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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal urges you to attend a public meeting
JAIL KILLER COPS!
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!
Justice for Oscar Grant!
Drop All Charges Against JR Valrey!
End the Racist Death Penalty!
For Labor Action To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Wednesday, 28 October 2009, 7 PM
Niebyl Proctor Marxist Library
6501 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley CA
VIDEO: OPERATION SMALL AXE, narrated by JR Valrey, a short film that shows "the occupation of Black and Brown neighborhoods by a militarized local law enforcement apparatus that parallels, in many ways, the current experiences of neighborhoods of color in post-apartheid South Africa and of Palestinians on their own occupied land." -- Cynthia McKinney
SPEAKERS: JR Valrey - Minister of Information for the Prisoners of Conscience Committee (POCC), host of Block Report Radio, a producer at KPFA and associate editor of the SF Bay View,
Gerald Sanders - Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal,
Jack Bryson - father of two friends of Oscar Grant, who were with him on the BART platform the night he was murdered, and
Richard Brown - former SF 8 defendant.
JR VALREY was arrested and had his camera confiscated by the Oakland Police on the night of January 7th, 2009, for covering the street uprising following the murder of Oscar Grant. He was charged with felony arson! JR has consistently covered police brutality and terrorism. It is clear that the police are continuing to use all means at their disposal to stifle criticism of their repressive actions.
The BART cop who put a bullet in the back of the young Oscar Grant--while he was face down on the station platform--is Johannes Mehserle. With 45 police killings in Oakland in the past 5 years, Mehserle is the only cop to be charged with murder while on duty. But the cops are pulling out all the stops to avoid a conviction. Mehserle's lawyer put on a starkly racist argument for a change of venue, which succeeded recently in getting the cop's trial moved out of the city.
The next hearing date for JR Valrey is October 30th. Come out to show your opposition to this vindictive police prosecution! 9 AM, at Superior Court,1225 Fallon St, Oakland.
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL, an innocent man on death for 27 years now and also a journalist, faces renewed danger of execution. Mumia's appeals have been exhausted, and the Supreme Court will rule soon on the petition by the State of Pennsylvania, We must remain vigilant, and organize to free him!
-- The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 Oakland CA 94610
INFO: 510 763-2347
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There will be a follow-up October 17 Coalition meeting:
Sunday, November 1, 2:00 P.M.
Unitarian Church (Fireside Room)
1187 Franklin at Geary, SF (wheelchair accessible).
www.oct17awc.wordpress.com
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In Celebration of the second anniversary of the Edward Said Cultural Mural at SFSU and looking forward to our next steps of positive social change and justice, the Cesar Chavez Student Center and General Union of Palestinian Students Present:
BDS: A Quest for Justice, Human Rights and Peace
Key Note Address by Omar Barghouti
Panel by Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi and Dr. Judith Butler
Tuesday November 3rd, 2009
6PM Jack Adams Hall, Cesar Chavez Student Center, San Francisco State University
6pm-7pm: light refreshments
7pm: Welcome Address by the Dean of College of Ethnic Studies at SFSU, Ken Monteiro.
7:10 pm: Opening address by Paloma Dudum-Maya of the Cesar Chavez Student Center Governing Board and General Union of Palestinian Students.
7:20 pm: An Introduction by community activist and scholar Dr. Jess Ghannam
7:30 pm: Keynote Address by Omar Barghouti (all the way from Palestine)
8:10 pm: Panel by Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi and Dr. Judith Butler,
8:45 pm: Question and Answer
Omar BARGHOUTI is a leading organizer in the international movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the state of Israel. He is coming to the United States for a multi-city tour to build support for the growing and powerful international BDS movement. We urge you to attend and publicize the events and take this opportunity to learn more about the movement.
"To have a dialogue you have to have a certain minimal level of a common denominator based on a common vision for the ultimate solution based on equality and ending injustice. If you don't have that common denominator than it's negotiation between the stronger and weaker party and, as I've written elsewhere, you can't have a bridge between them but only a ladder where you go up or down not across ... I call this the master/slave type of coexistence ... A master and a slave can also reach an agreement where this is reality and you cannot challenge it and you make the best out of it.
There is no war, no conflict, nobody is killing anybody, but a master remains a master and the slave remains a slave -- so this is not the kind of peace that we the oppressed are seeking -- the minimum is to have a just peace. Only with justice can we have a sustainable peace. So dialogue does not work -- it has not worked in reality and cannot work in principle. Boycotts have worked in reality and in principle so there is absolutely no reason why they cannot work, because Israel has total impunity given the official support it gets from the west in all fields (economic, cultural, academic and so on). Without raising the price of its oppression, it will never give up; it will never concede on any of our rights." Omar Barghouti, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10562.shtml
co-Sponsored by:
US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, General Union of Palestinian Students, Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative, Al-Awda, Associated Students Women Center, National Council of Arab Americans, ANSWER, International Solidarity Movement, Jewish Voice for Peace, Middle East Children's Alliance, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, San Jose Justice for Palestinians, SF State College of Ethnic Studies, Arab Resource and Organizing Center, American Friends Service Committee, Bay Area Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid, Students for Justice in Palestine UCB, People of Color Alliance SFSU, US Palestinian Communities Network, Palestinian Youth Network
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Black is Back Coalition Rally and March: Stop
U.S. Occupation and War inside U.S. and Abroad!
Saturday, November 7 beginning at 10 am, Malcolm X Park, Washington DC
Washington, D.C. - A newly-formed Black coalition has announced a Rally and March on the White House to take place November 7, 2009 beginning in Washington, D.C.'s historic Malcolm X Park. The Rally and March are to protest the expanding U.S. wars and other policy initiatives that unfairly target African and other oppressed people around the world. Known as the Black is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, the coalition formed on September 12, 2009 during a meeting in Washington, D.C. of more than fifteen activists from various Black organizations, institutions and communities.
http://blackisbackcoalition.org/
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Emergency public protest meeting:
Kevin Cooper, Troy Davis and Mumia Abu-Jamal:
Innocent! BUT FACING EXECUTION
Hear:
Laura Moye, Director, Amnesty International's Death Penalty Abolition Campaign; actively working for several years with Troy Davis and his family in Georgia
Hans Bennett, Founder, Journalists for Mumia Abu-Jamal; Editor, Free Mumia News; Author, The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: Innocent Man on Death Row
Rebecca Doran, leading activist in Kevin Cooper's defense
Sunday, November 8, 2009 2:00 pm
Centro Del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street (between 15th and 16th Streets) San Francisco
Admission: $5.00 - $20 sliding scale. No one turned away for lack of funds.
Sponsor: Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, 510-268-9429
freemumia.org
[Also in Palo Alto Fri., Nov. 6, 7:30 pm,
Fellowship Hall, First Baptist Church, 305 N. California
Ave, 650-326-8837, peaceandjustice.org]
labor donated
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A DAY OF ACTION FOR MUMIA ABU-JAMAL & MUSLIM POLITICAL PRISONERS
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2009
WASHINGTON, DC
Special Note:
This mobilization replaces the one that The Peace And Justice Foundation and FUJA had initially planned for Nov 23rd.
The November 12 mobilization will include a press conference at the National Press Club, and a demonstration at the U.S. Department of Justice. This will be a joint mobilization effort involving The Peace And Justice Foundation, Families United for Justice in America (FUJA), and some deeply committed grassroots folk connected to International Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Volunteers are needed in the DC Metro area. To volunteer call (301) 762-9162 or e-mail: peacethrujustice@aol.com
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U.S. OUT OF IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN NOW!
FREE PALESTINE!
San Francisco March and Rally
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
11am, Civic Center Plaza
National March on Washington
on Saturday, March 20, 2010
Fri., March 19 Day of Action & Outreach in D.C.
People from all over the country are organizing to converge on Washington, D.C., to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.
On Saturday, March 20, 2010, there will be a massive National March & Rally in D.C. A day of action and outreach in Washington, D.C., will take place on Friday, March 19, preceding the Saturday march.
There will be coinciding mass marches on March 20 in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The national actions are initiated by a large number of organizations and prominent individuals. (see below)
Click here to become an endorser:
http://answer.pephost.org/site/Survey?SURVEY_ID=5940&ACTION_REQUIRED=URI_ACTION_USER_REQUESTS&autologin=true&link=endorse-body-1
Click here to make a donation:
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Donation?ACTION=SHOW_DONATION_OPTIONS&CAMPAIGN_ID=2302&autologin=true&donate=body-1&JServSessionIdr002=2yzk5fh8x2.app13b
We will march together to say "No Colonial-type Wars and Occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine!" We will march together to say "No War Against Iran!" We will march together to say "No War for Empire Anywhere!"
Instead of war, we will demand funds so that every person can have a job, free and universal health care, decent schools, and affordable housing.
March 20 is the seventh anniversary of the criminal war of aggression launched by Bush and Cheney against Iraq. One million or more Iraqis have died. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops have lost their lives or been maimed, and continue to suffer a whole host of enduring problems from this terrible war.
This is the time for united action. The slogans on banners may differ, but all those who carry them should be marching shoulder to shoulder.
Killing and dying to avoid the perception of defeat
Bush is gone, but the war and occupation in Iraq still go on. The Pentagon is demanding a widening of the war in Afghanistan. They project an endless war with shifting battlefields. And a "single-payer" war budget that only grows larger and larger each year. We must act.
Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were predicated on the imperial fantasy that the U.S. could create stable, proxy colonial-type governments in both countries. They were to serve as an extension of "American" power in these strategic and resource-rich regions.
That fantasy has been destroyed. Now U.S. troops are being sent to kill or be killed so that the politicians in uniform ("the generals and admirals") and those in three-piece suits ("our elected officials") can avoid taking responsibility for a military setback in wars that should have never been started. Their military ambitions are now reduced to avoiding the appearance of defeat.
That is exactly what happened in Vietnam! Avoiding defeat, or the perception of defeat, was the goal Nixon and Kissinger set for themselves when they took office in 1969. For this noble cause, another 30,000 young GIs perished before the inevitable troop pullout from Vietnam in 1973. The number of Vietnamese killed between 1969 and 1973 was greater by many hundreds of thousands.
All of us can make the difference - progress and change comes from the streets and from the grassroots.
The people went to the polls in 2008, and the enthusiasm and desire for change after eight years of the Bush regime was the dominant cause that led to election of a big Democratic Party majority in both Houses of Congress and the election of Barack Obama to the White House.
But it should now be obvious to all that waiting for politicians to bring real change - on any front - is simply a prescription for passivity by progressives and an invitation to the array of corporate interests from military contractors to the banks, to big oil, to the health insurance giants that dominate the political life of the country. These corporate interests work around the clock to frustrate efforts for real change, and they are the guiding hand behind the recent street mobilizations of the ultra-right.
It is up to us to act. If people had waited for politicians to do the right thing, there would have never been a Civil Rights Act, or unions, women's rights, an end to the Vietnam war or any of the profound social achievements and basic rights that people cherish.
It is time to be back in the streets. Organizing centers are being set up in cities and towns throughout the country.
We must raise $50,000 immediately just to get started. Please make your contribution today. We need to reserve buses, which are expensive ($1,800 from NYC, $5,000 from Chicago, etc.). We have to print 100,000 leaflets, posters and stickers. There will be other substantial expenses as March 20 draws closer.
Please become an endorser and active supporter of the March 20 National March on Washington.
Please make an urgently needed tax-deductible donation today. We can't do this without your active support.
The initiators of the March 20 National March on Washington (preceded by the March 19 Day of Action and Outreach in D.C.) include: the ANSWER Coalition; Muslim American Society Freedom; National Council of Arab Americans; Cynthia McKinney; Malik Rahim, co-founder of Common Ground Collective; Ramsey Clark; Cindy Sheehan; Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK; Deborah Sweet, Director, World Can't Wait; Mike Ferner, President, Veterans for Peace; Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild; Ron Kovic, author of "Born on the 4th of July"; Juan Jose Gutierrez, Director, Latino Movement USA; Col. Ann Wright (ret.); March Forward!; Partnership for Civil Justice; Palestinian American Women Association; Alliance for a Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines; Alliance for Global Justice; Claudia de la Cruz, Pastor, Iglesia San Romero de Las Americas-UCC; Phil Portluck, Social Justice Ministry, Covenant Baptist Church, D.C.; Blase & Theresa Bonpane, Office of the Americas; Coalition for Peace and Democracy in Honduras; Comite Pro-Democracia en Mexico; Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos; Comites de Base FMLN, Los Angeles; Free Palestine Alliance; GABRIELA Network; Justice for Filipino American Veterans; KmB Pro-People Youth; Students Fight Back; Jim Lafferty, Executive Director, National Lawyers Guild - LA Chapter; LEF Foundation; National Coalition to Free the Angola 3; Community Futures Collective; Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival; Companeros del Barrio; Barrio Unido for Full and Unconditional Amnesty, Bay Area United Against War.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.answercoalition.org/
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 213-251-1025
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Oakland's Judge Jacobson ruled at 4:00PM Friday, October 16 to move the trial of Johannes Mehserle, killer of unarmed Oscar Grant, OUT OF OAKLAND. The location of the trial venue has not been announced.
In the case of an innocent verdict, folks are encouraged to head to Oakland City Hall ASAP to express our outrage in a massive and peaceful way! Our power is in our numbers! Oscar Grant's family and friends need our support!
For more information:
Contact BAMN at 510-502-9072
letters@bamn.com
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Cleve Jones Speaks At Gay Rights Rally In Washington, DC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvC3hVXZpc4
Free the SF8: Drop the Charges!
by Bill Carpenter ( wcarpent [at] ccsf.edu )
Monday Oct 12th, 2009 11:20 AM
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/10/12/18625220.php
Sony Piece of crap (Hilarious!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I-JByPDJm0
Sick For Profit
http://sickforprofit.com/videos/
Fault Lines: Despair & Revival in Detroit - 14 May 09 - Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ7VL907Qb0&feature=related
VIDEO INTERVIEW: Dan Berger on Political Prisoners in the United States
By Angola 3 News
Angola 3 News
37 years ago in Louisiana, 3 young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000-acre former slave plantation called Angola. In 1972 and 1973 prison officials charged Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King with murders they did not commit and threw them into 6x9 ft. cells in solitary confinement, for over 36 years. Robert was freed in 2001, but Herman and Albert remain behind bars.
http://angola3news.blogspot.com/2009/09/video-dan-berger-on-political-prisoners.html
Taking Aim Radio Program with
Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone
The Chimera of Capitalist Recovery, Parts 1 and 2
http://www.takingaimradio.com/shows/audio.html
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JROTC MUST GO!
