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"RESOLUTION: The Torture Song" By David Ippolito
http://www.thatguitarman.com/MP3/resolution.mp3
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U.S. Out Now! From Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and all U.S. bases around the world; End all U.S. Aid to Israel; Get the military out of our schools and our communities; Demand Equal Rights and Justice for ALL!
TAX THE RICH NOT THE POOR! MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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Urgent News
Hearing on Death Penalty June 30, Sacramento
Please: SIGN-UP TO ATTEND!
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1265/t/5820/signUp.jsp?key=4279
On May 1st, the State of California announced that it is moving forward with developing execution procedures in order to comply with a recent legal ruling and resume executions, which have been on hold for more than three years.
The State will be holding a hearing on Tuesday, June 30th from 9am to 3pm in Sacramento to hear public comments about the proposed execution procedures.
Death Penalty Focus, along with our allies, will be organizing a critical Day of Action to End the Death Penalty on June 30th.
What You Can Do to Help:
1. Please plan to attend the hearing on June 30th in Sacramento. We will be organizing buses from the SF Bay Area (more details to be announced very soon).
Please: SIGN-UP TO ATTEND!
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1265/t/5820/signUp.jsp?key=4279
We need to pack the room with more than 300 hundred supporters. More than one hundred individuals will be needed to give public comment. If they cannot accommodate everyone who signs up to speak, it is possible they will have to schedule another hearing.
After the hearing, we will head to the Capitol to share ours views with elected officials.
2. Please plan to submit a written comment to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). In just a few days we will be sending out suggestions for your comments and instructions on how to submit your comments. The CDCR is required by law to review and respond to every written comment. We need to generate thousands of comments from across the state, country and globe. We need to flood them with paperwork.
Please help us make this Day of Action a success!
Legislative Successes
Colorado
Colorado came very close to ending the death penalty this month when their State Senate voted 17-18 in favor of replacing the death penalty with life without parole and redirecting funding to solve murders. The State House has already passed the bill by a vote of 33-32.
Connecticut
On May 13, the Connecticut House voted 90-56 in favor of ending the death penalty. The bill now moves on to the Senate.
Several abolition bills are still active in other states, including New Hampshire, Illinois, Washington, and also in the U.S. Senate.
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Greetings! We wanted to thank you again for your on-going support, and let you know about 2 upcoming events:
Reinstatement Hearing [Ward Churchill]
Wed. July 1, 9:00 am
Courtroom 6 (Judge Naves)
1435 Bannock St., Denver 80202
www.wardchurchill.net
CU is attempting to completely ignore the jury's verdict in this case, pretending that there was no finding that it violated the Constitution by firing Ward, and arguing that the judge should refuse to reinstate Ward and refuse pay him (or his lawyers).
Its excuse is that Ward is not "collegial" enough because he refused to accept the conclusions of the investigative committees. An odd argument from an entity which is refusing to accept the verdict in this case.
The hearing is scheduled for all day, with both sides presenting witnesses and arguments. If you're in the Denver area, please come and show your support. More details at www.wardchurchill.net.
"Shouting Fire" - HBO documentary on the state of free speech in America, featuring Ward's case, will air on Monday June 29 at 9:00 pm ET. Directed by Liz Garbus, and also featuring her father, famed First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus.
Review from its Sundance Film Festival premiere is available at:
http://festival.sundance.org/2009/film_events/films/shouting_fire_stories_from_the_edge_of_free_speech
HBO schedule at:
http://www.hbo.com/apps/schedule/ScheduleServlet?ACTION_DETAIL=DETAIL&FOCUS_ID=573085
In struggle and solidarity,
Natsu
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ATTEND THE JULY 10 NATIONAL ASSEMBLY CONFERENCE IN PITTSBURGH!
REGISTER FOR THE CONFERENCE and DOWNLOAD PRINTABLE BROCHURE (8.5 X 14) at:
https://natassembly.org/Home_Page.html
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
On behalf of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, we are writing to invite you and members of your organization to attend a national antiwar conference to be held July 10-12, 2009 at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The purpose of this conference is to bring together antiwar and social justice activists from across the country to discuss and decide what we can do together to end the wars, occupations, bombing attacks, threats and interventions that are taking place in the Middle East and beyond, which the U.S. government is conducting and promoting.
We believe that such a conference will be welcomed by the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine and Iran, who are the victims of these policies. It will also be welcomed by victims of the depression-type conditions in this country, with tens of millions losing jobs, homes, health care coverage and pensions, while trillions of dollars are spent bailing out Wall Street and the banks, waging expansionist wars and occupations, and funding the Pentagon's insatiable appetite.
This will be the National Assembly's second conference. The first was held in Cleveland last June and it was attended by over 400 people, including top leaders of the antiwar movement and activists from many states. After discussion and debate, attendees voted - on the basis of one person, one vote - to urge the movement to join together for united spring actions. The National Assembly endorsed and helped build the March actions in Washington D.C., San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the April actions in New York City.
We are all aware of the developments since our last conference - the election of a new administration in the U.S., the ongoing occupation of Iraq, the escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the horrific Israeli bombing of Gaza, and the extreme peril of an additional war in the Middle East, this time against Iran. Given all this, it is crystal clear that a strong, united, independent antiwar movement is needed now more than ever. We urge you to help build such a movement by attending the July conference and sharing your ideas and proposals with other attendees regarding where the antiwar movement goes from here.
For more information, please visit the National Assembly's website at natassembly.org, email us at natassembly@aol.com, or call 216-736-4704. We will be glad to send you upon request brochures announcing the July conference (a copy is attached) and you can also register for the conference online. [Please be aware that La Roche College is making available private rooms with baths at a very reasonable rate, but will only guarantee them if reserved by June 25.]
Yours for peace, justice and unity,
National Assembly Administrative Body
Zaineb Alani, Author of The Words of an Iraqi War Survivor & More; Colia Clark, Chair, Richard Wright Centennial Committee, Grandmothers for Mumia Abu-Jamal; Greg Coleridge, Coordinator, Northeast Ohio Anti-War Coalition (NOAC) and Economic Justice and Empowerment Program Director, Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee (AFSC); Alan Dale, Iraq Peace Action Coalition (MN); Donna Dewitt, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Jerry Gordon, Former National Co-Coordinator of the Vietnam-Era National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) and Member, U.S. Labor Against the War Steering Committee; Jonathan Hutto, Navy Petty Officer, Author of Anti-War Soldier; Co-Founder of Appeal for Redress; Marilyn Levin, Coordinating Committee, Greater Boston United for Justice with Peace, Middle East Crisis Coalition; Jeff Mackler, Founder, San Francisco Mobilization for Peace, Jobs and Justice; Fred Mason, President, Maryland State and District of Columbia AFL-CIO and Co-Convenor, U.S. Labor Against the War; Mary Nichols-Rhodes, Progressive Democrats of America/Ohio Branch; Lynne Stewart, Lynne Stewart Organization/Long Time Attorney and Defender of Constitutional Rights [Bay Area United Against War also was represented at the founding conference and will be there again this year. Carole Seligman and I initiated the motion to include adding opposition to the War in Afghanistan to the demands and title of the National Assembly.
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NATIONAL MARCH FOR EQUALITY
WASHINGTON, D.C. OCTOBER 10-11, 2009
Sign up here and spread the word:
http://www.nationalequalitymarch.com/
On October 10-11, 2009, we will gather in Washington DC from all across
America to let our elected leaders know that *now is the time for full equal
rights for LGBT people.* We will gather. We will march. And we will leave
energized and empowered to do the work that needs to be done in every
community across the nation.
This site will be updated as more information is available. We will organize
grassroots, from the bottom-up, and details will be shared on this website.
Our single demand:
Equal protection in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states.
Our philosophy:
As members of every race, class, faith, and community, we see the struggle
for LGBT equality as part of a larger movement for peace and social justice.
Our strategy:
Decentralized organizing for this march in every one of the 435
Congressional districts will build a network to continue organizing beyond
October.
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Petition to Free the Wrongfully Convicted Mississippi Scott Sisters
To whom it may concern:
For over 14 miserable years, these two falsely accused incarcerated sisters (Jamie and Gladys Scott) have languished in a gruesome Mississippi prison for a trumped up $11.00 dollars crime that neither of them committed, in which they both received DOUBLE LIFE! Neither of them had any previous criminal records, no one was hurt, and the entire judiciary process from start to finish was heavily tainted by racial malpractice, witness coercion, threats, and harassment.
This travesty of injustice began in 1993 in Scott County Mississippi. It is alleged that two county Sheriffs had a beef with the sisters' father over him refusing to pay cash payoffs to the Sheriffs, whereas the Sheriffs threatened to wreck havoc upon the entire family if payment did not continue. The father refused, and soon thereafter, the Sheriffs succeeded in carrying out their threat, as Jamie and Gladys were falsely charged with armed robbery and later subsequently convicted. During the trial however, there were numerous inconsistencies and contradictions, and to make matters worst, both of the sister's lawyers were at best incompetent in their legal representation. As of this writing, the State's three witnesses have all recanted their coerced statements implicating Jamie and Gladys by a signed affidavit, but no court has seen fit to either reopen their case or seriously consider the sister's request for a retrial.
We are asking every person to sign this Free the Scott Sisters petition. Both Jamie and Gladys Scott need to be immediately exonerated and released. Your help is also needed and urged.
Thank you all.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Free-the-Scott-Sisters-Committee/
Sincerely,
The undersigned
Sign this petition!
Petition Author
CONTACT: Nathaniel x Vance, Jr.
Muskogee, Ok. 74401
Phone: 918-304-6017
E-Mail: broali4xx@suddenlink.net
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Keep the Arboretum Free
http://keeparboretumfree.org/
Write the mayor and supervisors:
http://keeparboretumfree.org/email-to-board-of-supervisors-budget-committee
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Troy Anthony Davis is an African American man who has spent the last 18 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses have recanted. New evidence and new testimony have been presented to the Georgia courts, but the justice system refuses to consider this evidence, which would prove Troy Davis' innocence once and for all.
Sign the petition and join the NAACP, Amnesty International USA, and other partners in demanding justice for Troy Davis!
http://www.iamtroy.com/
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Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
New videos from April 24 Oakland Mumia event
http://abu-jamal-news.com/article?name=jlboak
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation (indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501(c)(3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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IVAW Member Victor Agosto Refuses Deployment to Afghanistan
Sign our Petition in Support of Victor's Resistance Today:
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5966/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=383
Support Victor by making a donation to his legal defense fund:
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=27370
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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Don't let them kill Troy Davis
The case of Troy Davis highlights the need for criminal justice reform in the United States.
Please help us fight for the rights -- and life -- of Troy Davis today by signing the petition below, asking Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue to act on behalf of justice and commute Troy Davis's death sentence to ensure that Georgia does not put to death a man who may well be innocent.
Mr. Davis has a strong claim to innocence, but he could be executed without a court ever holding a hearing on his claims. Because of this, I urge you to act in the interests of justice and support clemency for Troy Davis. An execution without a proper hearing on significant evidence of innocence would compromise the integrity of Georgia's justice system.
As you may know, Mr. Davis was convicted of the 1989 murder of police officer Mark MacPhail, a conviction based solely on witness testimony. Seven of the nine non-police witnesses have recanted or contradicted their trial testimony.
The courts, citing procedural rules and time limits, have so far refused to hold an evidentiary hearing to examine these witnesses. Executive clemency exists, and executive action - and your leadership - is required to preserve justice when the protections afforded by our appeals process fail to do so.
Thank you for your attention.
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/2446/t/4676/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=369
See also:
In the Absence of Proof
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
May 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/opinion/23herbert.html?_r=1
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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PETITION IN SUPPORT OF PAROLE OF LEONARD PELTIER
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/parole2008/
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Older Recruits Challenge Army and Vice Versa
By JAMES DAO
June 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us/18recruit.html?ref=us
2) Immigration Agents to Get Expanded Powers
By GINGER THOMPSON
June 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us/politics/18brfs-003.html?ref=us
3) Major Military Academies Report Significant Rise in Applicants
By JAMES DAO
June 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/education/18academies.html?ref=education
4) Civic and political groups blast plans for ROTC in public schools
José Alvarado Vega - PR Daily Sun
June 17, 2009
http://www.independencia.net/noticias3/cp_JD_jrROTC_baseRRCeiba17jun09.html#ingles
5) Unparalleled and Denied
Editorial
June 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/opinion/19fri1.html
6) Judge tosses laws restricting recruiters
Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, June 19, 2009
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/19/BAC3189PQJ.DTL
7) Education Chief to Warn Advocates That Inferior Charter Schools Harm the Effort
By SAM DILLON
June 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/education/22duncan.html?ref=education
8) Son of PRISP
Obama's Classroom Spies
By David Price counterpunch.com
June 23, 2009
counterpunch.com
http://www.counterpunch.com/price06232009.html
9) Pentagon Exam Calls Protests 'Low-Level Terrorism,' Angering Activists
By James Osborne
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,526972,00.html
10) Who Are We?
