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Mumia Abu-Jamal - Legal Update
June 9, 2010
Robert R. Bryan, Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan
2088 Union Street, Suite 4
San Francisco, California 94123-4117
www.MumiaLegalDefense.org
Dear All:
There are significant developments on various fronts in the coordinated legal campaign to save & free Mumia Abu-Jamal. The complex court proceedings are moving forward at a fast pace. Mumia's life is on the line.
Court Developments: We are engaged in pivotal litigation in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Philadelphia. At stake is whether Mumia will be executed or granted a new jury trial on the question of the death penalty. Two years ago we won on that issue, with the federal court finding that the trial judge misled the jury thereby rendering the proceedings constitutionally unfair. Then in January 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that ruling based upon its decision in another case, & ordered that the case be again reviewed by the Court of Appeals.
The prosecution continues its obsession to kill my client, regardless of the truth as to what happened at the time of the 1981 police shooting. Its opening brief was filed April 26. Our initial brief will be submitted on July 28. At issue is the death penalty.
In separate litigation, we are awaiting a decision in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on prosecutorial abuses, having completed all briefing in April. The focus is on ballistics.
Petition for President Barack Obama: It is crucial for people to sign the petition for President Barack Obama, Mumia Abu-Jamal & the Global Abolition of the Death Penalty, which was initially in 10 languages (Swahili & Turkish have since been added). This is the only petition approved by Mumia & me, & is a vital part of the legal effort to save his life. Please sign the petition & circulate its link:
www.MumiaLegalDefense.org
Nearly 22,000 people from around the globe have signed. These include: Bishop Desmond Tutu, South Africa (Nobel Peace Prize); Günter Grass, Germany (Nobel Prize in Literature); Danielle Mitterrand, Paris (former First Lady of France); Fatima Bhutto, Pakistan (writer); Colin Firth (Academy Award Best-Actor nominee), Noam Chomsky, MIT (philosopher & author); Ed Asner (actor); Mike Farrell (actor); & Michael Radford (director of the Oscar winning film Il Postino); Robert Meeropol (son of Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953); Fatima Bhutto, Pakistan (writer); Noam Chomsky, MIT (philosopher & author); Ed Asner (actor); Mike Farrell (actor); Michael Radford (director of the Oscar winning film Il Postino); members of the European Parliament; members of the German Bundestag; European Association of Lawyers for Democracy & World Human Rights; Reporters Without Borders, Paris.
European Parliament; Rosa Luxemburg Conference; World Congress Against the Death Penalty; Geneva Human Rights Film Festival: We began the year with a major address to the annual Rosa Luxemburg Conference in Berlin, Germany, sponsored by the newspaper junge Welt. The large auditorium was filled with a standing-room audience. Mumia joined me by telephone. We announced the launching of the online petition, Mumia Abu-Jamal & the Global Abolition of the Death Penalty.
A large audience on the concluding night of the World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Geneva, Switzerland, February 25, heard Mumia by telephone. He spoke as a symbolic representative of the over 20,000 men, women & children on death rows around the world. The call came as a surprise, since we thought it had been canceled. Mumia's comments from inside his death-row cell brought to reality the horror of daily life in which death is a common denominator. During an earlier panel discussion I spoke of racism in capital cases around the globe with the case of Mumia as a prime example. A day before the Congress on February 23, I talked at the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival on the power of films in fighting the death penalty & saving Mumia.
On March 2 in the European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium, members Søren Søndergaard (Denmark) & Sabine Lösing (Germany) announced the beginning of a campaign to save Mumia & end executions. They were joined by Sabine Kebir, the noted German author & PEN member, Nicole Bryan, & me. We discussed the online petition which helps not only Mumia, but all the condemned around the globe.
Donations for Mumia's Legal Defense & Online Petition: The complex litigation & investigation that is being pursued on behalf of Mumia is enormously expensive. We are in both the federal & state courts on the issue of the death penalty, prosecutorial wrongdoing, etc. Mumia's life is on the line.
How to Help: For information on how to help, both through donations & signing the Obama petition, please go to Mumia's legal defense website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org .
Conclusion: Mumia remains on death row under a death judgment. He is in greater danger than at any time since his arrest 28 years ago. The prosecution is pursuing his execution. I win cases, & will not let them kill my client. He must be free.
Yours very truly,
Robert
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Robert R. Bryan
Law Offices of Robert R. Bryan
2088 Union Street, Suite 4
San Francisco, California 94123-4117
Lead counsel for Mumia Abu-Jamal
www.MumiaLegalDefense.org
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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 INNER TOUR - A touching film about the Palestinian right of return
June 10, 2010, 7:30 P.M.
ANSWER: San Francisco Bay Area
ATA Theater, 992 Valencia St. at 21st St., SF
$6 donation (no one turned away for lack of funds)
At time of the film's production in 2000-just months before the second Intifada-Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and were allowed into '48 Palestine on sightseeing tours.
The Inner Tour documents a three-day trip through Galilee to the Lebanon border, Tel Aviv and Jaffa where many of the passengers once lived. We hear conversations about occupation and loss. Several have been in Israeli prisons. Another sees his mother in Lebanon through barbed wire, unable to visit her. One woman tells how her husband was gunned down by Israeli soldiers while walking home. One man locates the site where his village once stood before it was destroyed by occupation forces, and finds his father's grave. 2002, Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles, 98 min.
For more info, call 415-821-6545.
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Mass Protest -- Beginning of Mehserle Trial -- Justice for Oscar Grant!!
Date: Monday, June 14, 2010
Time: 8:00am - 5:00pm
Location: All Out to the Courthouse
Street: Temple and Broadway
City/Town: Los Angeles, CA
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Please forward widely
Dear Friends of Lynne Stewart,
Forgive this hasty note updating Lynne's situation. I am off to Brazil shortly and must catch a plane soon.
I just spoke with Lynne's husband Ralph Poynter last night and learned the following.
A regularly scheduled follow up test to check on whether Lynne's breast cancel had reappeared revealed that Lynne now had a spot on her liver. Lynne struggled with prison authorities to have a required biopsy and related tests conducted at her regular, that is, non-prison, Roosevelt Hospital. Her requests were denied and she was compelled to have the biopsy done in a notoriously inferior facility where the results could not be determined for a week as compared to the almost immediate lab tests available at Roosevelt.
During Lynne's prison hospital stay she was shackled and handcuffed making rest and sleep virtually impossible. A horrified doctor ordered the shackles removed but immediately following his departure they were fastened on Lynne's feet and hands once again.
She is now back in her New York City prison cell. Her attorneys have filed for a postponement of her scheduled July 15 court appearance where Federal District Court sentencing Judge John Koeltl is to review the original 28-month jail sentence that he imposed last year.
This sentence was appealed by government prosecutors, who sought to order Koelt to impose a 30-year sentence. The U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, was sympathetic to the government's position and essentially stated that Koeltl's 28-month sentence exceeded the bounds of "reasonableness." Koeltl was ordered to reconsider. A relatively recent Supreme Court decision granted federal district court judges wide discretion in determining the length of internment. Koeltl's decision took into consideration many factors that the court system allows in determining Lynne's sentence. These included Lynne's character, her service to the community, her health and financial history and more. He ruled, among other things that Lynne's service to the community was indeed a "credit to her profession and to the nation."
Contrariwise, the government and prison authorities see Lynne as a convicted terrorist. Lynne was the victim of a frame-up trial held in the post-911 context. She was convicted on four counts of "aiding and abetting terrorism" stemming from a single act, Lynne's issuance of a press release on behalf of her client, the "blind" Egyptian Shreik Omar Abdel Rachman. The press release, that the government claimed violated a Special Administrative Order (SAM), was originally ignored as essentially trivial by the Clinton administration and then Attorney General Janet Reno. But the Bush administration's Attorney General John Ashcroft decided to go after Lynne with a sledge hammer.
A monstrous trial saw government attorney's pulling out all the stops to convince an intimidated jury that Lynne was associated in some way with terrorist acts across the globe, not to mention with Osama bin Laden. Both the judge and government were compelled to admit in court that there were no such "associations," but press clippings found in Lynne's office were nevertheless admitted as "hearsay" evidence even though they were given to Lynne by the government under the rules of discovery.
It is likely that Lynne's request for a postponement will be granted, assuming the government holds to the law that a prisoner has the right to partake in her/his own defense. Lynne's illness has certainly prevented her from doing so.
In the meantime, Lynne would like nothing more than to hear from her friends and associates. Down the road her defense team will also be looking for appropriate letters to the judge on Lynne's behalf. More later on the suggested content of these letters.
Please write Lynne to express your love and solidarity:
Lynne Stewart 53504-054
MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, New York 10007
In Solidarity,
Jeff Mackler, West Coast Coordinator
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
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Lynne Stewart and the Guantanamo Lawyers: Same Fact Patterns, Same Opponent, Different Endings?
Lynne Stewart will be re-sentenced sometime in July, in NYC.
By Ralph Poynter
(Ralph Poynter is the Life partner of Lynne Stewart. He is presently dedicated 24/7 to her defense, as well as other causes.)
Ralph.Poynter@yahoo.com
In the Spring of 2002, Lynne Stewart was arrested by the FBI, at her home in Brooklyn, for materially aiding terrorism by virtue of making a public press release to Reuters on behalf of her client, Sheik Abdel Omar Rahman of Egypt. This was done after she had signed a Special Administrative Measure issued by the Bureau of Prisons not permitting her to communicate with the media, on his behalf.
In 2006, a number of attorneys appointed and working pro bono for detainees at Guantanamo were discovered to be acting in a manner that disobeyed a Federal Judge's protective court order. The adversary in both cases was the United States Department of Justice. The results in each case were very different.
In March of 2010, a right wing group "Keep America Safe" led by Lynne Cheney, hoping to dilute Guantanamo representation and impugn the reputations and careers of the volunteer lawyers, launched a campaign. Initially they attacked the right of the detainees to be represented at all. This was met with a massive denouncement by Press, other media, Civil rights organizations ,and rightly so, as being a threat to the Constitution and particularly the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.
A second attack on the Gitmo lawyers was made in the Wall Street Journal of March 16. This has been totally ignored in the media and by civil and human rights groups. This latter revelation about the violations, by these lawyers, of the Judge's protective orders and was revealed via litigation and the Freedom of Information Act. These pro bono lawyers serving clients assigned to them at Gitmo used privileged attorney client mail to send banned materials. They carried in news report of US failures in Afghanistan and Iraq . One lawyer drew a map of the prison. Another delivered lists to his client of all the suspects held there. They placed on the internet a facsimile of the badges worn by the Guards. Some lawyers "provided news outlets with 'interviews' of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organizations." When a partner at one of the large Wall Street law firms sent in multiple copies of an Amnesty International brochure, which her client was to distribute to other prisoners, she was relieved from her representation and barred by the Military Commander from visiting her client.
This case is significant to interpret not because of the right wing line to punish these lawyers and manipulate their corporate clients to stop patronizing such "wayward" firms. Instead it is significant because, Lynne Stewart, a left wing progressive lawyer who had dedicated her thirty year career to defending the poor, the despised, the political prisoner and those ensnared by reason of race, gender, ethnicity, religion , who was dealt with by the same Department of Justice, in such a draconian fashion, confirms our deepest suspicions that she was targeted for prosecution and punishment because of who she is and who she represented so ably and not because of any misdeed.
Let me be very clear, I am not saying that the Gitmo lawyers acted in any "criminal" manner. The great tradition of the defense bar is to be able to make crucial decisions for and with the client without interference by the adversary Government.
I believe that they were acting as zealous attorneys trying to establish rapport and trust with their clients. That said, the moment the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice tried to remove Julia Tarver Mason from her client, the playing field tilted. Ms Tarver Mason was not led out of her home in handcuffs to the full glare of publicity. There was no press conference. The Attorney General did not go on the David Letterman show to gloat about the latest strike in the War on Terror, the purge of the Gitmo lawyer...NO.
