discussions in the private security world. He has worked with the Emirati government on various ventures in the past year, including an operation using South African mercenaries to train Somalis to fight pirates. There was talk, too, that he was hatching a scheme last year to cap the Icelandic volcano then spewing ash across Northern Europe.
The team in the hotel lobby was led by Ricky Chambers, known as C. T., a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had worked for Mr. Prince for years; most recently, he had run a program training Afghan troops for a Blackwater subsidiary called Paravant.
He was among the half-dozen or so Americans who would serve as top managers of the project, receiving nearly $300,000 in annual compensation. Mr. Chambers and Mr. Prince soon began quietly luring American contractors from Afghanistan, Iraq and other danger spots with pay packages that topped out at more than $200,000 a year, according to a budget document. Many of those who signed on as trainers - which eventually included more than 40 veteran American, European and South African commandos - did not know of Mr. Prince's involvement, the former employees said.
Mr. Chambers did not respond to requests for comment.
He and Mr. Prince also began looking for soldiers. They lined up Thor Global Enterprises, a company on the Caribbean island of Tortola specializing in "placing foreign servicemen in private security positions overseas," according to a contract signed last May. The recruits would be paid about $150 a day.
Within months, large tracts of desert were bulldozed and barracks constructed. The Emirates were to provide weapons and equipment for the mercenary force, supplying everything from M-16 rifles to mortars, Leatherman knives to Land Rovers. They agreed to buy parachutes, motorcycles, rucksacks - and 24,000 pairs of socks.
To keep a low profile, Mr. Prince rarely visited the camp or a cluster of luxury villas near the Abu Dhabi airport, where R2 executives and Emirati military officers fine-tune the training schedules and arrange weapons deliveries for the battalion, former employees said. He would show up, they said, in an office suite at the DAS Tower - a skyscraper just steps from Abu Dhabi's Corniche beach, where sunbathers lounge as cigarette boats and water scooters whiz by. Staff members there manage a number of companies that the former employees say are carrying out secret work for the Emirati government.
Emirati law prohibits disclosure of incorporation records for businesses, which typically list company officers, but it does require them to post company names on offices and storefronts. Over the past year, the sign outside the suite has changed at least twice - it now says Assurance Management Consulting.
While the documents - including contracts, budget sheets and blueprints - obtained by The Times do not mention Mr. Prince, the former employees said he negotiated the U.A.E. deal. Corporate documents describe the battalion's possible tasks: intelligence gathering, urban combat, the securing of nuclear and radioactive materials, humanitarian missions and special operations "to destroy enemy personnel and equipment."
One document describes "crowd-control operations" where the crowd "is not armed with firearms but does pose a risk using improvised weapons (clubs and stones)."
People involved in the project and American officials said that the Emiratis were interested in deploying the battalion to respond to terrorist attacks and put down uprisings inside the country's sprawling labor camps, which house the Pakistanis, Filipinos and other foreigners who make up the bulk of the country's work force. The foreign military force was planned months before the so-called Arab Spring revolts that many experts believe are unlikely to spread to the U.A.E. Iran was a particular concern.
An Eye on Iran
Although there was no expectation that the mercenary troops would be used for a stealth attack on Iran, Emirati officials talked of using them for a possible maritime and air assault to reclaim a chain of islands, mostly uninhabited, in the Persian Gulf that are the subject of a dispute between Iran and the U.A.E., the former employees said. Iran has sent military forces to at least one of the islands, Abu Musa, and Emirati officials have long been eager to retake the islands and tap their potential oil reserves.
The Emirates have a small military that includes army, air force and naval units as well as a small special operations contingent, which served in Afghanistan, but over all, their forces are considered inexperienced.
In recent years, the Emirati government has showered American defense companies with billions of dollars to help strengthen the country's security. A company run by Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser during the Clinton and Bush administrations, has won several lucrative contracts to advise the U.A.E. on how to protect its infrastructure.
Some security consultants believe that Mr. Prince's efforts to bolster the Emirates' defenses against an Iranian threat might yield some benefits for the American government, which shares the U.A.E.'s concern about creeping Iranian influence in the region.
"As much as Erik Prince is a pariah in the United States, he may be just what the doctor ordered in the U.A.E.," said an American security consultant with knowledge of R2's work.
The contract includes a one-paragraph legal and ethics policy noting that R2 should institute accountability and disciplinary procedures. "The overall goal," the contract states, "is to ensure that the team members supporting this effort continuously cast the program in a professional and moral light that will hold up to a level of media scrutiny."
But former employees said that R2's leaders never directly grappled with some fundamental questions about the operation. International laws governing private armies and mercenaries are murky, but would the Americans overseeing the training of a foreign army on foreign soil be breaking United States law?
Susan Kovarovics, an international trade lawyer who advises companies about export controls, said that because Reflex Responses was an Emirati company it might not need State Department authorization for its activities.
But she said that any Americans working on the project might run legal risks if they did not get government approval to participate in training the foreign troops.
Basic operational issues, too, were not addressed, the former employees said. What were the battalion's rules of engagement? What if civilians were killed during an operation? And could a Latin American commando force deployed in the Middle East really be kept a secret?
Imported Soldiers
The first waves of mercenaries began arriving last summer. Among them was a 13-year veteran of Colombia's National Police force named Calixto Rincón, 42, who joined the operation with hopes of providing for his family and seeing a new part of the world.
"We were practically an army for the Emirates," Mr. Rincón, now back in Bogotá, Colombia, said in an interview. "They wanted people who had a lot of experience in countries with conflicts, like Colombia."
Mr. Rincón's visa carried a special stamp from the U.A.E. military intelligence branch, which is overseeing the entire project, that allowed him to move through customs and immigration without being questioned.
He soon found himself in the midst of the camp's daily routines, which mirrored those of American military training. "We would get up at 5 a.m. and we would start physical exercises," Mr. Rincón said. His assignment included manual labor at the expanding complex, he said. Other former employees said the troops - outfitted in Emirati military uniforms - were split into companies to work on basic infantry maneuvers, learn navigation skills and practice sniper training.
R2 spends roughly $9 million per month maintaining the battalion, which includes expenditures for employee salaries, ammunition and wages for dozens of domestic workers who cook meals, wash clothes and clean the camp, a former employee said. Mr. Rincón said that he and his companions never wanted for anything, and that their American leaders even arranged to have a chef travel from Colombia to make traditional soups.
But the secrecy of the project has sometimes created a prisonlike environment. "We didn't have permission to even look through the door," Mr. Rincón said. "We were only allowed outside for our morning jog, and all we could see was sand everywhere."
The Emirates wanted the troops to be ready to deploy just weeks after stepping off the plane, but it quickly became clear that the Colombians' military skills fell far below expectations. "Some of these kids couldn't hit the broad side of a barn," said a former employee. Other recruits admitted to never having fired a weapon.
Rethinking Roles
As a result, the veteran American and foreign commandos training the battalion have had to rethink their roles. They had planned to act only as "advisers" during missions - meaning they would not fire weapons - but over time, they realized that they would have to fight side by side with their troops, former officials said.
Making matters worse, the recruitment pipeline began drying up. Former employees said that Thor struggled to sign up, and keep, enough men on the ground. Mr. Rincón developed a hernia and was forced to return to Colombia, while others were dismissed from the program for drug use or poor conduct.
And R2's own corporate leadership has also been in flux. Mr. Chambers, who helped develop the project, left after several months. A handful of other top executives, some of them former Blackwater employees, have been hired, then fired within weeks.
