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NEXT MEETING OF JROTC MUST GO!
Tuesday, June 3, 7:00 P.M.
Global Exchange, 2017 Mission Street near 16th.
The next meeting of the Board of Education is the following Tuesday, June 10th, 7:00 P.M. At 555 Franklin Street near McAllister Street.
415/241-6427 or (415) 241-6493
(To get on the speaker’s list call the Monday before the meeting from 8:30 AM - 4:00 PM or Tuesday, the day of the meeting from 8:30 AM - 3:30 PM. You will get at most, two minutes and most probably only one minute to speak.
http://www.jrotcmustgo.blogspot.com/
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Call for an Open U.S. National Antiwar Conference
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
Sponsored by the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation
P.O. Box 21008; Cleveland, OH 44121; Voice Mail: 216-736-4704; Email: NatAssembly@aol.com
FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION:
http://natassembly.org/
TO READ THE CALL:
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
AN OPEN NATIONAL CONFERENCE TO SUPPORT THE DEMANDS:
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home NOW!
We invite everyone who opposes the war and occupation to attend an open democratic
national antiwar conference to place on the agenda of the entire US antiwar movement
a proposal for the largest possible united mass mobilization to stop the war and end
the occupation.
Saturday, June 28 & Sunday, June 29, 2008
Cleveland, Ohio
Speakers include:
Donna Dewitt, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO
Fred Mason, President of the Maryland AFL-CIO and President of the
Metro Washington D.C. Central Labor Council, one of the National
Co-Convenors of U.S. Labor Against the War
Greg Coleridge, Program Director, Northeast Ohio American Friends
Service Committee; Coordinator, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition
Jonathan Hutto, Navy Petty Officer, author, Anti-War Soldier and
co-founder of Appeal for Redress
Jeremy Scahill, Author, of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World‚s Most Powerful Mercenary Army"
Jesse Diaz, Organizer of the May 1, 2006 immigrant rights boycott
Cindy Sheehan, by video
To register and for more information, log on to: www.natassembly.org.
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The Girl Who Silenced the World at the UN!
Born and raised in Vancouver, Severn Suzuki has been working on environmental and social justice issues since kindergarten. At age 9, she and some friends started the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), a small group of children committed to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. They traveled to 1992's UN Earth Summit, where 12 year-old Severn gave this powerful speech that deeply affected (and silenced) some of the most prominent world leaders. The speech had such an impact that she has become a frequent invitee to many U.N. conferences.
[Note: the text of her speech is also available at this site...bw]
http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=433
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MINIATURE EARTH
http://www.miniature-earth.com/me_english.htm
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"Dear Canada: Let U.S. war resisters stay!"
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/499/89/
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NO on state Prop. 98!
San Francisco Tenants Union (415) 282-5525 www.sftu.org
Wealthy landlords and other right-wing operatives placed Prop. 98 on the state ballot. This is a dangerous and deceptive measure. Disguised as an effort to reform eminent domain laws and protect homeowners, Prop. 98 would abolish tenant protections such as rent control and just-cause eviction laws, and would end a number of other environmental protection and land use laws. [The catch is, that while it's true that the landlord can increase rents to whatever he or she wants once a property becomes vacant, the current rent-control law now ensures that the new tenants are still under rent-control for their, albeit higher, rent. Under the new law, there simply will be no rent control when the new tenant moves in so their much higher rent-rate can increase as much as the landlord chooses each year from then on!!! So, no more rent-control at all!!! Tricky, huh?...BW]
SAVE RENT CONTROL! NO ON PROP. 98!
http://leftinsf.com/blog/index.php/archives/2492
We All Hate that 98!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Phrt5zVGn0
READ ALL OF PROP. 98 at: http://yesprop98.com/read/?_adctlid=v%7Cwynx8c5jjesxsb%7Cwziq39twoqov52
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Stop fumigation of citizens without their consent in California
Target: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Joe Simitian, Assemblymember Loni Hancock, Assemblymember John Laird, Senator Abel Maldonado
Sponsored by: John Russo
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-fumigation-of-citizens-without-their-consent-in-california
Additional information is available at http://www.stopthespray.org
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) Efficiently and Methodically Framed--Mumia is innocent!
FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, by J Patrick O'Connor (Lawrence Hill Books 2008)
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610, 510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org
LACFreeMumia@aol.com
2) Woman on oxygen machine dies when company shuts off power
May. 19, 2008 07:15 AM
Associated Press
http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/2008/05/19/20080519oxygen19-on.html
3) Most Homeless in New Orleans From City, Survey Finds
By SHAILA DEWAN
May 28, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/us/28tent.html?hp
4) Bear Spirit Rising
A Community Reaches Out
Council of the Haida Nation Resolution
RESOLUTION 95-01-HOA13 • RECREATIONAL HUNTING OF BLACK BEAR ON HAIDA GWAII
5) Strike Settled, American Axle Details Layoff Plans
By NICK BUNKLEY
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/business/29axle.html
6) In Defense of Workers
Editorial
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/opinion/29thu1.html
7) In Stock Plan, Employees See Stacked Deck
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/business/29sugar.html?hp
8) Britain Joins a Draft Treaty on Cluster Munitions
By JOHN F. BURNS
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/world/europe/29cluster.html?ref=world
9) Report Sees a New Era of Higher Food Prices
By ANDREW MARTIN
May 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/business/worldbusiness/30food.html?ref=world
10) U.N. Report Seeks Action to Address Food Crisis
By ANDREW MARTIN
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/business/worldbusiness/29food.html?ref=world
11)5 Countries Agree to Talk Over the Arctic
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/science/earth/29arctic.html?ref=world
12) Human Rights Report Assails U.S.
By ALAN COWELL
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/world/29amnesty.html?ref=world
13) A Step Closer to Justice
Editorial
May 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/opinion/30fri1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
14) U.S. Withdraws Fulbright Grants to Gaza
By ETHAN BRONNER
["Since Hamas, a radical Islamist group that opposes Israel’s existence, carried out what amounted to a coup d’état in Gaza against the more secular Fatah party a year ago, hundreds of rockets and mortar shells have been launched from here at Israeli civilians, truck and car bombs have gone off and numerous attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers have taken place." ...So the NYT has termed the democratic election of Hamas over Fatah a "coup d’état"! To hell with what the Palestinians think--as usual...bw]
May 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/world/middleeast/30gaza.html?ref=world
15) Secretary Gates Visits Guam Military Base
By ERIC SCHMITT
May 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/world/asia/31guam.html?adxnnl=1&ref=world&adxnnlx=1212167467-MsaOHbf6J8Xu9fFzq3NdIA
16) Ultimate Fighting Recruits Military to Its Ranks
By MICHAEL BRICK
May 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/sports/othersports/30fight.html?ref=us
17) JROTC Must Go! Campaign Heating Up
by Riva Enteen
Beyond Chron
May 30, 2008
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5720
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1) Efficiently and Methodically Framed--Mumia is innocent!
FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, by J Patrick O'Connor (Lawrence Hill Books 2008)
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610, 510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org
LACFreeMumia@aol.com
That is the conclusion of a new book on the case of former Black Panther, and internationally-known political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has now spent over a quarter of a century on death row for a crime he didn't commit. The book is, THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, by J Patrick O'Connor (Lawrence Hill Books 2008). The author is a former UPI reporter who took an interest in Mumia's case. He is now the editor of Crime Magazine (www.crimemagazine.com).
O'Connor offers a fresh perspective, and delivers a clear and convincing breakdown on perhaps the most notorious frame-up since Sacco and Vanzetti. This is a case not just of police corruption, or a racist lynching, though it is both. The courts are in this just as deep as the cops, and it reaches to the top of the equally corrupt political system.
"This book is the first to convincingly show how the Philadelphia Police Department and District Attorney's Office efficiently and methodically framed [Mumia Abu-Jamal]." (from the book jacket)
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (LAC) wants to alert you to this important new work. THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL is in bookstores now, at $16.95. but a little research in the SF Bay Area suggests that it may be hard to find. Contact the Labor Action Committee if you can't find it. We have a limited number ordered from the publisher at a discount.
Send a check or money order for $15 (includes shipping)
pay to/send to: Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610
Author J Patrick O'Connor says Mumia was framed at the hands of corrupt cops and courts, who were bent on vengeance against one of their most prominent critics.
"What makes getting to the truth of this case so difficult is that the prosecution built its case on perjured testimony with a calculated disregard for what the actual evidence established," says O'Connor (p. xii).
THE FRAMING OF MUMIA ABU-JAMAL is based on a thorough analysis of the 1982 trial and the 1995-97 appeals hearings, as well as previous writings on this case, and research on the MOVE organization, with which Mumia identifies, and the history of racist police brutality in Philadelphia. While leaving some of the evidence of Mumia's innocence unconsidered or disregarded, this book nevertheless makes clear that there is a veritable mountain of evidence--most of it deliberately squashed by the courts--that shows that Mumia was blatantly and deliberately framed, that he is innocent, that somebody else did the crime, and that corrupt cops and courts have "fixed" this case against Mumia from the beginning.
Upcoming Events with the Author
NEW YORK: SAVE THE DATE! Thursday, June 24th, New York City book signing party with author J. Patrick O'Connor for 'The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal' at 7:30PM at the Brecht Forum, 451 West Street (between Bank and Bethune Streets). Bring your questions and be prepared for surprise guests! For more information, call the Hotline: (212) 330-8029
SF BAY AREA: A book tour by the author is in planning stages. For more information, send your request to: LACFreeMumia@aol.com
For an interview with the author and other material about this book, visit Journalists For Mumia, www.Abu-Jamal-News.com. The publisher is Chicago Review Press. Get your local bookstore or library to order a copy!