Instead an "armada" of corporate lawyers went to Court against the Government. They, in the terms of the litigation trade, papered the US District Courthouse in Washington D.C. They brought to bear the full force of their Money and Power-- derived from the corporate world--and in 2006 "settled" the case with the government, restoring their clients to Guantanamo without any punishment at all, not to say any Indictment. Lynne Stewart, without corporate connections and coming from a working class background, was tried and convicted for issuing, on behalf of her client, a public press release to Reuters. There was no injury, no harm, no attacks, no deaths.
Yet that same Department of Justice that dealt so favorably and capitulated to the Gitmo corporate lawyers, wants to sentence Lynne Stewart to thirty (30) YEARS in prison. It is the equivalent of asking for a death sentence since she is 70 years old.
This vast disparity in treatment between Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers reveals the deep contradictions of the system ---those who derive power from rich and potent corporations, those whose day to day work maintains and increases that power--are treated differently. Is it because the Corporate Power is intertwined with Government Power???
Lynne Stewart deserves Justice... equal justice under law. Her present sentence of 28 months incarceration (she is in Federal Prison) should at least be maintained, if not made equal to the punishment that was meted out to the Gitmo lawyers. The thirty year sentence, assiduously pursued by DOJ under both Bush and Obama, is an obscenity and an affront to fundamental fairness. They wanted to make her career and dedication to individual clients, a warning, to the defense bar that the Government can arrest any lawyer on any pretext. The sharp contrasts between the cases of Lynne and the Gitmo lawyers just confirm that she is getting a raw deal--one that should be protested actively, visibly and with the full force of our righteous resistance.
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INVITATION TO A NATIONAL CONFERENCE TO BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
United National Peace Conference
July 23 - 25, 2010, Albany , NY
Unac2010@aol.com
UNAC, P.O. Box 21675
Cleveland, OH 44121
518-227-6947
www.nationalpeaceconference.org
Greetings:
Twenty co-sponsoring national organizations urge you to attend this conference scheduled for Albany , New York July 23-25, 2010. They are After Downing Street, Arab American Union Members Council, Bailout the People Movement, Black Agenda Report, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Campus Antiwar Network, Code Pink, International Action Center, Iraq Veterans Against the War, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, National Lawyers Guild, Peace Action, Peace of the Action, Progressive Democrats of America, The Fellowship of Reconciliation, U.S. Labor Against the War, Veterans for Peace, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and World Can't Wait.
The purpose of the conference is to plan united actions in the months ahead in support of demands for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. military forces and contractors from Afghanistan and Iraq , and money for human needs, not for wars, occupations, and bail-outs. The peace movement is strongest and most effective when plans for united actions are made by the whole range of antiwar and social justice organizations meeting together and deciding together dates and places for national mobilizations.
Each person attending the conference will have voice and vote. Attendees will have the opportunity to amend the action proposal submitted by conference co-sponsors, add demands, and submit resolutions for consideration by the conference.
Keynoters will be NOAM CHOMSKY, internationally renowned political activist, author, and critic of U.S. foreign and domestic policies, MIT Professor Emeritus of Linguistics; and DONNA DEWITT, President, South Carolina AFL-CIO; Co-Chair, South Carolina Progressive Network; Steering Committee, U.S. Labor Against the War; Administrative Body, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations.
The conference's website is www.nationalpeaceconference.org and you will find there details regarding other speakers, workshops, registration, hotel and travel information, and how to submit amendments, demands, and resolutions. The action proposal has also been published on the website.
Please write us at UNAC2010@aol.com for further information or call 518-227-6947. We can fill orders for copies of the conference brochure. Tables for display and sale of materials can be reserved.
We look forward to seeing you in Albany on July 23-25.
In peace,
Jerry Gordon
Secretary, National Peace Conference
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Education 4 the People!
October 7 Day of Action in Defense of Public Education - California
http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/
MORE THAN 100 activists from across California gathered in Los Angeles April 24 to debate next steps for the fight against the devastating cutbacks facing public education.
The main achievements of the conference were to set a date and location for the next statewide mass action-October 7-and for the next anti-cuts conference, which will happen October 16 at San Francisco State University. The other key outcome was the first steps toward the formation of an ad hoc volunteer coordinating committee to plan for the fall conference.
These decisions were a crucial step toward deepening and broadening the movement. For example, the fall conference will be the key venue for uniting activists from all sectors of public education, and especially from those schools and campuses which saw action on March 4, but which have yet to plug into the broader movement.
This will be crucial for extending the scope and increasing the strength of our movement, as well as for helping us strategize and prepare for what is certain to be a tough year ahead. Similarly, the fall mass action will be crucial to re-igniting the movement following the summer months.
http://defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/
Organizing for the next Statewide Public Education Mobilization Conference at SFSU on OCT 16th
Posted on May 24, 2010 by ooofireballooo
Organizing for the next Statewide Public Education Mobilization Conference
@ San Francisco State University on October 16th
MORE THAN 100 activists from across California gathered in Los Angeles April 24 to debate next steps for the fight against the devastating cutbacks facing public education.
The main achievements of the conference were to set a date and location for the next statewide mass action-October 7-and for the next anti-cuts conference, which will happen October 16 at San Francisco State University. The other key outcome was the first steps toward the formation of an ad hoc volunteer coordinating committee to plan for the fall conference.
These decisions were a crucial step toward deepening and broadening the movement. For example, the fall conference will be the key venue for uniting activists from all sectors of public education, and especially from those schools and campuses which saw action on March 4, but which have yet to plug into the broader movement.
This will be crucial for extending the scope and increasing the strength of our movement, as well as for helping us strategize and prepare for what is certain to be a tough year ahead. Similarly, the fall mass action will be crucial to re-igniting the movement following the summer months.
Proposal: Form a conference organizing listserve immediately!
Please join the google group today.
* Group home page: http://groups.google.com/group/fallconferencesfsu
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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Roger Waters - "We Shall Overcome" for Gaza
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnMMHepfYVc
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Bernadette McAliskey Quote on Zionists:
"The root cause of conflict in the Middle East is the very nature of the state of Israel. It is a facist state. It is a international bully, which exists not to protect the rights of the Jewish people but to perpetuate a belief of Zionist supremacy. It debases the victims of the holocaust by its own strategy for extermination of Palestine and Palestinians and has become the image and likeness of its own worst enemy, the Third Reich.
"Anyone challenging their position, their crazed self-image is entitled, in the fascist construction of their thinking, to be wiped out. Every humanitarian becomes a terrorist? How long is the reality of the danger Israel poses to world peace going to be denied by the Western powers who created this monster?"
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Rachel Maddow: Disgraceful response to the oil itself
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#37563648
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It Ain't My Fault by Mos Def & Lenny Kravitz | stupidDOPE.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnR1BrGgRVM
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Gulf Oil Spill?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAHS5z6QKok
Dear Readers,
If you are wondering why an antiwar newsletter is giving full coverage to the oil spill, it's because:
(1) "Supplying the US army with oil is one of BP's biggest markets, and further exploration in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico is part of its long-term strategy."*
(2) "The Senate on Thursday, [May 27, 2010] approved a nearly $60 billion measure to pay for continuing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq..."**
The two are inextricably entwined and interdependent.
--Bonnie Weinstein
*The black hole at the bottom of the Gulf
No one seems to know the extent of the BP disaster
By David Randall and Margareta Pagano
Sunday, 23 May 2010
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-black-hole-at-the-bottom-of-the-gulf-1980693.html
**Senate Approves Nearly $60 Billion for Wars
By CARL HULSE
May 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/us/politics/28cong.html?ref=us
Watch BP Live Video Webcam Camera Feed of Gulf Oil Spill Here! (Update 7)
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/05/20/live-video-feed-webcam-gulf-oil-spill/
What BP does not want you to see:
ABC News went underwater in the Gulf with Philippe Cousteau Jr., grandson of famous explorer Jacques Cousteau, and he described what he saw as "one of the most horrible things I've ever seen underwater."
Check out what BP does not want you to see. And please share this widely -- every American should see what's happening under the surface in the Gulf.
http://acp.repoweramerica.org/page/invite/oilspillvideo?source=sprd-fwd&utm_source=crm_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oilspillvideo20100527&utm_content=link1
Live BP Gulf Oil Spill Webcam Video Reveals 5 Leaks
http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2010/05/24/live-bp-gulf-oil-spill-webcam-video-reveals-5-leaks/
Stop Shell Oil's Offshore Drilling Plans in the Arctic
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/308597489?z00m=19844689
Sign the Petition to Ban Offshore Drilling Now!
http://na.oceana.org/en/stopthedrill?key=31522015
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POEM ON WHAT ISRAEL DOES NOT ALLOW INTO GAZA - FROM THE IRISH TIMES / CARDOMAN AS A BIOLOGICAL WARFARE WEAPON
[ The poem does not mention that the popular herb cardamom is banned from importation into Gaza. Israel probably fears that cardamom can be used as a biological weapon. Rockets with cardamom filled projectiles landing in Israel could cause Israeli soldiers 'guarding' the border to succumb to pangs of hunger, leave their posts to go get something eat, and leave Israel defenseless. - Howard Keylor]
Richard Tillinghast is an American poet who lives in Co Tipperary. He is the author of eight books of poetry, the latest of which is Selected Poems (Dedalus Press, 2010 ), as well as several works of non-fiction
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No tinned meat is allowed, no tomato paste,
no clothing, no shoes, no notebooks.
These will be stored in our warehouses at Kerem Shalom
until further notice.
Bananas, apples, and persimmons are allowed into Gaza,
peaches and dates, and now macaroni
(after the American Senator's visit).
These are vital for daily sustenance.
But no apricots, no plums, no grapes, no avocados, no jam.
These are luxuries and are not allowed.
Paper for textbooks is not allowed.
The terrorists could use it to print seditious material.
And why do you need textbooks
now that your schools are rubble?
No steel is allowed, no building supplies, no plastic pipe.
These the terrorists could use to launch rockets
against us.
Pumpkins and carrots you may have, but no delicacies,
no cherries, no pomegranates, no watermelon, no onions,
no chocolate.
We have a list of three dozen items that are allowed,
but we are not obliged to disclose its contents.
This is the decision arrived at
by Colonel Levi, Colonel Rosenzweig, and Colonel Segal.
Our motto:
'No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis.'
You may fish in the Mediterranean,
but only as far as three km from shore.
Beyond that and we open fire.
It is a great pity the waters are polluted
twenty million gallons of raw sewage dumped into the sea every day
is the figure given.
Our rockets struck the sewage treatments plants,
and at this point spare parts to repair them are not allowed.
As long as Hamas threatens us,
no cement is allowed, no glass, no medical equipment.
We are watching you from our pilotless drones
as you cook your sparse meals over open fires
and bed down
in the ruins of houses destroyed by tank shells.
And if your children can't sleep,
missing the ones who were killed in our incursion,
or cry out in the night, or wet their beds
in your makeshift refugee tents,
or scream, feeling pain in their amputated limbs -
that's the price you pay for harbouring terrorists.
God gave us this land.
A land without a people for a people without a land.
--
Greta Berlin, Co-Founder
+357 99 18 72 75
witnessgaza.com
www.freegaza.org
http://www.flickr.com/photos/freegaza
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Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program) and the Murder of Black Panther Leaders
http://www.averdade.org.br/modules/news/article.php?storyid=451
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This is just inspiring! You have to watch it! ...bw
Don't Get Caught in a Bad Hotel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-79pX1IOqPU
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SEIZE BP!
[While this is a good beginning to a fight to put safety first--for workers and the planet--we must recognize that the whole thrust of capitalism is to get the job done quicker and cheaper, workers and the world be damned!
It is workers who are intimately aware of the dangers of production and the ways those dangers could be eliminated. And, if, say, a particular mine, factory, industry can't be made to be safe, then it should be abandoned. Those workers effected should simply be "retired" with full pay and benefits. They have already been subjected to the toxins, dangers, etc., on the job.