To bolster the force, R2 recruited a platoon of South African mercenaries, including some veterans of Executive Outcomes, a South African company notorious for staging coup attempts or suppressing rebellions against African strongmen in the 1990s. The platoon was to function as a quick-reaction force, American officials and former employees said, and began training for a practice mission: a terrorist attack on the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, the world's tallest building. They would secure the situation before quietly handing over control to Emirati troops.
But by last November, the battalion was officially behind schedule. The original goal was for the 800-man force to be ready by March 31; recently, former employees said, the battalion's size was reduced to about 580 men.
Emirati military officials had promised that if this first battalion was a success, they would pay for an entire brigade of several thousand men. The new contracts would be worth billions, and would help with Mr. Prince's next big project: a desert training complex for foreign troops patterned after Blackwater's compound in Moyock, N.C. But before moving ahead, U.A.E. military officials have insisted that the battalion prove itself in a "real world mission."
That has yet to happen. So far, the Latin American troops have been taken off the base only to shop and for occasional entertainment.
On a recent spring night though, after months stationed in the desert, they boarded an unmarked bus and were driven to hotels in central Dubai, a former employee said. There, some R2 executives had arranged for them to spend the evening with prostitutes.
Mark Mazzetti reported from Abu Dhabi and Washington, and Emily B. Hager from New York. Jenny Carolina González and Simon Romero contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia. Kitty Bennett contributed research from Washington.
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13) 9 Killed as Israel Clashes With Palestinians on Four Borders
By ETHAN BRONNER
May 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/world/middleeast/16mideast.html?hp
JERUSALEM - Israel's borders erupted into deadly clashes on Sunday as thousands of Palestinians - marching from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank - confronted Israeli troops to mark the anniversary when Arabs mourn Israel's creation. As many as nine Palestinians were reported killed and scores injured in the unprecedented wave of coordinated protests.
The biggest confrontation took place on the Golan Heights when hundreds of Palestinians living in Syria breached a border fence and crowded into the village of Majdal Shams, waving Palestinian flags. Troops fired on the crowd, killing four of them.
At the Lebanese border Israeli troops shot at hundreds of Palestinians trying to cross, killing four protesters and wounding dozens more, according to Lebanese officials.
Every year in mid-May many Palestinians mark what they call Nakba, or the catastrophe, the anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence in 1948 and the start of a war in which thousands of Palestinians lost their homes through expulsion and flight.
But this is the first year that Palestinian refugees in Syria and Lebanon tried to breach the Israeli military border in marches inspired by recent popular protests around the Arab world. Here too, word about the rallies was spread on social media sites.
"The Palestinians are not less rebellious than other Arab peoples," said Ali Baraka, a Hamas representative in Lebanon.
Officials and analysts have argued that with peace talks broken down and plans for a request of the United Nations to declare Palestinian statehood in September, violence could return to define this conflict, which has been relatively quiet for the past two years.
"This is war, we're defending our country," asserted Amjad Abu Taha, a 16-year-old from Bethlehem as he took part along with thousands in the West Bank city of Ramallah near the main military checkpoint to Israel. He held a cigarette in one hand and a rock in the other. Hundreds of Israeli troops using stun guns and tear gas roamed the area.
In Gaza, a march toward Israel also resulted in Israeli troops shooting into the crowd and wounding dozens. The Hamas police stopped buses carrying protesters near the main crossing into Israel, but dozens of demonstrators walked on foot and reached a point closer to the Israeli border than they had reached in years.
Later, in a separate incident, an 18-year-old Gazan near another part of the border fence was shot and killed by Israeli troops when, the Israeli military says, he was trying to plant an explosive.
The chief Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, said on Israel radio that he saw Iran's fingerprints in the coordinated confrontations although he offered no evidence. Syria has a close alliance with Iran, as does Hezbollah, which controls southern Lebanon, and Hamas, which rules in Gaza.
Yoni Ben-Menachem, Israel Radio's chief Arab affairs analyst, said it seemed likely that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria was seeking to divert attention from his troubles caused by popular uprisings there in recent weeks by allowing confrontations on the Golan Heights for the first time in decades.
"This way Syria makes its contribution to the Nakba day cause and Assad wins points by deflecting the media's attention from what is happening inside Syria," he added.
Last week, in an interview with The New York Times, a top Syrian businessman and cousin of the president said, "If there is no stability here, there's no way there will be stability in Israel." He urged the West to reduce pressure on the Syrian government.
An Israeli military spokesman, Captain Barak Raz, said that Israeli troops at the Syrian border fired only at those infiltrators trying to damage the security barrier and equipment there. Some 13 Israeli soldiers were lightly wounded from thrown rocks.
The day's troubles began when an Israeli Arab truck driver rammed his truck into cars, a bus and pedestrians in Tel Aviv, killing one man and injuring more than a dozen others in what police described as a terrorist attack.
Later, hundreds of Lebanese joined by Palestinians from more than nine refugee camps in Lebanon headed toward the border, around the town of Maroun al-Ras, Lebanon, scene of some of the worst fighting in the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
They passed posters that had gone up the past week on highways in Lebanon. "People want to return to Palestine," they read, in a play on the slogan made famous in Egypt and Tunisia, "People want the fall of the regime."
Though the Lebanese army tried to block them from arriving at the border, some managed to reach it. They placed a Palestinian flag at the fence, and some threw rocks, witnesses said. Israeli soldiers opened fire and at least four were killed and 30 wounded.
Even in Lebanon, some speculated about the political message of the march, which came as President Assad of Syria grapples with the gravest challenge to 40 years of his family's rule. The crackdown in Syria persisted Sunday, with the military continuing its assault on Tall Kalakh, a town near the Lebanese border.
"Palestinians can only reach the border if they get permission from Lebanese intelligence," said Haytham Zaayter, a Lebanese expert on Palestinian issues.
The United Nations peacekeeping force in the border region called for "maximum restraint on all sides in order to prevent any further casualties" and "immediate concrete security steps on the ground" to prevent any further bloodshed.
Anthony Shadid contributed reporting from Beirut, and Fares Akram from Gaza.
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14) Credit Error? It Pays to Be on V.I.P. List
By TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/your-money/credit-scores/15credit.html?hp
The credit rating bureaus, whose reports influence everything from credit cards to mortgages to job offers, have a two-tiered system for resolving errors - one for the rich, the well-connected, the well-known and the powerful, and the other for everyone else.
The three major agencies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, keep a V.I.P. list of sorts, according to consumer lawyers and legal documents, consisting of celebrities, politicians, judges and other influential people. Those on the list - and they may not even realize they are on it - get special help from workers in the United States in fixing mistakes on their credit reports. Any errors are usually corrected immediately, one lawyer said.
For everyone else, disputes are herded into a largely automated system. Their complaints are often electronically ferried to a subcontractor overseas, where a worker spends, on average, about two minutes figuring out the gist of the matter, boiling it down to a one-to-three-digit computer code that signifies the problem - "account not his/hers," for example - and sending a dispute form to the creditor to investigate. Many times, consumer advocates say, the investigation translates to a perfunctory check of its records.
"The legal responsibility of the credit reporting agencies and of the creditors is well established," said Leonard Bennett, a consumer lawyer in Newport News, Va. "There is a requirement that they do meaningful research and analysis, and it is almost never done."
Consumers who have trouble fixing errors through the dispute process can quickly find themselves trapped in a Kafkaesque no man's land, where the only escape is through the court system.