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610, 510.763.2347
www.laboractionmumia.org
LACFreeMumia@aol.com
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2) Woman on oxygen machine dies when company shuts off power
May. 19, 2008 07:15 AM
Associated Press
http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/2008/05/19/20080519oxygen19-on.html
WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A New Zealand woman dependent on an oxygen machine for survival died when the power company shut off the electricity to her home because of an overdue bill, a coroner's court heard Monday.
Folole Muliaga, 44, a nursery school teacher, needed an oxygen machine to help her breathe and died two hours after Mercury Energy cut power to her home, Auckland Coroner Gordon Matenga heard in the inquest.
Muliaga's death on May 29, 2007, outraged New Zealanders and saw Prime Minister Helen Clark denounce the company's actions as heartless and intolerable.
Muliaga's husband, Lopaavea, told the court that he contacted Mercury Energy in early May 2007 to try to arrange paying their overdue power bill in installments but was unsuccessful.
He made a payment in May but the power was disconnected eight days later. At the time, he testified, he thought he only owed $26.67.
Mercury Energy said at the time that $130.12 was owed.
An emotional Lopaavea Muliaga said he was at work when the power was cut and arrived home to find his wife dead and two ambulance officers at the house.
He said by the time of her death his overweight wife needed the oxygen machine 16 hours a day to help her breathe.
In the wake of Folole Muliaga's death, the power company said it would review the way it deals with customers with medical dependencies and those in financial difficulty.
Lawyers for Mercury Energy and its subcontractor have expressed condolences to the Muliaga family, and have said they hoped some answers would come from the inquest.
A police investigation last year found no grounds for filing criminal charges against the utility.
Coroners in New Zealand can order inquests into unusual deaths to assess the circumstances surrounding them so they can make recommendations to prevent future occurrences. The inquest does not assign blame.
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3) Most Homeless in New Orleans From City, Survey Finds
By SHAILA DEWAN
May 28, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/us/28tent.html?hp
NEW ORLEANS — Mayor C. Ray Nagin recently suggested a way to reduce this city’s post-Katrina homeless population: give them one-way bus tickets out of town.
Mr. Nagin later insisted the off-the-cuff proposal was just a joke. But he has portrayed the dozens of people camped in a tent city under a freeway overpass near Canal Street as recalcitrant drug and alcohol abusers who refuse shelter, give passers-by the finger and, worst of all, hail from somewhere else.
While many of the homeless people do have addiction problems or mental illness, a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina. And about 30 percent had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Not far from the French Quarter, flanking Canal Street on Claiborne Avenue, they are living inside a long corridor formed not of walls and a roof but of the thick stench of human waste and sweat tinged with alcohol, crack and desperation.
The inhabitants are natives like Ronald Gardner, 54, an H.I.V.-positive man who said he had never before slept on the streets until Katrina. Or Ronald Berry, 57, who despite being a paranoid schizophrenic said he had lived on his own, in a rented house in the Lower Ninth Ward, for a dozen years before Katrina. Both men receive disability checks for $637 a month, not nearly enough to cover post-hurricane rents.
“If I could just get a warm room,” Mr. Gardner said, sitting on the cot under which all his belongings are stored, “I could take it from there.”
Lurlene Newell, 54, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency had paid her rent in Texas after the storm, but when she moved back to New Orleans, she could not find a place to live.
By one very rough estimate, the number of homeless people in New Orleans has doubled since the storm. Homelessness has also become a much more visible problem — late last year Unity of Greater New Orleans, a network of agencies that help the homeless, cleared an encampment of 300 people that had sprung up in Duncan Plaza, in full view of City Hall. About 280 of those people are now in apartments, but others have flocked to fill several blocks of Claiborne Street at Canal, near enough to the French Quarter to regularly encounter tourists.
Unity workers are hoping that Congress will include $76 million in the supplemental appropriation for Iraq to pay for vouchers that would give rent subsidies and services to 3,000 disabled homeless people.
On Thursday, the Senate passed a version of the bill that included the vouchers; the current House version, not yet approved, does not include them. Without the vouchers, according to Martha J. Kegel, Unity’s executive director, even those people already in apartments will be in jeopardy. Their current vouchers, issued under a “rapid rehousing” program, expire at the end of 2008.
New Orleans had 2,800 beds for the homeless before the storm; now it has 2,000, Ms. Kegel said. Those beds are full, but even if they were not, many of the people living on Canal Street are not the sort who can stay in a group shelter. According to the survey, which was conducted before dawn one morning so that only those who actually sleep in the camp would be counted, 80 percent have at least one physical disability, 58 percent have had some kind of addiction, 40 percent are mentally ill, and 19 percent were “tri-morbid” — they had a disability, an addiction and mental illness.
For these difficult cases, permanent housing with supportive services, like counseling, has become a preferred method. But it takes time, patience, money and one thing New Orleans is short of: apartments. Many apartment developers who applied for tax credits after Hurricane Katrina were required to set aside 5 percent of their units for supportive housing, but because of high construction costs and other factors, far fewer units than expected are in the pipeline. And without the vouchers, even those units will not be affordable.
Unity has already moved 60 of the most vulnerable people from the camp to hotel rooms, paid for with a city health department grant, including a woman who is eight months pregnant and a paranoid schizophrenic who is diabetic and a double amputee. In the filth of the camp, the amputee’s stumps had become infected.
Outreach workers have found clients with cancer and colostomy bags, and one so disabled that he was unable to talk. On average, people have stayed in hotels for six weeks before Unity finds an apartment and cobbles together the necessary funds.
Mike Miller, the director of supportive housing placement at Unity, said that since the city removed some portable toilets from the camp in February, the camp had become a public health hazard.
“Two outreach workers have tested positive for tuberculosis,” Mr. Miller said. “There’s hepatitis C, there’s AIDS, there’s H.I.V. Everyone out there’s had an eye infection of some sort. I got one.”
On Thursday, Herman Moore Jr. was hanging out with a friend in the camp. Mr. Moore had lived in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer, then a FEMA-financed hotel room, but had not realized that he was eligible for further assistance after the 30-day hotel stay ended last fall. Tipped off by his brother, Mr. Moore had only recently rented a house under the emergency management agency’s program, but had yet to pay the deposit or turn on the utilities because he had no money.
“If I had a TV and some electricity, you all wouldn’t even see me,” he said.
Clara Gomez, 45, told an outreach worker that she had just discovered she was pregnant. Like about 14 percent of the homeless people under the bridge, Ms. Gomez had come to New Orleans to work as a builder, but acknowledged that she had problems with drug and alcohol abuse.
After getting fired from one job, she wound up under the bridge, where she met Patrick Pugh, 36, a New Orleanian who said he had been in drug rehabilitation, turning his life around, when the storm hit. Their IDs had been stolen, they said, making it difficult to get jobs or food stamps.
Seated on a mattress, Ms. Gomez shifted nervously, changing positions every few seconds, all the while keeping her arms anchored around Mr. Pugh’s neck.
“We’re ready,” she said. “We’re ready to get out of here.”
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4) Bear Spirit Rising
A Community Reaches Out
Council of the Haida Nation Resolution
RESOLUTION 95-01-HOA13 • RECREATIONAL HUNTING OF BLACK BEAR ON HAIDA GWAII
WHEREAS many black bear are killed each year on Haida Gwaii by recreational hunters; and
WHEREAS the killing of these black bear is wasteful and contrary to Haida ethics;
BE IT RESOLVED that the 1995 House of Assembly directs the Council of the Haida Nation to act to halt the recreational killing of black bear on Haida Gwaii [Queen Charlotte Islands], home of the Haida First Nation, is an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean 75 – 150 kms off the north coast of British Columbia [B.C.] Canada It is also home to an endemic sub-species of bear [ursus americanus carlottae] that is found nowhere else in the world and is North America’s largest Black Bear.
In spite of their vulnerability due to limited range, habitat destruction caused by industrial clear-cut logging and food depletion resulting from a decline in wild salmon stocks, our bears are being commercially hunted. And despite lack of study and comprehensive census the B.C. government has yet to set a limit on how many may be killed [harvested].
These large bears are an attractive prize for foreign trophy hunters and hunting activity has recently increased. More than 400 have been killed in the last 8 years alone. We are concerned that this unfortunate set of circumstances will lead to the endangerment and eventual extinction of this magnificent animal. A Council of the Haida Nation Resolution calls for an end to the recreational killing of bears on Haida Gwaii.
Exclusive non-resident hunting rights are held by the government licensed company, Prophet Muskwa-Pacific Outfitters. An example of their unethical and unprofessional hunting practices has been recorded and posted on www.youtube.com - taansaver . Taan is the Haida word for bear.
On the nearby B.C. mainland a similarly unique variety of bear, the kermode or “spirit bear” has been protected from hunting. We seek equal recognition and the same protection for the Haida Gwaii black bear. Please join us by encouraging the regulation of more humane treatment for these bears, and, to ensure their continued survival, the designation of “protected” status………. Thank you.
For the Love of Bears
BEARS KILLED ON HAIDA GWAII SINCE 1976---1200+
CONTACT-
B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, Office of the Premier,
Parliament Buildings, Victoria, BC, Canada V5K 5J5
Ph. 250-356-2933 Email premier@gov.bc.ca, GORDON CAMPBELL
Guide Outfitters Assoc. of BC., PO Box 94675 Richmond, BC, Canada V6Y 4A4
Ph 604-278-2688 Fax 604-278-3440 Email: info@goabc.org
Guujaaw, President, Council of the Haida Nation, 133 Front Street,
PO Box 98, Skidegate Haida Gwaii, Canada, V0T 1S1
E--Council of the Haida Nation
www.haidanation.ca
Prophet Muskwa- Pacific Outfitters, Box 6677 Ft St John, BC. Canada V1J 4J1
250-789-3282 or 250-789-9494 E info@prophetmuskwa.com, KEVIN OLMSTEAD
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5) Strike Settled, American Axle Details Layoff Plans
By NICK BUNKLEY
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/business/29axle.html
DETROIT — Fewer than half of the hourly employees at American Axle & Manufacturing who are returning to work this week for the first time since going on strike in February will still have jobs in a year, company executives said Wednesday.