The San Francisco Board of Education has re-installed the Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corps in San Francisco schools -- including allowing it to count for Physical Education credits.
This is a complete reversal of the 2006 decision to end JROTC altogether in San Francisco public schools. Our children need a good physical education program, not a death education program!
With the economy in crisis; jobs and higher education for youth more unattainable; the lure, lies and false promises of military recruiters is driving more and more of our children into the military trap.
This is an economic draft and the San Francisco Board of Education is helping to snare our children to provide cannon fodder for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and for over 700 U.S. military bases around the world!
We can't depend upon "friendly politicians" who, while they are campaigning for office claim they are against the wars but when they get elected vote in favor of military recruitment--the economic draft--in our schools. We can't depend upon them. That has been proven beyond doubt!
It is up to all of us to come together to stop this NOW!
GET JROTC AND ALL MILITARY RECRUITERS OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS NOW!
Write, call, pester and ORGANIZE against the re-institution of JROTC in our San Francisco public schools NOW!
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
San Francisco Board of Education
555 Franklin Street, 1st Floor
San Francisco, CA 94102
415/241-6427, (415) 241-6493
cascoe@sfusd.edu
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HELP VFP PUT THIS BOOK IN YOUR HIGH SCHOOL OR PUBLIC LIBRARY
For a donation of only $18.95, we can put a copy of the book "10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military" into a public or high school library of your choice. [Reason number 1: You may be killed]
A letter and bookplate will let readers know that your donation helped make this possible.
Putting a book in either a public or school library ensures that students, parents, and members of the community will have this valuable information when they need it.
Don't have a library you would like us to put it in? We'll find one for you!
https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/826/t/9311/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=4906
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Showdown In Chicago
The Showdown in Chicago is underway! Thousands of Americans are in the midst of a series of demonstrations against Wall Street banks and their lobbyists to call for financial reform. Check out the latest news:
http://www.showdowninchicago.org/
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EYE WITNESS REPORTS FROM GAZA Video Free Gaza News October 22,2009
http://www.youtube.com/gazafriends#p/a/1/nHa-CzNCF3c
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ANSWER Statement on Proposed SF Parking Meter Hours
The ANSWER Coalition-SF Bay Area strongly opposes the proposal to extend parking meter hours in San Francisco. The SFMTA, the Metropolitan Transit Agency, is proposing to have parking meters in most of SF run until midnight Monday-Saturday, and from 11 am-6 pm on Sundays!
This is another attempt by the politicians to solve the city's budget crisis by squeezing every last dollar they can out of working people. They have outrageously jacked up MUNI fares, other city fees and parking fines. At the same time they have let the big banks, developers and other wealthy corporate interests-the ones who have created the current economic and budget crisis-off the hook.
The DPT (Department of Parking and Traffic) has already begun a policy of "enhanced enforcement," super-aggressively ticketing vehicles from 9:01 am to 5:59 pm, Monday-Saturday. Every day in every working class neighborhood of SF you can see the booted cars and trucks. On top of the $53, $63 and higher parking tickets, it costs over $200 just to get a boot removed! If your car gets towed, you have to pay $400 or more to get it back. This is causing many low-income people to lose their vehicles.
City officials are trying to mislead people by falsely claiming that the reason for extending meter hours is to collect more quarters and "open up more parking spaces." What they really want is to hit us with thousands more high-priced tickets, and then collect the ransom for booted and towed cars.
This is a class issue. The rich and the well-to-do don't have to worry about where to park in this small and crowded city. They have garages or can afford to pay for parking. It is overwhelmingly working class people who are being hit and who will be hit much, much harder if the new policy goes into effect. Many residents in neighborhoods with meters have no choice but to park at meters after 6 pm and move their vehicles before 9 am the next morning. There just aren't enough spaces otherwise.
As Cristina Gutierrez of Barrio Unido, an immigrant rights group opposed to the plan, asked: "What are we supposed to do, run out of our homes every hour at night to feed the meter?"
But the MTA board and some misguided individuals are trying to pose the issue as MUNI riders vs. car drivers. Some have even ignorantly asserted that if you own a car, you can't possibly be poor. Really? Tell that to the growing number of people forced to LIVE in their cars due to the depression!
The reality is that many people in SF both ride MUNI and own cars (some ride bikes, too). For a lot of people getting to work, shopping, medical appointments, etc. requires a car. That's especially true for families and for people whose jobs are outside SF or not easily accessible by mass transit. Posing the issue as bus riders vs. car riders is false and reactionary.
Does MUNI need more funding? Of course. Should MUNI fares be cut and service increased? No question about it. The issue is: Who should pay?
While taxes, fees, fines, fares, etc., etc, have been constantly increased for us, the taxes on corporate profits have been going down. Many big banks and corporations have been able to avoid paying income tax altogether. While we're told that there's no money for people's needs, $500,000,000 is spent every day on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trillions of dollars have been handed over to the biggest banks in just the last year.
It's time to say: Enough is Enough! It's time for the politicians to stop trying to make working people pay for the economic crisis that the rich created. It's time to make those who can afford it-big business-pay for the services that the people of the city, state and country need.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism
http://www.ANSWERcoalition.org http://www.answersf.org
answer@answersf.org
2489 Mission St. Rm. 24
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
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This is a must-see video about the life of Oscar Grant, a young man who loved his family and was loved by his family. It's important to watch to understand the tremendous loss felt by his whole family as a result of his cold-blooded murder by BART police officers--Johannes Mehserle being the shooter while the others held Oscar down and handcuffed him to aid Mehserle in the murder of Oscar Grant January 1, 2009.
The family wants to share this video here with you who support justice for Oscar Grant.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/21/18611878.php
WE DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OSCAR GRANT!
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Urgent: Ahmad Sa'adat transferred to isolation in Ramon prison!
http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org/
Imprisoned Palestinian national leader Ahmad Sa'adat, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was transferred on August 11, 2009 to Ramon prison in the Naqab desert from Asqelan prison, where he had been held for a number of months. He remains in isolation; prior to his transfer from Asqelan, he had been held since August 1 in a tiny isolation cell of 140 cm x 240 cm after being penalized for communicating with another prisoner in the isolation unit.
Attorney Buthaina Duqmaq, president of the Mandela Association for prisoners' and detainees' rights, reported that this transfer is yet another continuation of the policy of repression and isolation directed at Sa'adat by the Israeli prison administration, aimed at undermining his steadfastness and weakening his health and his leadership in the prisoners' movement. Sa'adat has been moved repeatedly from prison to prison and subject to fines, harsh conditions, isolation and solitary confinement, and medical neglect. Further reports have indicated that he is being denied attorney visits upon his transfer to Ramon.
Ahmad Sa'adat undertook a nine-day hunger strike in June in order to protest the increasing use of isolation against Palestinian prisoners and the denial of prisoners' rights, won through long and hard struggle. The isolation unit at Ramon prison is reported to be one of the worst isolation units in terms of conditions and repeated violations of prisoners' rights in the Israeli prison system.
Sa'adat is serving a 30 year sentence in Israeli military prisons. He was sentenced on December 25, 2008 after a long and illegitimate military trial on political charges, which he boycotted. He was kidnapped by force in a military siege on the Palestinian Authority prison in Jericho, where he had been held since 2002 under U.S., British and PA guard.
Sa'adat is suffering from back injuries that require medical assistance and treatment. Instead of receiving the medical care he needs, the Israeli prison officials are refusing him access to specialists and engaging in medical neglect and maltreatment.
The Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat demands an end to this isolation and calls upon all to protest at local Israeli embassies and consulates (the list is available at: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/ About+the+Ministry/Diplomatic+mission/Web+Sites+of+Israeli+ Missions+Abroad.htm) and to write to the International Committee of the Red Cross and other human rights organizations to exercise their responsibilities and act swiftly to demand that the Israelis ensure that Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners receive needed medical care and that this punitive isolation be ended. Email the ICRC, whose humanitarian mission includes monitoring the conditions of prisoners, at jerusalem..jer@icrc.org, and inform them about the urgent situation of Ahmad Sa'adat!
Ahmad Sa'adat has been repeatedly moved in an attempt to punish him for his steadfastness and leadership and to undermine his leadership in the prisoners' movement. Of course, these tactics have done nothing of the sort. The Palestinian prisoners are daily on the front lines, confronting Israeli oppression and crimes. Today, it is urgent that we stand with Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners against these abuses, and for freedom for all Palestinian prisoners and for all of Palestine!
The Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat
http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org
info@freeahmadsaadat.org
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Troy Anthony Davis is an African American man who has spent the last 18 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. There is no physical evidence tying him to the crime and seven out of nine witnesses have recanted. New evidence and new testimony have been presented to the Georgia courts, but the justice system refuses to consider this evidence, which would prove Troy Davis' innocence once and for all.
Sign the petition and join the NAACP, Amnesty International USA, and other partners in demanding justice for Troy Davis!
http://www.iamtroy.com/
For Now, High Court Punts on Troy Davis, on Death Row for 18 Years
By Ashby Jones
Wall Street Journal Law Blog
June 30, 2009
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/06/30/for-now-high-court-punts-on-troy-davis-on-death-row-for-18-years/
Take action now:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&aid=12361&ICID=A0906A01&tr=y&auid=5030305
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Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
New videos from April 24 Oakland Mumia event
http://abu-jamal-news.com/article?name=jlboak
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense in the U.S. Our legal effort is the front line of the battle for Mumia's freedom and life. His legal defense needs help. The costs are substantial for our litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court and at the state level. To help, please make your checks payable to the National Lawyers Guild Foundation (indicate "Mumia" on the bottom left). All donations are tax deductible under the Internal Revenue Code, section 501(c)(3), and should be mailed to:
It is outrageous and a violation of human rights that Mumia remains in prison and on death row. His life hangs in the balance. My career has been marked by successfully representing people facing death in murder cases. I will not rest until we win Mumia's case. Justice requires no less.
With best wishes,
Robert R. Bryan
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT!
FLASHPOINTS Interview with Innocent San Quentin Death Row Inmate
Kevin Cooper -- Aired Monday, May 18,2009
http://www.flashpoints.net/#GOOGLE_SEARCH_ENGINE
To learn more about Kevin Cooper go to:
savekevincooper.org
LINKS
San Francisco Chronicle article on the recent ruling:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/13/BAM517J8T3.DTL
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling and dissent:
http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2009/05/11/05-99004o.pdf
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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C. ARTICLES IN FULL
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1) Bank failures top 100,
only part of industry woes
By DANIEL WAGNER, AP Business Writer
October 24, 2009
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091024/ap_on_bi_ge/us_bank_failures
2) Arizona May Put State Prisons in Private Hands
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24prison.html?hp
3) Carefully Cleaning Up the Garbage at Los Alamos
By MICHAEL COOPER
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24alamos.html?ref=us
4) Hawaii: Protesting School Closings
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | West
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24brfs-PROTESTINGSC_BRF.html?ref=us
5) Food Label Program to Suspend Operations
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/business/24food.html?ref=business
6) Running in the Shadows
Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways
By IAN URBINA
October 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/us/26runaway.html?_r=1&hp
7) States Pressed Into New Role on Medical Marijuana
By KIRK JOHNSON
October 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/us/26marijuana.html?hp
8) After Reform Passes
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
October 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/opinion/26krugman.html
9) Rebel British soldier calls for Afghan exit
Thousands march in London anti-war demo
Mark Townsend and Rajeev Syal
The Observer, Sunday 25 October 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/25/rebel-soldier-wants-afghan-exit
10) Struggling Iraq vet may lose his anchor
His wife, brought here illegally at age 6, is about to be deported. 'She's my everything,' her husband says.
By Teresa Watanabe
October 26, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-immig-soldier26-2009oct26,0,4800387,full.story
11) Israel demolishes two Palestinian homes in Jerusalem
Tue Oct 27, 2009 7:34am EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLR381627
12) Changing the World
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/opinion/27herbert.html?hp
13) The Case for More Stimulus
Editorial
October 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/opinion/27tue1.html?hp
14) German Limits on War Face Afghan Reality
By NICHOLAS KULISH
October 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/27germany.html?ref=world
15) Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll
By DEXTER FILKINS, MARK MAZZETTI and JAMES RISEN
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?hp
16)California: Court to Reconsider Secrets Case
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
National Briefing | West
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/us/28brfs-COURTTORECON_BRF.html?ref=world
17) Push to Legalize Marijuana Gains Ground in California
By JESSE McKINLEY
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/us/28pot.html?ref=us
18) U.S. to Protect Populous Afghan Areas, Officials Say
"...the debate is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed."
By THOM SHANKER, PETER BAKER and HELENE COOPER
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28policy.html?ref=us
19) U.S. Use of Drones Queried by U.N.
By REUTERS
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/28nations.html?ref=us
20) Newark Mayor Backed Bloomberg, Then Got Funds
By DAVID W. CHEN
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/nyregion/28booker.html?ref=nyregion
21) Union Votes Go Against Cuts at Ford
"At Ford's largest assembly plant, where nearly 4,000 workers build pickup trucks and small sport utility vehicles near Kansas City, Mo., 92 percent voted against the deal, according to results posted on the Local 249 Web site. Workers at five plants in Michigan also have voted it down."
By NICK BUNKLEY
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/business/28ford.html?ref=business
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1) Bank failures top 100,
only part of industry woes
By DANIEL WAGNER, AP Business Writer
October 24, 2009
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091024/ap_on_bi_ge/us_bank_failures
WASHINGTON - The cascade of bank failures this year surpassed 100 on Friday, the most in nearly two decades. And the trouble in the banking system from bad loans and the recession goes even deeper than the number suggests.
Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other banks remain open even though they are as weak as many that have been shuttered. Regulators are seizing banks slowly and selectively - partly to avoid inciting panic and partly because buyers for bad banks are hard to find.
Going slow buys time. An economic recovery could save some banks that would otherwise go under. But if the recovery is slow and smaller banks' finances get even worse, it could wind up costing even more.
The bank failures, 106 in all, are the most in any year since 181 collapsed in 1992, at the end of the savings-and-loan crisis. On Friday, regulators took over three small Florida banks - Partners Bank and Hillcrest Bank Florida, both of Naples, and Flagship National Bank in Bradenton - along with American United Bank of Lawrenceville, Ga., Bank of Elmwood in Racine, Wis., Riverview Community Bank in Otsego, Minn., and First Dupage Bank in Westmont, Ill.