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/opinion/23herbert.html?_r=1
11) Pentagon to Outline Shift in War Planning Strategy
By THOM SHANKER
June 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/americas/23military.html?ref=world
12) Justices Say Waste Can Be Dumped in Lake
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
June 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/us/23alaska.html?ref=us
13) Madoff Lawyers Seek Leniency in Sentencing
Zachery Kouwe and Peter Edmonston
June 23, 2009
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/madoff-lawyers-seek-leniency-in-sentencing/?ref=business
Madoff Letter Seeking Leniency:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16699848/Madoff-Letter-Seeking-Leniency
14) How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Well
June 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/health/23well.html?ref=health
15) Work begins on world's deepest underground lab
By DIRK LAMMERS, Associated Press Writer
June 22, 2009
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090622/ap_on_sc/us_sci_underground_science
16) U.S. Drone Strike Said to Kill 60 in Pakistan
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH and SALMAN MASOOD
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/world/asia/24pstan.html?hpw
17) Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears
By JAMES GLANZ
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/energy-environment/24geotherm.html?ref=us
18) New Military Command for Cyberspace
By THOM SHANKER
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/technology/24cyber.html?ref=us
19) Arizona: New Abortion Restrictions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/24brfs-NEWABORTIONR_BRF.html?ref=us
20) Arkansas: Review for Prison System
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/24brfs-REVIEWFORPRI_BRF.html?ref=us
21) City Seeks New Powers in Its Stalled Fight Against Homelessness
By JULIE BOSMAN
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/nyregion/24homeless.html?ref=nyregion
22) Supreme Court Says Child's Rights Violated by Strip Search
By DAVID STOUT
June 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/politics/26scotus.html?_r=1&hp
23) In the Andes, a Toxic Site Also Provides a Livelihood
By SIMON ROMERO
June 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/world/americas/25peru.html?ref=world
24) Detective Perjured Himself at a Youth's Shooting Trial
By DOMINICK TAO
June 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/nyregion/25perjury.html?ref=nyregion
25) U.S. Jobless Claims Rise; G.D.P Revised Upward
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/business/economy/26econ.html?ref=business
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1) Older Recruits Challenge Army and Vice Versa
By JAMES DAO
June 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us/18recruit.html?ref=us
FORT SILL, Okla. - Pfc. Shane Dixon is known as Old Dix. Specialist Jason Ness goes by Gramps. Pfc. Christopher Batson's nom de boot camp is Pops. None of them are over 40, but to the 18-year-old soldiers in basic training here, they are as ancient as a first generation Xbox.
Yet in the three years since the Army raised its age limit for enlisting to 42, from 35, a steady stream of older recruits has joined the ranks, pushing creaky muscles through road training, learning to appreciate - or at least endure - Army chow and in some cases deploying to combat zones.
And while the number of such recruits, more than 3,800, is small by Army standards, the pace of over-35 enlistment jumped sharply in the first months of this year. Motives vary, from a yearning for midlife adventure to a desire to serve their country. But rising unemployment is also a major reason, say Army officials, recruiters and training officers.
"It's a guaranteed job, as long as you go to work every day," said Capt. Jared Auchey, company commander of the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia, who estimates that one in 10 of the enlistments at his high-tech marketing office are over 35. "There are no layoffs in the Army."
The Army recruits about 80,000 soldiers a year, and the older recruits are having an impact even on basic training, Army officers say. At classes here, as many as one in seven soldiers are over 35, and many drill sergeants now look to the older soldiers as mentors, or proxy disciplinarians.
Staff Sgt. Arron Barnes, Fort Sill's drill sergeant of the year in 2009, said the older recruits tended to bring technical skills and maturity, were easier to instruct and were often more committed than teenage soldiers.
"They contribute at a higher level because they have no other place to go," Sergeant Barnes, 26, said. "This is their life."
The older recruits are, however, injury prone. Rusty joints, forgotten injuries and slow-to-recover muscles cause the over-35 recruits to wash out of basic training at a somewhat higher rate than younger soldiers, said Lt. Col. Michael S. Patton, commander of a basic-training battalion here.
Specialist John D. Butts, 38, exemplifies the new breed. An aspiring writer who was a house painter outside Philadelphia for two decades, he lost his steady paycheck last November after the housing market crashed.
A part-time job at Blockbuster did not pay his rent, and when his landlord threatened to evict him, his girlfriend (now his wife) and her three teenage children, he decided radical action was required. He called an Army recruiter he had met recently and signed up for a three-year stint.
Despite years as a dedicated beer drinker and smoker, Specialist Butts made it through basic here at Fort Sill and is now training with an artillery unit that may head to South Korea this year. A tour in Afghanistan could be in the cards, he says.
Over the last two months, he has been yelled at by a 24-year-old drill sergeant, forced to inhale choking gas, done more push-ups than he cares to remember and patiently put up with wise-cracking 19-year-olds who forget to flush the toilet. So far, he has made the grade and is even considering a career in the military.
"I've just tried to keep my head down, keep my mouth shut and not wring necks," Specialist Butts said.
The sagging economy, of course, has bolstered military recruiting at all age levels. But the older recruits represent a new, and perhaps more challenging, opportunity for the Army, the only service that accepts recruits over 35. (The maximum age is 35 in the Navy, 28 in the Marine Corps and 27 in the Air Force.)
It is not clear yet how well older soldiers handle the rigors of combat. The Army says it does not segregate older recruits in basic training and does not consider age when deciding where to assign or deploy them. Of the nearly 5,000 military personnel killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 600 have been over 35, most of them career soldiers. The oldest was 60-year-old Steven Hutchison, who served in Vietnam and retired from the Army in 1988 only to re-enlist in 2007 under a special program for retirees. Major Hutchison was killed last month in a bombing in Iraq.
During a break in marksmanship training at Fort Sill last week, several older soldiers said the economy had not been their only motivation for enlisting. "I didn't want to be 75 and think back, 'I wish I had joined the Army,' " said Pvt. Mark O'Brien, 36, a corrections officer from Portsmouth, N.H. "There's nothing worse than regret."
But for Private Batson, 35, the threat of layoffs was the driving force behind his joining. A mechanical engineer from Utah with five children, he was spared when his company laid off workers last year, but the close call worried him. Deciding he needed a fall-back option, he turned to the National Guard.
Now, if he is laid off and cannot find work, he figures he can go full time with the National Guard or the regular Army. In exchange for that job security, he says there is a good chance he will do a tour in Afghanistan.
"My natural priority is my family," Private Batson said. "I'll do anything I have to do to take care of them."
Along with the rigors of basic training, the older soldiers say the hardest thing is being away from their families for nine weeks. The second hardest thing, they say, is coping with undisciplined, couch-potato soft, video-game-obsessed teenage recruits who are, technically, their peers.
Private Dixon, 38, builds log houses in the Boise area but recently joined the Idaho National Guard in part because he wanted to change careers, perhaps to become a medic. He said he had been chewed out for chewing out youngsters in his platoon for what he considered slacker behavior. He was so tough on one for tromping across a newly waxed floor in his boots that the teenager broke down in tears.
"I should have taken into consideration that it was a 17-year-old kid," Private Dixon said. "It's not a man, not somebody that I could hold to a level of accountability. My son's 17."
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2) Immigration Agents to Get Expanded Powers
By GINGER THOMPSON
June 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/us/politics/18brfs-003.html?ref=us
In an expansion of its crackdown on drug cartels, the Obama administration plans to announce Thursday that it will give Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents the authority to investigate drug crimes. Justice Department officials refused to divulge details of their plans, saying they did not want to pre-empt the news conference. But officials familiar with the plan said it would settle a long-running turf battle between the immigration agency and the Drug Enforcement Administration that has seriously undermined the efforts of both. The decision came amid drug-related violence that left more than 6,000 people dead in Mexico last year. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, called the Justice Department's decision "welcome news," saying, "The cartels that smuggle drugs and illegal immigrants have integrated their activities, and now the federal agencies will have a better integrated response."
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3) Major Military Academies Report Significant Rise in Applicants
By JAMES DAO
June 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/education/18academies.html?ref=education
The nation's three major military academies said Wednesday that applications for the incoming Class of 2013 were up significantly from previous years, citing aggressive marketing, declining casualties in Iraq and the economic downturn as factors.
The rise in applications was most notable at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., where applications reached their highest level since 1988, 15,342, up 40 percent from the class of 2012. About 1,240 are expected to enroll.
Applications were also up at the Military Academy at West Point, where 11,106 people applied for about 1,320 places in the incoming class, an increase of 9.6 percent. And at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, 9,890 people applied for about 1,350 places, an increase of just under 10 percent.
In a year when layoffs and shrinking paychecks dominated many families' thoughts about college, officials at the military academies acknowledged that the recession might have encouraged some students to apply. Not only are tuition and room and board completely covered at the academies, but students also receive stipends that total thousands of dollars a year.
But those officials also said that students tended to have very personal reasons for applying to the military academies - patriotism, an abiding interest in the military as a profession or a desire to follow a parent's footsteps among them - and that therefore the economy alone could not explain the upswing in applications.
"You find in most of the people who apply, this is a process that starts several years in advance," said Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a spokesman for the Naval Academy. "The process itself is much more involved and lengthy, and often involves a Congressional nomination, which is not something you do on a whim."
Commander Carpenter and officials from the other academies pointed to intensified marketing campaigns in recent years that they say played a major role in increasing the application pool.
The Military Academy, for instance, for the first time bought billboard space at airports in Los Angeles, Dallas-Forth Worth and Atlanta and Dulles airport near Washington during the holiday season last year, said Col. Deborah McDonald, director of admissions.
Colonel McDonald said her office had also expanded its efforts to stay in touch with potential candidates via letters and e-mail messages, and worked more closely with members of Congress to help them with the process of nominating applicants.
Commander Carpenter said that the Naval Academy began expanding its recruiting in urban areas, including New York, two years ago, and that the effort had begun to pay off, not only in more applicants from those areas, but also more minority applicants. Applications from minority students were up by 57 percent this year over last, he said.
The number of applicants to West Point was the highest in at least several years, but was slightly lower than the period immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when interest in all the military academies surged. In those years, applications to West Point rose over 12,000. But while the numbers have crept back down in the last four years, they remain higher than before the attacks, she said.
At the Air Force Academy, applications were at their highest point in five years, said John Van Winkle, the deputy chief of media relations for the academy.
The recession has also clearly benefited military recruiting this year, including for the Army, which had struggled to meet its quotas in some recent years.
The rise in applications at the military academies, which was reported this week by The Associated Press, is similar to the trend at many well-known public colleges, reflecting perhaps their lower cost. The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; all reported higher application numbers this year. But so did a number of elite colleges, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Dartmouth and Brown.
The drawdown of American forces in Iraq, combined with fewer casualties there, may have also contributed to easing some parents' concerns about having their children attend West Point, Colonel McDonald said. The Army has sustained by far the most casualties in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But Commander Carpenter noted that interest in the Marine Corps among Naval Academy students has been on the rise in recent years, even though Marines represent the second-largest group of casualties in those wars.
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4) Civic and political groups blast plans for ROTC in public schools
José Alvarado Vega - PR Daily Sun
June 17, 2009
http://www.independencia.net/noticias3/cp_JD_jrROTC_baseRRCeiba17jun09.html#ingles
Civic and political groups denounced plans Wednes- day by the Fortupo administration to establish Army Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps programs in at least eight local public high schools, and vowed to organize campaigns to discourage their implementation.
Veterans Advocate Jorge Mas Marrero disclosed Monday that his office is pushing for Junior ROTC programs in public schools, saying the initiative aims to discourage students from dropping out of school, impart discipline, develop leadership and encourage the learning of English.
While denying the initiative seeks to increase recruitment of students into the U.S. armed forces or "militarize" schools, Mas Marrero acknowledged the Junior ROTC programs aims to sign up 10 percent of high school students.
Mas Marrero, a former military sciences professor at the University of Puerto Rico 's ROTC program, said Junior ROTC programs would only be established in schools with more than 800 students and which have backing from communities and parents. Education Secretary Carlos Chardon said Tuesday he has no qualms with including the program in public schools, but he noted it must be requested by school boards.
Puerto Rico Independence Party General Secretary Juan Dalmau said Wednesday that Mas Marrero's justification that the program seeks to avoid school dropouts is "an insult to the intelligence of this country [sic] and a lie."
"I call on the governor to stop hiding behind the Veterans Advocate and tell us if he believes in a culture of peace and education for our students, or if his mission is to transform our public schools into centers for military recruitment, so that our youth can serve as cannon fodder in American wars," said Dalmau during a press conference at PIP headquarters in Puerto Nuevo.
Dalmau, who rejected the notion that the program benefits the Education Department by bringing in more federal funding, said the push for Junior ROTC programs is part of an "agenda to indoctrinate the youth with a pro-American and pro-war vision."