Basically, safety must be under worker's control. Workers must have first dibs on profits to insure safety first.
It not only means nationalizing industry--but internationalizing industry--and placing it under the control and operation of the workers themselves. Governmental controls of safety regulations are notoriously ineffectual because the politicians themselves are the corporation's paid defenders. It only makes sense that corporate profits should be utilized--under the worker's control--to put safety first or stop production altogether. Safety first has to be interpreted as "safety before profits and profits for safety first!" We can only hope it is not too late! ...bw]
SEIZE BP!
The government of the United States must seize BP and freeze its assets, and place those funds in trust to begin providing immediate relief to the working people throughout the Gulf states whose jobs, communities, homes and businesses are being harmed or destroyed by the criminally negligent actions of the CEO, Board of Directors and senior management of BP.
Take action now! Sign the Seize BP petition to demand the seizure of BP!
200,000 gallons of oil a day, or more, are gushing into the Gulf of Mexico with the flow of oil growing. The poisonous devastation to human beings, wildlife, natural habitat and fragile ecosystems will go on for decades. It constitutes an act of environmental violence, the consequences of which will be catastrophic.
BP's Unmitigated Greed
This was a manufactured disaster. It was neither an "Act of God" nor Nature that caused this devastation, but rather the unmitigated greed of Big Oil's most powerful executives in their reckless search for ever-greater profits.
Under BP's CEO Tony Hayward's aggressive leadership, BP made a record $5.6 billion in pure profits just in the first three months of 2010. BP made $163 billion in profits from 2001-09. It has a long history of safety violations and slap-on-the-wrist fines.
BP's Materially False and Misleading Statements
BP filed a 52-page exploration plan and environmental impact analysis with the U.S. Department of the Interior's Minerals Management Service for the Deepwater Horizon well, dated February 2009, which repeatedly assured the government that it was "unlikely that an accidental surface or subsurface oil spill would occur from the proposed activities." In the filing, BP stated over and over that it was unlikely for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill causing serious damage to beaches, mammals and fisheries and that as such it did not require a response plan for such an event.
BP's executives are thus either guilty of making materially false statements to the government to obtain the license, of consciously misleading a government that was all too ready to be misled, and/or they are guilty of criminal negligence. At a bare minimum, their representations constitute gross negligence. Whichever the case, BP must be held accountable for its criminal actions that have harmed so many.
Protecting BP's Super-Profits
BP executives are banking that they can ride out the storm of bad publicity and still come out far ahead in terms of the billions in profit that BP will pocket. In 1990, in response to the Exxon Valdez disaster, Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the Oil Pollution Act, which immunizes oil companies for the damages they cause beyond immediate cleanup costs.
Under the Oil Pollution Act, oil companies are responsible for oil removal and cleanup costs for massive spills, and their liability for all other forms of damages is capped at $75 million-a pittance for a company that made $5.6 billion in profits in just the last three months, and is expected to make $23 billion in pure profit this year. Some in Congress suggest the cap should be set at $10 billion, still less than the potential cost of this devastation-but why should the oil companies have any immunity from responsibility for the damage they cause?
The Oil Pollution Act is an outrage, and it will be used by BP to keep on doing business as usual.
People are up in arms because thousands of workers who have lost their jobs and livelihoods as a result of BP's actions have to wait in line to compete for lower wage and hazardous clean-up jobs from BP. BP's multi-millionaire executives are not asked to sacrifice one penny while working people have to plead for clean-up jobs.
Take Action Now
It is imperative that the government seize BP's assets now for their criminal negligence and begin providing immediate relief for the immense suffering and harm they have caused.
Seize BP Petition button*: http://www.seizebp.org/
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Neil Young - Ohio - Live at Massey Hall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV0rAwk4lFE&feature=player_embedded#
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Rachel Carson's Warnings in "The Sea Around Us":
"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself. . ." http://www.savethesea.org/quotes
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Operation Small Axe - Trailer
http://www.blockreportradio.com/news-mainmenu-26/820-us-school-district-to-begin-microchipping-students.html
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Shame on Arizona
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer just signed a law that will authorize officers to pull over, question, and detain anyone they have a "reasonable suspicion" to believe is in this country without proper documentation. It's legalized racial profiling, and it's an affront on all of our civil rights, especially Latinos. It's completely unacceptable.
Join us in letting Arizona's leaders know how we feel, and that there will be consequences. A state that dehumanizes its own people does not deserve our economic support
"As long as racial profiling is legal in Arizona, I will do what I can to not visit the state and to avoid spending dollars there."
Sign Petition Here:
http://presente.org/campaigns/shame?populate=1
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html
(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)
[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
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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 501c)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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Collateral Murder
[COLD-BLOODED, OUTRIGHT MURDER OF UNARMED CIVILIANS--AND THEY LAUGH ABOUT IT AS THEY SHOOT! THIS IS A BLOOD-CURTLING, VIOLENT AND BRUTAL VIDEO THAT SHOULD BE VIEWED BY EVERYONE! IT EXPOSES, AS MARTIN LUTHER KING SAID, "THE BIGGEST PURVEYORS OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD," THE U.S. BI-PARTISAN GOVERNMENT AND THE MILITARY THEY COMMAND. --BW]
Overview
5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
http://www.collateralmurder.com/
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San Francisco City and County Tramples on Civil Liberties
A Letter to Antiwar Activists
Dear Activists:
On Saturday, March 20, the San Francisco City and County Recreation and Parks Department's Park Rangers patrolled a large public antiwar demonstration, shutting down the distribution of Socialist Viewpoint magazine. The rally in Civic Center Plaza was held in protest of the illegal and immoral U.S. wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and to commemorate the 7th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Park Rangers went table-to-table examining each one. They photographed the Socialist Viewpoint table and the person attending it-me. My sister, Debbie and I, had set up the table. We had a sign on the table that asked for a donation of $1.25 for the magazine. The Park Rangers demanded that I "pack it up" and go, because selling or even asking for donations for newspapers or magazines is no longer permitted without the purchase of a new and expensive "vendors license." Their rationale for this denial of free speech is that the distribution of newspapers, magazines, T-shirts-and even food-would make the political protest a "festival" and not a political protest demonstration!
This City's action is clearly a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution-the right to free speech and freedom of the press-and can't be tolerated.
While they are firing teachers and other San Francisco workers, closing schools, cutting back healthcare access, cutting services to the disabled and elderly, it is outrageous that the Mayor and City Government chose to spend thousands of dollars to police tables at an antiwar rally-a protest demonstration by the people!
We can't let this become the norm. It is so fundamentally anti-democratic. The costs of the permits for the rally, the march, the amplified sound, is already prohibitive. Protest is not a privilege we should have to pay for. It's a basic right in this country and we should reclaim it!
Personally, I experienced a deep feeling of alienation as the crisply-uniformed Park Ranger told me I had to "pack it up"-especially when I knew that they were being paid by the City to do this at this demonstration!
I hope you will join this protest of the violation of the right to distribute and, therefore, the right to read Socialist Viewpoint, by writing or emailing the City officials who are listed below.1
In solidarity,
Bonnie Weinstein, Editorial Board Member, Socialist Viewpoint
www.socialistviewpoint.org
60 - 29th Street, #429
San Francisco, CA 94110
415-824-8730
1 Mayor Gavin Newsom
City Hall, Room 200
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102
gavin.newsom@sfgov.org
Board of Supervisors
City Hall
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place, Room 244
San Francisco, Ca 94102-4689
Board.of.supervisors@sfgov.org
San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department Park Rangers
McLaren Lodge & Annex
501 Stanyan Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
Park.patrol@sfgov.org
San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission
501 Stanyan Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
recpark.commission@sfgov.org
Chief of Police George Gascón
850 Bryant Street, #525
San Francisco, CA 94103
(I could not find an email address for him.).
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FREE LYNNE STEWART NOW!
Lynne Stewart in Jail!
Mail tax free contributions payable to National Lawyers Guild Foundation. Write in memo box: "Lynne Stewart Defense." Mail to: Lynne Stewart Defense, P.O. Box 10328, Oakland, CA 94610.
SEND RESOLUTIONS AND STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT TO DEFENSE ATTORNEY JOSHUA L. DRATEL, ESQ. FAX: 212) 571 3792 AND EMAIL: jdratel@aol.com
SEND PROTESTS TO ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER:
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Department of Justice Main Switchboard - 202-514-2000
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Office of the Attorney General Public Comment Line - 202-353-1555
To send Lynne a letter, write:
Lynne Stewart
53504-054
MCC-NY
150 Park Row
New York, NY 10007
Lynne Stewart speaks in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOQ5_VKRf5k&feature=related
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On June 30, an innocent man will be given a second chance.
In 1991, Troy Davis was sentenced to death for allegedly killing a police officer in Savannah, Georgia. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, and seven out of nine witnesses recanted or contradicted their testimony.
He was sentenced to death for a crime he didn't commit. But it's not too late to change Troy's fate.
We just learned today that Troy has been granted an evidentiary hearing -- an opportunity to right this wrong. Help give him a second chance by telling your friends to pledge their support for Troy:
http://www.iamtroy.com/
Troy Davis may just be one man, but his situation represents an injustice experienced by thousands. And suffering this kind of injustice, by even one man, is one person too many.
Thanks to you and 35,000 other NAACP members and supporters who spoke out last August, the U.S. Supreme Court is granting Troy Davis his day in court--and a chance to make his case after 19 years on death row.
This hearing is the first step.
We appreciate your continued support of Troy. If you have not yet done so, please visit our website, sign the petition, then tell your friends to do the same.
http://www.iamtroy.com
I will be in touch soon to let you know how else you can help.
Sincerely,
Benjamin Todd Jealous
President and CEO
NAACP
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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) With Strikes, China's Workers Seem to Gain Power
By DAVID BARBOZA and HIROKO TABUCHI
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/business/global/09labor.html?hp
2) CONFIRMED: Aerial Video Shows Second Leaking Rig Near The Deepwater Horizon
[There is a video of the Ocean Saratoga rig oil leak in addition to the Deepwater Horizon leak...bw]
By Gus Lubin
Jun. 8, 2010, 9:18 AM
http://www.businessinsider.com/confirmed-there-is-a-second-leaking-rig-near-the-deepwater-2010-6#ixzz0qI5jMgQu
3) Spain Hit by Strike Over Austerity Measures
By RAPHAEL MINDER
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/world/europe/09iht-spain.html?ref=world
4) Police Officers End a Mine Strike in Mexico
By ELISABETH MALKIN
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/americas/08mexico.html?ref=world
5)Rate of Oil Leak, Still Not Clear, Puts Doubt on BP
By JUSTIN GILLIS and HENRY FOUNTAIN
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/us/08flow.html?ref=us
6) Military Taps Social Networking Skills
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/technology/08homefront.html?ref=us
7) Plumes of Oil Below Surface Raise New Concerns
By JUSTIN GILLIS
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/us/09spill.html?ref=us
8) Border Shooting Strains Tensions With Mexico
[Like the Israeli Defense Force, U.S. Border patrol carries out death sentence for rock-throwing children...bw]
By MARC LACEY
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/world/asia/09border.html?ref=us
9) Facing Misconduct Claims, Brooklyn Prosecutor Agrees to Free Man Held 15 Years
By A. G. SULZBERGER
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/nyregion/09vecchione.html?ref=nyregion
10) Jury seated in Mehserle trial
"The jury includes no African Americans..."
Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/09/BA8L1DRPOT.DTL
11) Judge blocks nurses' strike at 5 UC hospitals
Victoria Colliver, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/08/BAO81DRSSA.DTL&tsp=1
12) Efforts to Limit the Flow of Spill News
By JEREMY W. PETERS
June 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/us/10access.html?ref=us
13) Chilling Images of Drilling's Perils, Met by Numbed Eyes
"At this point the voice of reason is supposed to add, Yes. But. We need the energy from somewhere. What's the least bad alternative: Offshore or Middle Eastern oil? Gas? Nuclear? Coal? A conventional answer is gas. Only you look at those sickening images from the gulf and the shimmering green canvas of hills, lakes and dairy farms upstate and you add another "Yes. But." If there could ever be an event that would set our hair on fire, send us running a million miles an hour toward full-bore efforts at conservation and alternative energy, what else could it be if not this one?"