When a bank fails, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. swoops in, usually on a Friday afternoon. It tries to sell off the bank's assets to buyers and cover its liabilities, primarily customer deposits. It taps the insurance fund to cover the rest.
Bank failures have cost the FDIC's fund that insures deposits an estimated $25 billion this year and are expected to cost $100 billion through 2013. To replenish the fund, the agency wants banks to pay in advance $45 billion in premiums that would have been due over the next three years.
The FDIC won't say how deep a hole its deposit insurance fund is in. It can tap a credit line from the Treasury of up to a half-trillion dollars to cover the gap.
The list of banks in trouble is getting longer. At the end of June, the FDIC had flagged 416 as being at risk of failure, up from 305 at the end of March and 252 at the beginning of the year.
Yet the pace of actual bank failures appears to be slowing. The FDIC seized 24 banks in July, 11 in September and 11 in October.
If any bank poses an immediate danger to customers or the broader financial system, regulators close it immediately, bank supervisors said. The issue is murkier for troubled banks that might qualify to close but whose closings might still be postponed or even prevented.
The FDIC's first priority, spokesman Andrew Gray said, is to maintain public confidence in the banking system. "As evidenced by the stability of insured deposits throughout last year, this mission has been a success," he said.
He said public confidence isn't reason enough to delay a bank closing, because legally the decision to close rests with whoever chartered the bank - a state or federal agency.
But more than a dozen experts, including current and former regulators, bankers and lawyers, say the FDIC's mission to maintain public confidence in the banking system contributes to the go-slow approach.
"The FDIC was set up to create confidence and prevent bank runs," says Mark Williams, a former bank examiner for the Federal Reserve. Being too aggressive about bank closings "can be counter to the mission."
Sarah Bloom Raskin, Maryland's top banking regulator, said: "Technically it's the states who decide, but in reality it's the FDIC calling you to say" when the bank will be closed.
Last fall, the financial turmoil was rooted in bad bets that the nation's biggest banks, like Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., had made on complicated, high-risk mortgage investments.
Smaller banks have been undone by something more conventional - real estate, construction and industrial loans that have soured as the recession has deepened. Defaults are up as developers abandon failing projects and landlords can't meet their loan payments.
Small- and mid-sized banks hold lots of those loans and have been hurt more than big ones by the sinking commercial real estate market, especially in states like California, Georgia and Illinois. As defaults rise, these banks must set aside more money to cover losses.
For the banks, this means mounting losses and shrinking reserves.
In a healthy economy, Williams said, the Fed and the FDIC would be inclined to close such weak banks. But these days, those agencies and other regulators prefer to hold off, hoping an economic recovery will eventually restore the health of some of the banks.
But the recovery is expected to be slow.
Americans remain hesitant to spend money because of job losses, flat wages, tight credit and high debt. Their cutbacks have triggered tens of thousands of business failures.
Abandoned retail space in downtowns and suburban malls means no rental income for property owners. As landlords default on real estate loans, they weaken the banks that hold the loans.
The situation now is especially grave in Southern California, Georgia and Illinois, which have some of the highest home foreclosure rates. Twenty banks have closed in Georgia alone.
Individual bank depositors aren't at risk when a bank fails. Their money is guaranteed up to $250,000 by the government. Ever conscious of maintaining public confidence, agency officials hammer this point in public statements.
When weak banks are allowed to stay open, their growing losses potentially can drain the FDIC's deposit insurance fund faster, says Bert Ely, an independent banking consultant.
Federal agencies aren't the only ones with an interest in slowing the pace of bank closings. State regulators with closer ties to local communities want to avoid the ripple effects when a town loses its main source of consumer and business credit, Williams said.
But finding buyers for wobbly banks has been tough.
FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair acknowledged as much in testimony this month before a Senate panel. The FDIC has been offering to share buyers' losses on the assets being transferred, she said.
"In the past several months investor interest has been low," she said in prepared testimony.
In an effort to find more potential buyers, the FDIC has relaxed the rules for private-equity firms to buy banks. In the past, regulators had feared such a move would allow investors to protect themselves from the cost of bank failures, escaping serious consequences while drawing down the FDIC's fund.
An early success of the new strategy was a deal announced this month to sell assets from Corus Bank of Chicago to a group of private investors. But there still aren't enough buyers to absorb quickly all the assets held by at-risk banks.
That's because there are so many weak and failing banks on the market - and so few others strong enough to buy them. That's one reason it's hard to know how many more banks could be closed in coming months, said Daniel Alpert, Managing Partner of the New York investment bank Westwood Capital LLC.
"How many banks will survive?" Alpert asked.
"Loans are still deteriorating, but there are glimmers of hope in the economy. Ultimately, it's all about employment."
AP Business Writers Marcy Gordon in Washington and Sara Lepro in New York contributed to this report.
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2) Arizona May Put State Prisons in Private Hands
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24prison.html?hp
FLORENCE, Ariz. - One of the newest residents on Arizona's death row, a convicted serial killer named Dale Hausner, poked his head up from his television to look at several visitors strolling by, each of whom wore face masks and vests to protect against the sharp homemade objects that often are propelled from the cells of the condemned.
It is a dangerous place to patrol, and Arizona spends $4.7 million each year to house inmates like Mr. Hausner in a super-maximum-security prison. But in a first in the criminal justice world, the state's death row inmates could become the responsibility of a private company.
State officials will soon seek bids from private companies for 9 of the state's 10 prison complexes that house roughly 40,000 inmates, including the 127 here on death row. It is the first effort by a state to put its entire prison system under private control.
The privatization effort, both in its breadth and its financial goals, demonstrates what states around the country - broke, desperate and often overburdened with prisoners and their associated costs - are willing to do to balance the books. Arizona officials hope the effort will put a $100 million dent in the state's roughly $2 billion budget shortfall.
"Let's not kid ourselves," said State Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican who supports private prisons. "If we were not in this economic environment, I don't think we'd be talking about this with the same sense of urgency."
Private prison companies generally build facilities for a state, then charge them per prisoner to run them. But under the Arizona legislation, a vendor would pay $100 million up front to operate one or more prison complexes. Assuming the company could operate the prisons more cheaply or efficiently than the state, any savings would be equally divided between the state and the private firm.
The privatization move has raised questions - including among some people who work for private prison companies - about the private sector's ability to handle the state's most hardened criminals. While executions would still be performed by the state, officials said, the Department of Corrections would relinquish all other day-to-day operations to the private operator and pay a per-diem fee for each prisoner.
"I would not want to be the warden of death row," said Todd Thomas, the warden of a prison in Eloy, Ariz., run by the Corrections Corporation of America. The company, the country's largest private prison operator, has six prisons in Arizona with inmates from other states.
"That's not to say we couldn't," Mr. Thomas said. "But the liability is too great. I don't think any private entity would ever want to do that."
James Austin, a co-author of a Department of Justice study in 2001 on prison privatization and president of the JFA Institute, a corrections consulting firm, said private companies tended to oversee minimum- and medium-security inmates and had little experience with the most dangerous prisoners.
"As for death row," Mr. Austin said, "it is a very visible entity, and if something bad happens there, you will have a pretty big news story for the Legislature and governor to explain."
Arizona is no stranger to private prisons or, for that matter, aggressive privatization efforts (recently, the state put up for sale several government buildings housing executive branch offices in Phoenix). Nearly 30 percent of the state's prisoners are being held in prisons operated by private companies outside the state's 10 complexes.
In addition, other states, including Alaska and Hawaii, have contracts with private companies like Corrections Corporation of America to house their prisoners in Arizona.
For advocates of prison privatization, the push here breathes a bit of life into a movement that has been on the decline across the country as cost savings from prison privatizations have often failed to materialize, corrections officers unions have resisted the efforts and high-profile problems in privately run facilities have drawn unwanted publicity
"We have private prisons in Arizona already, and we are very happy with the performance and the savings we get from them," said Representative John Kavanagh, a Republican who is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and an architect of the new legislation authorizing the privatization. "I think that they are the future of corrections in Arizona."
Under the legislation, any bidder would have to take an entire complex - many of them mazes of multiple levels of security risks and complexity - and would not be permitted to pick off the cheapest or easiest buildings and inmates. The state also wants to privatize prisoners' medical care.
Louise Grant, a spokeswoman for Corrections Corporation of America, said the high-security prisoners would be well within the company's management capabilities. "We expect we will be there to make a proposal to the state" for at least some of its complexes up for bid, Ms. Grant said.
In pure financial terms, it is not clear how well the state would make out with the privatization. The 2001 study for the Department of Justice found that private prisons saved most states little money (there has been no equivalent study since). Indeed, many states, struggling to keep up with the cost of corrections, have closed prisons when possible, and sought changes in sentencing to reduce crowding in the last two years.
As tough sentencing laws and the ensuing increase in prisoners began to press on state resources in the 1980s, private prison companies attracted some states with promises of lower costs. The private prison boom lasted into the 1990s. Throughout the years, there have been high-profile riots, escapes and other violent incidents. The companies also do not generally provide the same wages and benefits as states, which has resulted in resistance from unions and concerns that the private prisons attract less-qualified workers.
Then the federal government stepped in, with a surge of new immigrant prisoners, and began to contract with the private companies. The number of federal prisoners in private prisons in the United States has more than doubled, to 32,712 in 2008 from 15,524 in 2000. The number of state prisoners in privately run prisons has increased to 93,500 from 75,000 in that time.
With bad economic times again driving many decisions about state resources, other states are sure to watch Arizona's experiment closely.
"There simply isn't the money to keep these people incarcerated, and the alternative is to free many of them or lower cost," said Ron Utt, a senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group whose work for privatization was cited by one Arizona lawmaker.
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3) Carefully Cleaning Up the Garbage at Los Alamos
By MICHAEL COOPER
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24alamos.html?ref=us
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan Project-era dump here. At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world's first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.
But now a team of workers is using $212 million in federal stimulus money to clean up the 65-year-old, six-acre dump, which was used by the scientists who built the world's first atomic bomb. They are approaching the job like an archeological dig - only with even greater care, since some of the things they unearth are likely to be radioactive, while others may be explosive.
The dump has become part of the $6 billion stimulus program to clean up the toxic legacy of the arms race, which is one of the biggest sources of direct federal contracts in the $787 billion stimulus act. More than $1.9 billion is being spent at the Hanford site in Washington, the home of the nuclear reactor that made the plutonium for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. Another $1.6 billion is being spent cleaning up a Savannah River site, in South Carolina.
After the stimulus bill passed, some Republicans questioned the wisdom of devoting so much money to nuclear cleanups, noting that the Department of Energy's environmental management program had been bedeviled by cost overruns in the past. Democrats countered that the labor-intensive projects would create many jobs while advancing the stimulus act's goal of improving the environment.
They also noted that the money was only a down payment on what is still a staggering task: the Department of Energy is responsible for cleaning up 107 sites, with as much acreage as Delaware and Rhode Island combined, in work that could take decades and cost up to $260 billion to complete.
Nearly 73,000 people have applied for stimulus jobs cleaning up nuclear sites since the program was announced, the Department of Energy says, and more than 10,800 positions have been saved or created with the money.
Here at Los Alamos, some of the first work involves tearing down buildings and cleaning up land at what is called Technical Area 21. It was an isolated mesa in 1945 when the laboratory moved its plutonium processing operations there after a fire broke out uncomfortably close to its original plant near the center of town. But the town has grown since then, and now several businesses - including a hardware store, an auto repair shop and the local newspaper - are right across the street from the old dump.
Since the dump, the laboratory's first, was used only from 1944 through 1948, the cleanup team had to do a great deal of detective work to figure out what might be in it.
"You look for every possible shred of evidence that you can to give you an idea of what kind of surprises you might encounter," said Allan B. Chaloupka, who directs the decontamination and decommissioning program.
The team members pored over wartime classified documents and interviewed old-timers to learn what materials might have found their way into the dump, and took soil samples to test their estimates of how much plutonium might be buried there. They debriefed a laboratory worker who, as a young man, once fell into it.
They asked scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory to come up with worst-case scenarios of how explosive the chemicals dumped there might have grown over the years - and then they blew up the equivalent amounts of dynamite to test all the safety measures that they would be taking. While the laboratory has worked to assure the public that the work will be done safely, some of the site's closest neighbors are eyeing the project warily.
"You wonder what's going on," said Ken Romero, 40, a machinist at the Jona Manufacturing Company, across the street. "One day we looked across the street and there was a guy in a full-body white suit, and he was just 100 yards away from us."
On a recent visit, officials emphasized the extreme care they were taking. When they tore down an air-processing building early one morning, they did not use any explosives, for obvious reasons. Instead, an excavator tore a slice down the center of the building, and then surgically knocked the building's walls inward, so the debris would not hit any of the neighboring buildings.
Some of the workers did wear white body suits, but in this case they were for protection from asbestos, not radiation. The building was not contaminated, though some of its neighbors were.
So far, about 156 people - many from small businesses in the area - have been given jobs on the project, which will ultimately employ roughly 300 people, officials said.
"Many are basically common laborers that come out of commercial operations," Mr. Chaloupka said, "and we're teaching them to do something at a little higher level, and we're creating a cadre of people that can do other jobs later."
The government is under a consent order with the State of New Mexico to clean up the area, so there will be more work after the stimulus program ends.
George Rael, an assistant manager for environmental operations at the Department of Energy's site office here, said that by clearing most of the mesa, the stimulus work would send a signal to the public.
"This is going to be very visible skyline change that people will actually see and recognize," Mr. Rael said.
Several of the buildings they are tearing down date to the Manhattan Project days, when a secret laboratory hastily thrown up here on the Pajarito Plateau at the site of a ranch school for boys produced the bomb that changed the world.
The complex was top secret: eminent physicists who visited were given pseudonyms, the whole town was behind a fence, and the laboratory's inhabitants all had the same mailing address, "P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe," which was also used on the birth certificates of babies born there.
When the job here is done, and the waste is dug up and trucked elsewhere, officials said, the mesa will be clean enough for homes to be built on it.