"You are guilty before you are proven innocent in a situation like this," said Catherine Taylor, 45, of Benton, Ark., who said she had been denied employment and credit because her filing was mixed up with a felon who had the same name and birthday.
Judy Johnson of Bossier City, La., was confused with a less creditworthy Judith Johnson, with a similar address and Social Security number. For nearly seven years, Judy Johnson, a 63-year-old credit manager for a building supply company, said she tried to remove the black marks from her credit report. But when she was denied a credit card, she knew the problem had returned - a third time. "This time, I was livid," she said.
She ultimately brought a suit against one of the bureaus, and recently settled for an amount she cannot disclose. But the problems still linger. A deputy sheriff recently came to her door to serve her papers for a debt she says she does not owe.
The credit rating bureaus, private-sector companies that each attempt to track all American consumers' credit use, have grown much more powerful over the last couple of decades as credit has become a crucial cog in the nation's financial system. Their reports are used to formulate the all-powerful credit score, which lenders use to determine creditworthiness.
But as the bureaus' work has become more important, consumer advocates say, regulation has not kept up, in large part because their overseer, the Federal Trade Commission, lacks broad authority. That could change once responsibility for the credit bureaus shifts to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which will be able to write rules and examine the credit agencies' policies.
The bureaus, meanwhile, do not have an economic incentive to improve the system, consumer advocates say, because their main customers are the creditors, not consumers.
"There is no neutrality in the credit reporting agencies," said John Ulzheimer, who has been an expert witness in more than 80 credit-related cases and is president of consumer education at SmartCredit.com. "They work for the lenders who buy credit reports from them, and anyone who suggests otherwise is not being intellectually honest."
When asked about the V.I.P. category, TransUnion said all consumers "have the ability to speak to a live representative." Equifax said consumers who received a free copy of their credit report were provided with a number for customer service.
Experian denied that it had V.I.P. lists. But a spokeswoman did say that prominent people deemed high risk - like politicians in an election year - might have their credit files taken offline so that creditors or other companies making inquiries could not get access without the bureau's permission. Experian said those people did not receive any other special handling.
David Szwak, a consumer lawyer in Shreveport, La., who has handled dozens of credit cases, said that the V.I.P. designation and preferential treatment did exist at Experian, and he provided sworn testimony from former Experian employees that the category existed.
Estimates of credit reports with serious errors vary widely, anywhere from 3 to 25 percent. A recent study, paid for by the Consumer Data Industry Association, the trade group for the bureaus, found potential errors in 19.2 percent of reports, but said that less than 1 percent of them had disputes that, when settled, resulted in a meaningful increase in scores. Even 1 percent translates into millions of consumers, since there are at least 200 million files at each of the bureaus.
The F.T.C. is expected to deliver a nationwide study on credit report accuracy next year that could provide more clarity. It could also include recommendations for legislative action.
The volume of disputes has been rising as consumers borrow more and gain greater access to credit reports. The automated system was a response to that. A spokesman for the trade group said most consumers received an answer within 14 days.
Experian is the only bureau that still processes disputes in the United States, experts said, though most complaints wind their way through the same online system - unless the dispute involves a V.I.P.
"They get a lot more high-end treatment," said Mr. Szwak, the lawyer, who has read the bureaus' internal procedure manuals and deposed or cross-examined employees. The biggest difference at TransUnion and Equifax, lawyers said, is that V.I.P.'s disputes are specially handled domestically. Regular consumers' files, meanwhile, may get priority treatment if they involve a time-sensitive issue, like a mortgage pending, or if the consumer is represented by a lawyer or dealing with fraud.
Last year, new rules went into effect to strengthen existing regulations on the accuracy of reports. The rules also allow consumers to dispute errors directly with the creditor. But critics say the rule lacks any teeth because consumers don't have the right to sue the companies. (Individuals can, however, sue the bureaus and creditors after lodging a dispute through their system.)
But the problem, advocates say, is that consumers cannot vote with their feet. "They cannot remove their information from the bureaus," said Chi Chi Wu, a staff lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center, who wrote a report on the automated dispute process in 2009, "or take their business elsewhere."
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15) For Second Time in 3 Days, NATO Raid Kills Afghan Child
By SHARIFULLAH SAHAK and ALISSA J. RUBIN
May 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/world/asia/15afghan.html?ref=world
KABUL, Afghanistan - For the second time in three days, a night raid in eastern Afghanistan by NATO forces resulted in the death of a child, setting off protests on Saturday that turned violent and ended in the death of a second boy.
A NATO spokesman apologized for the child's death, which took place early Saturday in western Nangahar Province in the Hesarek District, a remote poppy-growing area close to Kabul Province and Logar Province. There has been almost no NATO presence there throughout the war, and the area is thought to be heavily penetrated by the Taliban.
The district governor, Abdul Khalid, said he had feared a Taliban attack on the government center and had called for help from local Afghan security forces. At the same time, there was a raid, he said. "American forces did an operation and mistakenly killed a fourth-grade student; he had gone to sleep in his field and had a shotgun next to him," he said.
"People keep shotguns with them for hunting, not for any other purposes," Mr. Khalid said.
The boy was the son of an Afghan National Army soldier, according to Noor Alam, the headmaster of the school the student attended. Although the boy was 15, like many rural Afghans, he was in a lower grade because he had not been able to go to school regularly, local residents said.
When morning came, an angry crowd gathered in Narra, the boy's village, and more than 200 people marched with his body to the district center. Some of the men were armed and confronted the police, shouting anti-American slogans and throwing rocks at police vehicles and the Hesarek government center, according to the district governor and the headmaster.
The police opened fire in an effort to push back the crowd to stop its advance to the district center. A 14-year-old boy was killed, and at least one other person was wounded, Mr. Khalid said.
"The police had to defend themselves; therefore, they fired some warning shots," he said.
On Thursday, a night raid by international forces in Nangahar Province resulted in the death of a 12-year-old girl and her uncle, who was a member of the Afghan National Police.
Elsewhere in eastern Afghanistan, there was a car bombing directed at a joint Afghan and coalition patrol on Saturday. The explosion, in Yaqoubi District, injured eight civilians, including six children, according to Faisal Mohammed, a doctor at the hospital in Khost City.
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16) Tortured to Death in the US
By Liliana Segura, The Nation
Posted on May 12, 2011, Printed on May 16, 2011
AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/150931/tortured_to_death_in_the_us
The following article first appeared in The Nation magazine. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for their email newsletters here.
As Emmanuel Hammond lay strapped to a gurney with lethal drugs seeping into his veins, witnesses to his execution could tell something wasn't right. First he closed his eyes. But moments later, they fluttered open.
"Maybe two minutes in, his mouth kind of pulled way over to the side and then relaxed," recalls his attorney, Sheri Johnson. It moved again, and he took two hard breaths. "To me it looked like pain," Johnson says. "It looked like a grimace." It was unlike other executions she'd witnessed, even one that took twenty minutes and required a second dose of lethal drugs. That inmate had closed his eyes and remained motionless a few seconds in. Hammond's execution "was like nothing I have ever seen before."
A few months earlier, in September 2010, another Georgia prisoner, Brandon Rhode, had died in a similar way. His mother, who at her son's request did not attend his execution, was at a nearby truck stop waiting for it to be over. "When the pastor, Randy Loney, came back," she told the Guardian, "he told me that Brandon had...maintained eye contact the whole time." Pastor Loney's account was supported by press reports, which stated that Rhode's eyes stayed open until he was pronounced dead.