[Check out the very short video at this site:
http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/
It will shock and amaze you!...bw]
By PETER APPLEBOME
WALTON, N.Y.
June 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/nyregion/10towns.html?ref=nyregion
14) [WAT] PRESS RELEASE: Trial for Anti-Torture Activists Begins Monday (6/14), GITMO Still Open Under Obama
BROKEN PROMISES, BROKEN LAWS, BROKEN LIVES
Twenty-Seven to Go on Trial for Protesting the Obama Administration's
Failure to Close Guantanamo, Plan for Indefinite Detention, and
Refusal to Prosecute Torture
For Immediate Release, June 10, 2010
Contact: Jeremy Varon: M: 732-979-3119 varon@aol.com
Helen Schietinger: M: 202-344-5762 h.schietinger@verizon.net
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1) With Strikes, China's Workers Seem to Gain Power
By DAVID BARBOZA and HIROKO TABUCHI
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/business/global/09labor.html?hp
SHANGHAI - Just days after resolving a strike by agreeing to give substantial raises to 1,900 workers at its transmission factory, Honda Motor said Tuesday that employees at another of its parts plants in southern China had staged a walkout.
A Honda spokeswoman in Tokyo, Natsuno Asanuma, said workers at an exhaust-system factory in the city of Foshan had gone on strike Monday morning. She declined to say what demands they had made. But the walkout will force Honda to halt work Wednesday at one of its four auto assembly plants in China, the company said.
The four assembly factories had just reopened after closing for almost two weeks because of the earlier strike. It was unclear how long the assembly plant, Guangqi Honda Automobile, would remain closed.
The second Honda strike comes amid growing signs that China's huge migrant work force is gaining bargaining power. New pressure to raise pay and improve labor conditions is likely to raise the cost of doing business and could induce some companies to shift production elsewhere.
Foxconn Technology - a giant contract electronics manufacturer that also raised wages in China this month - said Tuesday it was reconsidering the way it runs its operations there.
The company, which has seen a string of suicides among workers at its sprawling, citylike campuses in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, said it was considering turning the management of some of its worker dormitories over to local governments in China.
"Because Foxconn is a commercial enterprise operating like a society, we're responsible for almost everything for our workers, including their job, food, dorm and even personal relationships," Arthur Huang, a Foxconn spokesman, said Tuesday. "That is too much for a single company. A company like Foxconn shouldn't have so many functions."
Foxconn, a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision Industry of Taiwan, makes devices for companies like Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Hon Hai's shares fell more than 5 percent Tuesday in Taiwan, to their lowest since last August, after the company said it would seek to pass on its higher labor costs to clients.
As the company held annual shareholder meetings in Taipei and Hong Kong, small groups of people demonstrated outside, urging the company to improve conditions for workers.
Turning over management of employee dormitories to the government authorities would be a dramatic change for Foxconn, which - like thousands of other manufacturers in southern China - has lured peasants from rural areas to work at giant, gated factory compounds.
One of the company's Shenzhen campuses employs 300,000 workers and covers about 1 square mile, or more than 2.5 square kilometers. The gated campus boasts high-rise dormitories, a hospital, a fire department, an Internet cafe and even restaurants and bank branches.
Foxconn said Sunday that it planned to double the salaries of many of its 800,000 workers in China to 2,000 renminbi, or nearly $300, a month. The huge raise by one of the country's biggest exporters seems likely to put pressure on other companies to follow suit, analysts say.
Chairman Terry Gou told the Taipei shareholders' meeting that the company was looking to shift some unspecified production from China to automated plants in Taiwan, Reuters reported.
After years of focusing on luring foreign investment, Chinese officials are now endorsing efforts to improve conditions for workers and raise salaries. The government hopes the changes will ease a widening income gap between the rich and the poor and prevent social unrest over soaring food and housing prices.
On Friday, Beijing's municipal government said it would raise its minimum wage by 20 percent. Ma Jun, a Hong Kong-based economist at Deutsche Bank, said last week that more cities and provinces would soon raise their minimum wages 10 to 20 percent.
"We therefore believe that a faster-than-expected labor cost increase has now become a political imperative," Mr. Ma said in a report, citing comments from Beijing's leadership about improving social justice.
But analysts say wage pressure is also coming from labor shortages in coastal cities as the country's declining birth rate reduces the number of young people entering the work force.
Factories in southern China that used to advertise in search of employees 18 to 24 years old are now recruiting much older workers.
The labor shortages are being exacerbated by an economic boom and improving job prospects in inland provinces.
TPV Technology, a contract manufacturer that produces computer monitors with about 16,000 workers in five cities in China, says it raised salaries by 15 percent in January and plans to raise them again, perhaps as early as July.
"We'll adjust our salary to the market and to our competitors' level," said Shane Tyau, a vice president at TPV, which is based in Hong Kong. "If Foxconn announces another round of pay raises, we'll reconsider our wage level, too."
Economists say that China's labor force is growing increasingly bold and that over the past year, periodic strikes in southern China - some even involving global companies - have been resolved quietly or not reported in the media.
To resolve the strike at its transmission plant, Honda offered workers raises of 24 to 32 percent. The strike had forced Honda to shut down its assembly plants in China.
Now Honda, Japan's second-largest automaker, after Toyota Motor, has been a target again. The exhaust-system factory, which is controlled by a joint venture between a Honda subsidiary and a Chinese company.
Honda owns a network of production facilities in China, including the four car assembly factories and three auto parts manufacturers, as well as two motorbike plants, two plants that make generators, pumps and other power equipment and three research centers.
Those numbers do not include factories opened in China by Honda subsidiaries like Yutaka Giken, which separately runs four auto parts manufacturers in the country.
Honda denied Tuesday that it was vulnerable to more strikes because it had already shown a willingness to increase wages to get employees back to its production lines. "It's not at all clear at this point whether the two strikes are related," said Ms. Asanuma, the Honda spokeswoman.
"It's too early at this point to say whether we are looking at some kind of chain reaction."
Hiroko Tabuchi reported from Tokyo. Bao Beibei contributed research.
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2) CONFIRMED: Aerial Video Shows Second Leaking Rig Near The Deepwater Horizon
[There is a video of the Ocean Saratoga rig oil leak in addition to the Deepwater Horizon leak...bw]
By Gus Lubin
Jun. 8, 2010, 9:18 AM
http://www.businessinsider.com/confirmed-there-is-a-second-leaking-rig-near-the-deepwater-2010-6#ixzz0qI5jMgQu
Earlier we published speculation from satellite analytics group SkyTruth that there may be a second leak in the Gulf. A freelance pilot and photographer confirmed these rumors and a possible coverup.
Photographer J Henry Fair says the new photos show an oil plume originating from the Ocean Saratoga rig, which is operated by Diamond Offshore. A work ship in the foreground appeared to be applying dispersants to the oil. A larger rig in the background may be discharging another leak.
This leak was reported last night by Alabama local news. NOAA also mentioned this leak in a April 30 oil slick map [PDF].
Diamond Offshore spokesman Gary Krenek tells us his company was hired by Taylor Energy to "plug and abandon" the existing well. He declined to comment on the reported leak.
The rig was damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, according to Times Picayune. However, Diamond Offshore tells us, however, it was not hired to close the well until 2009.
So how long and how much oil has leaked?
A NOAA spokeswoman said "scientists are looking into the leak." Meanwhile, Coast Guard rep Zachary Zubricki tells us "this is not a story."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/confirmed-there-is-a-second-leaking-rig-near-the-deepwater-2010-6#ixzz0qI5jMgQu
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3) Spain Hit by Strike Over Austerity Measures
By RAPHAEL MINDER
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/world/europe/09iht-spain.html?ref=world
MADRID - Spanish public workers went on strike on Tuesday against a cut in their wages in what could be the first of several union-led protests against the government's latest austerity measures.
The strike reduced hospital care, mail distribution and other public services to a minimum, but did not cause a nationwide paralysis. Trade unions said that 75 percent of the country's 2.5 million public workers had gone on strike - a number that was contested by the government, which put the level of participation at about 11.85 percent.
Consuelo Rumi, deputy minister in charge of the civil service, described the protest as a day of "normality" with few incidents. "This strike has had a limited reach," she said.
Reports suggested that some regions were far more affected than others, particularly Catalonia, where the transport network was disrupted and protesters briefly cut off the city's main thoroughfare by burning tires. The public sector strike came on top of a separate protest by truck drivers angered by the cost of diesel fuel, which has notably hit traffic at the border with France.
Spain's public workers were protesting against a 5 percent average reduction in their wages this year, part of a government package of additional spending cuts worth 15 billion euros that was narrowly approved by lawmakers last month.
The cuts are designed to help appease international investors - concerned about Spain and other ailing economies among the 16 members of the euro - by cutting Spain's deficit from 11.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2009 to 3 percent in 2013, the limit under the euro rules.
Tuesday's strike, however, is widely expected to be the prelude to more severe labor unrest later this month, after the government unveils on June 16 plans to overhaul Spain's labor laws. The country's two main unions, which have been at loggerheads with employers over how to improve the labor market, have warned of a general strike should the government present a "hurtful" reform plan.
Spain has some of the highest firing costs for open-ended contracts in Europe, according to the World Bank. That, in turn, has encouraged employers to put a quarter of the country's workforce on temporary contracts. That contributes to rapid fluctuations in Spain's employment levels, with the jobless rate recently soaring to almost 20 percent, double the European Union's average.
As part of his labor reform, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the prime minister, is expected to propose next week a sharp cut in redundancy costs for companies, reducing the payment that fired workers on long-term contracts are guaranteed for each year of employment to as little as 20 days from the prevailing 45 days.
A second priority of the reform is to loosen the rigid system of collective bargaining that prevents companies from agreeing to their own terms with employees - and even forces them to follow different rules in different regions.
Still, the government is also expected to take additional steps - focusing this time on increasing state revenues - to help reduce the deficit amid concerns about Spain's growth prospects. BBVA, one of Spain's two biggest banks, forecast Monday that Spain's economy would contract 0.6 percent this year.
Mr. Zapatero recently warned the rich of higher taxes. The government is also considering a fiscal amnesty, according to the center-right newspaper El Mundo, that would seek to repatriate about 50 billion euros held offshore by granting tax evaders a pardon in return for investing in Spanish debt at below market rates.
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4) Police Officers End a Mine Strike in Mexico
By ELISABETH MALKIN
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/world/americas/08mexico.html?ref=world
MEXICO CITY - For almost three years, the miners at the massive open-pit Cananea copper mine have been on strike, ground troops in a battle to force the recognition of their exiled leader.
The strike ended abruptly Sunday night as busloads of federal police officers poured into the mine, which is 25 miles south of the Arizona border, and took it over.
Mexico's interior ministry said the takeover was peaceful. But witnesses said the police used tear gas to disperse about 50 miners picketing outside the gates and then followed the miners to the union hall where they tried to take refuge.
There were no confirmed reports of injuries.
On Monday, people in Cananea, a tiny desert town, awoke to see the picket line replaced by federal police officers on guard inside the mine's fences. Police trucks rolled through the streets as helicopters clattered overhead.
The mine's owner, Grupo Mexico, which has reported that it has lost more than $1.5 billion from the strike, said that investigators had already entered the mine to assess the damage.
On its surface, the strike by more than 1,000 workers began over health and safety conditions at the mine, but both sides acknowledge that was never the fundamental issue.
The labor dispute at Cananea has been a proxy for a fight that is highly personal - between the miners' leader, Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, who has been living in Vancouver, Canada, to escape corruption charges, and German Larrea, the company's secretive chief executive, who is one of Mexico's richest men.