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4) Hawaii: Protesting School Closings
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | West
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24brfs-PROTESTINGSC_BRF.html?ref=us
Angry parents are protesting the loss of education for their children on the first day of Hawaii's statewide public school closings. The parents rallied at the Capitol in Honolulu as 256 schools shut down to help balance the state budget. In all, 17 furlough days are planned for this year and next. Organizers said the demonstration was meant to show elected leaders that they should not make children suffer for a lack of economic planning. Many hope the government will either raise taxes or dip into emergency money to restore Hawaii's school year. The cuts give Hawaii the shortest school year in the country, at about 163 days, compared with 180 days in most other states.
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5) Food Label Program to Suspend Operations
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
October 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/business/24food.html?ref=business
Under pressure from state and federal authorities who feared consumers would be misled, the food industry on Friday started backing away from a major labeling campaign meant to highlight the nutritional benefits of hundreds of products.
PepsiCo said that it was cutting its ties with the program, called Smart Choices, which features a green checkmark on the front of products that meet its nutritional criteria.
Kellogg's, which makes Froot Loops and other sugary cereals that received the program's seal of approval, said that it would begin phasing out packaging bearing the program logo as its inventories ran out.
Officials with the program said that Smart Choices would suspend most of its operations while they waited for the Food and Drug Administration to devise regulations for package-front nutrition labeling. Those rules could differ from the program's criteria.
"I regard it as a partial victory," said Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, who recently began an investigation into the program to see if the labeling campaign violated his state's consumer protection law. He called on more companies to pull out of the program.
"Quite bluntly, without a commitment by the companies to stop using the logo, there is absolutely no benefit to consumers," he said.
The actions were a remarkable turnabout for an initiative that was developed by many of the country's largest food manufacturers. It had taken at least two years to develop.
The Smart Choices logo began appearing on food packages this summer but immediately met with criticism from some nutritionists who felt its criteria were too lax. They pointed to sugary cereals, like Froot Loops, and fat-heavy products like mayonnaise, which they said should not be considered among the healthiest choices in the supermarket. The first ingredient in Froot Loops is sugar.
The F.D.A. sent the program a letter in August voicing concern that the label could lead consumers to choose highly processed foods over healthier foods, like fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains.
And this week, Margaret A. Hamburg, the F.D.A. commissioner, said that the agency would move quickly to devise rules for package-front nutrition labeling, an area that until now has been only loosely regulated.
Ms. Hamburg said that the front of the package should give shoppers quick access to key dietary information that is already provided in greater detail in the Nutrition Facts box on the back or side of packages.
The Smart Choices program sent a letter on Friday to Dr. Hamburg and Mr. Blumenthal saying it would stop recruiting companies to take part in the program and stop promoting the program to consumers.
Eileen T. Kennedy, a nutritionist who is president of the Smart Choices board, said that the program was not bowing to outside pressures.
"I'm actually pleased that F.D.A. has moved in this direction," Dr. Kennedy said. "I think it's one more step in decreasing any confusion that's out there in the marketplace."
David DeCecco, a spokesman for PepsiCo, said the company was pulling out of the program in anticipation of working with the new F.D.A. rules. He said that only a few products, like Life cereal and instant oatmeal, made by PepsiCo's Quaker division, had carried the logo.
"We really just had our toe in the water," Mr. DeCecco said.
Kellogg's said it would maintain ties to the program and that Celeste A. Clark, the company's senior vice president of global nutrition, would remain on the program's board.
Kraft, another participant, said that it planned to stay involved in the program and had no plans to remove the logo from packaging.
Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, had worked with the Smart Choices program to help develop its criteria, but resigned last year out of concerns that the standards were too loose.
Mr. Jacobson said he believed that the companies involved in Smart Choices had hoped to head off federal regulation of package-front labeling by showing they could develop an acceptable system on their own.
"It clearly blew up in their faces," Mr. Jacobson said. "And the ironic thing is, their device for pre-empting government involvement actually seems to have stimulated government involvement."
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6) Running in the Shadows
Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways
By IAN URBINA
October 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/us/26runaway.html?_r=1&hp
MEDFORD, Ore. - Dressed in soaked green pajamas, Betty Snyder, 14, huddled under a cold drizzle at the city park as several older boys decided what to do with her.
Betty said she had run away from home a week earlier after a violent argument with her mother. Shivering and sullen-faced, she vowed that she was not going to sleep by herself again behind the hedges downtown, where older homeless men and methamphetamine addicts might find her.
The boys were also runaways. But unlike them, Betty said, she had been reported missing to the police. That meant that if the boys let her stay overnight in their hidden tent encampment by the freeway, they risked being arrested for harboring a fugitive.
"We keep running into this," said one of the boys, Clinton Anchors, 18. Over the past year, he said, he and five other teenagers living together on the streets had taken under their wings no fewer than 20 children - some as young as 12 - and taught them how to avoid predators and the police, survive the cold and find food.
"We always first try to send them home," said Clinton, who himself ran away from home at 12. "But a lot of times they won't go, because things are really bad there. We basically become their new family."
Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13. Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens.
Federal studies and experts in the field have estimated that at least 1.6 million juveniles run away or are thrown out of their homes annually. But most of those return home within a week, and the government does not conduct a comprehensive or current count.
The best measure of the problem may be the number of contacts with runaways that federally-financed outreach programs make, which rose to 761,000 in 2008 from 550,000 in 2002, when current methods of counting began. (The number fell in 2007, but rose sharply again last year, and the number of federal outreach programs has been fairly steady throughout the period.)
Too young to get a hotel room, sign a lease or in many cases hold a job, young runaways are increasingly surviving by selling drugs, panhandling or engaging in prostitution, according to the National Runaway Switchboard, the federally-financed national hot line created in 1974. Legitimate employment was hard to find in the summer of 2009; the Labor Department said fewer than 30 percent of teenagers had jobs.
In more than 50 interviews over 11 months, teenagers living on their own in eight states told of a harrowing existence that in many cases involved sleeping in abandoned buildings, couch-surfing among friends and relatives or camping on riverbanks and in parks after fleeing or being kicked out by families in financial crisis.
The runaways spend much of their time avoiding the authorities because they assume the officials are trying to send them home. But most often the police are not looking for them as missing-person cases at all, just responding to complaints about loitering or menacing. In fact, federal data indicate that usually no one is looking for the runaways, either because parents have not reported them missing or the police have mishandled the reports.
In Adrian, Mich., near Detroit, a 16-year-old boy was secretly living alone in his mother's apartment, though all the utilities had been turned off after she was arrested and jailed for violating her parole by bouncing a check at a grocery store.
In Huntington, W.Va., Steven White, 15, said that after casing a 24-hour Wal-Mart to see what time each night the cleaning crew finished its rounds, he began sleeping in a store restroom.
"You're basically on the lam," said Steven, who said he had left home because of physical abuse that increased after his father lost his job this year. "But you're a kid, so it's pretty hard to hide."
Between Legal and Illegal
Survival on the streets of Medford, a city of 76,000 in southwest Oregon, requires runaways to walk a fine line between legal and illegal activity, as a few days with a group of them showed. Even as they sought help from social service organizations, they guarded their freedom jealously.
Petulant and street savvy, they were children nonetheless. One girl said she used a butter knife and a library card to break into vacant houses. But after she began living in one of them, she ate dry cereal for dinner for weeks because she did not realize that she could use the microwave to boil water for Ramen noodles. Another girl was childlike enough to suck her thumb, but dangerous enough to carry a switchblade.
They camped in restricted areas, occasionally shoplifted and regularly smoked marijuana. But they stayed away from harder drugs or drug dealing, and the older teenagers fiercely protected the younger runaways from sexual or other physical threats.
In waking hours, members of the group split their time among a park, a pool hall and a video-game arcade, sharing cigarettes. When in need, they sometimes barter: a sleeveless jacket for a blanket, peanut butter for extra lighter fluid to start campfires on soggy nights.
Betty Snyder, the newcomer in the park, said she had bitten her mother in a recent fight. She said she often refused to do household chores, which prompted heated arguments.
"I'm just tired of it all, and I don't want to be in my house anymore," she said, explaining why she had run away. "One month there is money, and the next month there is none. One day, she is taking it out on me and hitting me, and the next day she is ignoring me. It's more stable out here."
Members of the group said they sometimes made money by picking parking meters or sitting in front of parking lots, pretending to be the attendant after the real one leaves. When things get really desperate, they said, they climb into public fountains to fish out coins late at night. On cold nights, they hide in public libraries or schools after closing time to sleep.
Many of the runaways said they had fled family conflicts or the strain of their parents' alcohol or drug abuse. Others said they left simply because they did not want to go to school or live by their parents' rules.
"I can survive fine out here," Betty said as she brandished a switchblade she pulled from her dirty sweatshirt pocket. At a nearby picnic table was part of the world she and the others were trying to avoid: a man with swastikas tattooed on his neck and an older homeless woman with rotted teeth, holding a pit bull named Diablo.
But Betty and another 14-year-old, seeming not to notice, went off to play on a park swing.
Around the country, outreach workers and city officials say they have been overwhelmed with requests for help from young people in desperate straits.
In Berks County, Pa., the shortage of beds for runaways has led county officials to consider paying stipends to families willing to offer their couches. At drop-in centers across the country, social workers describe how runaways regularly line up when they know the food pantry is being restocked.
In Chicago, city transit workers will soon be trained to help the runaways and other young people they have been finding in increasing numbers, trying to escape the cold or heat by riding endlessly on buses and trains.
"Several times a month we're seeing kids being left by parents who say they can't afford them anymore," said Mary Ferrell, director of the Maslow Project, a resource center for homeless children and families in Medford. With fewer jobs available, teenagers are less able to help their families financially. Relatives and family friends are less likely to take them in.
While federal officials say homelessness over all is expected to rise 10 percent to 20 percent this year, a federal survey of schools showed a 40 percent increase in the number of juveniles living on their own last year, more than double the number in 2003.
At the same time, however, many financially troubled states began sharply cutting social services last year. Though President Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package includes $1.5 billion to address the problem of homelessness, state officials and youth advocates say that almost all of that money will go toward homeless families, not unaccompanied youths.
"As a society, we can pay a dollar to deal with these kids when they first run away, or 20 times that in a matter of years when they become the adult homeless or incarcerated population," said Barbara Duffield, policy director for the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.
'You Traveling Alone?'
Maureen Blaha, executive director of the National Runaway Switchboard, said that while most runaways, like those in Medford, opt to stay in their hometowns, some venture farther away and face greater dangers. The farther they get from home and the longer they stay out, the less money they have and the more likely they are to take risks with people they have just met, Ms. Blaha said.
"A lot of small-town kids figure they can go to Chicago, San Francisco or New York because they can disappear there," she said.
Martin Jaycard, a Port Authority police officer in New York, sees himself as a last line of defense in preventing that from happening.
Dressed in scraggly blue jeans and an untucked open-collar shirt, Officer Jaycard, a seven-year police veteran, is part of the Port Authority's Youth Services Unit. His job is to catch runaways as they pass through the Port Authority Bus Terminal, the nation's busiest.
"You're the last person these kids want to see," he said, estimating that his three-officer unit stops at least one runaway a day at the terminal.
Pausing to look at a girl waiting for a bus to Salt Lake City, Officer Jaycard noticed a nervous look on her face and the overstuffed suitcases that hinted more at a life change than a brief stay.
"Hey, how's it going?" he said to the girl, gently, as he pulled a badge hanging around his neck from under his shirt. "You traveling alone?"
"Yes," she replied, without a glimmer of nervousness. "I'm 18," she quickly added before being asked.
But the girl carried no identification. The only phone number she could produce for someone who could verify her age was disconnected. And after noticing that the last name she gave was different from the one on her bags, the officer took her upstairs to the police station.
When she arrived, she burst into tears.
"Please, I'm begging you not to send me home," she pleaded as she sobbed into her hands. While listening, Officer Jaycard and the social worker on duty began contacting city officials to investigate her situation, and found her a place at a city shelter. "You have no idea what my father will do to me for having tried to run away," she said, describing severe beatings at home and threats to kill her if she ever tried to leave.
The girl turned out to be 14 years old, from Queens. Shaking her head in frustration, she added, "I should have just waited outside the terminal and no one would have known I was missing."
In all likelihood, she was right.
Invisible Names
Lacking the training or the expertise to spot runaways, most police officers would not have stopped the girl waiting for the bus. Even if they had, her name probably would not have been listed in the federal database called the National Crime Information Center, or N.C.I.C., which among other things tracks missing people.
Federal statistics indicate that in more than three-quarters of runaway cases, parents or caretakers have not reported the child missing, often because they are angry about a fight or would simply prefer to see a problem child leave the house. Experts say some parents fear that involving the police will get them or their children into trouble or put their custody at risk.
And in 16 percent of cases, the local police failed to enter the information into the federal database, as required under federal law, according to a review of federal data by The New York Times.
Among the 61,452 names that were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children from January 2004 to January 2009, there were about 9,625 instances involving children whose missing-persons reports were not entered into the N.C.I.C., according to the review by The Times. If the names are not in the national database, then only local police agencies know whom to look for.
Police officials give various reasons for not entering the data. The software is old and cumbersome, they say, or they have limited resources and need to prioritize their time. In many cases, the police said, they do not take runaway reports as seriously as abductions, in part because runaways are often fleeing family problems. The police also say that entering every report into the federal database could make a city's situation appear to be more of a problem than it is.
But in 267 of the cases around the nation for which the police did not enter a report into the database, the children remain missing. In 58, they were found dead.
"If no one knows they're gone, who is going to look for them?" said Tray Williams, a spokesman for the Louisiana Office of Child Services, whose job it was to take care of 17-year-old Cleveland Randall.
On Feb. 6, Cleveland ran away from his foster care center in New Orleans and took a bus to Mississippi. His social workers reported him missing, but the New Orleans police failed to enter the report into the N.C.I.C. Ten days later, Cleveland was found shot to death in Avondale, La.
"These kids might as well be invisible if they aren't in N.C.I.C.," said Ernie Allen, the director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Paradise by Interstate 5
Invisibility, many of the runaways in Medford say, is just what they want.
By midnight, the group decided it was late enough for them to leave the pool hall and to move around the city discreetly. So they went their separate ways.
Alex Molnar, 18, took the back alleys to a 24-hour laundry to sleep under the folding tables. If people were still using the machines, he planned on locking himself in the restroom, placing a sign on the front saying "Out of Service."
On the other side of the city, Alex Hughes, 16, took side streets to a secret clearing along Interstate 5.