The parts supplier said Wednesday that it expected to save about $300 million a year under its new contract with the United Automobile Workers union, largely by eliminating about 2,000 of the 3,650 jobs now held by U.A.W. members in Michigan and New York, plus an unspecified number of salaried positions.
Workers can leave voluntarily by accepting a buyout package worth either $85,000 or $140,000, depending on how long they have been there. Those who stay will earn considerably lower wages, which will be tempered by three annual “buydown” payments totaling as much as $105,000.
American Axle said its hourly labor rate, including wages and benefits, would be cut at least in half by the new contract, which had the support of 78 percent of the U.A.W. members who voted last week. Workers will earn an all-in rate of $30 to $45 an hour, or $26.54 for new hires, down from $73.48 under the previous contract. (During negotiations, the U.A.W. disputed the company’s calculation of the old numbers as too high.)
But reaching the agreement was costly. American Axle on Wednesday said it lost $370 million in sales and between $125 million and $130 million, or $1.60 a share, in earnings during the 87-day strike, which lasted from Feb. 26 to May 22.
Shares of American Axle were down 5 percent, to $18.01 in afternoon trading. The stock has lost 20 percent of its value since May 16, when negotiators reached a tentative settlement.
The chief executive, Richard E. Dauch, said the cost reductions and flexibility were needed to keep factories open in the United States. Mr. Dauch founded American Axle in 1994 from former General Motors parts plants in Detroit and Three Rivers in Michigan, and near Buffalo, N.Y.
“The recent and rapidly accelerating deterioration in the domestic light truck market is having a negative impact on A.A.M.’s U.S. operations,” Mr. Dauch said on a conference call. “While this is unfortunate, it is a market reality that A.A.M. and the international U.A.W. have jointly addressed in this new set of agreements.”
Two of the company’s five factories — forging plants in Detroit and Tonawanda, N.Y. — will close.
The chief financial officer, Michael K. Simonte, said the three remaining plants now have the potential to be profitable for the first time since 2004. Operations in Mexico and overseas helped the company earn $37 million in 2007.
“The cost savings we expect to derive from the new labor agreement will go a long way to improve the economic viability and sustainability of these facilities, and that will save jobs,” Mr. Simonte said.
But most new work will be going outside the United States. American Axle said it had lined up $1.4 billion in new and incremental business for the next five years, and that 85 percent of it will be sourced abroad.
The company said buyouts and buydowns will cost $400 million to $450 million. G.M., which had to shut numerous truck, sport utility vehicle and component factories during the strike after running out of parts made by American Axle, agreed to contribute $215 million toward those costs.
G.M. said last week in a regulatory filing that the strike reduced its earnings in the first half of this year by $2.6 billion.
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6) In Defense of Workers
Editorial
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/opinion/29thu1.html
The Supreme Court handed down a pair of well-reasoned, fair-minded rulings this week upholding the rights of employees who charge age and race discrimination. The decisions, which forbid employers from retaliating against such workers, are a welcome break from some of the recent rulings by this court that have ignored precedent and common sense to throw out legitimate claims of unfair treatment.
In the age case, Myrna Gómez-Pérez, a United States Postal Service worker, alleged that she was subjected to retaliation, including having her supervisor make baseless accusations against her, after filing an age-discrimination complaint. Ms. Gómez-Pérez sued, but the Postal Service argued that the age-discrimination law covering federal workers did not prohibit retaliation.
The court ruled for Ms. Gómez-Pérez in a 6-to-3 vote. The majority opinion, by Justice Samuel Alito, concluded that Congress intended to protect workers in her position from retaliation. It relied in large part on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of other anti-discrimination laws with similar language. Regrettably, Chief Justice John Roberts was in dissent, writing an opinion that was too willing to break with respect for precedent to reach its anti-worker result.
In the race case, the court ruled 7 to 2 in favor of Hedrick Humphries, a black employee of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Mr. Humphries charged that he was dismissed for complaining to managers when another black worker was fired, allegedly for race-based reasons. The issue was whether a post-Civil War-era law he sued under, widely known as Section 1981, bars retaliation. The majority relied on a previous decision holding that a similar statute covers retaliation claims.
A few years ago, these rulings would have been unremarkable. But the Roberts Court has been ignoring precedent and misreading Congress’s intent a lot lately to rule against victims of unfair treatment. The most notorious case was the court’s 5-to-4 ruling last year that Lilly Ledbetter, a manager in a Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant in Alabama, had missed the deadline to complain that the company paid her less than her male colleagues. A bill to overturn the ruling has passed in the House and is pending in the Senate.
It is not only workers who have been given a raw deal. In a shocking decision last year, the court ruled, 5 to 4, that a prisoner challenging his confinement had filed his case too late — even though it was within the deadline set by a federal judge. The majority ignored the court’s precedents to rule that because the judge was mistaken about the deadline, the prisoner was out of luck.
The court may have realized after its Ledbetter ruling — which has been criticized not only in Congress, but on the presidential campaign trail — that the American people want a Supreme Court that does not stack the deck in favor of the powerful. Or, it may simply be getting better at reading the will of Congress and respecting precedent. Whatever the explanation, we hope that this week’s decisions signal a new direction for the court.
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7) In Stock Plan, Employees See Stacked Deck
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/business/29sugar.html?hp
CLEWISTON, Fla. — Thousands of workers at U.S. Sugar thought they were getting a good deal when the company shelved their pension plan and gave them stock for their retirement instead. They had a heady sense of controlling their own destiny as they became the company’s biggest shareholders, Vic McCorvey, a former farm manager there, said.
“It was always stressed to me, as manager of that 20,000-acre farm, that the better you do, the higher your stock will be and the more retirement you could get,” Mr. McCorvey said. “That’s why I worked six and seven days a week, 14 hours a day,” slogging through wet and buggy cane fields, doing whatever it took.
Now that many U.S. Sugar workers are reaching retirement age, though, the company has been cashing them out of the retirement plan at a much lower price than they could have received. Unknown to them, an outside investor was offering to buy the company — and their shares — for far more. Longtime employees say they have lost out on tens of thousands of dollars each and millions of dollars as a group, while insiders of the company came out ahead.
Some former U.S. Sugar employees have since filed a lawsuit accusing company insiders of cheating them out of money that was rightfully theirs. Throughout, the worker-owners have been shut out of information about the company’s finances and unable to challenge management’s moves or vote because their shares were held through a retirement plan, not directly.
What has happened at U.S. Sugar could happen at many other companies because of a type of retirement plan that proliferated in the 1980s, after powerful members of Congress took an interest in “worker ownership” as a way to improve productivity.
Thousands of companies, large and small, embraced the ensuing tax benefits by creating employee stock ownership plans, known as ESOPs. U.S. Sugar, the largest American producer of cane sugar, took its stock off the public market in the transaction that created its ESOP, in 1983.
Nearly 95 percent of the country’s 10,000 ESOPs are now at privately held companies, like U.S. Sugar. Because their shares are not publicly traded, there is no market price. So workers cash out shares without knowing what the price would be on an open market.
The former employees accuse U.S. Sugar insiders — descendants of the industrialist Charles Stewart Mott — of scheming to enrich themselves by buying back workers’ shares on the cheap. They say “the principal actor” is William S. White, the company’s longtime chairman, who is married to Mr. Mott’s granddaughter. They also say he improperly exerted his influence as chairman of the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, whose mission is to advance human rights and fight poverty and which holds a big stake in U.S. Sugar.
“They robbed us,” said Loretta Weeks, who worked in U.S. Sugar’s lab, testing sucrose levels in cane juice. “It’s like the last 15 years we were working for nothing.”
U.S. Sugar said in a statement that the lawsuit had no merit and that the company would vigorously contest it, but it did not respond to any specific accusations.
Through his lawyer, Mr. White denied that he had improperly exerted control over the U.S. Sugar board, or that the Mott Foundation had anything to do with the decision not to sell to the outside investor. The lawyer, H. Douglas Hinson, also said that Mr. White and the Mott Foundation had no role in deciding what price employees received for their stock, because the price was set in an independent appraisal.
Members of Congress tried to prevent disputes over the fair market value of shares in employee stock plans by requiring private companies to get independent appraisals each year. But workers at U.S. Sugar say the chairman and his allies withheld crucial information from the appraiser and artificially depressed the share price, something the chairman denies. The employees do not accuse the appraiser of wrongdoing.
Missed Opportunities
To document their claims, the former workers cite two offers to buy U.S. Sugar for $293 a share — offers that came as the workers were being cashed out of their shares by the company for as little as $194 a share. The worker-owners were not told about these outside offers and had no chance to tender their shares. They found out only through word of mouth, after the board of U.S. Sugar had rejected both offers.
As retiring workers cash out their shares, the company then retires their stock. That leaves fewer shares outstanding over time, the lawsuit says, allowing the insiders’ control of U.S. Sugar to grow, without their having to spend a penny buying stock. In this way, Mr. White’s immediate family increased its stake in U.S. Sugar by 19 percent from 2000 to 2005, the lawsuit says.
The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation issued a statement saying that as a major U.S. Sugar shareholder, it was confident that U.S. Sugar’s board had “acted responsibly and within its duties.” It also said the workers’ lawsuit contained accusations that were inaccurate.
While they wait for their lawsuit to inch through federal court, U.S. Sugar’s former employees say they are struggling to get by on fewer retirement dollars than they should have received. Many are former field workers, machine operators and mechanics, paid by the hour and living in one of Florida’s poorest counties. Some said the disputed stock plan was their sole retirement nest egg.