"The reason for all this strike is they wanted to get rid of the orders of apprehension," said Juan Rebolledo, Grupo Mexico's vice president for international affairs. "It was not in our hands to fix the legal problems of Mr. Napoleon Gomez."
Mr. Rebolledo said that the company planned to invest billions of dollars in the mine, but that it could be months before it starts producing again. Before the strike, Cananea produced between 35 percent and 40 percent of Mexico's copper.
After Mr. Gomez Urrutia assumed the leadership of the union in 2001, he altered the traditionally placid labor relations between the country's officially recognized unions and the private sector. After only one strike against Grupo Mexico in the 1990s, the union has called 32 strikes against the company's operations, Grupo Mexico said.
His supporters argue that the Mexican government has allied itself with Grupo Mexico to get rid of Mr. Gomez Urrutia because of his combativeness.
Hours after the police action in Cananea, state police officers in the border state of Coahuila dislodged families of some of the 65 miners who were killed when the Pasta de Conchos coal mine exploded in February 2006. The coal mine is also owned by Grupo Mexico.
Some of the families had been camping outside the mine demanding the recovery of the miners' remains. Mr. Rebolledo said the police were accompanying officials who were shutting down the mine for good. The timing - on the same day as the Cananea action - was a coincidence, he said.
The miners' cause has been adopted by the United Steelworkers in the United States and Canada. Manny Armenta, a steelworkers representative in Arizona was in Cananea when the police arrived on Sunday. He said that he had helped get people out of the union hall when the police threw tear gas. "This is just a blatant violation of union rights and human rights and union autonomy by this government and Grupo Mexico," he said.
Grupo Mexico won a protracted legal battle with the mine workers in February when a court ruled that it could break its contract with the union and dismiss the workers.
Through the strike, the Cananea strikers have remained loyal to Mr. Gomez Urrutia.
"Grupo Mexico and the government wants to snatch the union away," Sergio Tolano, the general secretary of the local section of the union in Cananea, said Monday. "We know that what the government has been saying is slander."
The union's early battles with the company go back to the beginning of the 1990s, when the company offered the union 5 percent in stock as part of a privatization. The union demanded cash, but did not receive it until 2005 when the company put $55 million in a trust.
The union then took control of the trust, leading to the corruption charges against Mr. Gomez Urrutia.
"They are trying to silence our organization," Mr. Tolano said. "Our task is to defend it."
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5) Rate of Oil Leak, Still Not Clear, Puts Doubt on BP
By JUSTIN GILLIS and HENRY FOUNTAIN
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/us/08flow.html?ref=us
Staring day after day at images of oil billowing from an undersea well in the Gulf of Mexico, many Americans are struggling to make sense of the numbers.
On Monday, BP said a cap was capturing 11,000 barrels of oil a day from the well. The official government estimate of the flow rate is 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day, which means the new device should be capturing the bulk of the oil.
But is it? With no consensus among experts on how much oil is pouring from the wellhead, it is difficult - if not impossible - to assess the containment cap's effectiveness. BP has stopped trying to calculate a flow rate on its own, referring all questions on that subject to the government. The company's liability will ultimately be determined in part by how many barrels of oil are spilled.
The immense undersea gusher of oil and gas, seen on live video feed, looks as big as it did last week, or bigger, before the company sliced through the pipe known as a riser to install its new collection device.
At least one expert, Ira Leifer, who is part of a government team charged with estimating the flow rate, is convinced that the operation has made the leak worse, perhaps far worse than the 20 percent increase that government officials warned might occur when the riser was cut.
Dr. Leifer said in an interview on Monday that judging from the video, cutting the pipe might have led to a several-fold increase in the flow rate from the well.
"The well pipe clearly is fluxing way more than it did before," said Dr. Leifer, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "By way more, I don't mean 20 percent, I mean multiple factors."
Asked about the flow rate at a news conference at the White House on Monday, Adm. Thad W. Allen, the Coast Guard commander in charge of the federal response to the spill, said that as BP captured more of the oil, the government should be able to offer better estimates of the flow from the wellhead by tracking how much reaches the surface.
"That is the big unknown that we're trying to hone in and get the exact numbers on," Admiral Allen said. "And we'll make those numbers known as we get them. We're not trying to low-ball it or high-ball it. It is what it is."
Speaking at a briefing in Houston on Monday, Kent Wells, a BP executive involved in the containment effort, declined to estimate the total flow and how much it might have increased. He said that video images from the wellhead showed a "curtain of oil" leaking from under the cap.
"How much that is, we'd all love to know," Mr. Wells said. "It's really difficult to tell."
He said that more than 27,000 barrels of oil had been collected, and that engineers were working to optimize the collection rate.
On Sunday, engineers halted their efforts to close all four vents on the capping device, because even with one vent closed, the amount of oil being captured was approaching 15,000 barrels a day, the processing capacity of the collection ship at the surface.
Mr. Wells reiterated that a second collection system, involving hoses at the wellhead, would be implemented "by the middle of June." That oil would be collected by another rig with the ability to handle at least 5,000 barrels a day, he said.
The success of the containment device has cast new doubts on the official estimates of the flow rate, developed by a government-appointed team called the Flow Rate Technical Group. Before the riser pipe was cut, the group made estimates by several methods, including an analysis of video footage, and the overlap of those estimates produced the range of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day that the team reported on May 27. That was two to four times as high as the government's previous estimate of 5,000 barrels a day, a number that had been widely ridiculed by scientists and advocacy groups.
Yet the scientists who produced that new range emphasized its uncertainty when they presented it. In fact, a subgroup that analyzed the plume emerging at the wellhead could offer no upper bound for its flow estimate, and could come up with only a rough idea of the lower bound, which it pegged at 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day.
The Flow Rate Technical Group is scheduled to release a new estimate this week or early next, though it is not clear whether that report will take into account the changed circumstances of recent days.
Some scientists involved in the Flow Rate Technical Group say that they would like to produce a better estimate, but that they are frustrated by what they view as stonewalling on BP's part, including tardiness in producing high-resolution video that could be subjected to computer analysis, as well as the company's reluctance to permit a direct measurement of the flow rate. They said the installation of the new device and the rising flow of oil to the surface had only reinforced their conviction that they did not have enough information.
"It's apparent that BP is playing games with us, presumably under the advice of their legal team," Dr. Leifer said. "It's six weeks that it's been dumping into the gulf, and still no measurements."
President Obama has repeatedly criticized BP's handling of response efforts. He has been criticized for his seeming lack of outrage over the spill, but he took an angrier tone Monday in an interview to be broadcast Tuesday morning on NBC's "Today" show.
"I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar," Mr. Obama told the show's host, Matt Lauer, in an interview in Kalamazoo, Mich. "We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answer so I know whose ass to kick."
On Monday, Mr. Wells, the BP executive, said that engineers had always felt that the oil traveling through the damaged riser created some back pressure that reduced the flow rate. "We always expected to see some increase in flow" when the riser was cut, he said. "It's difficult to do any calculations on that."
The company, which for several weeks had publicly rejected the idea of using subsea equipment to measure the flow rate, now says it is up to the flow-rate group itself to decide whether to undertake such a step.
"We are fully cooperating with the Flow Rate Technical Group," said Anne Kolton, a spokeswoman for BP. "We are working very closely with their experts."
The difficulty adds one more item to the government's long to-do list as it begins planning its response to future oil spills: creating some kind of technology that can produce accurate numbers in a deep-sea blowout.
The lack of a reliable measurement system "opens the door to all this speculation and uncertainty," said Elgie Holstein, oil spill coordinator for the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group, "and we're all reduced to staring at grainy video footage from the ocean floor."
The success of the cap has prompted commentators on cable networks and the Internet to ask what BP intends to do with the oil, whether the company should be allowed to profit from it or even whether the federal government should confiscate it.
BP officials have said previously that they intend to refine the oil and sell it, although the oil may require special handling. They have also pointed out that any money to be made - at current prices the oil collected by the cap so far would be worth about $1.9 million - would pale in comparison with the costs of the spill, currently $1 billion and counting.
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6) Military Taps Social Networking Skills
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
June 7, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/technology/08homefront.html?ref=us
BEALE AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. - As a teenager, Jamie Christopher would tap instant messages to make plans with friends, and later she became a Facebook regular.
Now a freckle-faced 25, a first lieutenant and an intelligence officer here, she is using her social networking skills to hunt insurgents and save American lives in Afghanistan.
Hunched over monitors streaming live video from a drone, Lieutenant Christopher and a team of analysts recently popped in and out of several military chatrooms, reaching out more than 7,000 miles to warn Marines about roadside bombs and to track Taliban gunfire.
"2 poss children in fov," the team flashed as Marines on the ground lined up an air strike, chat lingo for possible innocents within the drone's field of view. The strike was aborted.
Another message, referring to a Taliban compound, warned: "fire coming from cmpnd." The Marines responded by strafing the fighters, killing nine of them.
Lieutenant Christopher and her crew might be fighting on distant keypads instead of ducking bullets, but they head into battle just the same every day. They and thousands of other young Air Force analysts are showing how the Facebook generation's skills are being exploited - and paying dividends - in America's wars.
The Marines say the analysts, who are mostly in their early to mid-20s, paved the way for them to roll into Marja in southern Afghanistan earlier this year with minimal casualties. And as the analysts quickly pass on the latest data from drones and other spy planes, they are creating the fluid connections needed to hunt small groups of fighters and other fleeting targets, military officials say.
But there can be difficulties in operating from so far away.
Late last month, military authorities in Afghanistan released a report chastising a Predator drone crew in an incident involving a helicopter attack that killed 23 civilians in February. Military officials say analysts in Florida who were monitoring the drone's video feed cautioned two or three times in a chatroom that children were in the group, but the drone's pilot failed to relay those warnings to the ground commander.
For the most part, though, the networking has been so productive that senior commanders are sidestepping some of the traditional military hierarchy and giving the analysts leeway in deciding how to use some spy planes.
"If you want to act quickly, you've got to flatten things out and engage at the lowest possible levels," said Lt. Col. Jason M. Brown, who runs the Air Force intelligence squadron at this base near Sacramento.
The connections have been made possible by the growing fleet of remote-controlled planes, like the Predators and Reapers, which send a steady flow of battlefield video to intelligence centers across the globe.
The Central Intelligence Agency and the military use drones to wage long-distance war against insurgents, with pilots in the United States pressing the missile-firing buttons. But as commanders in Afghanistan mass drones and U-2 spy planes over the hottest areas, the networking technology is expanding a homefront that is increasingly relevant to day-to-day warfare.
And the mechanics are simple in this age of satellite relays. Besides viewing video feeds, the analysts scan still images and enemy conversations. As they log the information into chatrooms, the analysts carry on a running dialogue with drone crews and commanders and intelligence specialists in the field, who receive the information on computers and then radio the most urgent bits to troops on patrol.
Marine intelligence officers say that during the Marja offensive in February, the analysts managed to stay a step ahead of the advance, sending alerts about 300 or so possible roadside bombs.
"To be that tapped into the tactical fight from 7,000 to 8,000 miles away was pretty much unheard of before," said Gunnery Sgt. Sean N. Smothers, a Marine who was stationed here as a liaison to the analysts.
Sergeant Smothers saw how easily the distance could melt away when an analyst, peering at images from a U-2, suddenly stuck up his hand and yelled, "Check!" - the signal for a supervisor to verify a spotting.
Sergeant Smothers said he and two Air Force officers rushed over and confirmed the existence of a roadside bomb. Nearby on a big screen map in the windowless room, they could see a Marine convoy approaching the site.
The group started sending frantic chat messages to their Marine contacts in the area.
As they watched the video feed from a drone, they could see that their messages had been heard: the convoy came to a sudden stop, 500 feet from the bomb.
"To me, this whole operation was like a template for what we should be doing in the future," Sergeant Smothers said.
Military officials said they are planning to repeat the operation around Kandahar.