On colder nights, he and Clinton Anchors have built a fire in a long shallow trench, eventually covering it with dirt to create a heated mound where they could put their blankets.
Building a lean-to with a tarp and sticks, Clinton lifted his voice above the roar of the tractor-trailers barreling by just feet away. He said they called the spot "paradise" because the police rarely checked for them there.
"Even if they do, Betty is not with us, so that's good," he added, explaining that she had found a friend willing to lend her couch for the night. "One less thing to worry about."
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7) States Pressed Into New Role on Medical Marijuana
By KIRK JOHNSON
October 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/us/26marijuana.html?hp
GREELEY, Colo. - Health and law enforcement officials around the nation are scrambling to figure out how to regulate medical marijuana now that the federal government has decided it will no longer prosecute legal users or providers.
For years, since the first medical marijuana laws were passed in the mid-1990s, many local and state governments could be confident, if not complacent, knowing that marijuana would be kept in check because it remained illegal under federal law, and that hard-nosed federal prosecutors were not about to forget it.
But with the Justice Department's announcement last week that it would not prosecute people who use marijuana for medical purposes in states where it is legal, local and state officials say they will now have to take on the job themselves.
In New Hampshire, for instance, where some state legislators are considering a medical marijuana law, there is concern that the state health department - already battered by budget cuts - could be hard-pressed to administer the system. In California, where there has been an explosion of medical marijuana suppliers, the authorities in Los Angeles and other jurisdictions are considering a requirement that all medical dispensaries operate as nonprofit organizations.
"The federal government says they're not going to control it, so the only other option we have is to control it ourselves," said Carrol Martin, a City Council member in this community north of Denver, where a ban on marijuana dispensaries was on the agenda at a Council meeting the day after the federal announcement.
At least five states, including New York and New Jersey, are considering laws to allow medical marijuana through legislation or voter referendums, in addition to the 13 states where such laws already exist. Even while that is happening, scores of local governments in California, Colorado and other states have gone the other way and imposed bans or moratoriums on distribution even though state law allows it.
Some health and legal experts say the Justice Department's decision will promote the spread of marijuana for medical uses because local and state officials often take leadership cues from federal policy. That, the experts said, could lead to more liberal rules in states that already have medical marijuana and to more voters and legislators in other states becoming comfortable with the idea of allowing it. For elected officials who have feared looking soft on crime by backing any sort of legalized marijuana use, the new policy might provide support to reframe the issue.
"The fact that the feds are backing off is going to allow changes that are going to make it more accessible," said Bill Morrisette, a state senator in Oregon and chairman of a committee that oversees the state's medical marijuana law. Mr. Morrisette said he expected a flurry of proposals in the Legislature, including a plan already floated to have the state grow the marijuana crop itself, perhaps on the grounds of the State Penitentiary in Salem.
"It would be very secure," he said.
Here in Greeley, anxiety and enthusiasm were on display as the City Council considered a ban on dispensaries.
Most of those who testified at the hearing, including several dispensary operators, opposed the ban and spoke of marijuana's therapeutic benefits and the taxes that dispensary owners were willing to pour into Greeley's budget, which has been battered by the recession.
But on the seven-member Council, the question was control. Mr. Martin, for example, said that he hated to see the spread of marijuana, but that the barricades had fallen. Still, he said he opposed a local ban on dispensaries.
"If we have no regulations at all, then we can't control it, and our police officers have their hands tied," Mr. Martin said.
Mayor Ed Clark, a former police officer, took the opposite tack in supporting the ban, which passed on a 6-to-1 vote.
"I think we do regulate them, by not allowing dispensaries," Mr. Clark said.
The backdrop to the debate here in Colorado is a sharp expansion in marijuana dispensaries and patients, fueled in part by the State Board of Health decision in July not to impose limits on the number of patients handled by each marijuana provider.
The state attorney general, John W. Suthers, said the federal government's retreat, combined with the growth in demand, had created a legal vacuum.
"The federal Department of Justice is saying it will only go after you if you're in violation of state law," Mr. Suthers said. "But in Colorado it's not clear what state law is."
In New Hampshire, by contrast, where the state legislature is scheduled to meet this week to consider overriding the governor's veto and passing a medical marijuana law, government downsizing has colored the debate.
The state agency that would be responsible for licensing marijuana dispensaries has been battered by budget cuts, said Senator Sylvia B. Larsen, the president of the New Hampshire Senate and a Democrat. Concerns about the department, Ms. Larsen said, have made it harder to find two more votes in the Senate to reach a two-thirds majority that is needed to override a veto by Gov. John Lynch, a Democrat.
An even odder situation is unfolding in Maine, which already allows medical marijuana and where residents will vote next month on a measure that would create a new system of distribution and licensing.
The marijuana proposal, several political experts said, has been overshadowed by another fight on the ballot that would overturn a state law and ban same-sex marriage.
The added wrinkle is that opponents of same-sex marriage, said Christian Potholm, a professor of government at Bowdoin College, have heavily recruited young, socially conservative voters, who by and large tend to not be concerned about medical marijuana expansion.
"The 18- to 25-year-old vote is going to be overrepresented because of the gay marriage situation, so overrepresented in favor of medical marijuana," Professor Potholm said.
Some legal scholars said the federal government, by deciding not to enforce its own laws (possession and the sale of marijuana remain federal crimes), has introduced an unpredictable variable into the drug regulation system.
"The next step would be a particular state deciding to legalize marijuana entirely," said Peter J. Cohen, a doctor and a lawyer who teaches public health law at Georgetown University. If federal prosecutors kept their distance even then, Dr. Cohen said, legalized marijuana would become a de facto reality.
Senator Morrisette in Oregon said he thought that exact situation - a state moving toward legalization, perhaps California - could play out much sooner now than might have been imagined even a few weeks ago. And the continuing recession would only help, he said, with advocates for legalization able to promise relief to an overburdened prison system and injection of tax revenues to the state budget.
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8) After Reform Passes
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
October 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/opinion/26krugman.html
So, how well will health reform work after it passes?
There's a part of me that can't believe I'm asking that question. After all, serious health reform has long seemed like an impossible dream. And it could yet go all wrong.
But the teabaggers have come and gone, as have the cries of "death panels" and the demonstrations by Medicare recipients demanding that the government stay out of health care. And reform is still on track. Right now it looks highly likely that Congress will, indeed, send a health care bill to the president's desk. Then what?
Conservatives insist (and hope) that reform will fail, and that there will be a huge popular backlash. Some progressives worry that they might be right, that the imperfections of reform - what we're about to get will be far from ideal - will be so severe as to undermine public support. And many critics complain, with some justice, that the planned reform won't do much to contain rising costs.
But the experience in Massachusetts, which passed major health reform back in 2006, should dampen conservative hopes and soothe progressive fears.
Like the bill that will probably emerge from Congress, the Massachusetts reform mainly relies on a combination of regulation and subsidies to chivy a mostly private system into providing near-universal coverage. It is, to be frank, a bit of a Rube Goldberg device - a complicated way of achieving something that could have been done much more simply with a Medicare-type program. Yet it has gone a long way toward achieving the goal of health insurance for all, although it's not quite there: according to state estimates, only 2.6 percent of residents remain uninsured.
This expansion of coverage has tremendous significance in human terms. The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured recently did a focus-group study of Massachusetts residents and reported that "Health reform enabled many of these individuals to take care of their medical needs, to start seeing a doctor, and in some cases to regain their health and control over their lives." Even those who probably would have been insured without reform felt "peace of mind knowing they could obtain health coverage if they lost access to their employer-sponsored coverage."
And reform remains popular. Earlier this year, many conservatives, citing misleading poll results, claimed that public support for the Massachusetts reform had plunged. Newer, more careful polling paints a very different picture. The key finding: an overwhelming 79 percent of the public think the reform should be continued, while only 11 percent think it should be repealed.
Interestingly, another recent poll shows similar support among the state's physicians: 75 percent want to continue the policies; only 7 percent want to see them reversed.
There are, of course, major problems remaining in Massachusetts. In particular, while employers are required to provide a minimum standard of coverage, in a number of cases this standard seems to be too low, with lower-income workers still unable to afford necessary care. And the Massachusetts plan hasn't yet done anything significant to contain costs.
But just as reform advocates predicted, the move to more or less universal care seems to have helped prepare the ground for further reform, with a special state commission recommending changes in the payment system that could contain costs by reducing the incentives for excessive care. And it should be noted that Hawaii, which doesn't have universal coverage but does have a long-standing employer mandate, has been far more successful than the rest of the nation at cost control.
So what does this say about national health reform?
To be sure, Massachusetts isn't fully representative of America as a whole. Even before reform, it had relatively broad insurance coverage, in part because of a large union movement. And the state has a tradition of strong insurance regulation, which has probably made it easier to run a system that depends crucially on having regulators ride herd on insurers.
So national reform's chances will be better if it contains elements lacking in Massachusetts - in particular, a real public option to keep insurers honest (and fend off charges that the individual mandate is just an insurance-industry profit grab). We can only hope that reports that the Obama administration is trying to block a public option are overblown.
Still, if the Massachusetts experience is any guide, health care reform will have broad public support once it's in place and the scare stories are proved false. The new health care system will be criticized; people will demand changes and improvements; but only a small minority will want reform reversed.
This thing is going to work.
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9) Rebel British soldier calls for Afghan exit
Thousands march in London anti-war demo
Mark Townsend and Rajeev Syal
The Observer, Sunday 25 October 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/25/rebel-soldier-wants-afghan-exit
A serving soldier facing a court martial for refusing to return to Afghanistan called on Britain to withdraw all troops from the country at an anti-war demonstration in London yesterday that attracted 5,000 protesters.
Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, 27, of the Royal Logistic Corps, said the presence of British forces in one of the world's poorest countries was making the situation worse. "It is distressing to disobey orders, but when Britain follows America in continuing to wage war against one of the world's poorest countries, I feel I have no choice," he told anti-war protesters at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park.
"Politicians have abused the trust of the army and the soldiers who serve. That's why I am compelled and proud to march with the Stop the War Coalition."
The father of a soldier killed in Iraq, who recently refused to shake hands with Tony Blair, also attended the march. Peter Brierley, 59, whose son, Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley, was killed in Iraq in 2003, recounted how he told the former prime minister at a memorial at St Paul's Cathedral, London, that he had blood on his hands and that one day he would have to answer for what he had done. His son was 28 when he was killed.
"They are not doing any good while they are over there. They need to leave the country to sort itself out," said Brierley. "While the British troops are there they are actually attracting more insurgents who are coming in to fight."
The country's oldest anti-war demonstrator also joined the march. Londoner Hetty Bowyer, 104, told the crowd: "I march because I can see no reason for further killing. I have walked on every march against us going to war. At my age there is not very much I can do, but while my legs can carry me I am going to march."
Central London was brought to a temporary standstill as the protesters made their way to Trafalgar Square. Glenton, from Norwich, led thousands of protesters as they snaked through the capital.
Meanwhile, the battalion that lost more men than any other during the most recent deployment to Helmand province arrived back home yesterday. Troops from 2nd Battalion The Rifles returned to Northern Ireland after losing 13 men and having dozens injured during their six-month tour in and around Sangin, the deadliest place for British soldiers in Helmand.
The battalion's commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Rob Thomson, described how the Taliban had encircled Sangin with roadside bombs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), making movement fraught.
Thomson said: "The enemy has planted IEDs in a greater number than ever before. It has been a hard battle, but the riflemen have found hundreds of IEDs across the area of operations. It is difficult to describe accurately the intensity of this fight."
guardian.co.uk (c) Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
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10) Hell and Dr. James
When Gitmo and Abu Ghraib Come Home
By BILL QUIGLEY and DEBORAH POPOWSKI
October 26, 2009
http://www.counterpunch.com/quigley10262009.html
The Louisiana Board that licenses psychologists is facing a growing legal fight over torture and medical care at the infamous Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons.
In 2003, Louisiana psychologist and retired colonel Larry James watched behind a one-way mirror in a U.S. prison camp while an interrogator and three prison guards wrestled a screaming near-naked man on the floor.
The prisoner had been forced into pink women's panties, lipstick and a wig; the men then pinned the prisoner to the floor in an effort "to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown." As he recounts in his memoir, Fixing Hell, Dr. James initially chose not to respond. He "opened [his] thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason..."
Although he claims to eventually find "good reason" to intervene, the Army colonel never reported the incident or even so much as reprimanded men who had engaged in activities that constituted war crimes.
Sadly, the story of Dr. James' complicity in prisoner abuse does not end there. The New Orleans native and former LSU psychology professor admits to overseeing the detention, interrogation and health care of three boys, aged twelve to fourteen, who were disappeared to Guantanamo and held without charge or access to counsel or their families. In Fixing Hell and elsewhere, Dr. James proudly proclaims that he was in a position of authority at Guantanamo.
Government records indicate that, as the senior psychologist consulting on interrogations, his decisions affected the policy and operations of interrogations and detention on the base. During his time there, reports of beatings, sexual abuse, religious humiliation and sleep deprivation during interrogations were widespread, and draconian isolation was official policy. Prisoners suffered, and some continue to suffer, devastating physical and psychological harm.
Dr. Trudy Bond, a psychologist under an ethical obligation to report abuse by other psychologists, filed a complaint against Dr. James before the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists in February 2008.
Dr. Bond's complaint says that Dr. James' conduct violated Louisiana laws governing his psychology license. As a psychologist and military colonel, he had a duty to avoid harm, to protect confidential information, and to obtain informed consent, as well as to prevent and punish the misconduct of his subordinates.
How did the Louisiana licensing board respond? Rather than investigate, the Board dismissed the complaint, and when asked again, reaffirmed its decision. Dr. Bond has now taken the case to the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal in Baton Rouge. Dr. James played an influential role in both the policy and day-to-day operations of interrogations and detention in the notorious prison camps built to hold men and boys captured during the U.S. "War on Terror."
According to his own statements, he was a senior member of interrogation consulting teams that, as documented by government records, were central in designing interrogation plans that exploited psychological and physical weaknesses of individual detainees. In one example cited by the New York Times, a military health professional told interrogators that "the detainee's medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate."
Had Dr. James chosen to cast himself as a brave, but ultimately ineffective voice against torture, he may have fooled some people into believing him. Instead, he's presented an utterly implausible portrait: one of a man "chosen" by "the nation" to "fix the hell" of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, a feat he claims to have accomplished so successfully that ever since he was first deployed in January 2003, "where ever [sic] we have had psychologists no abuses have been reported."