“I had to go back to work,” said Randy Smith, who retired last year after 25 years as a welder and machinist. He was only 55, but said U.S. Sugar had forced him to retire after declaring him no longer qualified to do his job. The company has been cutting staff aggressively for several years.
Mr. Smith said he cashed out of the retirement plan for about $90,000, but could have received about $53,000 more, if he had had the chance to tender his shares and the company had accepted the outside offers. The extra money would help a lot, he said, because his wife, Sandra, has rheumatoid arthritis, and after he retired, U.S. Sugar canceled its retiree health plan.
Mr. Smith has since found a new job, with health benefits — but it pays $10 an hour, compared with the $23 an hour he once earned at U.S. Sugar.
“My wife, she’s having to work two jobs just to make ends meet,” he said.
Mr. McCorvey said that he and his wife, Marilyn, also a former employee, have calculated that the outside offers would have been worth $137,000 more to them. He was laid off in 2004; an executive assistant, she was laid off in 2002.
Even though they no longer work at the company, they cannot cash out their stock, because of plan vesting rules, they said.
Meanwhile, the stock price has been falling, based on appraisals and cash-out values supplied by the company.
“I’m scared I’m going to lose it all,” Mr. McCorvey said.
Owners, but Excluded
To make matters worse, U.S. Sugar announced in April that it was eliminating its dividend. The McCorveys had been receiving dividends worth about $7,000 a year on their shares.
They and other former U.S. Sugar workers said they had planned to attend the company’s annual meeting this month, so they could tell management their complaints as shareholders.
But this year, for the first time, the company announced that employee-shareholders would not be allowed to attend the annual meeting. It said that they were not the shareholders of record, and that as a result they would be represented by the trustee of their plan, the U.S. Trust Company.
A spokeswoman for Bank of America, which owns U.S. Trust, said the company believed it had fulfilled all of its duties as the trustee.
Experts said it was unusual to bar participants in employee stock plans from shareholders’ meetings.
“It is legal,” said Loren Rodgers, project director for the National Center for Employee Ownership. But he cited research indicating that worker-owned companies tended to have better results when workers had a say in operations.
Mr. Rodgers said that Congress had decided to limit the workers’ powers as shareholders out of concern that companies might avoid the structure if workers received full rights.
Many former workers at U.S. Sugar acknowledged that they had never tried to attend an annual meeting until now. But that did not quell their anger at discovering they could not. “It was real nasty, the company to do us like they did us,” said Tommy Miller, who retired last fall after 32 years as a supervisor in a locomotive repair shop. He was only 56 but was caught in a mass layoff.
He said he cashed out his shares and invested in an individual retirement account, only to learn that a bidder had been willing to pay him a lot more.
“So you took my job and you took my stock, too,” Mr. Miller said.
The workers describe a harsh new face on a company once known as paternalistic. U.S. Sugar was bought out of bankruptcy during the Great Depression by Mr. Mott, an entrepreneur who said companies should strengthen the towns where they did business.
Mr. Mott, who started out making bicycle wheels and ended up with the largest single block of General Motors stock, created charities in Flint, Mich., and also provided Clewiston with swimming pools, libraries and a youth center.
“When somebody’s child got hurt or was seriously ill, the company would fly that child to a hospital in Tampa, or wherever they needed to go,” John Perry, a former mayor of Clewiston, said. “This was a wonderful, wonderful place to live.”
But that homey culture did not survive the tide of globalization. The North American Free Trade Agreement raised the prospect of a flood of cheap sugar from Mexico and other countries with low wages. U.S. Sugar scrambled to lower its costs.
Ellen Simms, U.S. Sugar’s former comptroller, said that when the company had to trim its payroll, it seemed to choose people with many years at the company.
“It was very obvious, with few exceptions, that they were targeting the employees who had been there the most time and who had the most ESOP shares,” she said. She resigned in protest in 2004.
Meanwhile, the falling stock price reported in the appraisals was a boon to the company, she said, because it made it cheaper to buy out the workers.
Conspicuous Offers
The reported declines in the stock price might not have been questioned, had it not been for two offers to acquire U.S. Sugar, one in the summer of 2005 and the other in early 2007. Both were made by the Lawrence Group, a large father-son agribusiness concern in Sikeston, Mo., for $293 a share in cash. Gaylon Lawrence Jr. confirmed the price but declined to comment further.
The worker-shareholders were being paid $205 to $194 a share at the time, based on ESOP appraisals.
But to help vet the Lawrence Group’s offer, U.S. Sugar hired a second appraisal firm to calculate the company’s breakup value. This appraiser came up with $2.5 billion, or about $1,273 a share.
U.S. Sugar then rejected the Lawrence Group’s offer as inadequate.
Mr. McCorvey said he would have tendered his shares to the Lawrence Group without a moment’s hesitation. “But we were never given the opportunity,” he said.
John Logue, an ESOP specialist at Kent State University, said federal law does not require worker-owners to vote on acquisition offers. But, he said, “when you’re in doubt, let the participants vote. We have kind of an innate sense in the United States that people are entitled to do what they want with the property they own.”
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8) Britain Joins a Draft Treaty on Cluster Munitions
By JOHN F. BURNS
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/world/europe/29cluster.html?ref=world
LONDON — The draft of a treaty to ban cluster munitions was adopted by a group of 111 nations on Wednesday in Dublin after Britain dropped its longstanding opposition to any limitations on the weapons.
The sudden shift by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who is under pressure to combat his Labor Party’s declining political fortunes, created fresh pressures on the United States, which had counted Britain as one of its staunchest allies in opposing the ban.
The treaty, hammered out in two weeks of talks in Dublin, had been under negotiation since February 2007. The nations accepting the treaty are scheduled to gather again in Oslo in early December to sign the pact, which would ban the use, production and sale of cluster munitions.
The draft treaty would still leave most of the world’s stockpile of cluster weapons untouched, as the United States has been joined in its outright opposition to the ban, and in its boycott of the Dublin conference, by a group of military powers that includes China, Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan and Brazil.
Weapons experts estimate that the United States, China and Russia each have at least a billion cluster munitions, counting the individual “bomblets” that are carried by each weapon, dwarfing the stockpiles of states that have accepted the treaty.
But supporters of the treaty said that its impact would be felt even by those nations that refused to sign, much as those countries that have rejected the 1997 Ottawa treaty on land mines, including the United States, have refrained from using mines since that treaty was adopted.
“We have a strong treaty,” said Simon Conway, a former British soldier who is a co-chairman of the Anti-Cluster Campaign, a coalition of more than 200 groups that have worked for a cluster munitions ban. “The treaty will stigmatize the use of cluster munitions, and those countries that have not signed up will not be able to use them.”
Cluster munitions is the term used for weapons fired from aircraft and artillery that contain dozens, or even hundreds, of bomblets that can remain active long after the weapon is fired, posing deadly risks to civilians. Used by the United States and Britain in Iraq during the invasion of 2003, and by Israel in its incursion into Lebanon in 2006, the weapons have been blamed for the deaths of hundreds of civilians. Human rights groups estimate that one in four of the casualties have been children playing with the unexploded bomblets.
The draft treaty sets an eight-year deadline for signatory nations to destroy most of their stockpiles of cluster weapons, along with other provisions that delegates said would ultimately eliminate all but a small fraction of cluster munitions in nations that sign the treaty. It also obliges nations that adopt it to provide “technical, financial or material assistance” for clearing up cluster munitions “remnants” that remain on the territory of other states.
The proposed treaty would not ban a new lightweight generation of so-called smart cluster munitions, each carrying fewer than 10 bomblets and designed to self-destruct within a short period after impact, if they have not detonated against a target.
These currently account for only a small part of the American inventory of cluster munitions, but the Bush administration has argued that a shift to these new weapons, which pose a much lower risk to civilians, makes a ban of the kind called for in the treaty unnecessary.
In Washington on Wednesday, a Bush administration spokesman said that, while sharing the “humanitarian concerns of those in Dublin,” the White House remained opposed to the draft treaty. “Cluster munitions have demonstrated military utility,” said the spokesman, Tom Casey of the State Department, “and their elimination from U.S. stockpiles would put the lives of our soldiers and those of our coalition partners at risk.”
Supporters said that in addition to stigmatizing the use of traditional cluster munitions, the treaty would hasten the transition to the new generation of “smart” weapons that self-destruct. And they pointed to Britain’s support of the ban, after years of resistance, as a watershed moment that would stand alongside the treaty that banned land mines.
The land mine pact has been shunned by a relatively small group of military powers, including the United States, but advocates of the cluster munitions treaty said that the decision by Britain — a major American ally, one of the most important military powers in NATO, and a member of the United Nations Security Council — could create fresh pressures on the United States, particularly after Mr. Bush leaves office next January.
That hope was voiced at the Dublin conference on Tuesday by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He told the conference that “anyone who has seen the indiscriminate devastation cluster weapons cause across a wide area must recognize the unacceptable threat they pose to civilians.”
He added: “As I have said many times, among the first tasks of our next president will be to reintroduce America to the world. We need to reject the ‘us versus them’ unilateralist approach that has so diminished our image and our leadership.”
Among the presidential contenders, only Senator Barack Obama has supported a ban on cluster munitions. In a Senate vote in 2006, both Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator John McCain voted against it, while Senator Obama was one of only four senators to support the motion.
The turnaround by Britain came at a time of mounting political pressure on Mr. Brown from within the governing Labor Party after a series of sharp electoral setbacks, including the loss of a previously safe Labor parliamentary seat in a by-election in Britain’s industrial midlands last week. The electoral setbacks, and opinion polls that have depicted Mr. Brown as Britain’s most unpopular prime minister in decades, have prompted several recent policy changes, including a $5.3 billion income tax rebate announced earlier this month.