The effort is a major turnaround for the Air Force, which had been criticized for taking too long to adjust to different types of threats since 9/11. During the cold war, it focused mostly on fixed targets like Soviet bases. But commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq have often complained that it is hard to get help from spy planes before insurgents slipped away.
Marine and Army officers say that that began to change as more planes were sent to Afghanistan in early 2009 and the Air Force got better at blending the various types of intelligence into a fuller picture.
And the new analysts, who were practically weaned on computers and interactive video games, have been crucial.
While Air Force analysts were once backroom technicians, the latest generation works in camouflage uniforms, complete with combat boots, on open floors, with four computer monitors on each desk. Large screens on the walls display the feeds from drones, and coffee and Red Bull help them get through the 12-hour shifts.
The chatrooms are no-frills boxes on a computer screen with lines of rolling text, and crew leaders keep dozens of them open at once. They may look crude compared to Facebook, but Lieutenant Christopher said they were effective in building rapport.
"When it's not busy, I'll be like, 'Hey, how's your day going?' " she said. "It's not just, 'What do you need?' "
There is also some old-fashioned interaction.
The Air Force, which has 4,000 analysts at bases like this and is hiring 2,100 more, has sent liaisons to Afghanistan to help understand the priorities on the ground. And some analysts pick up the phone to build closer bonds with soldiers they have never seen.
Andres Morales, a senior airman, said he often talked to a 24-year-old Army lieutenant, helping his battalion find arms caches and track enemy fighters.
But after four of his fellow soldiers were killed, "he didn't really want to talk about intelligence," Airman Morales, 27, said. "He wanted to talk, more or less, about how life is in California, and how when he comes back, we're going to go surfing together."
Quentin Arnold, 22, another enlisted analyst, said he had been working so closely with the Marines that 15 to 20 had asked to be friends on Facebook. He just collected $1,500 from analysts here to send a care package, including a PlayStation 3 game system and an Xbox 360, to some Marines.
Still, three-quarters of the 350 analysts here have never been to the war zones, so a cultural divide can pop up. Several said they were a bit intimidated when Sergeant Smothers, 36, who has had five tours in Iraq, strode onto the floor here in February.
At the time, the analysts were blending data from the U-2s and the drones to watch the roads into Marja and fields where helicopters might land. But as Sergeant Smothers looked over their shoulders, encouraging them to warn the Marines about even the most tentative threats, the analysts warmed up.
"It was like the shy house cat that wouldn't talk to you at first and now just won't stay out of your lap," he said.
As the operation unfolded, the analysts passed on leads that enabled the Marines to kill at least 15 insurgents planting bombs.
Lieutenant Christopher, who loves to chat on Facebook with her family in Ohio, was so exhausted from overnight shifts during that period that she skipped Facebook and went right to sleep. And sometimes, she said, she ended up dreaming about what she had just seen in the war.
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7) Plumes of Oil Below Surface Raise New Concerns
By JUSTIN GILLIS
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/us/09spill.html?ref=us
The government and university researchers confirmed Tuesday that plumes of dispersed oil were spreading far below the ocean surface from the leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico, raising fresh concern about the potential impact of the spill on sea life.
The tests, the first detailed chemical analyses of water from the deep sea, show that some of the most toxic components of the oil are not necessarily rising to the surface where they can evaporate, as would be expected in a shallow oil leak. Instead, they are drifting through deep water in plumes or layers that stretch as far as 50 miles from the leaking well.
As a rule, the toxic compounds are present at exceedingly low concentrations, the tests found, as would be expected given that they are being diluted in an immense volume of seawater.
"It's pretty clear that the oil that has been released is becoming more and more dilute," Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in an interview. "That does not mean it's unimportant - far from it. The total amount of oil out there is likely very large, and we have yet to understand the full impact of all that hydrocarbon on the gulf ecosystem."
BP's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, continued to insist Wednesday morning on the "Today" show on NBC that no underwater oil plumes in "large concentrations" have been detected from the spill, saying that it "may be down to how you define what a plume is here."
But scientists outside the government noted that the plumes appeared to be so large that organisms might be bathed in them for extended periods, possibly long enough to kill eggs or embryos. They said this possibility added greater urgency to the effort to figure out exactly how sea life was being affected, work that remains in its infancy six weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded.
"I'm glad to see the levels are low," said Carys L. Mitchelmore, an aquatic toxicologist at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the research. "But we're talking about a huge Gulf of Mexico here. I want to see evidence that this is one of the main plumes and there's not something way more concentrated somewhere else."
The announcement of test results came as the White House said President Obama would make his fourth trip to the region next week, visiting Mississippi, Alabama and Florida on Monday and Tuesday.
The results on the plumes came from samples taken by researchers at the University of South Florida, in St. Petersburg. NOAA helped finance the research and joined in Tuesday's announcement.
The test results, from samples taken in late May aboard the research vessel Weatherbird II, appeared to confirm information first presented three weeks ago by another group of researchers, who found evidence of large plumes of dispersed oil droplets in the deep ocean.
Those scientists have not yet completed their analysis of water samples, but one of them, Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, supplied additional information at a news conference on Tuesday, including instrument readings taken on her most recent research cruise.
Those readings suggest that a large plume, probably consisting of hydrocarbons from the leak, stretches through the deep ocean for at least 15 miles west of the gushing oil well, Dr. Joye said. The top of the plume is about 3,600 feet below the sea surface; the plume is three miles wide and as thick as 1,500 feet in spots, she said.
The University of South Florida researchers found an even larger plume stretching northeast of the oil well, with the hydrocarbons separated into two distinct layers in the ocean. One layer is about 1,200 feet below the surface, and the other is 3,000 feet deep, the scientists said.
The government's confirmation of subsea oil plumes is significant in part because BP, the oil company responsible for the leak, had denied that such plumes existed, and NOAA itself had previously been cautious in interpreting the preliminary results from Dr. Joye's group.
"The oil is on the surface," Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, said last week. "There aren't any plumes."
Descriptions of the plumes from the two groups of scientists are filling in details of one of the most remarkable findings to come from the disaster: the realization that much of the oil in a deepwater blowout may remain below the surface.
The scientists say the plumes are not bubbles of oil, as many people have imagined them, but consist of highly dispersed or dissolved hydrocarbons. In some spots, enough oil is present to discolor the water, but in most places, water samples come up clear. Yet the dissolved hydrocarbons show up vividly on instruments, and they can be smelled in some samples.
"This so-called invisible oil, which people tend to have a hard time grasping, is detectable clearly using analytical methods," said Ernst Peebles, a University of South Florida oceanographer who helped carry out the research.
Jeffrey Short, a marine scientist with Oceana, an advocacy group, said that even though the concentration of chemicals was low at any one locale, the magnitude of the plumes suggested a need for more research.
"We should, at a bare minimum, keep a much closer eye on how many plumes there are, how big they are, how long they last and what organisms they're affecting," Dr. Short said.
As the government wrestled with the many safety issues raised by the disaster, it imposed a drilling freeze late last month that halted virtually all new oil exploration in the gulf. On Tuesday, the Obama administration announced new standards that will allow resumption of drilling in water less than 500 feet deep.
All wells in water deeper than 500 feet remain under a moratorium for at least the next six months while a presidential panel studies the April 20 Deepwater Horizon explosion and makes recommendations on whether and how to resume such drilling.
The new rules address some of the problems that investigators believe contributed to the blowout of the BP well, including failure of the blowout preventer and improper design or application of the cement around the well bore.
"Oil and gas from the outer continental shelf remains an important component of our energy security as we transition to the clean-energy economy," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Tuesday in a statement, "but we must ensure that offshore drilling is conducted safely and in compliance with the law."
John M. Broder and Henry Fountain contributed reporting.
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8) Border Shooting Strains Tensions With Mexico
[Like the Israeli Defense Force, U.S. Border patrol carries out death sentence for rock-throwing children...bw]
By MARC LACEY
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/world/asia/09border.html?ref=us
MEXICO CITY - Mexican authorities expressed fury at the shooting death of a Mexican teenager on Monday night by a Border Patrol agent, while the FBI, which is investigating the death, said the agent had been under attack by rock-throwing migrants attempting to cross into El Paso, Texas.
The government of the Mexican state of Chihuahua condemned the killing of the teenager, Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca, 15, calling it a blow to all Mexicans and an example of the xenophobia that the anti-immigration law in Arizona has fomented in the United States.
American officials described the shooting as an act of self defense. Several agents were on a bike patrol in the concrete channel alongside the Rio Grande at about 6:30 p.m. Monday when they encountered a group of suspected illegal immigrants entering the United States. After two suspects were arrested, others in the group fled just across the border to Mexico and began throwing rocks at the agents, the FBI said in a statement. One agent fired several shots and hit the victim, who died at the base of the Paso Del Norte international bridge, officials said.
The Border Patrol says it is subjected to hundreds of rock attacks during its patrols and takes them seriously. From October 2007 to the end of May 2008, there were 537 rock-throwing incidents involving agents, officials said. That number dropped to 460 the following year and then rose to 604 incidents in the most recent reporting period, which ended on May 31.
"There's a misperception people have that we're having pebbles thrown at us," said Mark Qualia, a United States Customs and Border Protection spokesman in Washington. "They are stones the size of baseballs in some cases or half a brick. You can't take this lightly."
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9) Facing Misconduct Claims, Brooklyn Prosecutor Agrees to Free Man Held 15 Years
By A. G. SULZBERGER
June 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/nyregion/09vecchione.html?ref=nyregion
Facing questions about whether a high-ranking prosecutor's actions during a murder investigation and trial constituted misconduct, the Brooklyn district attorney's office agreed on Tuesday to allow a man imprisoned in that case to have his murder conviction vacated and his record cleared with the assurance that he will not be retried.
The agreement means that the man, Jabbar Collins, who 15 years ago was sentenced to 34 years to life in the murder of a Brooklyn landlord, will be freed later this week - the culmination of years of his own legal efforts to bring light to prosecutorial misconduct that he said deprived him of a fair trial.
The decision also spares officials from the Brooklyn district attorney's office - most notably the hard-charging prosecutor who oversaw the case, Michael F. Vecchione - from being compelled to testify about the allegations of misconduct during a habeas corpus hearing that was set to resume this week.
The deal amounted to a rare and embarrassing admission by the Brooklyn district attorney's office - which had initially insisted that Mr. Collins be retried - that the case had been mishandled.
Judge Dora L. Irizarry, of the United States District Court in Brooklyn, lamented that in agreeing to free Mr. Collins, the district attorney's office had avoided a hearing that would have offered greater transparency into the case's "troubling history."
"It is indeed beyond disappointing, it is really sad that the district attorney's office persists in standing firm and saying that it did nothing wrong here," the judge said. She described the handling of the case by the district attorney's office as "shameful."
The case cast a new, unflattering glare on Mr. Vecchione, who has overseen numerous high-profile cases in Brooklyn and even was one of the authors of a book about his exploits in the "Mafia Cops" case. In that book, "Friends of the Family," he described himself as "a prosecutor with a passion for justice who had spent most of his life trying to make sure bad things happened to bad people."
But he has also been dogged by allegations of impropriety from defense lawyers, and former colleagues who say his eye for the spotlight and willingness to cut corners to win convictions have caused some cases to fall apart, including the high-profile murder trial of Roy Lindley DeVecchio, a former F.B.I. agent.
"Prosecutors are supposed to hit hard, but he went far beyond," said Douglas E. Grover, who was Mr. DeVecchio's lawyer.
From prison, Mr. Collins, 37, had amassed evidence of misconduct by Mr. Vecchione, whom he accused of "playing God" by threatening a witness with physical violence, failing to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense, knowingly eliciting inaccurate testimony and making false statements.
Through a spokesman, Mr. Vecchione refused to comment on Tuesday. But in 2006, he offered a sworn affidavit denying any wrongdoing, saying that he held himself and those who worked for him "to a high professional standard." Judge Irizarry described Mr. Vecchione's statements in that affidavit as beyond credulity.