Dalmau said the party will include a campaign against Junior ROTC presence in public schools in its periodic talks to public school students on how they can deny giving their personal information to military recruiters. He called on parents to discourage their children from joining the program.
"The reality is you don't solve the school dropout problem by dressing up our youth in military drag and encouraging a militarist vision," said Dalmau, who noted that the problem can only be addressed by providing schools with needed psychologists and social workers, designing "modern" and "dynamic" school curricula, and providing teachers with "the tools they need to do their work."
Dalmau said ROTC officials are targeting schools with large student populations from low-income families, which he said are the most vulnerable to the "pipe dreams" offered by military recruiters.
The head of the National Union of Educators and Education Workers, or Unete by its Spanish acronym, said that having Junior ROTC programs in public schools would turn them into "centers of military recruitment" .
"Schools exist to promote the principles of peace, justice, service and other values and principles that make us better citizens. Schools don't exist to promote war and militarism," Unete President Emilio Nieves said in a press release, in which he called on Chardon to "assume a firm position in defense of the mission of public schools."
Militarization through the kitchen
Mothers Against War spokeswoman Sonia Santiago said the initiative was an attempt by the Fortune administration to sneak military curricula "through the kitchen." She also criticized the commonwealth Environmental Quality Board's recent authorization of construction of training facilities to be used by the U.S. armed forces and the Homeland Security Department at the former Roosevelt Roads Naval Base in Ceiba and in a Mayagiiez facility.
"We call on parents not to sign any document authorizing military officials to teach their children, because maternity is life and war is the anti-thesis of maternity," said Santiago, a clinical psychologist whose son was injured in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "We also denounce the building of military training centers on the island, where yoga exercises are not going to be taught but strategies on how to exterminate fellow men and women."
Santiago said Mas Marrero should desist from becoming a military recruiter and stick to his job defending veterans, who, she said, are being mistreated despite their service. She cited news reports in which the Department of Veterans Affairs acknowledges the huge backlog of unfinished disability claims. This situation has led veterans to wait an average of six months to receive disability benefits and as long as four years for their appeals to be heard in cases where their benefits were denied.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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5) Unparalleled and Denied
Editorial
June 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/opinion/19fri1.html
In an appalling 5-to-4 ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court's conservative majority tossed aside compelling due process claims, the demands of justice and a considered decision by a lower federal appeals court to deny the right of prisoners to obtain post-conviction DNA testing that might prove their innocence.
The inmate at the center of the case, William G. Osborne, is in prison in Alaska after a 1994 rape conviction based in part on a DNA test of semen from a condom recovered at the scene.
The state used an old method, known as DQ-alpha testing, that could not identify, with great specificity, the person to whom the DNA belonged. The high court sided with Alaska in its refusal to grant Mr. Osborne access to the physical evidence, the semen. His intent was to obtain a more advanced DNA test that was not available at the time of his trial and that prosecutors agreed could almost definitively prove his guilt or innocence.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. noted the "unparalleled ability" to prove guilt or innocence using DNA evidence. But he treated that breakthrough more as an irritant than an opportunity.
The availability of conclusive DNA testing, he wrote, "cannot mean that every criminal conviction, or even every criminal conviction involving biological evidence, is suddenly in doubt."
The chief justice further worried that establishing a "freestanding and far-reaching constitutional right of access" to DNA evidence would short-circuit efforts underway by federal and state governments to develop rules to control access to such evidence. Yet Alaska is one of four states that does not have laws giving prisoners access to DNA evidence that could establish their innocence - a dismal reality underscoring the need for Supreme Court intervention.
Of course, there is a value to finality of verdicts and not allowing prisoners to endlessly challenge their convictions. But the chief justice and his concurring colleagues have their priorities all wrong.
Much as the four dissenters - Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter - saw, Alaska was wrong to block testing when DNA technology is available that may prove someone is unjustly being kept behind bars. Overturning Alaska's denial of due process should have been an easy call.
As Justice Stevens noted in his dissent, "There is no reason to deny access to the evidence and there are many reasons to provide it."
We are also puzzled and disturbed by the Obama administration's decision to side with Alaska in this case - continuing the Bush administration's opposition to recognizing a right to access physical evidence for post-conviction DNA testing.
Thursday's ruling will inevitably allow some innocent people to languish in prison without having the chance to definitively prove their innocence and with the state never being completely certain of their guilt.
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6) Judge tosses laws restricting recruiters
Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, June 19, 2009
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/19/BAC3189PQJ.DTL
(06-18) 18:44 PDT -- Without fanfare, a federal judge in Oakland on Thursday threw out voter-approved laws in two Northern California cities barring military recruiters from contacting minors.
U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong ruled that laws passed in the Humboldt County cities of Arcata and Eureka in November were unconstitutional and invalid.
The finding was not unexpected by proponents of the laws, which passed with 73 percent of the vote in Arcata and 57 percent in Eureka. The federal government quickly sued to overturn the laws, which have been stayed ever since.
But Dave Meserve, the former Arcata councilman behind the laws, said he was disappointed that the judge ruled without hearing arguments on the case. Armstrong ruled on filed pleadings after a hearing scheduled this month was canceled.
"She doesn't respond to any of our arguments in any way," he said. "The order reads like a restatement of the government's case."
Department of Justice spokesman Charles Miller said "We are pleased with the court's ruling."
Eileen Lainez, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, declined tocomment on the suit but said, "It is important for recruiters to provide information to youth and their parents."
The Arcata and Eureka laws join a long list of failed attempts to restrict military recruiting.
Opponents of recruiting have tried to keep recruiters off college campuses nationwide. Berkeley issued and then rescinded a letter calling Marine recruiters "unwelcome intruders."
And the San Francisco school board in 2006 killed the local Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, which some members saw as a recruiting tool, launching a three-year battle that ended last month with JROTC back in place.
The Arcata and Eureka laws represented a new tactic that experts said appeared to have been the first of its kind in America: a counter-recruitment law passed not by a handful of elected activists, but by a plurality of voters.
Many voters in Arcata and Eureka who supported the measures saw the laws not as anti-military, but as an expression of a community's right to set its own rules - particularly relating to children.
Opponents said the laws were unpatriotic, pointlessly quixotic, and imposed a government regulation on a domain that would be better handled by parents.
The laws made it illegal to contact anyone under the age of 18 to recruit that person into the military or promote future enlistment. Minors could still initiate contact with recruiters if they chose.
"The judge said that the question of military recruitment is a subject which must be regulated by the federal government and may not be regulated by states and localities," said Stanford Law School Senior Lecturer Allen Weiner, who read the opinion but did not take part in the case.
Under the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, federal laws trump state laws on issues the federal government is responsible for, like foreign affairs and national defense.
The cities tried to head off that finding by arguing that the United States is party to international treaties prohibiting the recruiting of children under 17. The treaties, the cities argue, hold equal standing to the supremacy clause, so recruitment aimed at children under 17 - such as posters or recruiter calls - is unconstitutional.
Armstrong did not address that argument. Brad Yamauchi, a San Francisco attorney who represented Arcata pro bono, said the reason she didn't may have been because the treaty addresses recruitment of children under age 17, but the laws in Arcata and Eureka barred recruiting anybody under 18.
Recruits must be 18 to enlist in the U.S. military, or 17 with parental permission, although contact with recruiters may begin earlier.
If the cities choose to appeal or draft a new law, Yamauchi said, they might focus on the 17-and-under crowd. But they would still need to solve other constitutional concerns raised by Armstrong - a task he said will be difficult at best.
But Yamauchi said an appeal might still be worth pursuing.
"Everything has to be done to put this pressure (on policymakers), and having an appeal could be part of that pressure," he said. Arcata City Attorney Nancy Diamond said the city has made no decision on whether to pursue an appeal.
But Meserve said that no matter what, the effort was worthwhile.
"Whatever the outcome, I think it's been very positive," he said. "It has opened people's eyes across the country to the fact that recruiters target kids."
E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at mstannard@sfchronicle.com.
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7) Education Chief to Warn Advocates That Inferior Charter Schools Harm the Effort
By SAM DILLON
June 22, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/education/22duncan.html?ref=education
The Obama administration has made opening more charter schools a big part of its plans for improving the nation's education system, but Education Secretary Arne Duncan will warn advocates of the schools on Monday that low-quality institutions are giving their movement a black eye.
"The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and third-rate schools to exist," Mr. Duncan says in prepared remarks that he is scheduled to deliver in Washington at the annual gathering of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
In an interview, Mr. Duncan said he would use the address to praise innovations made by high-quality charter schools, urge charter leaders to become more active in weeding out bad apples in their movement and invite the leaders to help out in the administration's broad effort to remake several thousand of the nation's worst public schools.
Since 1991, when educators founded the first charter school in Minnesota, 4,600 have opened; they now educate some 1.4 million of the nation's 50 million public school students, according to Education Department figures. The schools are financed with taxpayer money but operate free of many curricular requirements and other regulations that apply to traditional public schools.
Mr. Duncan's speech will come at a pivotal moment for the charter school movement. The Obama administration has been working to persuade state legislatures to lift caps on the number of charter schools.
At the same time, the movement is smarting from the release last week of a report by Stanford University researchers that found that although some charter schools were doing an excellent job, many students in charter schools were not faring as well as students in traditional public schools.
"The charter movement is one of the most profound changes in American education, bringing tremendous new options to underserved communities," Mr. Duncan is to say in the speech, the text of which was provided to The New York Times by his advisers.
But, the speech says, states should scrutinize plans for new charter schools to allow only high-quality ones to open. In exchange for the autonomy that states extend to charter schools, states should demand "absolute, unequivocal accountability," the speech says, and close charter schools that fail to lift student achievement.
Mr. Duncan's speech calls the Stanford report - which singles out Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas as states that have done little to hold poorly run charter schools accountable - "a wake-up call."
"Charter authorizers need to do a better job of holding schools accountable," the speech says. (Mr. Duncan is to note exceptions like the California Charter Schools Association, which last week announced a plan to establish and enforce academic performance standards for charter schools.)
The Stanford study, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, used student achievement data from 15 states and the District of Columbia to gauge whether students who attended charter schools had fared better than they would if they had attended a traditional public school.
"The study reveals that a decent fraction of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students," the report says. "Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local public school options, and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their students would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools."
Reports on charter schools often arouse impassioned debates, because charter schools in some cities have drawn millions of dollars in taxpayer money away from traditional public schools, and because many operate with nonunion teachers. The Stanford study was no exception; some charter school advocates asserted that it was slanted to favor traditional public schools.
Nelson Smith, president of the charter school alliance, said that the authors of the Stanford study could have phrased their findings more positively, with no loss of accuracy, but that he considered the center a "very credible outfit" and its director, Margaret Raymond, "an esteemed researcher."
Mr. Smith praised the administration's efforts to increase financing for charter school startups.
"To a remarkable extent, they are walking the walk," he said. "They've been very clear on the need to stimulate the growth of quality charters."
Mr. Duncan has been working to build a national effort to restructure 5,000 chronically failing public schools, which turn out middle school students who cannot read and most of the nation's high school dropouts. In his speech, he will urge states, school districts, nonprofit groups, teachers' unions and charter organizations "to get in the business of turning around our lowest-performing schools."
"Over the coming years," the speech says, "America needs to find 5,000 high-energy, hero principals to take over these struggling schools, and a quarter of a million great teachers who are willing to do the toughest work in public education."
Mr. Smith said he believed that some charter school operators would react favorably to Mr. Duncan's call, but only if they were given flexibility over hiring and firing teachers, structuring student learning time and other issues.
"They have to be able to maintain the integrity of the charter model," Mr. Smith said.
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8) Son of PRISP
Obama's Classroom Spies
By David Price counterpunch.com
June 23, 2009
counterpunch.com
http://www.counterpunch.com/price06232009.html
As the continuities and disjunctures between the Bush and Obama administrations come into focus it becomes increasingly clear that while Obama's domestic agenda has some identifiable breaks with Bush's, at its core, the new administration remains committed to staying the course of American militarization. Now we have an articulate, nuanced president who supports elements of progressive domestic policies, can even comfortably say the phrase LGBT in public speeches, while funding military programs at alarming levels and continuing the Bush administration's military and intelligence invasion of what used to be civilian life.
The latest manifestation of this continuity came last week when Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, announced plans to transform the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP) from a pilot project into a permanent budget item. Blair also announced plans to establish a "Reserve Officers' Training Corps" to train unidentified future intelligence officers in U.S. college classrooms. Like students receiving PRISP funds, the identities of students participating in these programs would not be known to professors, university administrators or fellow students-in effect, these future intelligence analysts and agents would conduct their first covert missions in our university classrooms.
Four years ago I wrote a series of CounterPunch exposés on the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), then a pilot project funded under section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act. PRISP links undergraduate and graduate students with U.S. security and intelligence agencies like the NSA or CIA, and unannounced to universities, professors or fellow-students, PRISP-students enter American university campuses, classrooms, laboratories and professor's offices without disclosing links to these agencies. PRISP was originally conceived by anthropologist Felix Moos, long a proponent of using anthropological knowledge in waging of counterinsurgency campaigns-an area of growing interest to the Obama administration as it prepares for prolonged soft power counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan.