Hammond and Rhode were executed, like most death row prisoners, using a deadly combination of three drugs. The first, a barbiturate, is meant to sedate and anesthetize the inmate. The second, pancuronium bromide, causes paralysis. And the third, potassium chloride, stops the heart. For years, autopsies and witness descriptions have shown that the first drug, sodium thiopental, doesn't always work; some prisoners have been conscious, paralyzed and slowly suffocating until the end. Eye movement is one sign that things have gone wrong. Dr. Mark Heath, a physician and anesthesiologist who teaches at Columbia University Medical Center, wrote after Rhode's execution that "it is very unusual and surprising for a prisoner's eyes to remain open after the efficacious administration of thiopental." The implications were grim. "There is no dispute that the asphyxiation caused by pancuronium [bromide] and the caustic burning sensation caused by potassium [chloride] would be agonizing in the absence of adequate anesthesia," he wrote.
Concern that prisoners were being tortured to death was at the heart of the landmark 2008 Supreme Court case Baze v. Rees, which sought to decide whether lethal injection as carried out in Kentucky (and most death penalty states) was cruel and unusual punishment. The Court ruled that it was not, denying that lethal injections pose "a substantial risk of wanton and unnecessary infliction of pain, torture, or lingering death." But since then, states have strayed from the process upheld in Baze, partly because of a nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental. Some have sought out dubious new sources of the drug. Others, increasingly, are trading it in for a different one. Nowhere has the process been transparent-and some states appear to have broken federal laws in their rush to execute. As states have tinkered with their lethal formulas, in Georgia the result has been exactly the kind of tortuous executions the Supreme Court deemed unlikely when it upheld lethal injection.
Lawyers for Emmanuel Hammond knew he risked dying an excruciating death. After Rhode's botched execution, they filed an Open Records request to force the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) to disclose its source of sodium thiopental, while also requesting a stay of execution. Months later, on January 24, a Superior Court judge directed the GDC to release the records, but denied the stay, citing "no evidence" that the drugs were ineffective. The next day, just before midnight, Hammond was dead.
Their efforts were not in vain. The GDC records traced the drug used to kill Hammond and Rhode to a little-known Britain-based pharmaceutical wholesaler named Dream Pharma Ltd., whose headquarters are a rented space in the back of a driving school in a West London suburb. Its bare-bones website boasts that it can provide "discontinued" and "hard to find" drugs to customers, promising that "confidentiality will remain paramount." According to e-mail records released to Hammond's attorneys, a Dream Pharma representative wrote in the summer of 2010 that the company would be "more than happy to assist" with Georgia's execution needs. Derrick Schofield, assistant commissioner and chief of staff of GDC, gave the green light for the order, writing, "Make it happen."
Making it happen, the GDC cut corners. In February attorney John Bentivoglio wrote a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder on behalf of another Georgia death row prisoner, arguing that the GDC had violated the federal Controlled Substances Act by ordering sodium thiopental directly from Dream Pharma. Classified as a "Schedule III nonnarcotic controlled substance," he wrote, such a drug can be imported "if and only if advance notice is given to the Attorney General." The law also makes it illegal to "possess, manufacture, distribute or dispense" controlled substances without a registration from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
A few weeks later, DEA agents raided the maximum security prison in Jackson, Georgia, seizing the supply of sodium thiopental used to kill Hammond and Rhode. "There were questions about the way the drugs were imported over here," a DEA spokesperson said. There were also questions about whether the drug, which seemed clearly ineffective, had expired before it got to Georgia. An image of the shipping label from Dream Pharma bears the name of the now defunct Link Pharmaceuticals Ltd., which was bought out by another company in 2006. While the label shows the expiration date as 2014, sodium thiopental has a shelf life of about four years, meaning that even the freshest supply coming from Link would have been spoiled. In February lawyers trying to save the life of Roy Willard Blankenship argued that Georgia's batch of sodium thiopental had "almost certainly" expired. A judge was unconvinced, but the DEA raid would mean their client would live to see another day.
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Georgia was not alone in seeking new sources of sodium thiopental. On January 25, the same day as Hammond's execution, thirteen state attorneys general had written a letter of their own to Holder, with a rather macabre request: they needed assistance putting people to death; could the Department of Justice help?
"The majority of jurisdictions in the United States that include the death penalty as an authorized punishment...including the Federal Government, provide for lethal injection as the prescribed method," they wrote. With sodium thiopental supplies dwindling, many states "shortly will be unable to perform executions." The letter asked the Obama administration to identify a new source or else make "supplies held by the Federal Government available to the States." On March 4, Holder replied with bad news: the government had no reserves of sodium thiopental "and is therefore facing the same dilemma as many states." Holder described it as a "serious concern."
How serious seemed questionable. The shortage went back to August 2009, when Hospira Inc., the sole US manufacturer of the drug, announced a temporary halt after one of its suppliers stopped making a crucial ingredient. Hospira planned to resume production by moving operations to a plant in Italy, but under pressure from the Britain-based human rights group Reprieve, the Italian government refused to facilitate the export of drugs to be used in executions. This past January, Hospira announced that it would stop production of sodium thiopental altogether.
Meanwhile, other states had already turned to Dream Pharma. Documents obtained in January by the ACLU of Northern California unearthed a trail of e-mails between numerous state authorities beginning in the summer of 2010 showing wide efforts to find sodium thiopental wherever they could, including asking local hospitals. A shipping invoice obtained by Reprieve revealed that Arizona had ultimately placed an order from Dream Pharma, which was shipped to the Arizona State Prison Complex on September 28. Part of the stash was sent to California. ("You guys in AZ are life savers," one California official wrote.) Another portion was used to kill Jeffrey Landrigan a few weeks later, despite his lawyers' protests that Arizona "provided no information regarding the integrity of the drug." Afterward, his attorney described his execution. "Mr. Landrigan's eyes were still open," he said.
In London, the botched executions of Rhode, Hammond and Landrigan gave Reprieve sufficient ammunition to persuade British authorities to forbid the export of drugs for US executions-a ban announced on November 29. But days later, another foreign shipment of sodium thiopental arrived in the United States, in Nebraska. The source was an Indian company called Kayem Pharmaceuticals, based in Mumbai. In February, Kayem shipped another stash, this time to South Dakota.
Like Dream Pharma, Kayem's headquarters are unimpressive, "a two-room...office and storeroom with a balcony that doubles as a kitchen," according to the Times of India, which was told by Kayem's director, Navneet Verma, "several American states have now approached us for sodium thiopental." Days after that story broke, however, and after a news conference held in India by Reprieve, Verma reversed course. "I will be requesting my buyers to declare that they will not be using [the drug] for the lethal purposes," he said.
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As some states bought sodium thiopental overseas, others were busy reworking their formulas. The first to do so was Ohio, which, after a series of grisly botched executions of its own, changed its protocol from the common three-drug "cocktail" to a single deadly dose of sodium thiopental in 2009. In light of the shortage, however, Ohio announced that it would replace the drug with a fast-acting barbiturate called pentobarbital, mostly used for euthanizing animals. Pentobarbital had never been used on its own for executions. This past March, Ohio killed Johnnie Baston using the sole new drug, despite pleas from his victim's family that his life be spared.