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes, who was in office during Mr. Collins's initial trial, vigorously defended Mr. Vecchione, who he said would not face any investigation or disciplinary action.
"Anyone who knows Mike Vecchione, who has ever seen him in action, knows that he is a very, very principled lawyer," Mr. Hynes said. He also defended the office's handling of the case and said the decision to drop it had nothing to do with the allegations of misconduct but rather the passage of time since the slaying.
Joel B. Rudin, who represented Mr. Collins in the hearing, called Mr. Vecchione's conduct disgraceful. "I was looking forward to confronting him with his affidavit and his statements at the trial and comparing those statements to the truth," he said. "Obviously in the final analysis, the district attorney did not want to expose Mr. Vecchione to cross-examination."
Ellen Yaroshefsky, the director of the Jacob Burns Center for Ethics in the Practice of Law at Cardozo Law School, said the decision to free Mr. Collins without a hearing raised red flags. "It is important that the D.A.'s office examine what went wrong and hold individual prosecutors accountable for any misconduct," she said. "Transparency and accountability are essential."
The chain of events that led to vacating the case against Mr. Collins began last month when, after years defending the handling of the case, the district attorney's office acknowledged that a key witness had briefly recanted his testimony in the presence of a prosecutor before trial, a fact never disclosed to the defense. The office, which said it had just discovered the information, offered to release Mr. Collins if he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter, but Mr. Collins declined, saying he was willing to risk retrial to clear his name.
On Tuesday, in a court packed with family members including his three children, Mr. Collins thanked Judge Irizarry "for finally giving me the day in court that I have been deprived of the last 15 years of my life."
Several family members of Abraham Pollack, the Brooklyn landlord and father of nine who was shot and killed in 1994, were also in the courtroom; they said they remained convinced that Mr. Collins was guilty.
While the decision concludes Mr. Collins's long battle for freedom, it remains unclear whether the allegations of misconduct will have any impact on Mr. Vecchione, the chief of the rackets bureau and a 25-year veteran of the district attorney's office.
"Unquestionably, whether you agree with him or not, whether you like him or not, he's an aggressive prosecutor," said Richard E. Mischel, a defense lawyer who faced Mr. Vecchione in the case of the Brooklyn political leader Clarence Norman Jr. "That's not a criticism, it's just an observation."
Bruce Barket, a defense lawyer who pushed successfully to have another man who had been convicted of murder released during a 2003 habeas corpus hearing that featured similar allegations of misconduct, said he believed that Mr. Vecchione had a history of crossing the line in pursuit of convictions.
Mr. Barket said that in his case, he presented evidence that Mr. Vecchione had concealed from the defense the information that a key witness had been arrested on rape charges. Then at the trial, Mr. Vecchione allowed the witness to lie on the stand when he stated that he had never sought or received anything in return for his testimony - when, in fact, the lawyer for the witness said that he had sought a deal.
Immediately after the trial, the witness was allowed to plead guilty to reduced charges that did not include rape.
The cooperation agreement was personally signed by Mr. Vecchione. The agreement was never revealed to the defense in two subsequent trials that he supervised. And Mr. Vecchione also later, in a letter to the Nassau County district attorney's office, denied the existence of the agreement.
The district attorney's office also agreed to settle that case shortly before a ruling in the habeas corpus hearing from Judge Edward R. Korman of United States District Court in Brooklyn, who had expressed skepticism about Mr. Vecchione's testimony. The defendant was immediately released.
"Everyone pushes the envelope to some degree; everyone looks for strategic advantage," Mr. Barket said. "That's fine. But you have to play by the rules. What I've not seen is someone who disregards the rules so flagrantly. He looks at the rules as obstacles."
"I don't understand how he can continue to prosecute criminal cases," he added.
In the murder case vacated on Tuesday, there were serious questions raised about each of the three main witnesses who testified against Mr. Collins at the original trial. One of them, Angel Santos, was the only person to testify in the aborted habeas corpus hearing, before the district attorney agreed to the unconditional release of Mr. Collins.
Speaking reluctantly and at times saying he was unable to answer questions because his memory of the period "was all screwed up" by drugs, Mr. Santos described being coerced by Mr. Vecchione at the initial trial. "I told them I didn't want to get involved, so what they did, they locked me up," he testified. Mr. Vecchione repeatedly threatened to hit him and said, "If you don't testify you're going to be in jail a long time," Mr. Santos said. He said he was held in jail for a week before he agreed to testify and was kept in custody until he testified against Mr. Collins.
In 2006, Mr. Vecchione signed a sworn affidavit stating: "No deals were made with witnesses that were not disclosed by me to the court and the defense. No witness ever recanted a prior statement or grand jury testimony. No witness had to be threatened or forced to testify."
Mr. Rudin, the defense lawyer, declined to say whether Mr. Collins would file a civil suit or any formal complaints relating to the case. "Everything will be studied at the appropriate time. Right now we have to get him home and get him with his family," he said. "But it's not going to end here."
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10) Jury seated in Mehserle trial
"The jury includes no African Americans..."
Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/09/BA8L1DRPOT.DTL
(06-08) 18:55 PDT LOS ANGELES -- A jury of eight women and four men was seated Tuesday in the murder trial of former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle, who fatally shot unarmed train rider Oscar Grant during an arrest at Fruitvale Station in Oakland on New Year's Day 2009.
Opening statements in a courtroom in downtown Los Angeles - where the trial was moved to escape heavy publicity in the Bay Area - are scheduled for Thursday. Today, Judge Robert Perry plans to rule on a final round of legal motions by attorneys in the case.
Six alternate jurors - five women and one man - were selected after a day of questioning by Alameda County prosecutor David Stein and defense attorney Michael Rains. The panel will be partially sequestered, court officials said, taking breaks in isolation but going home each night.
The jury includes no African Americans, disappointing Grant's family and some activists who see the shooting as part of a larger problem of police brutality against young men of color. Grant was black and Mehserle is white.
Grant's uncle, Cephus "Bobby" Johnson, said he would have preferred that some African Americans be included on the panel. But he said he was more concerned about decisions on evidence by the judge, including a ruling that allows the defense to tell jurors that Grant resisted San Leandro police during a 2006 arrest.
"This case is about the evidence presented," Johnson said.
The trial is expected to last about a month and revolve around video footage of the shooting taken by other BART passengers. Mehserle's attorneys say he meant to use a Taser to subdue Grant, but accidentally fired his gun.
Prosecutors call the Taser story a fabrication and say Grant was not a threat when he was shot.
The final legal motions included a bid by Rains to exclude evidence relating to former BART police Officer Anthony Pirone, who detained Grant after a 2 a.m. fight on a train and made the decision to arrest him for allegedly resisting.
Just before Mehserle took Grant to the ground and shot him, video footage shows, Pirone shouted at Grant, "Bitch-ass n-, right? Bitch-ass n-, right?"
Pirone, who is appealing his recent firing from the BART force, was responding to being called the name by Grant, Rains said. He said Mehserle hadn't heard the slur, but that jurors might penalize him for it unfairly if they learn of it.
Stein said Pirone's words were relevant to Mehserle's state of mind and Pirone's credibility as a witness.
"Not only did defendant hear those words, but he reacted to them," Stein wrote. "He reacted by pushing Mr. Grant face-first onto the train platform. After he did so, Officer Pirone then responded to the defendant's action by shouting, 'Yeah!' "
Another dispute involves video footage of the incident that was taken by BART riders. Both sides spliced together images from several cameras into one flowing video, allowing jurors to see what was happening at any given time from multiple viewpoints.
But the footage apparently varies, depending on the source. The prosecution video suggests that Grant had both hands behind his back when Mehserle shot him, while the defense video does not, according to Rains. He is seeking to exclude the prosecution's video as "unreliable."
E-mail Demian Bulwa at dbulwa@sfchronicle.com.
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11) Judge blocks nurses' strike at 5 UC hospitals
Victoria Colliver, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/08/BAO81DRSSA.DTL&tsp=1
Plans by nearly 11,000 nurses to strike Thursday at five University of California medical centers were put on hold Tuesday when a San Francisco judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing the walkout.
Nurses represented by the California Nurses Association planned to join 12,000 Minnesota nurses in the one-day walkout that, even without the California nurses, would still be the largest registered nursing strike in U.S. history. Nurses from both states who are part of a larger union called National Nurses United say staffing issues - not wages - are at the heart of the disputes.
UC officials sought an order to stop the strike, maintaining that the walkout would pose a threat to public safety. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Peter J. Busch sided with attorneys representing the university, saying that to defer the issue for two weeks would not cause undue harm to either party.
Busch scheduled a hearing for June 18 on whether an injunction should be granted.
Thursday's strike would have been the first work stoppage by UC nurses since they became unionized in 1984. They had threatened to go on strike in 2005, but they were stopped by a court order.
Labor leaders said they scheduled an emergency meeting Tuesday evening to discuss the union's response to the ruling, which they expect to announce today.
Non-UC hospitals
Union officials said Tuesday's order did not apply to nurses at the three non-UC hospitals who planned to participate in the strike. Still, labor leaders said they would be evaluating whether to go ahead with Thursday's walkout at those hospitals.
The strike was to take place at five UC medical centers - San Francisco, Davis, Los Angeles, Irvine and San Diego. The non-UC hospitals are San Pedro Hospital, Citrus Valley Medical Center and Marina del Rey Medical Center, all in Los Angeles County.
The strike at 14 Twin Cities hospitals in Minnesota is still scheduled for Thursday. The California nurses decided to strike after the Minnesota nurses set their strike date. UC's attorneys argued that the timing was strategic.
"The California Nurses Association and its national leadership called for this strike as a tactical ploy in a campaign to increase membership rolls by building up staffing levels," said Dwaine Duckett, UC's vice president for human resources, in a statement issued after the ruling. "This ruling is a victory for our dedicated nurses; most importantly, a victory for our patients."
The nurses have accused UC management of failing to uphold California's nurse-to-patient staffing ratio law while nurses are on break or on meal times. They also accuse the university hospitals of failing to properly adjust those ratios for acutely ill patients.
UC officials say they are complying with the law. Both sides have agreed that wages are not a sticking point.
Technical issues
But in Tuesday's court hearing, the arguments centered on the technical contractual elements around whether the nurses had the right to strike at this point in the negotiations.
The nurses' current contract, which expires Sept. 30 and has a "no strike" provision, gives union leaders the right to reopen negotiations on certain key issues, including staffing, and the authority to suspend the no-strike clause.
The California nurses argued they have the right to strike if an agreement can't be reached on the key issues. But UC's attorneys contended that discussion over staffing concerns, which were reopened last fall, ended in December and that negotiations now pertain to the forthcoming contract, making the strike unlawful.
The judge, who received written and oral arguments and held an hourlong question-and-answer session, did not interpret the legality of the strike as part of his decision.
He sided with a decision made last week by the California Public Employment Relations Board, the quasi-judicial agency charged with administering the collective bargaining agreements for the state's public employees, which contended the strike could jeopardize the public's safety.
The nurses have a right to appeal the decision, but they declined Tuesday to discuss their options.
Nurses' strike
What happened Tuesday: A San Francisco Superior Court judge barred 11,000 UC nurses from participating in a one-day strike scheduled for Thursday.
The issues: The nurses say UC has failed to comply with California nurse-to-patient staffing levels during breaks and meal times as well as adjust staffing when patients are acutely ill. The nurses say they have the right to strike, while UC officials argue the strike is unlawful.
What's next: Both sides are scheduled to return to court June 18 for a hearing to determine whether a preliminary injunction is warranted.
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12) Efforts to Limit the Flow of Spill News
By JEREMY W. PETERS
June 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/us/10access.html?ref=us
When the operators of Southern Seaplane in Belle Chasse, La., called the local Coast Guard-Federal Aviation Administration command center for permission to fly over restricted airspace in Gulf of Mexico, they made what they thought was a simple and routine request.