This is patently untrue. The real "fact of the matter," as documented by government records, reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross and eyewitness accounts, is that serious abuses were widespread both during Dr. James' tenure as senior psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantánamo, and after he left.
One would imagine that such disregard for a law designed to protect the public welfare would greatly concern the body charged with its enforcement. But the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, which issued James his license, has refused to investigate whether he violated professional misconduct law.
The Board's conduct should alarm all Louisiana health professionals and their patients. The Board demeans the profession when it fails to seriously address the possibility that a Louisiana licensee was involved in torture. It also strips the Louisiana psychology license of meaning and value.
How can patients rely on a license issued and enforced by a body that arbitrarily refuses to look into allegations of grave misconduct?
As the legal battle wears on, the people of Louisiana need to ask the Board's members what "good reason" they await in order to act. They should demand that the Board of Examiners conduct a thorough investigation of Larry James and, if what he admits is true, revoke his privilege to practice.
Bill Quigley is a Loyola Law professor working at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Deborah Popowski is a Skirball Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program. Both authors are involved with the campaign When Healers Harm: Hold Health Professionals Accountable for Torture, see http://whenhealersharm.org/
Bill can be contacted at quigley77@gmail.com.
Deborah can be contacted at dpopowski@law.harvard.edu.
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10) Struggling Iraq vet may lose his anchor
His wife, brought here illegally at age 6, is about to be deported. 'She's my everything,' her husband says.
By Teresa Watanabe
October 26, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-immig-soldier26-2009oct26,0,4800387,full.story
The nightmares still plague him. The terrifying mortar attacks. The loss of an Albanian soldier and ally, mutilated by shrapnel. The Iraqi children, bloodied and battered, lined up for medical care at the U.S. base at Mosul.
Two years after returning from his service in Iraq, U.S. Army Spc. Jack Barrios, 26, is fighting sleeplessness, sudden angry outbursts, aversion to emotional intimacy and other fallout from his post-traumatic stress disorder.
But as he undergoes counseling and swallows anti-depressants, the soldier is fighting an even bigger battle: to keep his family from collapsing as his wife, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, faces deportation.
His wife, 23-year-old Frances, was illegally brought to the United States by her mother at age 6, learned of her status in high school and discovered just last year that removal proceedings have been started. Her possible deportation has left Barrios in panic as he contemplates life without her.
The Army reservist says his wife is the family's anchor, caring for their year-old daughter and 3-year-old son and helping him battle his post-traumatic stress.
"She's my everything," Barrios said as he sat glumly in the family's sparsely furnished but tidy Van Nuys apartment. "Without her, I can't function. It would be like taking away a part of my soul."
Hundreds of U.S. soldiers are facing the same trouble as they fight to legalize their spouses' status, a difficult process that has affected their military readiness, according to Margaret Stock, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves and an immigration attorney specializing in military cases.
Stock, speaking as a private attorney, said she gets at least one call a day from soldiers facing the deportation of spouses. Many are so stressed out they can't concentrate on their jobs, she said.
"The whole military system depends on families being support networks for soldiers," said Stock. "They're an integral part of military readiness, so we need to take care of them."
Concerned about the effect immigration problems are having on military families, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) has held hearings on the issue and last year introduced a bill to give undocumented spouses of U.S. soldiers a chance at gaining legal status.
Lofgren, who heads the House immigration subcommittee, said she plans to include the provision for military families in the comprehensive immigration reform bill that could be unveiled early next year.
"It's about respecting the American soldier and the sacrifices they have made," Lofgren said.
The issue has divided traditional allies. Her bill was co-sponsored by two Republican members of the House Armed Services committee but opposed by their GOP colleagues on the House immigration subcommittee.
The American Legion spoke out against the bill, but the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America supported it.
"Our soldiers fight and, in some cases, give their lives to preserve the rule of law. It seems ironic indeed that some would propose to disregard the rule of law just as another reward or inducement to serve our country," U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) told the House immigration subcommittee at the May hearing last year.
But the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans group has made the issue of legal status for military families one of its legislative priorities.
"The last thing troops in the American military should be worrying about while deployed is the possibility that their spouses at home may be deported," the group's legislative agenda says.
The issue has also been highlighted in a new documentary, "Second Battle," by the Brave New Foundation, a Culver City-based media group that has launched a film series exploring the effect of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on Americans.
For most families like the Barrioses, the options are bleak. Because she entered U.S. illegally, Frances cannot apply for a green card unless she returns to her native country. If she did that, her illegal status would bar her from returning to this country for 10 years unless she got a waiver. Getting one is difficult, Stock said.
Some soldiers have quit the military to move with their spouses. Others have divorced or chosen to live apart, often to give their children a better life in America, Stock said.
A few have managed to attract high-level attention and receive legal status. In 2007, Michael Chertoff, then the secretary of Homeland Security, asked the courts to end removal proceedings against the illegal immigrant wife of Army Spc. Alex Jimenez, who went missing in action that year. The action, requested by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), allowed Jimenez's wife to apply for a green card.
Jessica Dominguez, the Barrios family's attorney, said one glimmer of hope is that Frances has been in the U.S. longer than 10 years. That gives her standing to seek cancellation of her removal orders by arguing that her deportation would cause her U.S. citizen husband and children "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship."
To Jack Barrios, his wife is just as American as he is. She speaks better English than Spanish and has a high school diploma and ambitions to be a teacher. She has no criminal record.
Their roots in Van Nuys run deep. Jack was born in Los Angeles and moved to the Valley with his family as a child. They went to the same school, Erwin Elementary, where their son, Matthew, now attends preschool.
They live in the same complex on Oxnard Street where Frances Barrios grew up. The two-bedroom apartment is decorated with Jack's military photos, an Army medal of commendation and a certificate of wartime service in Iraq.
When Jack announced in 2004 that he wanted to join the Army, Frances was apprehensive. They wanted to start a family and she worried about his deployment to dangerous areas. But Jack had made up his mind.
"You've got to give back something to this country for the freedoms we have," Jack said then, reminding his wife of their blessings here. Jack's sister, a pharmacist who lived in Guatemala, was shot and killed when her office refused to pay protection money to local gangs, he said.
The call for deployment to Iraq came in 2006, when Matthew was just a few months old. Frances said she was terrified, especially when she had to sign copies of her husband's will and life insurance papers.
He returned a year later -- safe, but not sound.
When Frances Barrios tried to talk about how much her husband had changed after Iraq, she began to sob quietly.
He used to be a clown, she said, always the life of the party. Now, she said, he erupts in anger. He seems cold. He barely speaks. Not about his day. Not about his dreams. Certainly not about Iraq.
Sometimes, he wakes up in the middle of the night and sits in the darkened living room, mute and expressionless, staring straight ahead. When Frances asks what's wrong, he doesn't even acknowledge her, she said.
"I love him, but it does hurt," she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. "He has changed so much, and I wish I had the other Jack back."
Jack cannot easily express why he has changed so much. Maybe, he said, he shut down his emotions to get through the daily terrors in Iraq.
He said he is constantly on guard and can no longer stand crowds. He knows he is impatient with his children.
He knows he is stressed out by his daily life: a two-job, 15-hour workday that begins with him waking up at 3:30 a.m. to get to his first job as a driver for UPS, then to his second job at an auto parts firm.
And, he said, he knows that his life will collapse without his wife by his side.
As his parents speak of their pain, Matthew squeals with delight on his Playskool truck. Moon-faced Allanna gurgles and smiles as she crawls across the living room.
Whatever happens, the children, both U.S.-born citizens, will stay here. There is no future for them in Guatemala.
But their mother's heart breaks at the thought of separation. "I'm with them all day," Frances says of her children, sobbing. "I cook, I clean. It will be too much for Jack. It's hard enough for him already."
Barrios said his wife never intentionally broke any laws. She was just a small child when she was taken across the border without papers.
"I just want my girl to stay here and be part of this country," he says. "Why should we have to break up our family? We just want to have the American Dream, just like everyone else."
teresa.watanabe@latimes.com
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11) Israel demolishes two Palestinian homes in Jerusalem
Tue Oct 27, 2009 7:34am EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLR381627
JERUSALEM, Oct 27 (Reuters) - Israeli authorities demolished two Palestinian homes near Arab East Jerusalem on Tuesday, ignoring international concern about the practice.
Israel's Jerusalem municipality said the houses were built without permits. Palestinians say such permission is impossible to obtain and accuse Israel of using demolitions to tighten its hold on occupied territory in and around Jerusalem.
"This is part of the Israeli plan to disrupt the demographic balance," Hatem Abdel-Qader, in charge of Jerusalem affairs in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement.
Jerusalem is at the centre of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and the United States, seeking to revive peace talks, has called the demolition of Palestinian homes "unhelpful".
Other Western countries and human rights organisations have been more outspoken in their condemnation of Israel's demolition policy.
Israeli paramilitary border police troops deployed to secure the razing of the two homes by bulldozers. One of the houses was in Shuafat and the other in Sur Baher, Palestinian communities on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
"International bodies and the United Nations Security Council should intervene to stop Israeli authorities from carrying out these criminal actions," said Adnan al-Husseini, the Palestinian-appointed governor of Jerusalem.
Earlier this year, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called for a halt to home demolitions in East Jerusalem.
Statistics in a U.N. report published in May showed that 1,500 demolition orders issued by the Jerusalem municipality were pending for Palestinian dwellings built without permits.
The report said that if the orders were implemented, about 9,000 Palestinians would be displaced.
Some 200,000 Jews live in East Jerusalem, alongside about 250,000 Palestinians. (Reporting by Ori Lewis, Yehuda Gruber and Labib Nasir, Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Jeffrey Heller)
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12) Changing the World
By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed Columnist
October 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/opinion/27herbert.html?hp
One of the most cherished items in my possession is a postcard that was sent from Mississippi to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June 1964.
"Dear Mom and Dad," it says, "I have arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy."
That was the last word sent to his family by Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old college student who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, on his first full day in Mississippi - June 21, the same date as the postmark on the card. The goal of the three young men had been to help register blacks to vote.
The postcard was given to me by Andrew's brother, David, who has become a good friend.
Andrew and that postcard came to mind over the weekend as I was thinking about the sense of helplessness so many ordinary Americans have been feeling as the nation is confronted with one enormous, seemingly intractable problem after another. The helplessness is beginning to border on paralysis. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly a decade long, are going badly, and there is no endgame in sight.
Monday morning's coffee was accompanied by stories about suicide bombings in the heart of Baghdad that killed at least 150 people and wounded more than 500 and helicopter crashes in Afghanistan that killed 14 Americans.
Here at home, the terrible toll from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression continues, with no end to the joblessness in sight and no comprehensible plans for fashioning a healthy economy for the years ahead. The government's finances resemble a Ponzi scheme. If you want to see the epidemic that is really clobbering American families, look past the H1N1 virus to the home foreclosure crisis.
The Times ran a Page A1 article on Monday that said layoffs, foreclosures and other problems associated with the recession had resulted in big increases in the number of runaway children, many of whom were living in dangerous conditions in the streets.
Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.
This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class.
This passivity and sense of helplessness most likely stems from the refusal of so many Americans over the past few decades to acknowledge any sense of personal responsibility for the policies and choices that have led the country into such a dismal state of affairs, and to turn their backs on any real obligation to help others who were struggling.
Those chickens have come home to roost. Being an American has become a spectator sport. Most Americans watch the news the way you'd watch a ballgame, or a long-running television series, believing that they have no more control over important real-life events than a viewer would have over a coach's strategy or a script for "Law & Order."
With that kind of attitude, Andrew Goodman would never have left the comfort of his family home in Manhattan. Rosa Parks would have gotten up and given her seat to a white person, and the Montgomery bus boycott would never have happened. Betty Friedan would never have written "The Feminine Mystique."
The nation's political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference.
It can start with just a few small steps. Mrs. Parks helped transform a nation by refusing to budge from her seat. Maybe you want to speak up publicly about an important issue, or host a house party, or perhaps arrange a meeting of soon-to-be dismissed employees, or parents at a troubled school.
It's a risk, sure. But the need is great, and that's how you change the world.
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13) The Case for More Stimulus
Editorial
October 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/opinion/27tue1.html?hp
The consensus among economists is that the recession is over, and, technically, the herd is probably right. Corporate profitability has been boosted by job cuts, pay cuts and a drive to restock depleted inventories. Immense federal stimulus has jolted the economy.
But what happens when those measures run their course? The economy is going to need more government support, or it is bound to be very weak for a very long time - and vulnerable to a relapse into recession. Unemployment is expected to worsen well into next year, exceeding 10 percent. Foreclosures are expected to rise, which will push home values down further. Hundreds of small and midsize banks are likely to fail in coming years. State and local governments face budget shortfalls in 2010 that are as bad or worse than this year's.
Yet Washington is not providing a coherent plan for effective stimulus. The Senate has been hamstrung for nearly a month over the most basic relief-and-recovery boost: an extension of unemployment benefits. The Obama administration has called for an expensive crowd-pleaser of dubious effectiveness: sending every Social Security recipient an extra $250.
And Washington is mired in a warped political debate. Congressional Republicans say continued economic weakness is proof that February's stimulus package failed. Lawmakers in both parties fret that large budget deficits preclude more stimulus, lest the burden of debt outweigh the benefit of deficit spending.
Both arguments are wrong. If anything, ongoing economic problems are a sign that stimulus needs to be bolstered. Deficits are a serious issue, but the immediate need for stimulus trumps the longer-term need for deficit reduction. A self-reinforcing stretch of economic weakness would be far costlier than additional stimulus.
The Senate could take a step in the right direction by extending unemployment benefits without further delay. That is the single most effective way to boost consumption - which, in turn, preserves jobs - because it creates spending that would otherwise not occur.
Next, Congress and the administration should agree on ways to ease the dire financial condition of the states. Most important is continued aid for state Medicaid programs, which would ensure vital services, support jobs and free up money for other needs. Governors will begin to prepare their new budgets in early 2010, and those budgets will be in effect for a year, starting in July. So the states need to know soon what to expect from the federal government through mid-2011. As long as the states are suffering, any economic recovery efforts by the federal government are undermined.