It seems likely that many of the affected disciplines will offer little resistance and some may quickly warm to announcements of any new funding stream. Traditionally, the disciplines of political science, history or area specialists coming from the humanities have seldom resisted such developments; but for disciplines like anthropology, these undisclosed intelligence-linked programs present devastating ethical and practical problems, as the non-discloser of funding and links to intelligence agencies flies in the face of the basic ethical principles of the discipline. But even without the problems for individual disciplinary ethics codes, the presence of these undisclosed secret sharers in our classrooms betrays fundamental trusts that lie at the core of honest academic endeavors.
While the National Intelligence Director's move to make PRISP a permanent budget item will damage the academic freedom and integrity of American universities, it will likely be met by the open arms of university administrators facing crashed university endowments and dwindling budgets. That some administrators would so easily accommodate themselves and their institutional integrity for the promise of funds should be of little surprise, but I fear that the combined forces of the current economic collapse conjoined with President Obama's ability to bring a new liberal credibility to this warmed-over Bush era project will induce many faculty and students to seriously consider participating in these programs. Times are hard and as funds get scarce it will be increasingly difficult for many to say no.
This development is just the latest installment in ongoing efforts to increase the militarization of American higher education. None of this should be surprising in a nation that alone spends about 48 percent of the planet's military budget. In the social sciences, these shifts away from broad funding sources designed to create independent knowledgeable scholars, to those now requiring indentured servitude has been a long time coming.
Back in the early 1990s when the National Security Education Program (NSEP) was first introduced it was widely condemned by professional associations like the Middle East Studies Association and the African Studies Association, Latin American Studies Association for blurring the lines between independent scholarship raised by NSEP's requirements that program participants later seek employment in governmental agencies. But with the depressed economy, plummeting endowment funds at universities and foundations, the difficult academic job market, and scarce academic funding sources, I fear that professional associations' reactions against these developments will be muted. As pilot programs, PRISP and the Intelligence Community Scholars Programs made scarce funds available to students, as traditional non-payback funding programs were being cut. Programs like PRISP that seek to tie young scholars to agencies like the CIA early in their career as a means of bringing new ideas and skills to these agencies will fail in meeting the claimed goal of getting these agencies to think in new ways because such ties to institutional culture early in student-agent careers will increase the influence of agency cultural groupthink while diminishing the impact of academic culture. If the Obama administration really wants to improve governmental agencies' knowledge of and approaches to the world, they need to increase funding to a broad range of educational funding programs that do not encumber or limit the range of knowledge in the ways that programs like PRISP do.
This move to establish PRISP as a permanent budgetary item is the sort of program that likely will speed through congress-which can then claim it is both supporting education funding, and military and intelligence sectors, with a bonus feel-good work-ethic mandate thrown in by requiring students to payback their funds through required future governmental service. But this push will be done without an outside assessment of PRISP as pilot program. PRISP needs an independent assessment of what it has accomplished-including an assessment of the impact of the predatory penalties facing former PRISP students who come to realize that they do not wish to fulfill their commitments to work for these agencies upon graduation. Because of the lack of transparency surrounding PRISP, we have little idea what is really going on with the program. Last year I was able to identify one social science recipient of PRISP funds who explained to me that PRISP had been such a failure in finding social scientists to fund that PRISP had sought out this person and provided them with funds for work that was already underway just to spend-down the PRISP budget. Given these recent difficulties with the program, I wonder if the current expansion of PRISP is a supply-side effort to troll the pool of increasingly underfunded and debt-carrying desperate young scholars with few other funding options.
Professional associations like the American Association of University Professors, the American Psychological Association and the American Anthropological Association need to speak out in opposition of the permanent establishment of PRISP. PRISP risks further blurring already hazy borders marking proper independent academic roles, and it stands to confuse academic identities in ways that many will not even realize. Some of these processes are reminiscent of a recurrent motif in Philip K. Dick's stories where protagonists becomes unclear of their own agency and identity; becoming unsure of their own histories and memories, or true political alliances-in effect becoming undercover agents with identities unknown even to themselves. As this new generation of programs covertly brings undeclared and unidentifiable students into our universities they disrupt university identities and transforms the roles all who teach, research, study and work there in ways that they will not necessarily understand-as institutions of higher learning further lose their independence and become unwitting agents of state intelligence functions.
David Price is a member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologist. He is the author of Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War, published by Duke University Press, and a contributor to the Network of Concerned Anthropologists' forthcoming Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual published later this month by Prickly Paradigm Press.
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9) Pentagon Exam Calls Protests 'Low-Level Terrorism,' Angering Activists
By James Osborne
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,526972,00.html
A written exam administered by the Pentagon labels "protests" as a form of "low-level terrorism" - enraging civil liberties advocates and activist groups who say it shows blatant disregard of the First Amendment.
The written exam, given as part of Department of Defense employees' routine training, includes a multiple-choice question that asks:
"Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism?"
- Attacking the Pentagon
- IEDs
- Hate crimes against racial groups
- Protests
The correct answer, according to the exam, is "Protests."
"Its part of a pattern of equating dissent and protest with terrorism," said Ann Brick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained a copy of the question after a Defense Department employee who was taking the test printed the screen on his or her computer terminal.
"It undermines the core constitutional values the Department of Defense is supposed to be defending," Brick said, referring to the First Amendment right to peaceably assemble.
She said the ACLU has asked the Defense Department to remove the question and send out a correction to all employees who took the exam.
"There were other employees who were unhappy with it and disturbed by it," Brick said.
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Les Melnyk said the Defense Department is looking into the matter and expects to provide more information later Wednesday.
"We need to determine if it's something we're currently doing," Melnyk said. "A lot of the information in this exam is intended for people stationed abroad. We counsel those people to avoid demonstrations."
Anti-war protesters, who say they have been targets of federal surveillance for years, were livid when they were told about the exam question.
"That's illegal," said George Martin, national co-chairman of United for Peace and Justice. "Protest in terms of legal dissent has to be recognized, especially by the authorities.
"It's not terrorism or a lack of patriotism. We care enough to be active in our government."
Bill Wilson, president of the Americans for Limited Government, which supported the Tea Party demonstrations earlier this year, agreed.
"Groups like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, paramilitary orgainzations that are striking at out at something they oppose or hate, that's terrorism," Wilson said.
"To equate that in any degree with citizens being able to express themselves seems to me to be headed down a road where all dissent is suspect and questionable."
Ben Friedman, a research fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, said the U.S. government has a long history of infringing upon citizens' civil liberties in the name of domestic security.
"It's the kind of thing that happens when you have large security bureaucracies, which is why they need to be kept in check," Friedman said. "These things tend to occur in times of panic, like after Sept. 11."
The ACLU, in a letter of complaint it sent to the Defense Department, catalogued a list of what it said were recent civil liberties violations by federal authorities, including the monitoring of anti-war protests and the FBI's surveillance of potential protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York.
Martin said getting information on the extent of the FBI and National Security Agency's surveillance programs is nearly impossible.
"I have been arrested within 100 yards of George W. Bush and spoken out against the policies of our government in more than 100 countries," he said. "But they said they have no record on me. I don't believe that."
During Bush's presidency, the Defense Department was criticized for infringing on citizens' civil rights through surveillance programs designed to protect the nation against terrorist attacks. Brick said she has seen no indication that there will be a change in policy under President Obama.
"We need to see what they do," she said. "In a number of areas the Obama administration has not backed off and kept the Bush administration line."
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10) Who Are We?
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
June 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/opinion/23herbert.html?_r=1
Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House.
One of the most disappointing aspects of the early months of the Obama administration has been its unwillingness to end many of the mind-numbing abuses linked to the so-called war on terror and to establish a legal and moral framework designed to prevent those abuses from ever occurring again.
The president deserves credit for unequivocally banning torture and some of the other brutal interrogation techniques that spread like a plague in the Bush administration's lawless response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But other policies that offend the conscience continue.
Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention, imprisoning people indefinitely, for years and perhaps for life, without charge and without giving them an opportunity to demonstrate their innocence.
And yet we've embraced it, asserting that there are people who are far too dangerous to even think about releasing but who cannot be put on trial because we have no real evidence that they have committed any crime, or because we've tortured them and therefore the evidence would not be admissible, or whatever. President Obama is O.K. with this (he calls it "prolonged detention"), but he wants to make sure it is carried out - here comes the oxymoron - fairly and nonabusively.
Proof of guilt? In 21st-century America, there is no longer any need for such annoyances.
Human rights? Ha-ha. That's a good one.
Also distressing is the curtain of secrecy the Obama administration has kept drawn over shameful abuses that should be brought into the light of day. Back in April, the administration rightly released the "torture memos" detailing the gruesome interrogation techniques unleashed by the Bush crowd. But last month, Mr. Obama apparently tripped over his own instincts and reversed his initial decision to release photos of American soldiers engaged in the brutal abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We saw the profound effect of the disclosure of the photos from Abu Ghraib in 2004. Imagine if they had never been released. Now, in an affront to a society that is supposed to be intelligent and free, the Obama administration is trying to sit on photos that are just as important for Americans to see. The president's argument for trying to block the court-ordered release of the photos is a demoralizing echo of the embarrassingly empty rhetoric of the Bush years:
"The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger."
The Obama administration is also continuing the Bush administration's abuse of the state-secrets privilege. Lawyers from the Obama Justice Department have argued, as did lawyers from the Bush administration before them, that a lawsuit involving extraordinary rendition and allegations of extreme torture should be dismissed outright because discussions of such matters in court would harm national security.
In other words, the victims, no matter how strong their case might be, no matter how badly they might have been abused, could never have their day in court. Jane Mayer, writing in the June 22 New Yorker, said of the rendition program, in which suspects were swept up by Americans and spirited off to foreign countries for imprisonment and interrogation: "As many as seven detainees were misidentified and abducted by mistake."
The Bush and Obama view of the state-secrets privilege effectively bars any real examination of such egregious mistakes.
It was thought by many that a President Obama would put a stop to the madness, put an end to the Bush administration's nightmarish approach to national security. But Mr. Obama has shown no inclination to bring even the worst offenders of the Bush years to account, and seems perfectly willing to move ahead in lockstep with the excessive secrecy and some of the most egregious activities of the Bush era.
The new president's excessively cautious approach to the national security and civil liberties outrages of the Bush administration are unacceptable, and the organizations and individuals committed to fairness, justice and the rule of law - the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many others - should intensify their efforts to get the new administration to do the right thing.
More than 500 of the detainees incarcerated at one time or another at Guantánamo Bay have been released, and, except for a handful, no charges were filed against them. The idea that everyone held at Guantánamo was a terrorist - the worst of the worst - was always absurd.
Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, noted that Mr. Obama had promised to bring both transparency and accountability to matters of national security. It's the only way to get our moral compass back.
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11) Pentagon to Outline Shift in War Planning Strategy
By THOM SHANKER
June 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/world/americas/23military.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon will adopt a new strategy that for the first time orders the military to anticipate that future conflicts will include a complex mix of conventional, set-piece battles and campaigns against shadowy insurgents and terrorists, according to senior officials.
The shift is intended to assure that the military is prepared to deal with a spectrum of possible threats, including computer network attacks, attempts to blind satellite positioning systems, strikes by precision missiles and roadside bombs, and propaganda campaigns waged on television and the Internet. The new strategy has broad implications for training, troop deployment, weapons procurement and other aspects of military planning.
In officially embracing hybrid warfare, the Pentagon would be replacing a second pillar of long-term planning. Senior officials disclosed in March that the review was likely to reject a historic premise of American strategy - that the nation need only to prepare to fight two major wars at a time.
Driving both sets of developments are lessons learned from the past six years, when the United States has been fighting two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet is stretched to be ready for potentially significant operations elsewhere, Pentagon officials say, such as against Iran, North Korea or even China and Russia. Conflicts with any of those countries would also be expected to present a hybrid range of challenges.
But powerful constituencies in the military and in Congress continue to argue that the next war will not look like Iraq or Afghanistan, and they say the military is focusing too much on counter-insurgency and losing its ability to defeat a traditional nation-state.
Even so, senior officials say hybrid warfare will be adopted as a central premise of military planning in the top-to-bottom review required every four years by Congress. When completed later this year, the assessment, officially called the Quadrennial Defense Review, will determine how billions of dollars are spent on weapons and influence how the military reshapes its training.
During a Pentagon news conference last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said of the new strategy, "It derives from my view that the old way of looking at irregular warfare as being one kind of conflict and conventional warfare as a discreet kind of warfare is an outdated concept. Conflict in the future will slide up and down a scale, both in scope or scale and in lethality."
Even before the review is complete, the new thinking has claimed high-dollar victims.