Soon after that, Texas, the death penalty capital of the United States, announced that it, too, would switch to pentobarbital. Attorneys for Cleve Foster, scheduled to die on April 5, protested that the drug had been adopted in secret, and they scrambled to halt his execution. Their case was bolstered by a new report by the ACLU of Texas and Northwestern University noting that "the manner in which Texas carries out the execution of human beings is riskier, less transparent, and has less oversight than the euthanasia of cats, dogs, birds, and lizards."
There were other problems. Records obtained by Foster's attorneys showed that authorities had not only violated Texas's Administrative Procedures Act by adopting a new execution drug without public comment but also violated the Controlled Substances Act by using a bogus DEA registration number to obtain it. As Foster's attorney, Maurie Levin, explained on the eve of his scheduled execution, purchase documents had inadvertently revealed a DEA registration code. "We ran [the number] and it appeared to be registered to the Huntsville Unit Hospital, a notorious institution that was closed down in 1983," Levin said. DEA registration codes are supposed to be renewed every three years. In a letter to Eric Holder, Foster's attorneys argued that the outdated DEA number was proof that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice had been "purchasing and dispensing controlled substances with a DEA registration number registered to a nonexistant entity" for twenty-eight years. Holder did not intervene, but on April 5, the US Supreme Court stayed Cleve Foster's execution on unrelated grounds. "To be so determined to carry out an execution at all cost-the impunity, the lawlessness-to me that's the thing that is the most striking," Levin said.
Legal challenges have not been able to stop executions using pentobarbital, and the Obama administration has mostly stayed out of the way. On May 4, Texas killed its first prisoner using the drug, and two days later South Carolina followed suit. Georgia and Virginia have switched to pentobarbital, and Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky, whose supplies of sodium thiopental were also seized by the DEA earlier this year, are poised to do the same. Reprieve is targeting the Danish company Lundbeck, which has sold pentobarbital to several states despite lingering questions about its use to kill human beings. "I would say it has not been vetted," says Levin. "It certainly hasn't been vetted in Texas." Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, calls it "human experimentation."
"It's sort of tragic that the only way we're going to find out just how painful the process is by killing some people," he says. Fordham law professor Deborah Denno, a leading legal scholar on lethal injection, points out another serious concern.
"Baze said that any other [lethal injection] protocol had to be 'substantially similar' to what Kentucky was using. And some of these are not substantially similar protocols," she says. "In a right world, the Supreme Court should be hearing that."
Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of Rights & Liberties and World Special Coverage. Follow her on Twitter.
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17) IOF Kill Palestinian Child in Cold Blood in Occupied Jerusalem
PCHR (Palestinian Centre for Human Rights)
May 15, 2011
For more information please call PCHR office in Gaza , Gaza Strip, on +972 8 2824776 - 2825893
PCHR, 29 Omer El Mukhtar St., El Remal, PO Box 1328 Gaza, Gaza Strip. E-mail: pchr@pchrgaza.org, Webpage http://www.pchrgaza.org
In a new crime in the evening of the day before yesterday, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) killed in cold blood a Palestinian child in Silwan neighborhood in the south of the old town of occupied Jerusalem. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns this crime and calls upon the international community to take immediate action in order to compel the government of Israel to stop such crimes.
According to investigations conducted by PCHR and statements made by the deceased child's father, Said Ali Issa Ayash, 57, who lives in Ras al-Amud area in East Jerusalem and who is a translator and an editor of Israeli affairs, at approximately 15:00 on Friday, 13 May 2011, Milad, 17, who is Ayash's son, was walking on a dirt road in the center of Silwan in the south of the old town of Jerusalem. As he was between 10 and 15 meters far from two houses which had already been occupied by Israeli settlers, he was shot by a bullet coming from the direction of the two houses. The bullet penetrated Milad's abdomen and exited his back and he fell onto the ground. A number of Palestinians rushed to rescue him, but IOF soldiers providing protection to settlers occupying the two houses fired sound bombs at them. Approximately fifteen minutes later, an ambulance could reach Milad and transferred him to al-Maqased Islamic Charity Hospital. Quoting medical sources at the hospital, the father said that when Milad arrived at the hospital, his heart was not beating and his intestines and arteries were torn. Medical sources pronounced Milad dead in the dawn of Saturday, 14 May 2011. Mr. Ayash said that the area where Milad was passing was so calm at that time and that there were clashes between Palestinian boys and IOF in Beer Ayoub area in al-Bustan district in Silwan, approximately 1,500 meters far from the area where Milad was walking.
It should be noted that individuals from Israeli private security companies and forces from the Israeli Border Guard are providing protection to the Israeli settlers occupying the two mentioned houses.
PCHR renews its condemnation of, and points with grave concern to the reported crime and:
1. Asserts that these crimes are part of a series of war crimes committed by IOF in the OPT, which reflect a total disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians.
2. Calls upon the international community to take immediate action in order to put an end to such crimes. PCHR further renews its demand for the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to fulfill their obligation under Article 1 which stipulates "the High Contracting Parties undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances," as well as their obligations under Article 146 which requires that the Contracting Parties prosecute persons alleged to commit grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention. These grave breaches constitute war crimes under Article 147 of the same Convention and under Protocol I Additional to Geneva Conventions.
Public Document
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18) The Renewable Future
Sunday 15 May 2011
by: Achim Steiner, Helen Clark and Kandeh K. Yumkella, Project Syndicate
http://www.truth-out.org/renewable-future/1305474409
Wind turbines outside Tocca da Casauria, Italy, on May 1, 2010. The town produces 30 percent more energy than it uses, which allows it to sell green electricity and for residents to pay no local income taxes or fees for services like trash removal. (Photo: Dave Yoder / The New York Times)
Nairobi - Renewable energy triggers sharply polarized views. For some, it is a costly white elephant; for others, it is humanity's savior, promising to emancipate us (and our environment) from the "folly" of fossil fuels. So a hardheaded, credible, and, above all, impartial analysis, which would provide a much-needed dose of pragmatism and realism to the debate, is long overdue.
The new report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), involving more than 120 scientists, economists, and technology specialists, provides that long-overdue assessment. It adopts a global perspective and reconciles developed and developing countries' interests, while weighing the broader economic, environmental, and social issues at stake.
The summary, signed by representatives of the more than 190 countries meeting this week in the United Arab Emirates, concludes that renewable energy is an increasingly practical and highly promising option. Costs are falling - and are likely to fall even further as innovation accelerates and global energy demand continues to rise.
The researchers have painstakingly sifted more than 160 scenarios, including in-depth examinations of four. The most optimistic of these predicts that renewables could account for close to 80% of total energy supply by mid-century, thereby cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by around one-third.
Of course, only time will tell whether or not this figure will be reached. Some of the six renewable-energy technologies evaluated, such as those that generate electricity from the oceans, will require more research, development, and incubation before they reach commercial maturity. But others, such as wind, solar, and geothermal, are in some circumstances already cost competitive - or nearly cost competitive - with fossil fuels.
The IPCC report also underscores what some development experts and economists have been saying for years: energy choices should take into account wider benefits. Renewables cut air pollution, which is costing the global economy billions of dollars a year in health-care costs alone. Photovoltaics can be rapidly deployed in rural areas without the need for installing an expensive grid system - Bangladesh is a pioneering case in point. And we are only just coming to grips with the cooling costs of thermal power plants in terms of finite water resources - let alone the future price of unchecked climate change.
The ball is now firmly in politicians' court. The IPCC assessment points out that renewables are already growing. In 2009, installed capacity of wind and PVs increased by more than 30% and 50%, respectively. But the really big numbers are unlikely to be reached without the kinds of supportive public policies that have catalyzed the expansion of renewables in countries such as China and Germany.