Negotiators in Dublin also resolved a dispute over a section of the treaty that deals with the responsibilities, and potential legal liabilities, of signatory states that cooperate in battlefield situations with nations that have not joined the ban — something the United States had lobbied for energetically.
In a concession to Britain, Australia and other American military allies, the draft treaty contains a permissive provision stating that the troops of signatory nations “may engage in military cooperation and operations with states not party to this convention that might engage” in the use of cluster munitions.
It seemed likely that the treaty would also skirt another potential snarl, allowing the United States to continue to maintain the stockpiles of cluster munitions that it has at bases in countries that plan to join the ban, including Britain and Germany.
Eamon Quinn contributed reporting from Dublin, and Helene Cooper from Washington.
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9) Report Sees a New Era of Higher Food Prices
By ANDREW MARTIN
May 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/business/worldbusiness/30food.html?ref=world
Record prices for farm crops should gradually come down, but they will remain substantially higher than average over the next decade because of fundamental changes in demand, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Because the recent spike in crop and food prices has been caused in part by temporary factors like drought, the report predicted that prices should decrease as weather conditions return to normal and crop yields improve.
“At least we hope they are temporary,” said Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the O.E.C.D., alluding to the potential impact of climate change on agricultural production.
The report was critical of government policies that encouraged biofuel production, saying their environmental, energy security and economic benefits were modest at best and “sometimes even negative.”
And the report suggested that those policies should be re-examined in light of the current food crisis, as should government trade policies like export bans that do not allow farmers to take advantage of higher global prices for agriculture commodities.
The report also encouraged countries that have balked at allowing genetically modified crops to reconsider their use as a way to improve yields.
In a related matter, the World Bank on Thursday announced that it would increase its spending on agriculture and food programs to $6 billion in the coming fiscal year, which begins on July 1, up from $4 billion. The additional money includes $800 million that has already been earmarked for Africa and an additional $1.2 billion to rapidly finance such things as seeds, fertilizer and irrigation for small-scale farmers, food-for-work programs and school feeding initiatives.
“These initiatives will help address the immediate danger of hunger and malnutrition for the 2 billion people struggling to survive in the face of rising food prices,” the president of the World Bank Group, Robert B. Zoellick said, in a statement.
According to the report by the O.E.C.D. and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, released Thursday at a news conference in Paris, the anticipated causes of higher than average prices during the next decade include a doubling of biofuel production, higher fuel costs that increase the cost of producing crops and food and greater demand for food and animal feed in developing countries where incomes are rising.
Prices for vegetable oils are expected to remain the highest, 80 percent above the average from 1998 to 2007; wheat, corn and skim milk powder are anticipated to 40 to 60 percent higher; sugar, 30 percent; and beef and pork, about 20 percent. Biofuel production should account for about a third of the expected increases in prices for vegetable oils and grains.
But the authors of the report cautioned that crop prices may be more volatile because of less predictable weather patterns, the infusion of speculators in agricultural futures markets and the low levels of stockpiles of grains.
The projected increases in crop prices would have the most serious impact in poor countries, where food accounts for more than 50 percent of income and where higher prices are already pushing more people into malnourishment and starvation. Mr. Gurria said that the end of an era of cheap food was of considerable concern for the millions in the world earning less than $2 a day, and that there was an urgent need to provide more food aid to the poor.
The authors of the report encouraged increased investment in agriculture research and outreach programs in the least developed countries after years of declining support.
“Agricultural development was not given sufficient priority over the last decades, and its importance was underestimated,” said Jacques Diouf, secretary-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
The report was released in anticipation of next week’s summit of world leaders in Rome to address to the steep spikes in crop and food prices, which has sparked rioting in a number of developing countries.
It noted that agricultural production is shifting away from developed countries like the United States and Europe to developing countries, which are expected to dominate production and consumption of most commodities except for cheese, coarse grains and skim-milk powder. Consumption and production are growing faster in developing countries for all major farm commodities but wheat.
Growth in demand of meat is expected to increase 2.5 percent a year in developing countries, fueling the need for more grains for animal feed. Brazil is expected to increase its share of global meat exports to 30 percent of the total by 2017.
As part of the World Bank’s announcement on Thursday, Mr. Zoellick said $200 million of the $1.2 billion would be used as grants for countries most vulnerable to the food crisis. As part of that effort, he said $10 million grants were being distributed immediately to Haiti and Liberia, as well as a $5 million grant to Djibouti.
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10) U.N. Report Seeks Action to Address Food Crisis
By ANDREW MARTIN
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/business/worldbusiness/29food.html?ref=world
In anticipation of a global summit on the food crisis, the United Nations called on world leaders Wednesday to agree to urgent measures to ease demand for grains and alleviate high food prices.
The report, by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, suggests that countries might need to reconsider policies that encourage the production of ethanol and other biofuels. The report also suggests that the food summit in Rome, which will run June 3 to 5, will give world leaders a chance to renew a war on hunger.
“This is a unique moment in history: for the first time in 25 years, a fundamental incentive — high food commodity prices — is in place for stimulating the agriculture sector,” said Jacques Diouf, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, in a prepared statement. He said the current global food situation was a reminder that previous commitments to eradicate hunger had not been met.
The report by the United Nations food agency said 22 countries were particularly vulnerable to sharp increases in food and fuel prices because many of their people were already hungry, and they depended on imports for fuel, and in some cases, for major grains.
Eritrea, for instance, imports 100 percent of its petroleum and 88 percent of its major grains, and three-quarters of its population is undernourished.
Among the other countries listed were Haiti, Tajikistan, Niger, Botswana, Cambodia and Zambia.
Food prices have soared since 2006, prompting discontent across the globe and, in some instances, rioting. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s index of food prices increased 24 percent in 2007 compared with the previous year, and 53 percent in the first three months of 2008.
While noting that price spikes in agricultural markets were not uncommon, the report suggested that the current run-up in prices was different because it had lasted longer and affected nearly all major food and feed commodities, instead of just a few crops. It predicted that higher food prices would continue but was vague on how long the higher prices would last.
“The possibility of further sharp price hikes and continued volatility as a result of unforeseen events seems to be likely for the next few seasons,” the report said. “As opposed to other instances of sharp increases in agricultural commodity prices that have rapidly dissipated, we could be facing higher prices for some time.”
The report said the price increases were caused by a confluence of events. Weather problems created crop shortages, and demand for biofuels ratcheted up demand for corn, sugar and other feedstocks. Stockpiles of grains have dropped by 3.4 percent a year, on average, since 1995 because demand has outstripped supply. An increasing appetite for meat and dairy products in China and other developing countries has intensified the demand for feed grains.
The report encourages targeted food giveaways and food subsidies to the world’s poor, and short-term subsidies to small-scale farmers to provide them with seeds, fertilizer and animal feed to increase production.
For the long term, it emphasizes that the public and private sector should invest in agricultural research and outreach programs.
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11)5 Countries Agree to Talk Over the Arctic
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/science/earth/29arctic.html?ref=world
Diplomats from the five countries bordering the Arctic Ocean adopted a declaration on Wednesday aimed at defusing tensions over the likelihood that global warming will open northern waters to shipping, energy extraction and other activities.
The agreement, reached after a daylong meeting in Ilulissat, Greenland, said the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway and Denmark saw no need for new accords on Arctic matters and would use existing international laws like the Law of the Sea Treaty to resolve disputes. Greenland belongs to Denmark.
The countries also agreed to work more cooperatively to limit environmental risks attending more Arctic shipping and commerce and to coordinate potential rescue operations given the rising number of tourists heading north as sea ice increasingly retreats in the summer.
The meeting capped a frenetic year of Arctic activity as countries vied to demonstrate their polar hegemony with a mix of rhetoric, military maneuvers and, in the case of Russia, a submarine voyage to the seabed at the North Pole.
One of the two participating minisubmarines left a titanium national flag on the bottom, 14,000 feet beneath the shifting sea ice.
In a statement, Per Stig Moller, Denmark’s foreign minister, alluded to that voyage and the media blitz that followed. “We have politically committed ourselves to resolve all differences through negotiations,” he said. “And thus we have hopefully, once and for all, killed all the myths of a ‘race to the North Pole.’ The rules are in place. And the five states have now declared that they will abide by them.”
European environmental groups have expressed concern recently about a looming Arctic rush for resources and potential environmental harms.
Indigenous peoples in the region have been divided over the prospect of more economic activity, but many Inuit leaders have expressed strong concern about the threat to their traditions as open water expands.
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12) Human Rights Report Assails U.S.
By ALAN COWELL
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/world/29amnesty.html?ref=world
PARIS — Sixty years after the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, governments in scores of countries still torture or mistreat their people, Amnesty International said Wednesday in a report that again urged the United States to close down the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.
In its annual report, the London-based human rights watchdog said “flashpoints” in Darfur, Zimbabwe, Gaza, Iraq/ and Myanmar “demand immediate action.”
“World leaders are in a state of denial but their failure to act has a high cost,” Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty International, said in a statement accompanying the report. “As Iraq and Afghanistan show, human rights problems are not isolated tragedies, but are like viruses than can infect and spread rapidly, endangering all of us.”
The report singled out for criticism China, the United States, and Russia and accused the European Union of complicity in the rendition of terrorism suspects. The European Union, it said, must “set the same bar on human rights for its own members as it does for other countries.”
It urged Washington to close down the Guantánamo facility and other “secret detention centers,” and to “prosecute the detainees under fair trial standards or release them and unequivocally reject the use of torture and ill-treatment.”
The U.S. State Department had no immediate comment on the Amnesty International allegations, which followed an exhaustive report earlier this month by the Justice Department inspector general in Washington. That review provided the fullest account to date of internal dissent and confusion within the Bush administration over the use of harsh interrogation tactics by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency.