Mr. Gates proposed ending production of the Air Force's top-of-the-line F-22 fighter jets, arguing that money should be spent on warplanes that carry out a broader array of missions, from countering enemy air forces to evading surface-to-air missiles to bombing insurgent militias in hiding.
But supporters of the F-22 in Congress are pushing for financing to keep the production line open, potentially setting up a veto battle.
The defense secretary also put on hold a multibillion-dollar program for the Army's next-generation armored vehicle, saying its proposed flat-bottom design ignored lessons that angular troop transports are safer from roadside bombs, which have been the biggest killer of troops in Iraq.
In preparing to adopt concepts of hybrid warfare, the Defense Department has closely studied Israel's last war in Lebanon in 2006, when a terrorist group, Hezbollah, fielded high-tech weapons equal to any nation's, including long-range missiles. Likewise, when a traditional military power like Russia went to war with the former Soviet republic of Georgia last August, its tanks, paratroopers and warships were preceded by crippling computer network attacks.
The previous Pentagon strategy review focused on a four-square chart that described security challenges to the nation as perceived then. It included traditional, conventional conflicts; irregular warfare, such as terrorism and insurgencies; catastrophic challenges from unconventional weapons used by terrorists or rogue states; and disruptive threats, in which new technologies could counter American advantages.
"The 'quad chart' was useful in its time," said Michele A. Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, who is leading the strategy review for Mr. Gates.
"But we aren't using it as a point of reference or departure," she said in an interview. "I think hybrid will be the defining character. The traditional, neat categories - those are types that really don't match reality any more."
The nation's top military officers are reviewing their procurement programs and personnel policies to adapt to the new environment, focusing in particular on weapons systems that can perform multiple missions.
"When I send a carrier strike group forward, or when I send an amphibious ready group forward with a Marine Expeditionary Unit on board, I don't know what they are going to end up doing," said Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations. "Therefore, the way that we view our training, the way that we view our capabilities, has to be packaged for this range of actions."
He cited the experience of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, which was steaming toward Iraq to carry out combat missions when it was diverted to become the American headquarters for tsunami relief in Indonesia. Both Admiral Roughead and Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, said in interviews that they had adopted goals of making certain each weapon system could "stretch" across a spectrum of operations, proving value in traditional and irregular warfare.
General Schwartz cited Air Force decisions to place surveillance systems on its long-range bombers and tactical warplanes to make each a provider of valuable battlefield intelligence, as well as maintaining strike capabilities.
"This is the kind of thing we are talking about, where we avoid point-mission platforms and look for versatility," General Schwartz said. "Multipurpose platforms are inherently more affordable."
For the ground forces, the goal is an ability to sustain 10 combat brigades abroad at all times, with 10 more in reserve and nearly ready to go as they complete training. This eventually would allow active duty troops to spend three years at home for every year deployed.
Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, when asked to define the Army's goals in the review, said: "The most significant thing I'd like to get is an acceptance of that rotational model."
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12) Justices Say Waste Can Be Dumped in Lake
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
June 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/us/23alaska.html?ref=us
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Clean Water Act does not prevent the Army Corps of Engineers from allowing mining waste to be dumped into rivers, streams and other waters.
In a 6-to-3 decision that drew fierce criticism from environmentalists, the court said the Corps of Engineers had the authority to grant Coeur Alaska Inc., a gold mining company, permission to dump the waste known as slurry into Lower Slate Lake, north of Juneau.
"We conclude that the corps was the appropriate agency to issue the permit and that the permit is lawful," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority.
The corps permit, issued in 2005, said that 4.5 million tons of waste from the Kensington mine could be dumped into the lake even though it would obliterate life in its waters. The corps found that disposing of it there was less environmentally damaging than other options.
Environmental advocacy organizations sued, saying the Bush administration was violating 30 years of tradition under the Clean Water Act in which such waste was regulated under the much more stringent standards of the federal Environment Protection Agency. In 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, agreed and invalidated the permit.
The Supreme Court overturned that decision Monday in Coeur Alaska Inc. v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, No. 07-984, saying there was nothing in the Clean Water Act that prevented the corps from making the decision.
Dissenting were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens.
Environmentalists said they worried that the ruling would set a precedent for dumping by mining and other industries.
"If a mining company can turn Lower Slate Lake in Alaska into a lifeless waste dump, other polluters with solids in their wastewater can potentially do the same to any water body in America," said Trip Van Noppen, president of the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice, whose lawyer argued the case before the court.
But mining interests and their advocates said the decision simply reaffirmed longstanding practice.
"The idea that this spells the end and every industrial producer will start dumping waste is just untrue," said Matthew D. McGill, the lawyer representing Coeur Alaska.
The Environmental Protection Agency said it was reviewing the decision to see if it affected its ability to safeguard the nation's waters.
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13) Madoff Lawyers Seek Leniency in Sentencing
Zachery Kouwe and Peter Edmonston
June 23, 2009
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/madoff-lawyers-seek-leniency-in-sentencing/?ref=business
Madoff Letter Seeking Leniency:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16699848/Madoff-Letter-Seeking-Leniency
Lawyers for Bernard L. Madoff, who has confessed to running what may be the biggest Ponzi scheme in modern history, asked a judge for leniency when he imposes a sentence on Mr. Madoff at a hearing next week.
In their letter, included below, the lawyers said there seemed to be an atmosphere of "mob vengeance" surrounding Mr. Madoff and urged the court to consider that he essentially turned himself in, rather than continuing the fraud or fleeing the country, when he described the $65 billion scheme to his sons late last year. Since then, they said, he has cooperated fully with his bail conditions and helped investigators in their efforts to recover funds for his victims.
Mr. Madoff has also met with the Securities and Exchange Commission's inspector General, H. David Kotz, who is conducting an investigation into how regulators failed to detect the fraud despite numerous red flags. Victims can expect Mr. Madoff to speak "to the shame he has felt and to the pain he has caused" at the sentencing hearing, his lawyers said in the letter.
Mr. Madoff, who is 71 years old, is expected live another 13 years, according to figures from the Social Security Administration cited by Ira Lee Sorkin, Mr. Madoff's attorney. Based on that figure, Mr. Sorkin wrote in the letter that a prison sentence of 12 years - just short of an effective life sentence - would "sufficiently address the goals of deterrence, protecting the public, and promoting respect for the law without being 'greater than necessary' to achieve them."
Other white-collar criminals have received longer sentences than Mr. Sorkin is asking for his client. Samuel Israel III, co-founder of a hedge fund, the Bayou Group, was sentenced earlier this year to a 20-year prison term for cheating investors out of $400 million.
Among long sentences meted out to those convicted of white-collar crimes, Timothy J. Rigas, former finance chief at Adelphia Communications, is serving a 20-year prison term; Bernard J. Ebbers, the former WorldCom chief executive, received 25 years; and a former Enron chief executive, Jeffrey K. Skilling, got 24 years.
More than 100 victims of Mr. Madoff's long-running scheme have filed emotional letters with the Federal District Court in Manhattan, nearly all of which asked Judge Denny Chin to give him the harshest sentence that the law allows.
"Madoff should never see the light of day and in fact be sentenced to hard labor," said Jerry Reisman, who represents 16 victims of the scheme. "He should not only be punished for his crimes but the sentence must be a deterrence to others who may even think of committing a similar crime. The irony of his incarceration is that the government must pay for it while his wife continues to live on Park Avenue, and his brother and sons continue to keep their millions."
The charges to which Mr. Madoff pleaded guilty carry a maximum potential sentence of 150 years in prison. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for June 29.
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14) How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Well
June 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/health/23well.html?ref=health
As head of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. David A. Kessler served two presidents and battled Congress and Big Tobacco. But the Harvard-educated pediatrician discovered he was helpless against the forces of a chocolate chip cookie.
In an experiment of one, Dr. Kessler tested his willpower by buying two gooey chocolate chip cookies that he didn't plan to eat. At home, he found himself staring at the cookies, and even distracted by memories of the chocolate chunks and doughy peaks as he left the room. He left the house, and the cookies remained uneaten. Feeling triumphant, he stopped for coffee, saw cookies on the counter and gobbled one down.
"Why does that chocolate chip cookie have such power over me?" Dr. Kessler asked in an interview. "Is it the cookie, the representation of the cookie in my brain? I spent seven years trying to figure out the answer."
The result of Dr. Kessler's quest is a fascinating new book, "The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite" (Rodale).
During his time at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Kessler maintained a high profile, streamlining the agency, pushing for faster approval of drugs and overseeing the creation of the standardized nutrition label on food packaging. But Dr. Kessler is perhaps best known for his efforts to investigate and regulate the tobacco industry, and his accusation that cigarette makers intentionally manipulated nicotine content to make their products more addictive.
In "The End of Overeating," Dr. Kessler finds some similarities in the food industry, which has combined and created foods in a way that taps into our brain circuitry and stimulates our desire for more.
When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren't particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain's reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we're full.
Dr. Kessler isn't convinced that food makers fully understand the neuroscience of the forces they have unleashed, but food companies certainly understand human behavior, taste preferences and desire. In fact, he offers descriptions of how restaurants and food makers manipulate ingredients to reach the aptly named "bliss point." Foods that contain too little or too much sugar, fat or salt are either bland or overwhelming. But food scientists work hard to reach the precise point at which we derive the greatest pleasure from fat, sugar and salt.
The result is that chain restaurants like Chili's cook up "hyper-palatable food that requires little chewing and goes down easily," he notes. And Dr. Kessler reports that the Snickers bar, for instance, is "extraordinarily well engineered." As we chew it, the sugar dissolves, the fat melts and the caramel traps the peanuts so the entire combination of flavors is blissfully experienced in the mouth at the same time.
Foods rich in sugar and fat are relatively recent arrivals on the food landscape, Dr. Kessler noted. But today, foods are more than just a combination of ingredients. They are highly complex creations, loaded up with layer upon layer of stimulating tastes that result in a multisensory experience for the brain. Food companies "design food for irresistibility," Dr. Kessler noted. "It's been part of their business plans."
But this book is less an exposé about the food industry and more an exploration of us. "My real goal is, How do you explain to people what's going on with them?" Dr. Kessler said. "Nobody has ever explained to people how their brains have been captured."
The book, a New York Times best seller, includes Dr. Kessler's own candid admission that he struggles with overeating.
"I wouldn't have been as interested in the question of why we can't resist food if I didn't have it myself," he said. "I gained and lost my body weight several times over. I have suits in every size."
This is not a diet book, but Dr. Kessler devotes a sizable section to "food rehab," offering practical advice for using the science of overeating to our advantage, so that we begin to think differently about food and take back control of our eating habits.
One of his main messages is that overeating is not due to an absence of willpower, but a biological challenge made more difficult by the overstimulating food environment that surrounds us. "Conditioned hypereating" is a chronic problem that is made worse by dieting and needs to be managed rather than cured, he said. And while lapses are inevitable, Dr. Kessler outlines several strategies that address the behavioral, cognitive and nutritional factors that fuel overeating.
Planned and structured eating and understanding your personal food triggers are essential. In addition, educating yourself about food can help alter your perceptions about what types of food are desirable. Just as many of us now find cigarettes repulsive, Dr. Kessler argues that we can also undergo similar "perceptual shifts" about large portion sizes and processed foods. For instance, he notes that when people who once loved to eat steak become vegetarians, they typically begin to view animal protein as disgusting.
The advice is certainly not a quick fix or a guarantee, but Dr. Kessler said that educating himself in the course of writing the book had helped him gain control over his eating.
"For the first time in my life, I can keep my weight relatively stable," he said. "Now, if you stress me and fatigue me and put me in an airport and the plane is seven hours late - I'm still going to grab those chocolate-covered pretzels. The old circuitry will still show its head."
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15) Work begins on world's deepest underground lab
By DIRK LAMMERS, Associated Press Writer
June 22, 2009
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090622/ap_on_sc/us_sci_underground_science
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - Far below the Black Hills of South Dakota, crews are building the world's deepest underground science lab at a depth equivalent to more than six Empire State buildings - a place uniquely suited to scientists' quest for mysterious particles known as dark matter.
Scientists, politicians and other officials gathered Monday for a groundbreaking of sorts at a lab 4,850 foot below the surface of an old gold mine that was once the site of Nobel Prize-winning physics research.
The site is ideal for experiments because its location is largely shielded from cosmic rays that could interfere with efforts to prove the existence of dark matter, which is thought to make up nearly a quarter of the mass of the universe.
The deepest reaches of the mine plunge to 8,000 feet below the surface. Some early geology and hydrology experiments are already under way at 4,850 feet. Researchers also hope to build two deeper labs that are still awaiting funding from Congress.
"The fact that we're going to be in the Davis Cavern just tickles us pink," said Tom Shutt of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, referring to a portion of the mine named after scientist Ray Davis Jr., who used it in the 1960s to demonstrate the existence of particles called solar neutrinos.
Davis and a colleague named John Bahcall won a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize for physics for their work.