Smart and forward-looking national policies are imperative. Kenya's new feed-in tariff has triggered a rapid expansion of geothermal capacity, and, at 300MW, the largest wind-farm project in sub-Saharan Africa.
But diverse national policies can achieve only so much. International policies, including the lending decisions of the World Bank and regional development banks, must evolve, as do the strategies of the UN and bilateral donors.
The importance of moving forward to a new global climate agreement in Durban, South Africa, this year cannot be underestimated. A comprehensive agreement would bring certainty to the carbon markets and strengthen the various mechanisms that are already encouraging renewables in developing economies and pump-priming private-sector investments. The Rio+20 meeting in Brazil next year is another opportunity to spark the transition to a global green economy.
Technical challenges remain: seamlessly managing an array of very different energy sources will require investment in better national and regional grids. Yet the opportunities - to keep the global temperature rise this century to under two degrees Celsius, and to generate decent employment in clean-tech industries for millions of people - far outweigh the challenges. Clean and renewable energy will be an indispensable component of the fight against poverty worldwide.
The IPCC estimates that the costs of triggering a renewable revolution could range from $3 trillion to more than $12 trillion between now and 2030. That sounds pricey - and it is. But so are fossil-fuel subsidies, which, with barely a murmur of protest, are currently running at more than $600 billion a year.
The IPCC report has provided a solid, scientific foundation for a low-carbon, resource-efficient future. Governments now have a clearer perspective on how to empower the lives and livelihoods of the world's seven billion people (9-10 billion by 2050), while keeping humanity's footprint, including climate change, within the planet's boundaries of environmental sustainability.
Achim Steiner is Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program. Helen Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand, is Administrator of the UN Development Program. Kandeh Yumkella is Director General of the UN Industrial Development Organization.
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19) 'White phosphorous used in Afghan war'
Press TV
Sat May 14, 2011 2:26PM
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/179875.html
Leaked documents have revealed that US-led forces in Afghanistan have made extensive use of white phosphorus bombs in densely-populated areas.
A review of the Afghan military documents revealed more than 1,100 instances of US-led forces -- including Danish troops -- having used white phosphorus (WP) grenades, rockets and bombs, the Danish daily Information reported.
According to one document, US-led forces fired 20 to 50 WP rockets at a single target.
Many of the WP munitions have often been used in residential areas.
White phosphorus is a substance that burns upon coming into contact with human flesh; it sticks to the skin and continues to burn as long as there is oxygen. The result is severe and possibly lethal chemical burns.
According to international conventions the use of white phosphorus is to be restricted exclusively to areas that are not densely populated.
However, the leaked documents from Afghanistan indicate that the WP has been used as an attack weapon in populated areas, including zones where the Danish troops are deployed.
The widespread use of white phosphorus by US-led forces has prompted concern among rights groups.
"White phosphorus must not be used against civilians or in areas inhabited by civilians," said Peter Vedel Kessing, a senior researcher at Denmark's Department of Human Rights.
Amnesty International has also called for an investigation into the use of the substance in Afghanistan.
"If talking about inhuman weapons makes any sense at all, white phosphorus certainly must belong to this category, since it leaves its victims in unimaginable pain," Amnesty International spokesperson in Denmark Ole Hoff Lund said.
"Therefore, it is important that the Danish military launches an inquiry into how and why" US-led forces have been using white phosphorus munitions, Lund added.
Military lawyer Rolf Verge at the Danish Army's Operational High Command (HOK) has confirmed that the Danish forces have been using white phosphorus, but he stressed that the WP is used only in a lawful manner.
HJL/HGH/MMN
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20) Israeli Troops Fire as Marchers Breach Borders
By ETHAN BRONNER
May 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/world/middleeast/16mideast.html?ref=world
JERUSALEM - Israel's borders erupted in deadly clashes on Sunday as thousands of Palestinians - marching from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank - confronted Israeli troops to mark the anniversary of Israel's creation. More than a dozen people were reported killed and scores injured.
With an unprecedented wave of coordinated protests, the popular uprisings that have swept the region touched Israel directly for the first time. Like those other protests, plans for this one spread over social media, including Facebook, but there were also signs of official support in Lebanon and Syria, where analysts said leaders were using the Palestinian cause to deflect attention from internal problems.
At the Lebanese border, Israeli troops shot at hundreds of Palestinians trying to force their way across. The Lebanese military said 10 protesters were killed and more than 100 were wounded. Israel said it was investigating the casualties.
In the Golan Heights, about 100 Palestinians living in Syria breached a border fence and crowded into the village of Majdal Shams, waving Palestinian flags. Troops fired on the crowd, killing four people. The border unrest could represent a new phase in the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
In the West Bank, about 1,000 protesters carrying Palestinian flags and throwing stones and occasional firecrackers and gasoline bombs fought with Israeli riot troops near the military checkpoint between Ramallah and Israel. Scores were injured, local medical officials said.
In Gaza, when marchers crossed a security zone near the border, Israeli troops fired into the crowd, wounding dozens.
In Jordan and Egypt, government security forces thwarted protesters headed to the border.
Every year in mid-May, many Palestinians observe what they call "the nakba," or catastrophe, the anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence in 1948 and the war in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes through expulsion and flight. But this was the first year that Palestinian refugees and their supporters in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, inspired by the recent protests around the Arab world, tried to breach Israel's military border from all sides.
"The Palestinians are not less rebellious than other Arab peoples," said Ali Baraka, a Hamas representative in Lebanon.
At day's end, as a tense calm returned to the country's borders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said the protests had been aimed at destroying Israel, not creating a Palestinian state alongside it.
"The leaders of these violent demonstrations, their struggle is not over the 1967 borders but over the very existence of Israel, which they describe as a catastrophe that must be resolved," he said. "It is important that we look with open eyes at the reality and be aware of whom we are dealing with and what we are dealing with."
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, saluted the protesters in a televised speech, referring to the dead as martyrs. "The blood of the nakba fatalities was not spilled in vain," he said. "They died for the Palestinian people's rights and freedom."
Officials and analysts have argued that with peace talks broken down and plans to request the United Nations to declare Palestinian statehood in September, violence could return to define this conflict, relatively quiet for the past two years.
"This is war," said Amjad Abu Taha, a 16-year-old from Bethlehem who joined the protesters in Ramallah, a rock in one hand and a cigarette in the other. "We're defending our country."
Nearby, hundreds of Israeli troops roamed the area, using stun guns and tear gas.
In Gaza, the Hamas police stopped buses carrying protesters near the main crossing into Israel, but dozens of demonstrators continued on foot, arriving at a point closer to the Israeli border than they had reached in years and drawing Israeli fire.
Later, in a separate episode, an 18-year-old Gazan near another part of the border fence was shot and killed by Israeli troops when, the Israeli military says, he was trying to plant an explosive.
At the Syrian border, an Israeli military spokesman said, troops fired only at infiltrators trying to damage the security barrier and equipment there. Some 13 Israeli soldiers were lightly wounded from thrown rocks.
The chief Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, said on Israel Radio that he saw Iran's fingerprints in the coordinated confrontations, although he offered no evidence. Syria has a close alliance with Iran, as does Hezbollah, which controls southern Lebanon, and Hamas, which rules in Gaza.
Yoni Ben-Menachem, Israel Radio's chief Arab affairs analyst, said it seemed likely that President Assad of Syria was seeking to divert attention from his crackdown on the popular uprisings there by allowing confrontations in the Golan Heights for the first time in decades.