At that time,the Pentagon noted that a Defense Department investigation in 2005 found no evidence of torture but called some interrogation tactics degrading and abusive. A spokesman for the C.I.A. said its harsh methods were “found lawful by the Department of Justice itself” and “were employed only when traditional means of questioning — things like rapport-building — were ineffective.”
Criticizing other countries, Amnesty International urged China to ‘’live up to the human rights promises it made around the Olympic Games” and said Russia should ‘’show greater tolerance for political dissent, and none for impunity on human rights abuses in Chechnya.”
The annual report said people “are still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries, face unfair trials in at least 54 countries and are not allowed to speak freely in at least 77 countries.”
Faced with that tally, the report said, western governments had proven “impotent” to redress human rights abuses while “emerging powers” had shown themselves to be ambivalent or reluctant to “tackle some of the world’s worst human rights crises, ranging from entrenched conflicts to growing inequalities which are leaving millions of people behind.”
The report assailed the moral leadership of the United States, saying that, as “the world’s most powerful state” it “sets the standard for government behavior globally.” But, Amnesty International said, the United States had “distinguished itself in recent years through its defiance of international law.”
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13) A Step Closer to Justice
Editorial
May 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/opinion/30fri1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
New Yorkers should be proud of Gov. David Paterson’s efforts to assure basic civil rights for same-sex couples married outside the state. Now, the State Legislature should prove its own commitment to equality and justice by granting gay couples the right to marry in New York State.
Mr. Paterson has directed state agencies to respond to a recent court ruling by reviewing more than 1,300 state policies that affect married people. He wants to ensure that New York fully recognizes all legal marriage licenses, including those granted to gay couples in places like Massachusetts, Canada, South Africa and soon, California.
If that sounds like mere paper shuffling in Albany, it is not. It means that New Yorkers who marry in San Francisco or Montreal can return home knowing that their rights will be protected. That is progress, especially since many states have specifically outlawed even the recognition of same-sex marriages granted legally elsewhere.
Despite the growing political outcry, Mr. Paterson is on firm legal, as well as moral, ground.
For more than a century, New York has recognized marriage contracts from other states — even if those couples could not legally marry in New York. New York does not grant licenses for common law marriages, but if such marriages are legal elsewhere, they are recognized in New York. In February, a New York State appeals court ruled unanimously that this “marriage recognition rule” also had to apply to any same-sex couple with a legal marriage license obtained elsewhere.
While most Democrats in Albany have pushed for legislation to legalize gay marriage, most Republicans have argued that it is enough to adjust state laws to make them more equitable for same-sex couples. These half-measures have not worked.
The New York City Bar Association and Empire State Pride Agenda last year identified more than 1,300 aspects of New York State law that either deny rights to gay couples or make their lives far more complicated.
There are cases of one partner being denied access to a mate’s hospital room. People who have spent their adult lives together without the benefit of a marriage license can be compelled to testify against each other. Benefits for survivors from workers’ compensation go only to a legally recognized spouse.
After one of the most vigorous and emotional floor debates in recent Albany history, the Democratic-controlled Assembly has passed a bill allowing same-sex couples to marry in New York. The Republican-controlled Senate has refused, so far, to act.
Governor Paterson has worked hard to promote comity in Albany — we fear at the cost of many essential reforms. He should use his influence with the Republican Senate leader, Joseph Bruno, to get the Assembly version of the marriage bill passed this year.
No matter their sexual orientation, New Yorkers should have the same fundamental right to marry. Governor Paterson has taken an important first step, but it is not enough. Now he needs to persuade the rest of Albany to do what is fair.
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14) U.S. Withdraws Fulbright Grants to Gaza
By ETHAN BRONNER
["Since Hamas, a radical Islamist group that opposes Israel’s existence, carried out what amounted to a coup d’état in Gaza against the more secular Fatah party a year ago, hundreds of rockets and mortar shells have been launched from here at Israeli civilians, truck and car bombs have gone off and numerous attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers have taken place." ...So the NYT has termed the democratic election of Hamas over Fatah a "coup d’état"! To hell with what the Palestinians think--as usual...bw]
May 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/world/middleeast/30gaza.html?ref=world
GAZA — The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.
Israel has isolated this coastal strip, which is run by the militant group Hamas. Given that policy, the United States Consulate in Jerusalem said the grant money had been “redirected” to students elsewhere out of concern that it would go to waste if the Palestinian students were forced to remain in Gaza.
A letter was sent by e-mail to the students on Thursday telling them of the cancellation. Abdulrahman Abdullah, 30, who had been hoping to study for an M.B.A. at one of several American universities on his Fulbright, was in shock when he read it.
“If we are talking about peace and mutual understanding, it means investing in people who will later contribute to Palestinian society,” he said. “I am against Hamas. Their acts and policies are wrong. Israel talks about a Palestinian state. But who will build that state if we can get no training?”
Some Israeli lawmakers, who held a hearing on the issue of student movement out of Gaza on Wednesday, expressed anger that their government was failing to promote educational and civil development in a future Palestine given the hundreds of students who had been offered grants by the United States and other Western governments.
“This could be interpreted as collective punishment,” complained Rabbi Michael Melchior, chairman of the Parliament’s education committee, during the hearing. “This policy is not in keeping with international standards or with the moral standards of Jews, who have been subjected to the deprivation of higher education in the past. Even in war, there are rules.” Rabbi Melchior is from the Meimad Party, allied with Labor.
The committee asked the government and military to reconsider the policy and get back to it within two weeks. But even if the policy is changed, the seven Fulbright grantees in Gaza are out of luck for this year. Their letters urged them to reapply next year.
Israel’s policy appears to be in flux. At the parliamentary hearing on Wednesday, a Defense Ministry official recalled that the cabinet had declared Gaza “hostile territory” and decided that the safety of Israeli soldiers and civilians at or near the border should be risked only to facilitate the movement out of Gaza for humanitarian concerns, like medical treatment. Higher education, he said, was not a humanitarian concern.
But when a query about the canceled Fulbrights was made to the prime minister’s office on Thursday, senior officials expressed surprise. They said they did, in fact, consider study abroad to be a humanitarian necessity and that when cases were appealed to them, they would facilitate them.
They suggested that American officials never brought the Fulbright cases to their attention. The State Department and American officials in Israel refused to discuss the matter. But the failure to persuade the Israelis may have stemmed from longstanding tensions between the consulate in Jerusalem, which handles Palestinian affairs, and the embassy in Tel Aviv, which manages relations with the Israeli government.
The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas’s ability to rule because of the hardships of life.
Since Hamas, a radical Islamist group that opposes Israel’s existence, carried out what amounted to a coup d’état in Gaza against the more secular Fatah party a year ago, hundreds of rockets and mortar shells have been launched from here at Israeli civilians, truck and car bombs have gone off and numerous attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers have taken place.
While Hamas says the attacks are in response to Israeli military incursions into Gaza, it also says it will never recognize Israel.
“We are using the rockets to shake the conscience of the world about Israeli aggression,” argued Ahmed Yusef, political adviser to the Hamas foreign minister in an interview in his office here. “All our rockets are a reaction to Israeli aggression.”
The Israeli closing of Gaza has added markedly to the difficulty of daily life here, with long lines for cooking gas and a sense across the population of being under siege. Israel does send in about 70 truckloads per day of wheat, dairy products and medical equipment as well as some fuel, and it permits some medical cases out.
But Israel’s stated goal is to support moderates among the Palestinians so that Hamas will lose power, and even some security-conscious Israeli hard-liners say that the policy of barring students with grants abroad is counterproductive.
“We correctly complain that the Palestinian Authority is not building civil society, but when we don’t help build civil society this plays into the hands of Hamas,” said Natan Sharansky, a former government official. “The Fulbright is administered independently, and people are chosen for it due to their talents.”
The State Department Web site describes the Fulbright, the American government’s flagship program in international educational exchange, as “an integral part of U.S. foreign relations.” It adds, “the Fulbright Program creates a context to provide a better understanding of U.S. views and values, promotes more effective binational cooperation and nurtures open-minded, thoughtful leaders, both in the U.S. and abroad, who can work together to address common concerns.”
Sari Bashi, who directs Gisha, an Israeli organization devoted to monitoring and increasing the free movement of Palestinians, said, “The fact that the U.S. cannot even get taxpayer-funded Fulbright students out of Gaza demonstrates the injustice and short-sightedness of a closure policy that arbitrarily traps 1.5 million people, including hundreds of Palestinian students accepted to universities abroad.” She said that their education was good not just for Palestinian society, but for Israel as well.
Some Israelis disagree strongly.
“We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges,” said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. “So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior.”
Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.
“I stayed to get my scholarship,” she said. “Now I am desperate.”
She, like her six colleagues, was in disbelief. Mr. Abdullah, who called the consulate in Jerusalem for further explanation after receiving his letter, said to the official on the other end, “I still cannot believe that the American administration is not able to convince the Israelis to let seven Palestinians out of Gaza.”
Taghreed el-Khodary contributed reporting.
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15) Secretary Gates Visits Guam Military Base
By ERIC SCHMITT
May 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/world/asia/31guam.html?adxnnl=1&ref=world&adxnnlx=1212167467-MsaOHbf6J8Xu9fFzq3NdIA
ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, Guam — Dipping low over this tropical island in a Navy helicopter on Friday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates gazed out over one of the largest American military construction projects in decades.
Over the next six years, the Pentagon is planning to spend $15 billion to upgrade and expand World War II-era air bases, barracks and ports, and carve out of the jungle new housing and headquarters to accommodate thousands of additional troops and their families who are scheduled to arrive.
It is all part of the military’s effort to remake Guam into a strategic hub in the western Pacific, underscoring both the increasing geopolitical importance of Asia to Washington as well as the Pentagon’s priority to project power from American territory rather than foreign bases.