The old Homestake Gold Mine in a community called Lead (pronounced LEED) was shut down in 2001 after 125 years. Pumps that kept the mine dry were turned off years ago, so workers have been drying it out to prepare for the new research.
Before the labs are built, crews must also stabilize the tunnels and install new infrastructure. The lab at 4,850 feet is not much to look at yet. A rusty orange film covers the walls, floors, ceilings and debris left behind by miners.
The first dark matter experiment will be the Large Underground Xenon detector experiment - or LUX - a project to detect weakly interacting particles that could give scientists greater insight into the Big Bang explosion believed to have formed the universe.
Shutt, along with Brown University's Rick Gaitskell and nearly a dozen collaborators will work at the site to search for dark matter, which does not emit detectable light or radiation. But scientists say its presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter.
Scientists believe most of the dark matter in the universe contains no atoms and does not interact with ordinary matter through electromagnetic forces. They are trying to discover exactly what it is, how much exists and what effect it may have on the future of the universe.
Physicists have said that without dark matter, galaxies might never have formed. By learning more about dark matter, they hope to understand better whether the universe is expanding or contracting.
The research team will try to catch the ghostly particles in a 300-kilogram tank of liquid xenon, a cold substance that is three times heavier than water. If they tried to detect dark matter above ground, the highly sensitive detector would be bombarded by cosmic radiation.
Scientists hope to start construction on the two deepest labs by 2012 and open them by 2016. The projects are expected to cost $550 million.
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16) U.S. Drone Strike Said to Kill 60 in Pakistan
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH and SALMAN MASOOD
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/world/asia/24pstan.html?hpw
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - An airstrike believed to have been carried out by a United States drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral for a Taliban fighter in South Waziristan on Tuesday, residents of the area and local news reports said.
Details of the attack, which occurred in Makeen, remained unclear, but the reported death toll was exceptionally high. If the reports are indeed accurate and if the attack was carried out by a drone, the strike could be the deadliest since the United States began using the aircraft to fire remotely guided missiles at members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The United States carried out 22 previous drone strikes this year, as the Obama administration has intensified a policy inherited from the Bush administration.
Before the attack on Tuesday, the Pakistani Army and Air Force had begun operations in South Waziristan against the forces of the Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud. The group's suicide bombings in major cities have terrorized Pakistanis for years.
In a serious blow to Pakistan's effort, on Tuesday an assassin loyal to Mr. Mehsud shot and killed a rival tribal leader, Qari Zainuddin, whom the government had hoped to use as an ally in its campaign to corner the Taliban leader.
The killing called into question the government's strategy of exploiting tribal fissures in order to defeat Mr. Mehsud and was apparently intended to serve as a reminder that there were serious consequences for crossing him, analysts said.
"It tells people, if you side with the government, this is what will happen to you," said Talat Masood, a retired general and a military analyst. "It says the government can't give you protection, but the other side can."
The army, which is already involved in operations against Taliban strongholds in the Swat Valley and other areas, would now have to rely more on its own soldiers to take on the Taliban in South Waziristan as well, he said.
Mr. Zainuddin was killed in the northwestern town of Dera Ismail Khan, said Iqbal Khan, the town's district police chief, and the tribal leader's death revealed the tenuous hold of his splinter group in the area.
The initial investigation, the police chief said, indicated that the shooting was carried out by a guard named Gulbadin Mehsud, who may have infiltrated Mr. Zainuddin's ranks and escaped after the attack. Another guard was wounded in the attack, he said.
In recent months, Mr. Zainuddin and his group had helped the government by denying Baitullah Mehsud and his fighters the ability to operate in the region, killing about 30 of Mr. Mehsud's fighters.
When he was in his 30s, Mr. Zainuddin was part of Mr. Mehsud's tribe. However, Mr. Zainuddin split with Mr. Mehsud and joined forces with Turkestan Bhaitani, an older Taliban fighter who had switched sides to ally with the government.
The two men had held a jirga, or tribal meeting, this month with as many as 100 elders of the Mehsud tribe in the town of Tank in an effort to rally opposition to Mr. Mehsud. Officially, the Pakistani military denies supporting the effort.
Mr. Zainuddin was selected as successor to Abdullah Mehsud, a top Taliban militant who died in 2007 as security forces raided a hide-out in Baluchistan Province. Mr. Zainuddin had claimed that he had the ability to take on Baitullah Mehsud with the support of 3,000 fighters.
"Baitullah Mehsud is not involved in jihad because Islam does not allow suicide attacks, which his group is perpetrating," Mr. Zainuddin was quoted as saying in an interview.
Some reports in the local news media have also suggested that Mr. Mehsud killed Mr. Zainuddin's father years ago.
Pakistani jets have aimed at Mr. Mehsud's hide-outs in recent days, and the funeral in Makeen that was hit on Tuesday was being held for a Taliban commander killed that day.
While the strike on the funeral may have been conducted by the Pakistani Air Force, residents and local news reports uniformly attributed it to a United States drone.
The dead may have included top commanders for Mr. Mehsud. The Geo Television Network, quoting unnamed sources, said that the dead included a trainer of suicide bombers named Qari Hussain as well as a Taliban commander named Sangeen, though there was no way to immediately verify the report.
Another television channel, AAJ, put the death toll at 60 and said the attack was carried out by a guided missile.
Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Lahore, Pakistan.
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17) Deep in Bedrock, Clean Energy and Quake Fears
By JAMES GLANZ
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/energy-environment/24geotherm.html?ref=us
BASEL, Switzerland - Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was a hero in this city of medieval cathedrals and intense environmental passion three years ago, all because he had drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane.
He was prospecting for a vast source of clean, renewable energy that seemed straight out of a Jules Verne novel: the heat simmering within the earth's bedrock.
All seemed to be going well - until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.
Hastily shut down, Mr. Häring's project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours' drive north of San Francisco.
Residents of the region, which straddles Lake and Sonoma Counties, have already been protesting swarms of smaller earthquakes set off by a less geologically invasive set of energy projects there. AltaRock officials said that they chose the spot in part because the history of mostly small quakes reassured them that the risks were limited.
Like the effort in Basel, the new project will tap geothermal energy by fracturing hard rock more than two miles deep to extract its heat. AltaRock, founded by Susan Petty, a veteran geothermal researcher, has secured more than $36 million from the Energy Department, several large venture-capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Google. AltaRock maintains that it will steer clear of large faults and that it can operate safely.
But in a report on seismic impact that AltaRock was required to file, the company failed to mention that the Basel program was shut down because of the earthquake it caused. AltaRock claimed it was uncertain that the project had caused the quake, even though Swiss government seismologists and officials on the Basel project agreed that it did. Nor did AltaRock mention the thousands of smaller earthquakes induced by the Basel project that continued for months after it shut down.
The California project is the first of dozens that could be operating in the United States in the next several years, driven by a push to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and the Obama administration's support for renewable energy.
Geothermal's potential as a clean energy source has raised huge hopes, and its advocates believe it could put a significant dent in American dependence on fossil fuels - potentially supplying roughly 15 percent of the nation's electricity by 2030, according to one estimate by Google. The earth's heat is always there waiting to be tapped, unlike wind and solar power, which are intermittent and thus more fickle. According to a 2007 geothermal report financed by the Energy Department, advanced geothermal power could in theory produce as much as 60,000 times the nation's annual energy usage. President Obama, in a news conference Tuesday, cited geothermal power as part of the "clean energy transformation" that a climate bill now before Congress could bring about.
Dan W. Reicher, an assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration who is now director of climate change and energy at Google's investment and philanthropic arm, said geothermal energy had "the potential to deliver vast amounts of power almost anywhere in the world, 24/7."
Power companies have long produced limited amounts of geothermal energy by tapping shallow steam beds, often beneath geysers or vents called fumaroles. Even those projects can induce earthquakes, although most are small. But for geothermal energy to be used more widely, engineers need to find a way to draw on the heat at deeper levels percolating in the earth's core.
Some geothermal advocates believe the method used in Basel, and to be tried in California, could be that breakthrough. But because large earthquakes tend to originate at great depths, breaking rock that far down carries more serious risk, seismologists say. Seismologists have long known that human activities can trigger quakes, but they say the science is not developed enough to say for certain what will or will not set off a major temblor.
Even so, there is no shortage of money for testing the idea. Mr. Reicher has overseen a $6.25 million investment by Google in AltaRock, and with more than $200 million in new federal money for geothermal, the Energy Department has already approved financing for related projects in Idaho by the University of Utah; in Nevada by Ormat Technologies; and in California by Calpine, just a few miles from AltaRock's project.
Steven E. Koonin, the under secretary for science at the Energy Department, said the earthquake issue was new to him, but added, "We're committed to doing things in a factual and rigorous way, and if there is a problem, we will attend to it."
The tone is more urgent in Europe. "This was my main question to the experts: Can you exclude that there is a major earthquake triggered by this man-made activity?" said Rudolf Braun, chairman of the project team that the City of Basel created to study the risks of resuming the project.
"I was quite surprised that all of them said: 'No, we can't. We can't exclude it,' " said Mr. Braun, whose study is due this year.
"It would be just unfortunate if, in the United States, you rush ahead and don't take into account what happened here," he said.
Basel's Big Shock
By the time people were getting off work amid rain squalls in Basel on Dec. 8, 2006, Mr. Häring's problems had already begun. His incision into the ground was setting off small earthquakes that people were starting to feel around the city.
Mr. Häring knew that by its very nature, the technique created earthquakes because it requires injecting water at great pressure down drilled holes to fracture the deep bedrock. The opening of each fracture is, literally, a tiny earthquake in which subterranean stresses rip apart a weak vein, crack or fault in the rock. The high-pressure water can be thought of loosely as a lubricant that makes it easier for those forces to slide the earth along the weak points, creating a web or network of fractures.
Mr. Häring planned to use that network as the ultimate teapot, circulating water through the fractures and hoping it emerged as steam. But what surprised him that afternoon was the intensity of the quakes because advocates of the method believe they can pull off a delicate balancing act, tearing the rock without creating larger earthquakes.
Alarmed, Mr. Häring and other company officials decided to release all pressure in the well to try to halt the fracturing. But as they stood a few miles from the drill site, giving the orders by speakerphone to workers atop the hole, a much bigger jolt shook the room.
"I think that was us," said one stunned official.
Analysis of seismic data proved him correct. The quake measured 3.4 - modest in some parts of the world. But triggered quakes tend to be shallower than natural ones, and residents generally describe them as a single, explosive bang or jolt - often out of proportion to the magnitude - rather than a rumble.
Triggered quakes are also frequently accompanied by an "air shock," a loud tearing or roaring noise.
The noise "made me feel it was some sort of supersonic aircraft going overhead," said Heinrich Schwendener, who, as president of Geopower Basel, the consortium that includes Geothermal Explorers and the utility companies, was standing next to the borehole.
"It took me maybe half a minute to realize, hey, this is not a supersonic plane, this is my well," Mr. Schwendener said.
By that time, much of the city was in an uproar. In the newsroom of the city's main paper, Basler Zeitung, reporters dived under tables and desks, some refusing to move until a veteran editor barked at them to go get the story, said Philipp Loser, 28, a reporter there.
Aysel Mermer, 25, a waitress at the Restaurant Schiff near the Rhine River, said she thought a bomb had gone off.
Eveline Meyer, 44, a receptionist at a maritime exhibition, was on the phone with a friend and thought that her washing machine had, all by itself, started clattering with an unbalanced load. "I was saying to my friend, 'Am I now completely nuts?' " Ms. Meyer recalled. Then, she said, the line went dead.
Mr. Häring was rushed to police headquarters in a squad car so he could explain what had happened. By the time word slipped out that the project had set off the earthquake, Mr. Loser said, outrage was sweeping the city. The earthquakes, including three more above magnitude 3, rattled on for about a year - more than 3,500 in all, according to the company's sensors.
Although no serious injuries were reported, Geothermal Explorers' insurance company ultimately paid more than $8 million in mostly minor damage claims to the owners of thousands of houses in Switzerland and in neighboring Germany and France.
Optimism and Opportunity
In the United States, where the Basel earthquakes received little news coverage, the fortunes of geothermal energy were already on a dizzying rise. The optimistic conclusions of the Energy Department's geothermal report began driving interest from investors, as word trickled out before its official release.
In fall 2006, after some of the findings were presented at a trade meeting, Trae Vassallo, a partner at the firm Kleiner Perkins, phoned Ms. Petty, the geothermal researcher who was one of 18 authors on the report, according to e-mail messages from both women. That call eventually led Ms. Petty to found AltaRock and bring in, by Ms. Petty's tally, another six of the authors as consultants to the company or in other roles.
J. David Rogers, a professor and geological engineer at the Missouri University of Science and Technology who was not involved in the report, said such overlap of research and commercial interests was common in science and engineering but added that it might be perceived as a conflict of interest. "It's very, very satisfying to see something go from theory to application to actually making money and being accepted by society," Professor Rogers said. "It's what every scientist dreams of."