"This way Syria makes its contribution to the Nakba Day cause, and Assad wins points by deflecting the media's attention from what is happening inside Syria," he added.
There were also signs of grass-roots support for the protests.
Palestinian activists have called on the Internet for a mass uprising against Israel to begin on May 15. A Facebook page calling for a third Palestinian intifada, or uprising, had gathered more than 300,000 members before it was taken down in March after complaints that comments posted to it advocated violence.
In Egypt, political organizers worked for weeks to rally Egyptians around the idea of a third intifada.
In Lebanon, activists had urged Palestinians to protest at the border town of Maroun al-Ras. Posters went up on Lebanese highways reading, "People want to return to Palestine," playing on the slogan made famous in Egypt and Tunisia, "People want the fall of the regime."
Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948. Israelis celebrate the anniversary according to the Hebrew calendar, which this year was last Tuesday.
The day's troubles began when an Israeli Arab truck driver rammed his truck into cars, a bus and pedestrians in Tel Aviv, killing one man and injuring more than a dozen in what the police described as a terrorist attack.
Later, hundreds of Lebanese joined by Palestinians from more than nine refugee camps in Lebanon headed toward Maroun al-Ras, scene of some of the worst fighting in the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.
Though the Lebanese Army tried to block them from arriving at the border fence, some reached it. They placed Palestinian flags at the fence, and after Israeli troops fired on them, some threw rocks at the soldiers, witnesses said.
In Egypt, too, the government tried to prevent an international confrontation, sending troops to the border in anticipation of a planned march there from Cairo.
About 250 people were stopped at El Arish, in the northern Sinai, where they were demonstrating for Egypt to open the border with Gaza, expel the Israeli ambassador and stop selling natural gas to Israel. About 30 activists made it around military checkpoints to stage a small demonstration at the border crossing.
Several thousand Egyptians protested in front of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, waving Palestinian flags, clapping and chanting "Down with Israel." After midnight some protesters tried to storm the embassy and were repelled by Egyptian Army guards, witnesses reported.
In Jordan, 800 Palestinians were bused to the border, but security officials and local residents prevented them from going further. During the clashes that resulted, 14 demonstrators and three police officers were hurt, one critically, according to Jordan's public security office.
The fact that protesters made it to the border in Lebanon and Syria raised questions about whether those governments had endorsed the actions.
Protesters in Lebanon said they received permission from the army to enter the border area near Maroun al-Ras, classified as a militarily sensitive region.
Hezbollah was believed to have helped coordinate the march. A field hospital affiliated with the group, the Martyr Salah Ghandour Hospital, which operates in Bint Jbeil, a large town in southern Lebanon, was at the scene.
In Syria, dozens of checkpoints safeguard the border area, which has been relatively peaceful since a truce in 1974. The arrival of hundreds, if not thousands, would require government permission, or at least official acquiescence.
A Syrian dissident, citing accounts from Damascus residents, said pro-government Palestinian groups began busing people to the border on Saturday night.
Reporting was contributed by Nada Bakri and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Fares Akram from Gaza, Ranya Kadri from Amman, Jordan, and David D. Kirkpatrick and Liam Stack from Cairo.
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21) Money Troubles Take Personal Toll in Greece
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
May 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/business/global/16drachma.html?ref=world
ATHENS - His face contorted with anguish, Anargyros D. recounted how he had lost everything in the aftermath of the Greek economic collapse - the food-processing factory founded by his father 30 years ago, his house, his car, his Rolex, his pride and now, he said, his will to live.
"Many times I have thought of taking my father's car and driving it into a wall," he said, declining to give his last name because he was reluctant to draw attention to himself under these circumstances.
Hunched over and shaking, he sat last week in the spartan office of Klimaka, a social services organization here that provides help to the swelling numbers of homeless and depressed Greek professionals who have lost their jobs and their dignity.
"We were the people in Greece who helped others," he said. "Now we are asking for help."
It has been one year since Greece avoided bankruptcy when Europe and the International Monetary Fund provided a 110 billion euro ($155 billion) bailout. While no one expected the country to reverse its sagging fortunes quickly, the despair of Greeks like Anargyros D. reflects a level of suffering deeper than anyone here had anticipated.
Economists are predicting a 4 percent contraction in gross domestic product this year, and the data support the pessimism. Cement production is down 60 percent since 2006. Steel production has fallen, in some cases more than 80 percent in the last two years. Analysts say that close to 250,000 private sector jobs will have been lost by the end of the year, pushing the unemployment rate above 15 percent.
With headlines shouting of credit rating downgrades, panicky Greeks are taking their money from banks. Greece lost 40 billion euros of deposits last year, and bankers say withdrawals have increased recently.
These struggles have again made Greece an urgent matter for the 17-nation euro zone, whose finance ministers are to meet on Monday to discuss Greece and the debt crisis that has defied Europe's yearlong efforts to contain it. On the table will be whether Greece, which is now projected to miss its deficit target by as much as two percentage points of G.D.P. this year, will be granted another round of loans totaling as much as 60 billion euros, and what further budget cuts would be required in return.
But there is serious debate about whether this kind of prescription - subjecting Greece to more cuts and sacrifice in order to justify a second installment of funds from a reluctant Europe - is the right one.
This form of remedy violates two basic economic principles, according to Yanis Varoufakis, an economics professor and blogger at the University of Athens. "You do not lend money at high interest rates to the insolvent and you do not introduce austerity into a recession," he said. "It's pretty simple: the debt is going up and G.D.P. is going down. Have we not learned the lesson of 1929?"
The arrest on Saturday of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the I.M.F., on charges related to sexual assault could create new uncertainty about a push for more severe austerity. Mr. Strauss-Kahn generally favored a less onerous approach, and if he is forced to resign it is possible that tougher conditions preferred by Germany will be imposed.
But while the debate over how to fix the Greek economy has played out in public, the ways in which this slump is tearing at the country's social fabric are less well known. The transformation has been jarring to a citizenry long accustomed to a generous welfare state.
Social workers and municipal officials in Athens report that there has been a 25 percent increase in homelessness. At the main food kitchen in Athens, 3,500 people a day come seeking food and clothing, up from about 100 people a day when it first opened 10 years ago.
The average age of those who show up is now 47, down from 60 two years ago, adding to evidence that those who are suffering now are former professionals. The unemployment rate for men 30 to 60 years old has spiked to 10 percent from 4 percent since the crisis began in 2008.
Aris Violatzis, Anargyros D.'s counselor, says that calls to the Klimaka charity's suicide help line have risen to 30 a day, twice the number two years ago.
"We cannot imagine this," Mr. Violatzis said. "We were once the 29th-richest country in the world. This is a nation in deep emotional shock."
Evidence of the emotional and social shock was abundant in Athens last week. Even as I.M.F. and European banking officials worked with Greek officials to hash out the contours of a second bailout package, a nicely dressed middle-aged woman with silver buckles on her shoes sifted through the garbage cans outside the five-star hotels where many of these officials were staying.
At dusk, riot police fired tear gas at rock-throwing protesters as tourists and workers on their way home took cover.
Laid off construction workers have holed up in abandoned villas. A security guard fired by one of the many downsizing Greek companies said he had spent the last year sleeping in the back seat of his battered hatchback. And a chef trained in the premier cooking school in Athens spent 18 months sleeping on park benches after the restaurant where he worked eliminated his job. A homeless charity recently gave him shelter.