Other measures being floated are less effective than unemployment benefits and aid to states. Many of the $250 checks to Social Security beneficiaries will not be spent quickly, because many recipients have no pressing need for the extra money. Proposals by some lawmakers to extend and expand the $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers are even less well targeted. Since it was enacted in February, only an estimated 15 percent of buyers who claimed the credit needed the money to make the purchase. It's not stimulus when you pay people to do something they would have done anyway. It's waste.
To be highly effective as stimulus, cash aid must be targeted to needy populations. The housing market would be better served by a reinvigorated attempt to reduce foreclosures, including, at long last, reducing principal balances for the millions of people who owe more on their homes than they are worth.
Without another round of effective stimulus, the worst recession in modern memory will likely become - at best - the weakest recovery in modern memory. Another boost to federal spending that is targeted and timely should not be too much for politicians to deliver.
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14) German Limits on War Face Afghan Reality
By NICHOLAS KULISH
October 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/27germany.html?ref=world
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan - Forced to confront the rising insurgency in once peaceful northern Afghanistan, the German Army is engaged in sustained and bloody ground combat for the first time since World War II.
Soldiers near the northern city of Kunduz have had to strike back against an increasingly fierce campaign by Taliban insurgents, while carrying the burden of being among the first units to break the German taboo against military combat abroad that arose after the Nazi era.
At issue are how long opposition in Germany will allow its troops to stay and fight, and whether they will be given leeway from their strict rules of engagement to pursue the kind of counterinsurgency being advocated by American generals. The question now is whether the Americans will ultimately fight one kind of war and their allies another.
For Germans, the realization that their soldiers are now engaged in ground offensives in an open-ended and escalating war requires a fundamental reconsideration of their principles.
After World War II, German society rejected using military power for anything other than self-defense, and pacifism has been a rallying cry for generations, blocking allied requests for any military support beyond humanitarian assistance.
German leaders have chipped away at the proscriptions in recent years, in particular by participating in airstrikes in the Kosovo war. Still, the legacy of the combat ban remains in the form of strict engagement rules and an ingrained shoot-last mentality that is causing significant tensions with the United States in Afghanistan.
Driven by necessity, some of the 4,250 German soldiers here, the third-largest number of troops in the NATO contingent, have already come a long way. Last Tuesday, they handed out blankets, volleyballs and flashlights as a goodwill gesture to residents of the village of Yanghareq, about 22 miles northwest of Kunduz. Barely an hour later, insurgents with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades ambushed other members of the same company.
The Germans fought back, killing one of the attackers, before the dust and disorder made it impossible to tell fleeing Taliban from civilians.
"They shoot at us and we shoot back," said Staff Sgt. Erik S., who, according to German military rules, could not be fully identified. "People are going to fall on both sides. It's as simple as that. It's war."
The sergeant added, "The word 'war' is growing louder in society, and the politicians can't keep it secret anymore."
Indeed, German politicians have refused to utter the word, trying instead to portray the mission in Afghanistan as a mix of peacekeeping and reconstruction in support of the Afghan government. But their line has grown less tenable as the insurgency has expanded rapidly in the west and north of the country, where Germany leads the regional command and provides a majority of the troops.
The Germans may not have gone to war, but now the war has come to them.
In part, NATO and German officials say, that is evidence of the political astuteness of Taliban and Qaeda leaders, who are aware of the opposition in Germany to the war. They hope to exploit it and force the withdrawal of German soldiers - splintering the NATO alliance in the process - through attacks on German personnel in Afghanistan and through video and audio threats of terrorist attacks on the home front before the German elections last month.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior American and allied commander in Afghanistan, is pressing NATO allies to contribute more troops to the war effort, even as countries like the Netherlands and Canada have begun discussing plans to pull out. Germany has held out against pleas for additional troops so far.
Ties between Germany and the United States were strained last month over a German-ordered bombing of two hijacked tanker trucks, which killed civilians as well as Taliban. Many Germans, from top politicians down to enlisted men, thought that General McChrystal was too swift to condemn the strike before a complete investigation.
Germany's combat troops are caught in the middle. In interviews last week, soldiers from the Third Company, Mechanized Infantry Battalion 391, said they were understaffed for the increasingly complex mission here. Two men from the company were killed in June, among 36 German soldiers who have died in the Afghan war.
The soldiers expressed frustration over the second-guessing of the airstrike not only by allies, but also by their own politicians, and over the absence of support back home.
While the intensity of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan's south has received most attention, the situation in the Germans' part of the north has deteriorated rapidly. Soldiers said that just a year ago they could patrol in unarmored vehicles. Now there are places where they cannot move even in armored vehicles without an entire company of soldiers.
American officials have argued that an emphasis on reconstruction, peacekeeping and the avoidance of violence may have given the Taliban a foothold to return to the north.
German officers here said they had adjusted their tactics accordingly, often engaging the Taliban in firefights for hours with close air support. In July, 300 German soldiers joined the Afghan Army and National Police in an operation in Kunduz Province that killed more than 20 Taliban fighters and led to the arrests of half a dozen more.
The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the operation "a fundamental transition out of the defensive and into the offensive."
Germany's military actions are controlled by a parliamentary mandate, which is up for renewal in December. The German contingent has unarmed drones and Tornado fighter jets, which are restricted to reconnaissance and are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.
German soldiers usually stay in Afghanistan for just four months, which can make it difficult to maintain continuity with their Afghan partners. The mandate also caps the number of troops in the country at 4,500.
A NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, called the mandate "a political straitjacket."
A company of German paratroopers in the district of Chahar Darreh, where insurgent activity is particularly pronounced, fought off a series of attacks and stayed in the area, patrolling on foot and meeting with local elders for eight days and seven nights.
"The longer we were out there, the better the local population responded to us," said Capt. Thomas K., the company's commander. Another company relieved them for three days but then abandoned the position, where intelligence said that a bomb was waiting for the next group of German soldiers.
"Since we were there, no other company has been back," the captain said.
Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin.
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15) Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll
By DEXTER FILKINS, MARK MAZZETTI and JAMES RISEN
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?hp
KABUL, Afghanistan - Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country's booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.'s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai's home.
The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America's war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.
The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America's increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.'s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.
More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.
"If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves," said Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the senior American military intelligence official in Afghanistan.
Ahmed Wali Karzai said in an interview that he cooperated with American civilian and military officials, but did not engage in the drug trade and did not receive payments from the C.I.A.
The relationship between Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging, several American officials said. He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists. On at least one occasion, the strike force has been accused of mounting an unauthorized operation against an official of the Afghan government, the officials said.
Mr. Karzai is also paid for allowing the C.I.A. and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city - the former home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's founder. The same compound is also the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. "He's our landlord," a senior American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Mr. Karzai also helps the C.I.A. communicate with and sometimes meet with Afghans loyal to the Taliban. Mr. Karzai's role as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban is now regarded as valuable by those who support working with Mr. Karzai, as the Obama administration is placing a greater focus on encouraging Taliban leaders to change sides.
A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.
"No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations," said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.
Some American officials said that the allegations of Mr. Karzai's role in the drug trade were not conclusive.
"There's no proof of Ahmed Wali Karzai's involvement in drug trafficking, certainly nothing that would stand up in court," said one American official familiar with the intelligence. "And you can't ignore what the Afghan government has done for American counterterrorism efforts."
At the start of the Afghan war, just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, American officials paid warlords with questionable backgrounds to help topple the Taliban and maintain order with relatively few American troops committed to fight in the country. But as the Taliban has become resurgent and the war has intensified, Americans have increasingly viewed a strong and credible central government as crucial to turning back the Taliban's advances.
Now, with more American lives on the line, the relationship with Mr. Karzai is setting off anger and frustration among American military officers and other officials in the Obama administration. They say that Mr. Karzai's suspected role in the drug trade, as well as what they describe as the mafialike way that he lords over southern Afghanistan, makes him a malevolent force.
These military and political officials say the evidence, though largely circumstantial, suggests strongly that Mr. Karzai has enriched himself by helping the illegal trade in poppy and opium to flourish. The assessment of these military and senior officials in the Obama administration dovetails with that of senior officials in the Bush administration.
"Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it," a senior American military officer in Kabul said. Like most of the officials in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the information.
"If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck," the American officer said of Mr. Karzai. "Our assumption is that he's benefiting from the drug trade."
American officials say that Afghanistan's opium trade, the largest in the world, directly threatens the stability of the Afghan state, by providing a large percentage of the money the Taliban needs for its operations, and also by corrupting Afghan public officials to help the trade flourish.
The Obama administration has repeatedly vowed to crack down on the drug lords who are believed to permeate the highest levels of President Karzai's administration. They have pressed him to move his brother out of southern Afghanistan, but he has so far refused to do so.
Other Western officials pointed to evidence that Ahmed Wali Karzai orchestrated the manufacture of hundreds of thousands of phony ballots for his brother's re-election effort in August. He is also believed to have been responsible for setting up dozens of so-called ghost polling stations - existing only on paper - that were used to manufacture tens of thousands of phony ballots.
"The only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone," General Flynn said.
In the interview in which he denied a role in the drug trade or taking money from the C.I.A., Ahmed Wali Karzai said he received regular payments from his brother, the president, for "expenses," but said he did not know where the money came from. He has, among other things, introduced Americans to insurgents considering changing sides. And he has given the Americans intelligence, he said. But he said he was not compensated for that assistance.
"I don't know anyone under the name of the C.I.A.," Mr. Karzai said. "I have never received any money from any organization. I help, definitely. I help other Americans wherever I can. This is my duty as an Afghan."
Mr. Karzai acknowledged that the C.I.A. and Special Operations troops stayed at Mullah Omar's old compound. And he acknowledged that the Kandahar Strike Force was based there. But he said he had no involvement with them.
A former C.I.A. officer with experience in Afghanistan said the agency relied heavily on Ahmed Wali Karzai, and often based covert operatives at compounds he owned. Any connections Mr. Karzai might have had to the drug trade mattered little to C.I.A. officers focused on counterterrorism missions, the officer said.
"Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade," he said. "If you are looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn't live in Afghanistan."
The debate over Ahmed Wali Karzai, which began when President Obama took office in January, intensified in June, when the C.I.A.'s local paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, shot and killed Kandahar's provincial police chief, Matiullah Qati, in a still-unexplained shootout at the office of a local prosecutor.
The circumstances surrounding Mr. Qati's death remain shrouded in mystery. It is unclear, for instance, if any agency operatives were present - but officials say the firefight broke out when Mr. Qati tried to block the strike force from freeing the brother of a task force member who was being held in custody.
"Matiullah was in the wrong place at the wrong time," Mr. Karzai said in the interview.
Counternarcotics officials have repeatedly expressed frustration over the unwillingness of senior policy makers in Washington to take action against Mr. Karzai - or even begin a serious investigation of the allegations against him. In fact, they say that while other Afghans accused of drug involvement are investigated and singled out for raids or even rendition to the United States, Mr. Karzai has seemed immune from similar scrutiny.
For years, first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration have said that the Taliban benefits from the drug trade, and the United States military has recently expanded its target list to include drug traffickers with ties to the insurgency. The military has generated a list of 50 top drug traffickers tied to the Taliban who can now be killed or captured.
Senior Afghan investigators say they know plenty about Mr. Karzai's involvement in the drug business. In an interview in Kabul this year, a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official familiar with Afghan counternarcotics operations said that a major source of Mr. Karzai's influence over the drug trade was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar.
The former Interior Ministry official said that Mr. Karzai was able to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges.
But the former officials said it was impossible for Afghan counternarcotics officials to investigate Mr. Karzai. "This government has become a factory for the production of Talibs because of corruption and injustice," the former official said.
Some American counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American efforts to single out other drug lords.
In debriefing notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured Hajji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison this year.
Habibullah Jan, a local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar, told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai's arrest.
Dexter Filkins reported from Kabul, and Mark Mazzetti and James Risen from Washington. Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington.
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16)California: Court to Reconsider Secrets Case
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
National Briefing | West
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/us/28brfs-COURTTORECON_BRF.html?ref=world
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will reconsider a decision allowing a lawsuit against a company suspected of involvement in C.I.A. "extraordinary rendition" flights in which detainees were transferred to other countries. The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, argued that the case should not go forward because it would expose state secrets. In April, a three-judge panel ruled against the government, but the court said in a brief order that an 11-judge panel would rehear the case. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the civil lawsuit on behalf of five plaintiffs who said they had been kidnapped and flown to secret facilities where they were tortured; a Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, arranged the flights, according to the suit.
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17) Push to Legalize Marijuana Gains Ground in California
By JESSE McKINLEY
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/us/28pot.html?ref=us
SAN FRANCISCO - These are heady times for advocates of legalized marijuana in California - and only in small part because of the newly relaxed approach of the federal government toward medical marijuana.
State lawmakers are holding a hearing on Wednesday on the effects of a bill that would legalize, tax and regulate the drug - in what would be the first such law in the United States. Tax officials estimate the legislation could bring the struggling state about $1.4 billion a year, and though the bill's fate in the Legislature is uncertain, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has indicated he would be open to a "robust debate" on the issue.
California voters are also taking up legalization. Three separate initiatives are being circulated for signatures to appear on the ballot next year, all of which would permit adults to possess marijuana for personal use and allow local governments to tax it. Even opponents of legalization suggest that an initiative is likely to qualify for a statewide vote.
"All of us in the movement have had the feeling that we've been running into the wind for years," said James P. Gray, a retired judge in Orange County who has been outspoken in support of legalization. "Now we sense we are running with the wind."
Proponents of the leading ballot initiative have collected nearly 300,000 signatures since late September, supporters say, easily on pace to qualify for the November 2010 general election. Richard Lee, a longtime marijuana activist who is behind the measure, says he has raised nearly $1 million to hire professionals to assist volunteers in gathering the signatures.
"Voters are ripping the petitions out of our hands," Mr. Lee said.
That said, the bids to legalize marijuana are opposed by law enforcement groups across the state and, if successful, would undoubtedly set up a legal showdown with the federal government, which classifies marijuana as an illegal drug.
California was the first state to legalize marijuana for medical purposes, in 1996, but court after court - including the United States Supreme Court - has ruled that the federal government can continue to enforce its ban. Only this month, with the Department of Justice announcement that it would not prosecute users and providers of medical marijuana who obey state law, has that threat subsided.