Ms. Petty said that her first "serious discussions" with Ms. Vassallo about forming a company did not come until the report was officially released in late January 2007. That June, Ms. Petty founded AltaRock with $4 million from Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures, an investment firm based in California.
The Basel earthquake hit more than a month before the Energy Department's report came out, but no reference to it was included in the report's spare and reassuring references to earthquake risks. Ms. Petty said the document had already been at the printer by the fall, "so there was no way we could have included the Basel event in the report."
Officials at AltaRock, with offices in Sausalito, Calif., and Seattle, insist that the company has learned the lessons of Basel and that its own studies indicate the project can be carried out safely. James T. Turner, AltaRock's senior vice president for operations, said the company had applied for roughly 20 patents on ways to improve the method.
Mr. Turner also asserted in a visit to the project site last month that AltaRock's monitoring and fail-safe systems were superior to those used in Basel.
"We think it's going to be pretty neat," Mr. Turner said as he stood next to a rig where the company plans to drill a hole almost two and a half miles deep. "And when it's successful, we'll have a good-news story that says we can extend geothermal energy."
AltaRock, in its seismic activity report, included the Basel earthquake in a list of temblors near geothermal projects, but the company denied that it had left out crucial details of the quake in seeking approval for the project in California. So far, the company has received its permit from the federal Bureau of Land Management to drill its first hole on land leased to the Northern California Power Agency, but still awaits a second permit to fracture rock.
"We did discuss Basel, in particular, the 3.4 event, with the B.L.M. early in the project," Mr. Turner said in an e-mail response to questions after the visit.
But Richard Estabrook, a petroleum engineer in the Ukiah, Calif., field office of the land agency who has a lead role in granting the necessary federal permits, gave a different account when asked if he knew that the Basel project had shut down because of earthquakes or that it had induced more than 3,500 quakes.
"I'll be honest," he said. "I didn't know that."
Mr. Estabrook said he was still leaning toward giving approval if the company agreed to controls that could stop the work if it set off earthquakes above a certain intensity. But, he said, speaking of the Basel project's shutdown, "I wish that had been disclosed."
Bracing for Tremors
There was a time when Anderson Springs, about two miles from the project site, had few earthquakes - no more than anywhere else in the hills of Northern California. Over cookies and tea in the cabin his family has owned since 1958, Tom Grant and his sister Cynthia Lora reminisced with their spouses over visiting the town, once famous for its mineral baths, in the 1940s and '50s. "I never felt an earthquake up here," Mr. Grant said .
Then came a frenzy of drilling for underground steam just to the west at The Geysers, a roughly 30-square-mile patch of wooded hills threaded with huge, curving tubes and squat power plants. The Geysers is the nation's largest producer of traditional geothermal energy. Government seismologists confirm that earthquakes were far less frequent in the past and that the geothermal project produces as many as 1,000 small earthquakes a year as the ground expands and contracts like an enormous sponge with the extraction of steam and the injection of water to replace it.
These days, Anderson Springs is a mixed community of working class and retired residents, affluent professionals and a smattering of artists. Everyone has a story about earthquakes. There are cats that suddenly leap in terror, guests who have to be warned about tremors, thousands of dollars of repairs to walls and cabinets that just do not want to stay together.
Residents have been fighting for years with California power companies over the earthquakes, occasionally winning modest financial compensation. But the obscure nature of earthquakes always gives the companies an out, says Douglas Bartlett, who works in marketing at Bay Area Rapid Transit in San Francisco, and with his wife, Susan, owns a bungalow in town.
"If they were creating tornadoes, they would be shut down immediately," Mr. Bartlett said. "But because it's under the ground, where you can't see it, and somewhat conjectural, they keep doing it."
Now, the residents are bracing for more. As David Oppenheimer, a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., explains it, The Geysers is heated by magma welling up from deep in the earth. Above the magma is a layer of granite-like rock called felsite, which transmits heat to a thick layer of sandstone-like material called graywacke, riddled with fractures and filled with steam.
The steam is what originally drew the power companies here. But the AltaRock project will, for the first time, drill deep into the felsite. Mr. Turner said that AltaRock, which will drill on federal land leased by the Northern California Power Agency, had calculated that the number of earthquakes felt by residents in Anderson Springs and local communities would not noticeably increase.
But many residents are skeptical.
"It's terrifying," said Susan Bartlett, who works as a new patient coordinator at the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco. "What's happening to all these rocks that they're busting into a million pieces?"
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18) New Military Command for Cyberspace
By THOM SHANKER
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/technology/24cyber.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Tuesday ordered the creation of the military's first headquarters designed to coordinate Pentagon efforts in the emerging battlefield of cyberspace and computer-network security, officials said.
Pentagon officials said Mr. Gates intends to nominate Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, currently director of the National Security Agency, for a fourth star and to take on the top job at the new organization, to be called Cybercom.
The new command's mission will be to coordinate the day-to-day operation - and protection - of military and Pentagon computer networks. Currently, the Defense Department operates 15,000 separate computer networks and more than seven million individual computers or information-technology devices, officials said.
The Obama administration has undertaken significant efforts to protect the nation from cyberattack and prepare for potential offensive operations against adversary computer networks. The first step was creating a position of White House director for cybersecurity issues.
But the plans raised concerns that respect for privacy, diplomatic rules and sovereignty may be harmed as the administration accelerates its efforts to detect and attack adversaries on global computer networks that disregard borders.
"I can't reiterate enough that this is not about the militarization of cyber," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, in discussing Mr. Gates's order on Tuesday.
"This is an internal Department of Defense reorganization," Mr. Whitman said. "It is focused only on military networks to better consolidate and streamline Department of Defense capabilities into a single command."
The officer in charge of Cybercom would report up military channels through the Strategic Command, based in Omaha, Neb., which previously was in charge of network warfare and is the headquarters for military efforts in areas like space and nuclear deterrence.
Operating within Strategic Command, the new headquarters would be referred to as a "sub-unified command," not unlike how subordinate four-star commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan report to another four-star commander at Central Command, in charge of all military operations in the Middle East.
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19) Arizona: New Abortion Restrictions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Southwest
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/24brfs-NEWABORTIONR_BRF.html?ref=us
The State Senate narrowly approved a bill to impose new restrictions on abortion, including a mandatory waiting period and a requirement for state-scripted disclosures by doctors. The Senate voted 16 to 12 to complete legislation action on the measure, which the House approved in March. The number of affirmative votes was the minimum needed for passage by the 30-member Senate. Under the bill, women seeking an abortion would have to wait 24 hours after their initial visit to the abortion provider. An existing law that requires parental approval for minors seeking to end a pregnancy would also be toughened.
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20) Arkansas: Review for Prison System
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/24brfs-REVIEWFORPRI_BRF.html?ref=us
Gov. Mike Beebe wants the state prison system to conduct an "in-depth investigation" after revelations that an inmate nearly died after guards left him lying naked in his own feces for a weekend in January. Mr. Beebe, left, said the incident, along with recent escapes and accusations that guards were given lap dances by a nurse, raised serious concerns about the prison system. The governor, a Democrat, stopped short of calling it a systemic problem, saying officials needed to "analyze each event" first. A prison lieutenant and a sergeant involved in the inmate's near-death have been fired.
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21) City Seeks New Powers in Its Stalled Fight Against Homelessness
By JULIE BOSMAN
June 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/nyregion/24homeless.html?ref=nyregion
In June 2004, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made a lofty promise to address one of the city's most intractable problems: he would reduce the homeless population of 38,000 by two-thirds in five years.
Today, with the total homeless population down only slightly, and with more families in shelters than five years ago, the administration is seeking state approval for a new set of policies designed to move families out more quickly, applying the same market-driven, incentive-based philosophy to homeless shelters that it has used in schools and antipoverty programs.
Under the new rules, nonprofit agencies that provide shelter beds under contract with the city would be paid more than the usual rate, which is roughly $100 a day, for each family that arrives. But after six months, if the agency has not been able to get the family into stable housing, the city would begin paying it less than the standard rate.
And city officials are trying to toughen rules and consequences for homeless families, forcing them to follow a strict code of conduct or risk being ejected from the shelter.
"The thing that we have been trying to introduce is a greater expectation of accountability, both by the providers and by the clients themselves," Linda I. Gibbs, the deputy mayor for health and human services, said in an interview. "We want them to overcome homelessness more quickly. We believe they are in shelter far longer than they need to be."
Shelter providers say that they are doing the best they can, and that the proposed payment structure could achieve the opposite of its intended result, especially since the city just imposed a 4 percent budget cut as part of reductions in virtually every city agency.
Christy Parque, the executive director of Homeless Services United, a coalition of more than 60 providers, said that further reductions "could result in an increased length of stay in shelter, because there will be fewer staff and resources to help clients address their problems and return to the community quickly."
Advocates for the homeless called the city's plans mean-spirited, and warned that they would threaten the safety of families, especially children, forced to leave the shelter with no place to go.
"It's an extraordinary change in what has been city policy for nearly three decades," said Steven Banks, the attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society. "It's striking that the current city administration and the current state administration would be returning to these shelter-termination regulations, which are really a relic of another, harsher era."
The attempt to evict families from shelters began under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, an effort that was blocked by the courts. The Bloomberg administration has been no more successful. In 2002, the city pursued a policy that would allow it to eject families it deemed uncooperative, but backed down and agreed to reserve the right to eject single adults, but not families.
Ms. Gibbs said that an ejection could result from a homeless family "refusing to look for housing, refusing to seek employment, anything that is an unreasonable refusal to participate in the steps they need to take to overcome their homelessness."
"The families need to understand that they can't just thumb their nose at the rules and have no consequences," she said.
One thing is indisputable: While the population of homeless single adults has gone down significantly in the last five years, the number of families sleeping in shelters is near an all-time high. According to the Web site for the Department of Homeless Services, there were 34,774 people in shelters last week, including 9,361 families - often single mothers with children.
About 150 organizations that hold contracts with the city operate most of the homeless shelters. (The city runs a small handful of its own shelters.)
The cost of providing shelter has risen. The city estimates that it costs roughly $36,000 a year to house a homeless family, up from $31,656 in 2004. The average stay in a shelter is about nine months.
City officials have privately expressed frustration at their inability to get a handle on the problem, despite efforts to expand homelessness prevention and introduce rental subsidy programs.
The new policies reflect the administration's determination to rid the system of families who stay in shelters for long stretches, sometimes rejecting apartments offered to them, while giving the shelter providers an incentive to get them out.
Under the new rules, which would take effect in January, the city would pay the agencies a 10 percent premium for the first six months that it houses a family. During that time, the agency is expected to push the family toward economic independence and permanent housing. But if the family stayed longer, the agencies would be paid 20 percent less than the standard rate.
But advocates for the homeless questioned the city's ability to avoid bureaucratic mistakes that could result in a family being wrongly ejected.
In May, a state-mandated program to charge rent to the working homeless was quickly suspended after it began with a dizzying series of errors from both state and city agencies. (City officials say the program is being revamped.)
State approval is required to make changes to social service policies. Anthony Farmer, a spokesman for the State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, said the state commissioner was considering the proposals.
Robert V. Hess, the city's commissioner of homeless services, said that the new policies would be put in place after a long rollout, staff training and orientation, and that ejections would occur only after a thorough review.
"At the end of the day, we're not putting policies in place that are intended, or will result in, people just arbitrarily having their shelter rights terminated," Mr. Hess said. "That's not what we're about."
Bonnie Stone, the executive director of Women in Need, a shelter for women and children, praised the city for its ability to house an ever-increasing number of people who needed help.
But the notion of ejecting a family, she said, made her uneasy.
"I believe that you only do that under huge, huge safety and due process, and not for small things," she said, pausing. "I think it is not what we do."
At the moment, shelter residents who resist following rules are frequently subject to another form of punishment: transfer to a shelter seen as less desirable.
Tina Rodriguez, a pink-haired 23-year-old with a silver stud in her lip, said she and her toddler son, Damonie, had been living in a shelter in Hell's Kitchen since September, and lately workers there had threatened that if she did not move out soon, she would be transferred to a so-called Next Step shelter. The city says such shelters offer more intensive case management, but among families, they are known for stricter rules and more crowded conditions.
Still, when Ms. Rodriguez was recently offered a studio apartment in Harlem, she rejected it. "I was scared to tell my worker that I didn't want it," she said, standing outside the Hell's Kitchen shelter as Damonie slept in a stroller. "But there was no living room. I can't live with a 2-year-old in an apartment like that. They're trying to force me into somewhere that I'm not comfortable."
Amanda Hayes, 24, said she entered the shelter system with her toddler, Xavier, in April after growing fed up with her living arrangements in the Bronx: sharing a one-bedroom apartment with her mother, adult brother and Xavier.
She needs no additional pressure from shelter workers to persuade her to move out, she said.
"I've been looking for work every day," Ms. Hayes said. "I don't need to be threatened about it at every turn."