While aid workers refer to these people as a new generation of homeless, the Greek government does not officially recognize the homeless as a social category in need of assistance, says Anta Alamanu, who runs a privately financed shelter for Klimaka, the social services group.
As a result there are no government-supported homeless shelters as they exist in other parts of Europe or in the United States.
When Kostas DeLazaris, 47, lost his tourism job on the island of Corfu in 2007, he joined a construction firm in Athens, only to lose that job 10 months ago as the once-buoyant building industry ground to a halt. Now he sleeps on the floor in an abandoned house, sharing the space with two Greek women and a family of Bangladeshi immigrants.
He was a dedicated union man when he worked in tourism, serving as vice president of his local branch. But on the same day last week that his former peers marched on Parliament in protest, he said he would not be joining them.
"I feel betrayed," he said, his voice rising in anger. "I paid my dues. I was part of the masses, and now I am on the streets."
He snorts at the possibility of a new deal with Europe.
"That is a dead end," he said. "There will be an earthquake instead and blood will be spilt."
Indeed, there are analysts who argue that a social flare-up is in the making, fueled by the divide between the hard-hit private sector and a public work force of about one million strong that so far has not experienced significant job losses.
"This is an explosive situation, and there could well be violence," said Stefanos Manos, a former economy minister who has advocated more aggressive spending cuts. "Especially as those who lost their jobs were earning 50 percent less than those who kept them."
There is mounting criticism that Prime Minister George A. Papandreou, after a burst of changes last year, has lost his nerve. A plan to raise 50 billion euros by 2015 by privatizing the publicly owned power and train companies has been a bitter disappointment. Those companies, home to powerful unions that protect what some view as thousands of excess workers, remain largely untouched by reforms.
Mr. Papandreou has achieved some success in opening up closed professions and reforming the country's pension and retirement systems. And he still retains the support of many Greeks, who believe that there is no better alternative.
But his critics say he may be avoiding the difficult choices in the belief that, as the saying goes here, the god of Greece will save Greece by means of a fresh European bailout.
That is what Richard Parker, a political economist from Harvard who is serving as one of Mr. Papandreou's top outside advisers, thinks should happen. Germany, he says, has to overcome its Calvinist instincts and write Greece one big check so that it can continue its economic overhaul process.
"Greece's debt is just 3 percent of the euro zone G.D.P.," said Mr. Parker, who has known Mr. Papandreou for more than 40 years. "And the price of tipping over Europe will be much larger. My attitude is, give them the money."
Greece may well get the assistance, with strings attached, of course. But whether that will help lift Anargyros D. out of his despondency remains unclear. At age 41, he lives off his father's monthly pension of 962 euros, which is down from 1,500 euros a year ago, and he must borrow money for the bus from his home in the Peloponnese region to his counseling sessions in Athens.
"Everything was coming up roses," he said, mashing a cigarette into the ashtray before him. "And then the banks took it all away from us."
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22) Despite City Crackdown, Immigrants Still Are Often Cheated by Job Agencies
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
May 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/nyregion/immigrants-often-cheated-by-job-agencies-in-new-york.html?ref=nyregion
Cristina Rivas, 49, an immigrant from El Salvador, thought her one-year search for steady work had finally come to an end. A Queens employment agency that she had paid $120 said it had found her a job as a waitress at an upscale restaurant. She needed only to show up.
But when Ms. Rivas arrived at the "restaurant" last year, she encountered an atmosphere far different from what had been promised. Men whistled at female employees. Tips were offered for private dances. Distraught, she asked for a refund from the agency, but it refused.
"They exploited me," Ms. Rivas said in Spanish. "They didn't act like human beings. They treated me like a slave."
In some of the poorest neighborhoods across the city, immigrants hoping to land jobs through employment agencies have routinely been cheated out of money. They are often charged hundreds of dollars in fees, promised jobs that do not exist, and sent to abusive working environments.
Three years ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, responding to an influx of complaints about employment agencies, pledged to root out wrongdoing through undercover inspections and mandatory training for the agencies. "The city is putting a stop to the widespread abuse and fraudulent behavior that for too long has cheated New Yorkers in need," he said at the time.
But achieving that goal has proved vexing, complicated by what is often a fly-by-night business culture and by the reluctance of many immigrants to speak up. The city is up against an industry that has multiplied rapidly during the economic downturn - there are officially 350 agencies, but some advocates say the number exceeds 1,000. In the past six years, 36 have been shut down, but about 200 complaints a year come in, only a fraction of the probable violations.
"This is the tip of the iceberg," said Jonathan B. Mintz, commissioner of the city's Department of Consumer Affairs, which is leading the effort to crack down on abusive agencies. "Achieving compliance in this industry is quite difficult."
Owners of employment agencies acknowledge that there is abuse in the industry, but they say the city's campaign has harmed the reputation of honest enterprises and hurt business.
"We are not here to exploit people," said Antonio Ruiz, owner of Éxito Agencia de Empleo in Queens. "We are here to help them find work."
For immigrants looking for a foothold in the economy, employment agencies are often the first stop. Many of these agencies are concentrated in Chinatown and Jackson Heights, Queens, both home to large immigrant communities.
Customers usually pay a fee of at least $100 to be placed in a job. The help in writing résumés and translating paperwork is especially enticing for illegal immigrants, who do not qualify for unemployment benefits.
Under city law, employment agencies are prohibited from guaranteeing applicants that they will find them jobs, and they are not permitted to place people in jobs that pay below minimum wage. Agencies are also required to provide a written contract, a detailed job description, and information on refunds and labor laws.
Consumers frequently complain that agencies require non-English speakers to sign contracts in English, or demand upfront payments, which in most cases are illegal. City officials say they have encountered agencies that plotted with businesses to dupe consumers and steal their money, and cases of women being sent for work to strip clubs, rather than to restaurants as they thought.
Adela Valdez, a community activist in Queens, said she had been cheated several times by employment agencies, including once when she was asked to work at a laundry for a one-week trial and was never compensated. She said elected officials should have done more to regulate the industry.
"Who are the laws for?" she said. "Those that have more money? We are the ones who have to work."
Julissa Bisono, an organizer for Make the Road, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group, said she often heard complaints from families about agencies that collected money one day and disappeared the next.
"It's like you gave money to a ghost," Ms. Bisono said. "Sometimes those are the last $100 that they have."
Her group has begun an effort to educate immigrants about consumer rights and the perils of employment agencies.
Some state lawmakers are proposing legislation to increase fines against employment agencies to $500, from $100, for each day a violation continues, and to make it a misdemeanor to accumulate three or more violations in a five-year span.
State Senator Adriano Espaillat, a Democrat who has sponsored a bill requiring employment agencies to prominently post information about the rights of applicants, said many immigrants did not know where to turn for help. In Washington Heights, Mr. Espaillat said, he has noticed a new scheme: agencies that arrange work and transportation for immigrants but withhold their paychecks. "They're taking advantage of folks that don't know their rights," said Mr. Espaillat, who represents parts of Manhattan and the Bronx. "It's very dehumanizing."
For Ms. Rivas, the immigrant from El Salvador, the job search continued. After calling the city's 311 help line, she was able to get her money refunded. In all, the city has recovered more than $300,00 for customers cheated by employment agencies since 2005. She eventually found work as a nanny through another agency, working seven days a week to support her two children.
"We don't have another way of finding work," she said. "If you don't speak English, you have to put your trust in them."
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