But federal authorities have also made it clear that their tolerance stops at recreational use. In a memorandum on Oct. 19 outlining the medical marijuana guidelines, Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden said marijuana was "a dangerous drug, and the illegal distribution and sale of marijuana is a serious crime," adding that "no state can authorize violations of federal law."
Still, Mr. Lee anticipates spending up to $20 million on a campaign to win passage of his ballot measure in California, raising some of it from the hundreds of already legal medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles, which have been recently fighting efforts by Los Angeles city officials to tighten restrictions on their operations.
"It's a $2 billion industry," Mr. Lee said of the medical marijuana sales.
Opponents said they are also preparing for a battle next year.
"I fully expect they will qualify," said John Lovell, a Sacramento lobbyist for several groups of California law enforcement officials that oppose legalization.
Any vote would take place in a state where attitudes toward marijuana border on the schizophrenic. Last year, the state made some 78,500 arrests on felony and misdemeanors related to the drug, up from about 74,000 in 2007, according to the California attorney general.
Seizures of illegal marijuana plants, often grown by Mexican gangs on public lands in forests and parks, hit an all-time high in 2009, and last week, federal authorities announced a series of arrests in the state's Central Valley, where homes have been converted into "indoor grows."
At the same time, however, there are also pockets of California where marijuana can seem practically legal already. At least seven California cities have formally declared marijuana a low priority for law enforcement, with ballot measures or legislative actions. In Los Angeles, some 800 to 1,000 dispensaries of medical marijuana are in business, officials say, complete with consultants offering public relations services and "canna-business management."
Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a San Francisco Democrat and author of the legalization bill, said momentum for legalization has built in recent years, especially as the state's finances have remained sour.
"A lot of people that were initially resistant or even ridiculed it have come aboard," Mr. Ammiano said.
In Oakland, which passed a tax on medical cannabis sales in July, several people who signed a petition backing Mr. Lee's initiative said they were motivated in part by the cost of imprisoning drug offenders and the toll of drug-related violence in Mexico.
"Personally I don't see a way of getting it under control other than legalizing it and taxing it," said Jim Quinn, 60, a production manager. "We've got to get it out of the hands of criminals both domestic and international."
Mr. Lovell, the law enforcement lobbyist, however, said those arguments paled in comparison to the potential pitfalls of legalization, including people driving under the influence. He also questioned how much net revenue a tax like Mr. Ammiano is proposing would actually raise. "We get revenue from alcohol," he said. "But there's way more in social costs than we retain in revenues."
The recent history of voter-approved drug reform laws in California is not encouraging for supporters of legalization. Last November, voters rejected a proposition that would have increased spending for drug treatment programs and loosened parole and prison requirements for drug offenders.
None of which seems to faze Mr. Lee, 47, a former roadie who founded Oaksterdam University, a medical marijuana trade school in Oakland, in 2007. Mr. Lee says he plans to use the Internet to raise money, as well as tapping out-of state sources for campaign money.
More than anything, however, Mr. Lee said he was banking on a basic shift in people's attitudes toward the drug.
"For a lot of people," he said, "it's just another brand of beer."
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18) U.S. to Protect Populous Afghan Areas, Officials Say
"...the debate is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed."
By THOM SHANKER, PETER BAKER and HELENE COOPER
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28policy.html?ref=us
This article is by Thom Shanker, Peter Baker and Helene Cooper.
WASHINGTON - President Obama's advisers are focusing on a strategy for Afghanistan aimed at protecting about 10 top population centers, administration officials said Tuesday, describing an approach that would stop short of an all-out assault on the Taliban while still seeking to nurture long-term stability.
Mr. Obama has yet to make a decision and has other options available to him, but as officials described it, the debate is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed. The question of how much of the country should fall under the direct protection of American and NATO forces will be central to deciding how many troops will be sent.
At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.
But military planners are also pressing for enough troops to safeguard major agricultural areas, like the hotly contested Helmand River valley, as well as regional highways essential to the economy - tasks that would require significantly more reinforcements beyond the 21,000 deployed by Mr. Obama this year.
One administration official said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, had briefed Mr. Obama's advisers on how he would deploy any new troops under the approach being considered by the White House. The first two additional combat brigades would go south, including one to Kandahar, while a third would be sent to eastern Afghanistan and a fourth would be used flexibly across the nation, said the official, who like others insisted on anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
Administration and military officials said the strategy would include other elements, like accelerated training of Afghan troops, expanded economic development and reconciliation with less radical members of the Taliban.
But such a strategy would be open to complaints that American and allied forces were in effect giving insurgents free rein across large parts of the nation, allowing the Taliban to establish ministates with training camps that could be used by Al Qaeda.
"We are not talking about surrendering the rest of the country to the Taliban," a senior administration official said.
Military officers said that they would maintain pressure on insurgents in remote regions by using surveillance drones and reports from people in the field to find pockets of Taliban fighters and to guide attacks, in particular by Special Operations forces.
But a range of officials made the case that many insurgents fighting Americans in distant locations are motivated not by jihadist ideology, but by local grievances, and are not much of a threat to the United States or to the government in Kabul.
At the heart of this strategy is the conclusion that the United States cannot completely eradicate the insurgency in a nation where the Taliban is an indigenous force - nor does it need to in order to protect American national security. Instead, the focus would be on preventing Al Qaeda from returning in force while containing and weakening the Taliban long enough to build Afghan security forces that would eventually take over the mission.
In effect, the approach blends ideas advanced by General McChrystal and by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., seen as opposite poles in the internal debate.
General McChrystal has sought at least 40,000 more troops for a counterinsurgency strategy to protect Afghan civilians so they will support the central government. Mr. Biden has opposed a buildup, contending that a bigger military footprint could be counterproductive and that fighting Al Qaeda in Pakistan should be the top priority.
A strategy of protecting major Afghan population centers would be "McChrystal for the city, Biden for the country," as one administration official put it. Officials said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was playing a crucial role, balancing the case made by commanders with the skepticism of some civilians on Mr. Obama's war council as the debate entered its final days.
A senior military officer said the developing strategy adopted General McChrystal's central tenet. "We are no longer thinking about just destroying the enemy in a conventional way," the officer said. "We must remove the main pressure that civilians live under, which is the constant intimidation and corruption and direct threat from the insurgency."
The officer said General McChrystal wanted the most expansive definition of population centers to include fertile valleys, economic belts and major roadways, in particular the national ring road central for commerce, as well as four or five roadways linking Afghanistan eastward to Pakistan and westward to Iran.
Officials said no exact statistics were available for the percentage of the Afghan population that would fall under a new population-centered policy.
Elements of the strategy are already being carried out. Over the past month, General McChrystal has closed half a dozen isolated military outposts in towns like Wanat, where nine Americans were killed in a vicious firefight in July 2008. The decision to close these bases has allowed the general to shift nearly 1,000 troops to other missions.
Historical analogies are imperfect, but the strategy being put in place can be viewed as a rejection of arguments that individual villages have a strategic importance - a Vietnam-era mistake - instead building on the lessons of the Iraq troop increase, when large population areas received the most reinforcements.
Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who has been working closely with the administration on Afghanistan, signaled the current thinking in a speech on Monday: "We don't have to control every hamlet and village, particularly when non-Pashtun sections of the country are already hostile to the Taliban."
One possible focus in the administration debate centers on Helmand, a lightly populated farming area and Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. For years, insurgents controlled much of the province, but Marines arrived in force this year to reinforce British troops.
Some administration officials ask whether it makes sense for 20 percent of the foreign forces to be protecting 3 percent of the country's population. But others point out that Helmand's fertile valley is important to Afghanistan's economy and that it has become a major source of opium used to finance the insurgency.
Mr. Obama will meet with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Friday, his seventh major session since beginning his review.
David E. Sanger contributed reporting.
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19) U.S. Use of Drones Queried by U.N.
By REUTERS
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/28nations.html?ref=us
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States must demonstrate that it is not randomly killing people in violation of international law through its use of drones on the Afghan border, a United Nations rights investigator said Tuesday.
The investigator, Philip Alston, also said the American refusal to respond to United Nations concerns that the use of drones might result in illegal executions was an "untenable" position.
Mr. Alston, who is appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, said his concern over drones had grown in the past few months as the American military prominently used them in the rugged area along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
He said the United States may be using the drones legally but needed to answer questions he raised in June. "Otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line, which is that the Central Intelligence Agency is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws," he said.
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20) Newark Mayor Backed Bloomberg, Then Got Funds
By DAVID W. CHEN
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/nyregion/28booker.html?ref=nyregion
Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark has been one of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's most vocal supporters this campaign season, stumping with him on at least four occasions, including a whirlwind tour of black churches in Queens on Sunday.
Perhaps Mr. Booker was trying to show some gratitude.
On April 17, Mr. Booker, a Democrat, crossed party and state lines by endorsing Mr. Bloomberg, an independent running as a Republican, in Harlem. About a month later, Mr. Bloomberg's longtime accountant contributed $26,000 - the maximum allowed - to Mr. Booker's re-election committee, according to campaign finance records.
Technically, the contribution to Mr. Booker's 10-member slate, which includes 9 Municipal Council candidates, was made by Martin J. Geller, Mr. Bloomberg's accountant. But Mr. Geller has long had a habit of contributing money to candidates or committees that the mayor supports, with a total of $100,000 in 2007 to Senate Republicans in Albany being one notable example.
The Booker contribution is only the second one that Mr. Geller has made to anyone in New Jersey politics. In 2005, he gave $2,000 to the campaign efforts of the Assembly Republicans in Trenton. At that time, Mr. Bloomberg was still registered as a Republican.
When asked about whether there was a quid pro quo, Howard Wolfson, the Bloomberg campaign's chief media strategist, said: "As Mayor Booker made clear this past Sunday, he and Mayor Bloomberg formed a friendship three years ago when he was first elected to office, and have worked together on a number of issues since, including gun violence and education reform. They form a mutual admiration society, and so it's not surprising that the two mayors would be supporting one another."
A spokeswoman for Mr. Booker, Desiree Peterkin Bell, pointed out that several members of Mr. Booker's staff have worked in the Bloomberg administration.
"Since 2006, both men have publicly praised and respected each other's leadership - they have and both will continue to be supportive of each other in the future," she said in a written statement.
Mr. Booker is hardly the only Democratic elected official who is not supporting William C. Thompson Jr., Mr. Bloomberg's Democratic opponent. But he has been one of Mr. Bloomberg's most avid supporters, regardless of party affiliation, and has campaigned vigorously in the last two weeks for Mr. Bloomberg and for Gov. Jon S. Corzine, a Democrat.
Never was Mr. Booker more effusive than on Sunday when he traveled with Mr. Bloomberg to black churches in Queens.
"My big brother mayor," Mr. Booker said in describing Mr. Bloomberg, during a rousing address at the Rev. Floyd H. Flake's Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral in Jamaica, Queens.
When told of the contribution, Anne Fenton, a spokeswoman for Mr. Thompson, said: "Today's revelation that Mike Bloomberg has paid for the endorsement of Newark Mayor Cory Booker is scandalous. It proves Bloomberg is willing to do anything to win this election and calls into question many of the supporters who have stood beside him."
No other politicians who have endorsed Mr. Bloomberg have also received contributions from his campaign in recent months.
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21) Union Votes Go Against Cuts at Ford
"At Ford's largest assembly plant, where nearly 4,000 workers build pickup trucks and small sport utility vehicles near Kansas City, Mo., 92 percent voted against the deal, according to results posted on the Local 249 Web site. Workers at five plants in Michigan also have voted it down."
By NICK BUNKLEY
October 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/business/28ford.html?ref=business
DETROIT - Many workers at the Ford Motor Company are signaling that they are unwilling to help the automaker cut its labor costs further, by voting against what would be the third round of concessions in the last two years.
Members of at least five local chapters of the United Automobile Workers union have turned down the proposed changes, which include a six-year wage freeze for newly hired workers, some job-classification changes and a provision that bars the union from striking over demands for better pay and benefits through 2015.
Ford, the only one of the three Detroit automakers to avoid bankruptcy this year, says it needs the modifications to remain competitive with General Motors and Chrysler, whose workers agreed to similar deals in the spring. Compared to its crosstown rivals, Ford has been surging.
Only about a third of the locals representing Ford's 41,000 union workers had finished voting by Tuesday, but already the potential for successful ratification was diminishing unless U.A.W. leaders could quickly contain growing opposition among rank-and-file members.
At Ford's largest assembly plant, where nearly 4,000 workers build pickup trucks and small sport utility vehicles near Kansas City, Mo., 92 percent voted against the deal, according to results posted on the Local 249 Web site. Workers at five plants in Michigan also have voted it down.
"This would be a tremendous blow to Ford and the U.A.W., which has gone out on a limb here," said Gary N. Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
"The workers are essentially saying enough is enough, that they don't see enough of a case for further concessions," Mr. Chaison said. "Ford had been making a case that it was doing better than General Motors and Chrysler, and as a result they have painted themselves into a corner, claiming that they were turning around but at the same time trying to claim that they needed major concessions to turn around."
Ford reported a $2.3 billion profit in the second quarter, largely because of a debt restructuring effort. An analyst said recently that the company could report another profit next week, though most observers on Wall Street are expecting a modest loss for Ford in the third quarter.
The company received more positive news Tuesday from Consumer Reports, which said Ford "has secured its position as the only Detroit automaker with world-class reliability." The magazine rated about 90 percent of Ford, Mercury and Lincoln models as having average or better reliability in its 2009 study.
The U.A.W.'s president, Ron Gettelfinger, has been urging workers to approve changing their contract, arguing that Ford is still heavily in debt and that workers could end up worse off if they do not agree to the deal. If ratified, the deal gives all hourly workers a $1,000 bonus in March and assigns new products to some plants, in some cases adding jobs.
"This is a great agreement, and it protects our membership," Mr. Gettelfinger said Tuesday on Detroit's WJR-AM, a radio station. "In my heart, I know that for the men and women who work at Ford and their families that this was the right thing to bring before them at this point in time."
Mr. Gettelfinger said opponents of the deal were misleading workers about the effect of the no-strike clause, which in G.M. and Chrysler's case was mandated by the federal government as part of its loan package to those companies, and turning it into a "flashpoint issue." He emphasized that the U.A.W. retained its ability to strike if Ford were to propose more cuts or over issues unrelated to pay and benefits.
Rejection of the deal by the union's membership would be an embarrassment for Mr. Gettelfinger, who is in his final term as president, and for his possible successor, Bob King, who heads the union's Ford department.
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