A pilot wanted to take a photographer from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans to snap photographs of the oil slicks blackening the water. The response from a BP contractor who answered the phone late last month at the command center was swift and absolute: Permission denied.
"We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?" recalled Rhonda Panepinto, who owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. "The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: 'Not allowed.' "
Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.
To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials' filtering what images of the spill the public sees.
Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP.
"I think they've been trying to limit access," said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts who fought BP to release more video from the underwater rovers that have been filming the oil-spewing pipe. "It is a company that was not used to transparency. It was not used to having public scrutiny of what it did."
Officials at BP and the government entities coordinating the response said instances of denying news media access have been anomalies, and they pointed out that the company and the government have gone to great lengths to accommodate the hundreds of journalists who have traveled to the gulf to cover the story. The F.A.A., responding to criticism following the incident with Southern Seaplane, has revised its flight restrictions over the gulf to allow for news media flights on a case-by-case basis.
"Our general approach throughout this response, which is controlled by the Unified Command and is the largest ever to an oil spill," said David H. Nicholas, a BP spokesman, "has been to allow as much access as possible to media and other parties without compromising the work we are engaged on or the safety of those to whom we give access."
Anomalies or not, reporters and photographers continue to be blocked from covering aspects of the spill.
Last week, Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, tried to bring a small group of journalists with him on a trip he was taking through the gulf on a Coast Guard vessel. Mr. Nelson's office said the Coast Guard agreed to accommodate the reporters and camera operators. But at about 10 p.m. on the evening before the trip, someone from the Department of Homeland Security's legislative affairs office called the senator's office to tell them that no journalists would be allowed.
"They said it was the Department of Homeland Security's response-wide policy not to allow elected officials and media on the same 'federal asset,' " said Bryan Gulley, a spokesman for the senator. "No further elaboration" was given, Mr. Gulley added.
Mr. Nelson has asked the Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, for an official explanation, the senator's office said.
Capt. Ron LaBrec, a Coast Guard spokesman, said that about a week into the cleanup response, the Coast Guard started enforcing a policy that prohibits news media from accompanying candidates for public office on visits to government facilities, "to help manage the large number of requests for media embeds and visits by elected officials."
In a separate incident last week, a reporter and photographer from The Daily News of New York were told by a BP contractor they could not access a public beach on Grand Isle, La., one of the areas most heavily affected by the oil spill. The contractor summoned a local sheriff, who then told the reporter, Matthew Lysiak, that news media had to fill out paperwork and then be escorted by a BP official to get access to the beach.
BP did not respond to requests for comment about the incident.
"For the police to tell me I needed to sign paperwork with BP to go to a public beach?" Mr. Lysiak said. "It's just irrational."
In the first few weeks after the oil rig explosion, BP kept a tight lid on images of the oil leaking into the gulf. Even when it released the first video of the spewing oil on May 12, it provided only a 30-second clip. The most detailed images did not become public until two weeks ago when BP gave members of Congress access to internal video feeds from its underwater rovers. Without BP's permission, some members of Congress displayed the video for news networks like CNN, which carried them live.
For journalists on the ground, particularly photographers who hire their own planes, one of the major sources of frustration has been the flight restrictions over the water, where access is off limits in a vast area from the Louisiana bayous to Pensacola, Fla. Each time they fly in the area, they have to be granted permission from the F.A.A.
"Although there's a tremendous amount of oil, finding out exactly where it's washing ashore or where booming is going on is very difficult," said John McCusker, a photographer with The Times-Picayune. "At 3,000 feet you're shooting through clouds, and it's difficult to tell the difference between an oil slick and a shadow from a cloud."
A spokeswoman for the agency, Laura J. Brown, said the flight restrictions are necessary to prevent civilian air traffic from interfering with aircraft assisting the response effort.
Ms. Brown also said the Coast Guard-F.A.A. command center that turned away Southern Seaplane was enforcing the essential-flights-only policy in place at the time; and she said the BP contractor who answered the phone was there because the F.A.A. operations center is in one of BP's buildings.
"That person was not making decisions about whether aircraft are allowed to enter the airspace," Ms. Brown said.
But the incident with Southern Seaplane is not the only example of journalists being told they cannot go somewhere simply because they are journalists. CBS News reported last month that one of its news crews was threatened with arrest for trying to film a public beach where oil had washed ashore. The Coast Guard said later that it was disappointed to learn of the incident.
Media access in disaster situations is always an issue. But the situation in the gulf is especially nettlesome because journalists have to depend on the government and BP to gain access to so much of the affected area.
Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor at the Associated Press, likened the situation to reporters being embedded with the military in Afghanistan. "There is a continued effort to keep control over the access," Mr. Oreskes said. "And even in places where the government is cooperating with us to provide access, it's still a problem because it's still access obtained through the government."
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13) Chilling Images of Drilling's Perils, Met by Numbed Eyes
"At this point the voice of reason is supposed to add, Yes. But. We need the energy from somewhere. What's the least bad alternative: Offshore or Middle Eastern oil? Gas? Nuclear? Coal? A conventional answer is gas. Only you look at those sickening images from the gulf and the shimmering green canvas of hills, lakes and dairy farms upstate and you add another "Yes. But." If there could ever be an event that would set our hair on fire, send us running a million miles an hour toward full-bore efforts at conservation and alternative energy, what else could it be if not this one?"
[Check out the very short video at this site:
http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/
It will shock and amaze you!...bw]
By PETER APPLEBOME
WALTON, N.Y.
June 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/nyregion/10towns.html?ref=nyregion
The occasion was the screening of "Gasland," a polemical and quite frightening documentary on the impact of the new generation of gas drilling coming to upstate New York. But, given the news, there was also plenty of talk about that huge well explosion everyone had heard about.
No, not that one far away in the Gulf of Mexico. Closer to home was the natural gas blowout last week in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania that shot gas and water polluted with drilling fluids as high as 75 feet into the air until it was finally shut down 16 hours later.
As our numbed eyes witness every night on the news, stuff happens, particularly when it comes to extracting hydrocarbons. So here in the far reaches of the Catskills the issues in the film weren't abstract, and the gulf wasn't so far away. They were the stuff of daily politics, pitting neighbor against neighbor, revolving around two questions: Is the risk worth the reward? What's the alternative?
For this crowd, overwhelmingly antidrilling, the first answer was easy. The second, well, we're all waiting.
New York announced in April that it would impose stricter regulations on gas drilling in the watershed that supplies drinking water to 8.2 million people in New York City and about 1 million people in Westchester, Putnam and other nearby counties. Similar standards would be placed on the watershed serving about 200,000 people in Syracuse and elsewhere. That accounts for less than 10 percent of the New York portion of the Marcellus Shale, a giant gas deposit that extends through several states, chiefly New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
"Gasland" is the product of Josh Fox, a 37-year-old theater director who lives over the border in Milanville, Pa. In 2008, he received a leasing offer from a gas company. He set out to find the effects of gas drilling and captured harrowing footage from places like Dimock, Pa.; Pavillion, Wyo.; and Weld County, Colo., documenting polluted air, tap water that catches fire, tainted well water and families claiming to be sickened by drilling on their property. The film won the special jury prize for documentaries at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and will air on HBO on June 21.
It's one-sided, flawed and personal in the Michael Moore mode, and it jibes completely with the stories told by people from out west who offered cautionary tales at an information session at the same theater two years earlier, when the leasing frenzy upstate was just beginning.
Many people have signed leases hoping to get rich. Not many of them were at the screening. Most of those on hand were more concerned with the environmental risks. Gas is not oil. The Catskills region is not the gulf. But that endless underwater gusher, the oil-soaked pelicans in full cry, seemed just outside the door.
"What they have in common is that they're working on the hairy edge of the possible," said Laurie Spaeth of the Chenango Delaware Otsego Gas Drilling Opposition Group, whose Web site, un-naturalgas.org, tracks drilling issues. "As impressive as the technology is, there are going to be accidents. What they're doing here is not quite as extreme as what they were doing in the gulf, but it clearly has the same potential for devastation."
Apparently others agree. The advocacy group American Rivers put the Upper Delaware River at the top of its annual list of the nation's 10 most endangered rivers, citing gas exploration and the millions of gallons of water used in the hydraulic fracturing of each well. Thousands of wells are projected to be drilled in New York, and a drilling boom is well under way in Pennsylvania.
At this point the voice of reason is supposed to add, Yes. But. We need the energy from somewhere. What's the least bad alternative: Offshore or Middle Eastern oil? Gas? Nuclear? Coal? A conventional answer is gas. Only you look at those sickening images from the gulf and the shimmering green canvas of hills, lakes and dairy farms upstate and you add another "Yes. But." If there could ever be an event that would set our hair on fire, send us running a million miles an hour toward full-bore efforts at conservation and alternative energy, what else could it be if not this one?
Or maybe there's no such thing. We look at the images from the gulf, feel ill, click to another channel. Leno and Letterman tell oil-spill jokes. Half comatose, half engaged, we gravitate toward whatever silos make us happy. Maybe New York has gotten ahead of the curve on regulation. Maybe the optimists hope it all works out - some get rich, some get run over, life goes on.
E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com
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14) [WAT] PRESS RELEASE: Trial for Anti-Torture Activists Begins Monday (6/14), GITMO Still Open Under Obama
BROKEN PROMISES, BROKEN LAWS, BROKEN LIVES
Twenty-Seven to Go on Trial for Protesting the Obama Administration's
Failure to Close Guantanamo, Plan for Indefinite Detention, and
Refusal to Prosecute Torture
For Immediate Release, June 10, 2010
Contact: Jeremy Varon: M: 732-979-3119 varon@aol.com
Helen Schietinger: M: 202-344-5762 h.schietinger@verizon.net
WASHINGTON, D.C. - On Monday, June 14 twenty-seven will face trial
stemming from arrests at the U.S. Capitol on January 21, 2010 - the
date by which President Obama had promised the closure of the
Guantanamo detention camp. The human rights activists will hold a
press conference outside the courthouse defending their protest,
condemning the Obama administration's continuation of Bush policies,
and explaining their use in court of the "necessity defense." The
press conference will be held Monday, June 14th at 8:30 am, across
from the Federal District Courthouse (333 Constitution Avenue, NW).
On January 21, twenty-seven people dressed as Guantanamo prisoners
were arrested on the steps of the Capitol holding banners reading
"Broken Promises, Broken Laws, Broken Lives." Inside the Capitol
Rotunda, at the location where deceased presidents lie in state,
fourteen activists were arrested performing a memorial service for
three men who died at Guantanamo in 2006. Initially reported as
suicides, the deaths may have been - as recent evidence suggests - the
result of the men being tortured to death (see Scott Horton, "Murders
at Guantanamo, March 2010, Harpers).
"The continued operation of the prison camp at Guantanamo is
unacceptable," Matthew W. Daloisio of Witness Against Torture. "If
Guantanamo was a foreign policy liability and stain on the rule of law
on day one of the Obama presidency, it surely is eighteen months
later."
"The deaths at Guantanamo show how barbaric US policies have been,"
says Helen Schietinger, a defendant in the trial. "We are still
waiting for accountability for those who designed and carried out
torture policies under President Bush. Obama can't restore the rule
of law if he doesn't enforce the law."
The human rights activists plan to mount a "necessity defense" before
Judge Russell Canan. "We will be arguing that we broke the law only
after exhausting all legal means of opposing a much larger crime-the
indefinite detention, mistreatment, and torture of men at Guantanamo
and other US prisons," says Jerica Arents of Chicago, Illinois,
another the defendants.
The January protests were the culmination of a twelve-day fast for
justice and an end to torture organized by Witness Against Torture in
Washington, DC. More than 100 people participated in the fast and
daily actions throughout the nation's Capital.
***********
Witness Against Torture formed in December 2005 when twenty-five
activists walked to Guantanamo to visit the prisoners and condemn
torture policies. Since then, it has engaged in public education,
community outreach, and non-violent civil disobedience. To learn more
visit www.witnesstorture.org
--
Frida Berrigan
frida.berrigan@gmail.com
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