Mr. Gates made Guam his first stop on a weeklong trip to Asia, his fourth to the region since becoming defense secretary 17 months ago. He will also attend a regional security conference in Singapore, and confer with defense officials in Thailand and South Korea.
An underlying theme of the trip, Mr. Gates said, will be “affirming that the United States is not distracted by our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from our long-term interests here in Asia.”
With American officials warily watching China’s military buildup as well as the continuing standoff with North Korea over its nuclear program, the massive construction projects already underway and on the drawing board here are striking.
The military owns about one-third of this island, and much of the remaining jungle will be bulldozed to build military headquarters, housing, hospitals, schools and commissaries, officials said.
By 2014, some 8,000 marines are expected to move here from their long-time base in Okinawa, requiring a new headquarters, housing and a small-arms training range. The Japanese government is paying $6 billion to help defray costs of the move and the new constructions here, said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary.
Japanese defense forces will train and conduct exercises with American troops here, said Mr. Morrell, in a historical twist of fate. Three days after the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan’s occupation of this American island started and continued until United States soldiers returned to Guam on July 21, 1944, a date celebrated here as Liberation Day.
The Navy, which has three submarines, a helicopter squadron and supply ships based here, is planning to dredge the harbor to accommodate large marine amphibious ships.
Since 2004, the Air Force has been rotating B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers through Guam from bases in the United States. The rotations are designed to support American security in the Asia-Pacific while other United States forces are diverted to the Middle East.
The Air Force is also planning to build hangars for three Global Hawk surveillance aircraft, and expand facilities to accommodate periodic rotations of fighter jets, including the Air Force’s newest fighter, the F-22, from their bases in Hawaii and Alaska.
“Andersen in six years will not look anything like it does today,” Brig. Gen. Doug Owens, the base commander here, told reporters traveling with Mr. Gates.
In all, Mr. Gates said, more than 12,000 additional American troops will move here, more than doubling the current total of about 7,000 service members.
American and Guamanian officials acknowledge that the wave of new construction — as well as the more than 25,000 workers likely to flock to the island to supplement local laborers — will require a careful balancing of environmental protections and national security priorities.
Mr. Gates said the Pentagon wants to complete these projects “in a way that’s sensitive to the needs of the people of Guam as well as to our military needs.”
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16) Ultimate Fighting Recruits Military to Its Ranks
By MICHAEL BRICK
May 30, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/sports/othersports/30fight.html?ref=us
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — The United States military is embracing a combat sport commonly called ultimate fighting that a decade ago was called human cockfighting and largely outlawed.
The sport, also known as mixed martial arts and involving disciplines like jiu-jitsu, boxing and wrestling, adopted safety measures that satisfied most state regulators. It is now soaring in popularity, especially among young men; on Saturday, an event will be broadcast live in prime time on network television for the first time. The armed forces, acknowledging the phenomenon and the suitable demographics, are using the sport not only as a way to build morale and aid in recruiting, but also as a training aid to enhance the skills of soldiers.
To rally the troops, military leaders have welcomed professional fighters with names like Ace and the Huntington Beach Bad Boy. The Army has conducted tournaments among soldiers. In an opinion article for Army Times last year, Maj. Kelly Crigger urged commanders to field a team of fighters on television in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the dominant pro league.
“Many of those viewers are eligible recruits,” Major Crigger wrote. “The U.F.C. provides a great venue to get the Army name into the minds of millions of young Americans.”
Across the service, the embrace of mixed martial arts has come with some reservations. The sport’s emphasis on solitary glory runs counter to the Army’s recent efforts to shift recruiting themes from individual development (Be All That You Can Be; Army of One) to group unity (Army Strong; Go Army).
But as the sport found its audience on channels aimed at young men, recruiters and drill sergeants soon took notice.
In 2006, officials at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in California invited the U.F.C. fighter Tito Ortiz, marketed as the Huntington Beach Bad Boy, to attend their birthday ball as a guest of honor. Letters to Marine Times protested the invitation, but it was rescinded only after the Bad Boy indicated that he planned to take his girlfriend, the porn star Jenna Jameson.
Rich Franklin, the former U.F.C. middleweight champion known as Ace, frequently appears on Marine bases. Last year, Matt Hughes, a former U.F.C. welterweight champion, was applauded on a visit to Fort Benning, an Army base in Georgia.
Without any formal arrangement, the military has also produced fighters for the professional leagues. Brian Stann, the light-heavyweight champion of World Extreme Cagefighting, fought in Iraq with the Marines. Last November, a Marine named Will Thiery was promoted on the undercard at an event in Florida called Salute to Our Armed Forces. Staff Sgt. James Damien Stelly, an Army Ranger with three tours in Afghanistan, has gained a following through fights for several professional outfits.
Promoters have sought to capitalize on the common ground. In April, Harrah’s Casino in Tunica, Miss., promoted a fight night billed as G.I.’s vs. Pros.
“You have an organization like the United States Army that in our minds best personifies the combative sports we’re involved in,” said C. J. Comu, organizer of the event. “This is their demographic, 18-30-year-old males.”
Military officials have sought practical applications. In 2002, the Army published a new field manual section on mixed martial arts techniques. Its author, Matthew C. Larsen, the director of the Modern Army Combatives Program, considered competition a powerful motivator.
“As long as we’re all about our values and upfront about what the Army stands for, and that’s being warriors, the question is, what kind of warriors?” said Mr. Larsen, who served as a young Marine in Tokyo and earned several black belts. “The game of mixed martial arts is just that, it’s a game. But the game can be training for the real thing.”
Mr. Larsen has promoted his program cautiously, acknowledging that too much focus on competition could train soldiers to win competitions, not battles. But the shifting nature of modern warfare, especially as conducted in the cramped corridors of Iraqi homes, has helped make his case.
“These guys could be in any situation, from a life-and-death battle with a bad guy to trying to subdue a citizen who has Stockholm syndrome, and you don’t even want to hurt that guy,” Mr. Larsen said. “But you’ve got to have all these moves for all those different situations.”
Army bases around the country now conduct mixed martial arts tournaments, sending the winners to a branchwide championship at Fort Benning. The fourth annual championship, set for October, has been planned to incorporate, for the first time, advanced rules indistinguishable from mixed martial arts. The rules, allowing closed-fisted punches to the head and knee blows, still ban moves considered dangerous, ostentatious or ineffective in battle, like elbow strikes, biting and eye gouging.
In January, the Air Force adopted the Combatives program. The Navy has trained certain units. The Marine Corps has trained recruits in martial arts since 2000, with less emphasis on competition.
There are several professional mixed martial arts leagues around the world, and most have adopted rules since the sport’s early no-holds-barred era, when bloodshed was common and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and his party’s presumptive candidate for president, called the sport human cockfighting. Rules differ from league to league, but most fighters wear open-fingered gloves, and gouges and blows to certain body parts are forbidden.
As military mixed martial arts competitions have gained popularity, the matches have come to resemble the real thing. Since the first Army-wide championship in 2005, commanders at Fort Knox have allowed soldiers to fight inside a six-foot-high steel cage. Mr. Larsen has been trying to coordinate a tournament in Baghdad for broadcast on ESPN.
Here in the Cape Fear Valley of North Carolina, the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division conducted a tournament last week as word of new deployments spread across the base. Among the 259 men and 9 women entered, many knew they would not be available come October to compete in the Army-wide championship.
The soldiers seemed eager to test themselves. Pfc. Melissa Jenkins, 20, from Union City, Ind., chose confronting men in the fighting tournament over soccer, running and other competitions. She fought hard but was eliminated in the early rounds, in which traditional wrestling rules were in effect. The mixed martial arts rules were phased in during the semifinal rounds.
“I knew it was going to be difficult,” Private Jenkins said. “He was a lot stronger than I was, so I expected to be the underdog.”
The tournament director, Sgt. Jeff Yurk, who had fought in mixed martial arts events in San Diego before joining the Army, strictly enforced rules of sportsmanship. He was quick to end matches when fighters failed to defend themselves.
“You get a lot of the just-out-of-high-school guys, they’re looking to be part of something, that’s where M.M.A. and the Army share the same demographic,” Sergeant Yurk said. But getting in the ring, he said, “is the same thing as going up to that door in Iraq, knowing there’s a bad guy on the other side and still doing it.”
Among those in the tournament was Pfc. Carl Miller, entered as a welterweight. He had returned from a tour of Iraq in March, enrolling in fight training instead of taking leave. He was aiming to win a berth in the All-Army championships, admission to higher-level training classes and a path toward becoming a mixed martial arts instructor.
“It’s a mental game,” Private Miller said. “If I could do this, I’d stay in the Army for 20 years.”
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17) JROTC Must Go! Campaign Heating Up
by Riva Enteen
Beyond Chron
May 30, 2008
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5720
For more information:
JROTC Must Go!
(415) 575-5543
JROTCmustgo@gmail.com
http://www.jrotcmustgo.blogspot.com/
The San Francisco chapter of the Green Party, the Chinese Progressive Association and the Idriss Stelley Foundation have joined the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, the SF Tenants Union and the SF Bay View newspaper in saying that they "will look very closely" at the next School Board vote on JROTC, and "consider the votes carefully when making any endorsement for future candidates."
These comments are aimed at two school board members, Green Party member Jane Kim and "progressive" Kim-Shree Maufas, who are the swing votes. Matt Gonzalez, former President of the Board of Supervisors, puts it even more bluntly. "I would not ever support a candidate for the Board of Education that continued JROTC and I would urge other progressives to do the same."
Last Tuesday, May 27, a delegation of JROTC opponents met with Maufas.
Kiilu Nyasha, 69, our Black elder, began by talking about the blood that the US military has on its hands, and the corporate nature of US foreign policy. Nyasha then spoke of her son, raised in the Bayview, who studied martial arts to stay out of trouble, the epitome of the discipline JROTC claims to foster. We don't need the military to teach our children discipline, she insisted.