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22) Supreme Court Says Child's Rights Violated by Strip Search
By DAVID STOUT
June 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/politics/26scotus.html?_r=1&hp
WASHINGTON - In a ruling of interest to educators, parents and students across the country, the Supreme Court ruled, 8 to 1, on Thursday that the strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona girl by school officials who were looking for prescription-strength drugs violated her constitutional rights.
The officials in Safford, Ariz., would have been justified in 2003 had they limited their search to the backpack and outer clothing of Savana Redding, who was in the eighth grade at the time, the court ruled. But in searching her undergarments, they went too far and violated her Fourth Amendment privacy rights, the justices said.
Had Savana been suspected of having illegal drugs that could have posed a far greater danger to herself and other students, the strip search, too, might have been justified, the majority said, in an opinion by Justice David H. Souter.
"In sum, what was missing from the suspected facts that pointed to Savana was any indication of danger to the students from the power of the drugs or their quantity, and any reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear," the court said. "We think that the combination of these deficiencies was fatal to finding the search reasonable."
In fact, no pills were found on Savana when her underwear was examined by two school officials, both women, who were acting on a tip passed along by another student.
Thursday's ruling sends the case back to the lower courts to assess what damages, if any, should be paid by the school district. But, by a vote of 7 to 2, the Supreme Court held that the individual officials in the case should not be held liable, because "clearly established law" at the time of the search did not show that it violated the Fourth Amendment.
The portion of the ruling exempting the officials from liability is likely to be greeted with relief by thousands of principals, teachers and other school officials who work to impart knowledge and maintain discipline in a fast-changing world, where children are growing up (or trying to) earlier than ever.
Many school districts already prohibit strip searches, or severely limit them, a fact that was brought out when the case was argued on April 21.
Justice Clarence Thomas was the only member of the court to conclude that the strip search of Savana Redding did not violate the Fourth Amendment. He asserted that the majority's finding second-guesses the measures that educators take to maintain discipline "and ensure the health and safety of the students in their charge."
The majority said it meant to cast "no ill reflection" on the assistant principal, Kerry Wilson, who ordered the search at a time when there were incidents of students using alcohol and tobacco. "Parents are known to overreact to protect their children from danger, and a school official with responsibility for safety may tend to do the same," Justice Souter wrote.
But Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not agree, and would not have protected the officials from liability. Justice Ginsburg singled out the assistant principal, noting that he had made Savana sit on a chair outside his office for more than two hours in what Justice Ginsburg called a "humiliating situation" when the case was argued.
"At no point did he attempt to call her parent," Justice Ginsburg wrote on Thursday. "Abuse of authority of that order should not be shielded by official immunity."
During the April argument, Justice Ginsburg seemed taken aback by the circumstances of the case, particularly that Savana came under suspicion because of a "tip" to officials from a classmate. "And nothing is done to check her veracity, nothing is done to follow up on it at all," the justice observed.
Justice Stevens wrote on Thursday that "it does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude."
The majority noted that students in a school setting are protected by something less than the "probable cause" standard that normally determines whether searches are reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. "The lesser standard for school searches could as readily be described as a moderate chance of finding evidence of wrongdoing," the court said.
But the search of Savana Redding, who Justice Stevens said was an honors student at the time, did not meet even the lower standard, the majority found. (Ms. Redding is now in college.)
Dan Capra, a Fordham Law School professor, issued a statement in which he said that the fundamental question about the ruling in Safford Unified School District v. Redding, No. 08-479, is "is whether school officials will ever actually be liable for such searches."
"According to the court, the law on the subject was not clearly established, and so the officials had qualified immunity," Mr. Capra said. "But every case will be an application of law to fact. Officials now know they can't do exactly what was done in Safford. But what if there is any change of material fact in the circumstances?"
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23) In the Andes, a Toxic Site Also Provides a Livelihood
By SIMON ROMERO
June 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/world/americas/25peru.html?ref=world
LA OROYA, Peru - Claudia Albino, a washerwoman who earns about $3 a day and lives in a one-room hovel with her family in this bleak town high in the Andes, might seem at first to have nothing to do with Ira Rennert, the reclusive New York billionaire who built one of the largest homes in the United States, an Italianate mansion sprawling over more than 66,000 square feet in the Hamptons.
But Mr. Rennert's privately held industrial empire includes the smelter with a towering smokestack that overlooks Ms. Albino's home, so the health and economic fate of her and thousands of others here rest on the corporate maneuvers he is carrying out.
La Oroya has been called one of the world's 10 most polluted places by the Blacksmith Institute, a nonprofit group that studies toxic sites. But for several months, the Peruvian smelting company in Mr. Rennert's empire has claimed that low metals prices prevented it from completing a timely cleanup to lower the emissions that have given this town such an ignoble distinction.
The tensions here over the lead emissions and the smelter's financial meltdown is precisely the kind of dire mix of foreign investment and environmental contamination feared by indigenous groups elsewhere in Peru, particularly in the country's Amazon basin, where protests over similar issues left dozens dead this month.
Citing financial difficulties, the smelter's Peruvian operators, who have idled most of its operations, have threatened to close entirely for several months, putting in danger 3,000 jobs at the plant and thousands more who rely on it like Ms. Albino, who washes clothes for the wives of smelter workers.
This week, some workers and residents protested against the possible closing, halting traffic and commerce along the highway that descends from La Oroya to the capital, Lima. Then on Tuesday, the government signaled that it might be open to extending the October deadline for the cleanup. Officials involved in talks on Wednesday said that one possible solution to the impasse would involve giving workers some control of the plant.
"This man Rennert, I've heard of him on television, of his great wealth and the homes he has around the world," said Ms. Albino. "As for me, I cannot afford to test the lead levels in my daughters' blood any longer," she said, attributing the stunted growth of her youngest daughter, 7, to the smelter's emissions.
Residents of La Oroya, with a population of 35,000, talk about the lead in their blood like people elsewhere discuss the weather. Ninety-seven percent of children under the age of 6 had lead levels that would be considered toxic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, according to a 2005 study by scientists from Saint Louis University.
But while some here seethe against Mr. Rennert and the company, Doe Run Peru, others defend them for providing work, making for a sharply divided town.
"We are thankful to Doe Run," said Elizabeth Canales, 40, a seamstress and a member of a company-supported group that teaches hygiene to poor families here. "It truly saddens me because I don't know if this is happening because there's a misunderstanding."
Some publicly praise Doe Run Peru while requesting, amid fear of retribution, anonymity to vent their anger at the company. "This town is owned by one company, and we vassals cannot be seen as disloyal to our owners," said one longtime worker.
The discord between those for and against the company festers in La Oroya's labyrinthine streets, packed with stands selling foods like seasoned guinea pig and bars catering to the plant's workers, who largely move here from other parts of Peru and earn salaries that dwarf those of other residents.
Insults and threats are common. Some workers at the plant recently paraded an effigy of Archbishop Pedro Barreto, an outspoken critic of the company's environmental record, burning it at the culmination of their protest.
"When insults don't work, the company resorts to intimidation, and when that fails, to blackmail, which is what it's doing now by saying it will shut the plant unless it gets an extension for its cleanup," said Pedro Córdova, 50, a production mechanic at the smelter who is suing the company over health claims related to a lung ailment.
Environmental activists in La Oroya said they saw parallels between Doe Run Peru's strategies here and those employed elsewhere by Renco, Mr. Rennert's holding company. Even as his fortune remained intact, they contend, some Renco companies in the United States faced complaints over environmental contamination and went into bankruptcy earlier this decade.
Through a spokesman in New York, Mr. Rennert declined to be interviewed, and Renco would say only that it was in talks aimed at "reaching a viable solution."
Doe Run Peru claims that it has "dramatically reduced" the toxic emissions at the smelter since buying it from Peru's government in 1997, leading to "a radical improvement in environmental conditions."
Still, researchers contend Doe Run Peru has misled officials by using 1997, the year it took control of the smelter, as a point of comparison for pollution levels, since contamination climbed that year. "Doe Run Peru has overseen an absolute increase in contamination in La Oroya," said Corey Laplante, an American scholar who researched La Oroya at the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law in Lima.
Despite being pressed by workers here to find a solution, officials in Lima this week said they had concerns about taking over or intervening in the company, pointing to legal battles that could arise from taking some control of a foreign-owned asset.
News reports that Renco had tried this month to buy the Swedish automaker Saab, led angry residents here to ask why Doe Run Peru could not complete its cleanup or prevent a shutdown of the smelter at a time when metal prices have begun to climb again.
Nearly everyone here wants the smelter to remain open and for the cleanup to proceed. But with Peru forging closer ties to the United States in Latin America through its new trade deal with Washington, some here question the benefits of such a pact.
"It's like we're pawns in a game," said Rosa Amaro, 52, a leader of an environmental group here. "What I still fail to understand is why we are exposed to the risks of an American investment," she added, "but not to the environmental protections enjoyed by the citizens of the United States."
Andrea Zarate contributed reporting from Lima, Peru.
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24) Detective Perjured Himself at a Youth's Shooting Trial
By DOMINICK TAO
June 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/nyregion/25perjury.html?ref=nyregion
A New York City police detective was convicted Wednesday of lying on the witness stand in 2007 when he testified in an attempted-murder trial, a finding that a Bronx judge based largely on a recording made on an MP3 player by a defendant the officer had questioned.
The detective, Christopher Perino, was convicted of three felony counts of perjury after the judge found that he had lied while testifying that he had never questioned the defendant, when, in fact, the recording proved he had. He faces up to seven years in prison on each count and is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 18.
The judge, State Supreme Court Justice James M. Kindler, allowed Mr. Perino to remain free on a $15,000 personal recognizance bond until then.
Mr. Perino, who opted for a nonjury trial, was terminated by the Police Department after his conviction, said Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman.
"We cannot even begin to address the public safety issues in the city if the testimony on which we must rely is perjured," the Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, said in a statement. "The damage is compounded when the person who offers untruthful testimony is a police officer who is sworn to uphold the law."
Mr. Perino's lawyer, Murray Richman, said he planned to appeal. "It's an upsetting verdict," he said. "I believe the police officer was just doing a good job to get a guy with a gun off the street."
The case originated in December 2005, when Detective Perino was investigating a shooting in the elevator of a building in the High Bridge neighborhood of the Bronx. A suspect, Erik Crespo, 17, was arrested six days after the shooting.
Mr. Crespo, who was listening to music on an MP3 player when he was brought to a Bronx station house, used the device to record Detective Perino questioning him, for an hour and 15 minutes, without his parents or a lawyer present.
During cross-examination at Mr. Crespo's trial, Mr. Perino denied that any such interrogation had taken place. According to a transcript of that trial, when Mark S. DeMarco, Mr. Crespo's lawyer, asked the detective if he had asked his client any questions, Mr. Perino replied: "That's correct. He wasn't questioned."
Mr. Crespo was sentenced to seven years in prison on a weapons charge; an attempted-murder charge was dropped when evidence of Mr. Perino's perjury surfaced.
Simon Akam contributed reporting.
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25) U.S. Jobless Claims Rise; G.D.P Revised Upward
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/business/economy/26econ.html?ref=business
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Labor Department said on Thursday that new jobless claims rose unexpectedly last week. And the number of people continuing to receive unemployment was higher than expected.
The figures indicate that jobs remain scarce even as the economy shows some signs of recovering from the longest recession since World War II.
A revised reading on gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation's output, said the economy posted a 5.5 percent annualized decline from January through March. That was slightly better than the 5.7 percent estimate made a month ago. Economists generally think the economy is shrinking at a slower rate, about 2 percent, in the current quarter.
During the quarter, businesses held larger stockpiles of goods than in previous quarters, and imports declined more sharply than previously estimated.
Initial claims for jobless benefits rose last week by 15,000 to a seasonally adjusted 627,000. Economists had expected a drop to 600,000. Several states reported more claims than expected from teachers, cafeteria workers and other school employees, a Labor Department analyst said.
The number of people who are continuing to receive unemployment insurance rose by 29,000, to 6.74 million, slightly above analysts' estimates of 6.7 million. The four-week average of claims, which smoothes out fluctuations, was largely unchanged, at 616,750.
Most economists still expect the number of initial unemployment insurance claims, which reflects the level of layoffs, to decline slowly in coming months as the recession bottoms out.
"We still firmly believe that the underlying trends in claims is downwards, but it is slow and uneven," Ian Shepherdson, chief United States economist for High Frequency Economics, wrote in a client note.
The number of people continuing to receive unemployment aid remains below the peak of 6.8 million reached on May 30. That means job losses are most likely slowing, economists said.
Meanwhile, the rebound in consumer spending in the first quarter was slightly less vigorous than previously reported. Consumers increased their spending at a 1.4 percent rate, down from a 1.5 percent growth rate estimated last month.
Still, that was the strongest showing in nearly two years and a huge improvement from the fourth quarter, when skittish consumers cut spending by the most in nearly three decades.
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