Babara Lopez, 29, who works with La Voz Latina of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic Youth Program, told of parents she works with who say Mission High staff are telling immigrant families that students must take JROTC to graduate. She then spoke emotionally about her father, who was tortured in Mexico by agents of the US military. She said that she thinks of his torture every day, and has done work to expose Abu Ghraib.
Sabrina Davidson, a 21-year-old gay Black woman, expressed outrage that the school district allows the military to remain in our schools, even though they practice outright and illegal discrimination against gays and lesbians. She also made the point that she knows many youth who joined the military after JROTC because they couldn't find any other jobs.
Forrest Schmidt, 31, a vet recruited out of high school, spoke of the pervasive racism in the military, sexist violence against female soldiers, and of the anti-gay hostility he saw and experienced. He said that the real alternative to JROTC would be a commitment to giving youth jobs and education.
Jackson Losh, 18, a Lowell senior, recalled the intimidation against JROTC opponents by JROTC cadets at previous School Board meetings, and said such constant intimidation makes it hard for students (and teachers)to speak out. He said that the military wouldn't be spending money on JROTC if it didn't produce recruits for the military.
Mara Kubrin, 18, who graduated high school last year, ended the meeting by giving Maufas a copy of an open letter she wrote to Maufas and Jane Kim. "JROTC is a recruitment tool," Kubrin wrote, "so have the program at recruitment centers. If students are so insistent that this and only this program will provide the discipline, leadership, and family element that they want, then they can seek it out in their own time, using the military's own funding, and on its own recruitment grounds. The military does not belong in our schools."
Maufas did not indicate at the meeting whether or not she would vote to end JROTC now. We are waiting for her answer to this question.
Let Maufas and Kim know that they should join the 60% of San Franciscans who oppose the military in our schools. You can reach them at Maufasks@sfusd.edu and Kimj7@sfusd.edu.
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Tennessee: State to Retry Inmate
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
The Union County district attorney said the county would meet a federal judge’s deadline for a new trial in the case of a death row inmate whose trial was questioned by the United States Supreme Court. The state is facing a June 17 deadline to retry or free the inmate, Paul House, who has been in limbo since June 2006, when the Supreme Court concluded that reasonable jurors would not have convicted him had they seen the results of DNA tests from the 1990s. The district attorney, Paul Phillips, said he would not seek the death penalty. Mr. House, 46, who has multiple sclerosis and must use a wheelchair, was sentenced in the 1985 killing of Carolyn Muncey. He has been in a state prison since 1986 and continues to maintain his innocence.
May 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/us/29brfs-STATETORETRY_BRF.html?ref=us
Israel: Carter Offers Details on Nuclear Arsenal
By REUTERS
World Briefing | Middle East
Former President Jimmy Carter said Israel held at least 150 nuclear weapons, the first time a current or former American president had publicly acknowledged the Jewish state’s nuclear arsenal. Asked at a news conference in Wales on Sunday how a future president should deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, he sought to put the risk in context by listing atomic weapons held globally. “The U.S. has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union has about the same, Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more,” he said, according to a transcript. The existence of Israeli nuclear arms is widely assumed, but Israel has never admitted their existence and American officials have stuck to that line in public for years.
May 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/world/middleeast/27briefs-CARTEROFFERS_BRF.html?ref=world
Iowa: Lawsuit Filed Over Raid
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
The nation’s largest single immigration raid, in which nearly 400 workers at an Agriprocessors Inc. meat processing plant in Postville were detained on Monday, violated the constitutional rights of workers at a meatpacking plant, a lawsuit contends. The suit accuses the government of arbitrary and indefinite detention. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office said he could not comment on the suit, which was filed Thursday on behalf of about 147 of the workers. Prosecutors said they filed criminal charges against 306 of the detained workers. The charges include accusations of aggravated identity theft, falsely using a Social Security number, illegally re-entering the United States after being deported and fraudulently using an alien registration card.
May 17, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17brfs-LAWSUITFILED_BRF.html?ref=us
Senate Revises Drug Maker Gift Bill
By REUTERS
National Breifing | Washington
A revised Senate bill would require drug makers and medical device makers to publicly report gifts over $500 a year to doctors, watering down the standard set in a previous version. The new language was endorsed by the drug maker Eli Lilly & Company. Lawmakers said they hoped the support would prompt other companies to back the bill, which had previously required all gifts valued over $25 be reported. The industry says the gifts are part of its doctor education, but critics say such lavish gestures influence prescribing habits.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/washington/14brfs-SENATEREVISE_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Sect Mother Is Not a Minor
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
Child welfare officials conceded to a judge that a newborn’s mother, held in foster care as a minor after being removed from a polygamous sect’s ranch, is an adult. The woman, who gave birth on April 29, had been held along with more than 400 children taken last month from a ranch run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She was one of two pregnant sect members who officials had said were minors. The other member, who gave birth on Monday, may also be an adult, state officials said.
May 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/us/14brfs-SECTMOTHERIS_BRF.html?ref=us
Four Military Branches Hit Recruiting Goals
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Washington
The Marine Corps far surpassed its recruiting goal last month, enlisting 2,233 people, which was 142 percent of its goal, the Pentagon said. The Army recruited 5,681 people, 101 percent of its goal. The Navy and Air Force also met their goals, 2,905 sailors and 2,435 airmen. A Defense Department spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that if the Marine Corps continued its recruiting success, it could reach its goal of growing to 202,000 people by the end of 2009, more than a year early.
May 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/us/13brfs-FOURMILITARY_BRF.html?ref=us
Texas: Prison Settlement Approved
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
A federal judge has approved a settlement between the Texas Youth Commission and the Justice Department over inmate safety at the state’s juvenile prison in Edinburg. The judge, Ricardo Hinojosa of Federal District Court, signed the settlement Monday, and it was announced by the commission Wednesday. Judge Hinojosa had previously rejected a settlement on grounds that it lacked a specific timeline. Federal prosecutors began investigating the prison, the Evins Regional Juvenile Center, in 2006. The settlement establishes parameters for safe conditions and staffing levels, restricts use of youth restraints and guards against retaliation for reporting abuse and misconduct.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-PRISONSETTLE_BRF.html?ref=us
Michigan: Insurance Ruling
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Midwest
Local governments and state universities cannot offer health insurance to the partners of gay workers, the State Supreme Court ruled. The court ruled 5 to 2 that Michigan’s 2004 ban against same-sex marriage also blocks domestic-partner policies affecting gay employees at the University of Michigan and other public-sector employers. The decision affirms a February 2007 appeals court ruling. Up to 20 public universities, community colleges, school districts and local governments in Michigan have benefit policies covering at least 375 gay couples.
May 8, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/us/08brfs-INSURANCERUL_BRF.html?ref=us
Halliburton Profit Rises
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HOUSTON (AP) — Increasing its global presence is paying off for the oil field services provider Halliburton, whose first-quarter income rose nearly 6 percent on growing business in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, the company said Monday.
Business in the first three months of 2008 also was better than expected in North America, where higher costs and lower pricing squeezed results at the end of 2007.
Halliburton shares closed up 3 cents, at $47.46, on the New York Stock Exchange.
Halliburton said it earned $584 million, or 64 cents a share, in the three months that ended March 31, compared with a year-earlier profit of $552 million, or 54 cents a share. Revenue rose to $4.03 billion, from $3.42 billion a year earlier.
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/business/worldbusiness/22halliburton.html?ref=business
Illegal Immigrants Who Were Arrested at Poultry Plant in Arkansas to Be Deported
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Eighteen illegal immigrants arrested at a poultry plant in Batesville will be processed for deportation, but will not serve any jail time for using fake Social Security numbers and state identification cards, federal judges ruled. Magistrate Judge Beth Deere and Judge James Moody of Federal District Court accepted guilty pleas from 17 of those arrested last week at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant. Federal prosecutors dismissed the misdemeanor charges against one man, but said they planned to ask Immigration and Customs Enforcement to begin deportation proceedings against him. The guilty pleas will give the 17 people criminal records, which will allow prosecutors to pursue tougher penalties if they illegally return to the United States. They had faced up to up to two years in prison and $205,000 in fines. Jane Duke, a United States attorney, said her office had no interest in seeing those arrested serve jail time, as they were “otherwise law-abiding citizens.”
National Briefing | South
April 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/us/22brfs-002.html?ref=us
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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Stop the Termination or the Cherokee Nation
http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/activismissues.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5580
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We Didn't Start the Fire
http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html
I Can't Take it No More
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#9214483115237950361
The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
MONEY AS DEBT
http://video. google.com/ videoplay? docid=-905047436 2583451279
http://www.moneyasd ebt.net/
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6582099850410121223&pr=goog-sl
IRAQ FOR SALE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155
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Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
—MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"Award-Winning Writer/Filmmaker Donald L. Vasicek Launches New Sand
Creek Massacre Website"
May 21, 2008 -- CENTENNIAL, CO -- Award-winning filmmaker, Donald L.
Vasicek, has launched a new Sand Creek Massacre website. Titled,
"The Sand Creek Massacre", the site contains in depth witness
accounts of the massacre, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
trailer for viewing, the award-winning Sand Creek Massacre
documentary short for viewing, the story of the Sand Creek Massacre,
and a Shop to purchase Sand Creek Massacre DVD's and lesson
plans including the award-winning documentary film/educational DVD.
Vasicek, a board member of The American Indian Genocide Museum
(www.aigenom.com)in Houston, Texas, said, "The website was launched
to inform, to educate, and to provide educators, historians, students
and all others the accessibility to the Sand Creek Massacre story."
The link/URL to the website is sandcreekmassacre.net.
###
Contact:
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
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