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END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL NOW!
Protest Condemning Israel's Attack on the Freedom Flotilla Ships
TODAY, Tuesday, June 1 at 4:30pm
Israeli Consulate 456 Montgomery, San Francisco, CA
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25580.htm
Israel Kills 20 : Attacks Gaza Aid Fleet
Video Reports
Israel Navy troops opened fire on pro-Palestinian activists aboard a six-ship aid flotilla sailing for the Gaza Strip early Monday.
Posted May 31, 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19452
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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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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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YES ON F, GIVE RENTERS A BREAK!
Just two weeks before the June 8 election and if we are going to give renters a break from rent increases we need your help now!
Thousands of San Francisco renters are unemployed and at risk of losing their homes--Prop F will let them delay any new rent increases and give them a chance to stay housed. Here's how you can help pass Prop F:
Phonebanking, 5-7pm, Mon and Wed at SOMCAN, 1070 Howard Street
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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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B. SPECIAL APPEALS, VIDEOS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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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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From Gary Bledsoe, Texas President of the NAACP:
Have you heard about what's going on here in Texas? History is being rewritten. And not in a good way.
The state of Texas sets national standards for school textbooks -- and on Friday, the State Board of Education is casting its vote on updated social studies and history textbooks.
Those books are changing the record on slavery, celebrating the Confederacy and shedding a positive light on Jim Crow laws. And the Texas NAACP has spent the past several months fighting back. We've written thousands of emails, placed hundreds of calls, and people are starting to notice.
I'm writing because we need your help. No matter the result of tomorrow's vote, make sure these bad ideas don't spread into your state. Sign the Not in My State Pledge:
http://action.naacp.org/NotInMyState
The civil rights era was, and remains, one of the most significant and defining moments in U.S. history. Its leaders were true patriots -- fighting against oppression and for equality.
But if the proposed textbook changes happen, our children won't learn about them. They won't learn about brave men like Sam McCollough, who gave his life for Texas independence. And they won't learn that Texas seceded from the Union to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
Rewriting history in the name of national pride isn't patriotic. It's ignorant.
Make it known throughout your state that if Texas textbook standards pass, they won't be coming into your classrooms. Sign the Not in My State Pledge to stop history from being rewritten:
http://action.naacp.org/NotInMyState
American history -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- is what makes our country what it is today. A reminder of that past helps ensure a better future for all of us.
Thank you for speaking out,
Gary Bledsoe
Texas President
NAACP
P.S. To find out the voting results and watch an interview with NAACP President, Benjamin Todd Jealous, tune in to NBC Nightly News tomorrow (Friday) at 6:30/5:30 p.m. ET/CT.
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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) At Least 10 Are Killed as Israel Halts Flotilla With Gaza Aid
By ISABEL KERSHNER
May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01flotilla.html?hp
2) The Pain Caucus
By PAUL KRUGMAN
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31krugman.html?hp
3) White House Tries to Regroup as Criticism Mounts Over Leak
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, JOHN M. BRODER and JACKIE CALMES
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31spill.html?hp
4) CALL FROM GAZA FOR GLOBAL RESPONSE TO KILLINGS ON THE FREEDOM FLOTILLA
PRESS RELEASE
GAZA, PALESTINE
MAY 31, 2010
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led
non-violent resistance movement committed to ending Israel's illegal
occupation of Palestinian land. We call for full compliance with all
relevant UN resolutions and international law. For specific media
inquires such as interview requests, photo usage, etc. please email the
ISM Media Office at media@palsolidarity.org
5) Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains
By MICHAEL POWELL
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/economy/31memphis.html?hp
6) Reforms Slow to Arrive at Drilling Agency
By JOHN M. BRODER and MICHAEL LUO
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/politics/31drill.html?ref=us
7) Fears Rise in Europe Over Potential for Deflation
By JACK EWING
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/global/31deflation.html?ref=business
8) Questions About the Gulf
New York Times Editorial
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31mon1.html?hp
9) Israel Holds Hundreds Seized During Raid on Flotilla
By ISABEL KERSHNER and ALAN COWELL
June 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/middleeast/02flotilla.html?hp
10) BP Tries Again to Divert Oil Leak With Dome
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/us/02spill.html?hp
11) Mere Silence Doesn't Invoke Miranda, Justices Rule
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 1, 2010
Filed at 10:59 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/01/us/politics/AP-US-Supreme-Court-Miranda-Rights.html?_r=1&hp
12) Job Outlook for Teenagers Worsens
By MICKEY MEECE
May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/business/01jobs.html
13) Louisianan Becomes Face of Anger on Spill
"To hear Mr. Nungesser tell it, the big boys - BP, the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers - have all been better at pointing fingers than solving problems."
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/us/01parish.html?ref=us
14) Owners Stop Paying Mortgages, and Stop Fretting
By DAVID STREITFELD
May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/business/01nopay.html?ref=business
15) Not in My Jewish Name
By Rob Kall
June 1, 2010
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Not-in-My-Jewish-Name-by-Rob-Kall-100601-960.html
16) Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it
The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades
By John Vidal, environment editor
The Observer
Sunday 30 May 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
17) Veterans For Peace Responds to Armed Attack on Aid Flotilla
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Organized locally. Recognized nationally. Exposing the true costs of war since 1985.
Veterans For Peace, 216 S. Meramec, St. Louis, MO 63105, 314-725-6005
www.veteransforpeace.org
18) U.N. Security Council Condemns 'Acts' in Israeli Raid
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and ALAN COWELL
June 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/middleeast/02nations.html?hp
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1) At Least 10 Are Killed as Israel Halts Flotilla With Gaza Aid
By ISABEL KERSHNER
May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01flotilla.html?hp
JERUSALEM - Israeli naval commandos raided a flotilla carrying thousands of tons of supplies for Gaza in international waters on Monday morning, killing at least 10 people, according to the Israeli military and activists traveling with the flotilla. Some Israeli news reports put the death toll higher.
The confrontation drew widespread international condemnation of Israel, with Israeli envoys summoned to explain their country's actions in several European countries.
The criticism offered a propaganda coup to Israel's foes, particularly Hamas, the militant group that holds sway in Gaza, and damaged Israel's ties to Turkey, one of its most important Muslim partners and the unofficial sponsor of the Gaza-bound convoy. Turkey recalled its ambassador to Israel, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cut short a visit to Latin America to return home.
The killings also coincided with preparations for a planned visit to Washington on Tuesday by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Israeli Defense Forces said more than 10 people were killed when naval personnel boarding the six ships in the aid convoy met with "live fire and light weaponry including knives and clubs." The naval forces then "employed riot dispersal means, including live fire," the military said in a statement.
Greta Berlin, a leader of the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement, speaking by telephone from Cyprus, rejected the military's version.
"That is a lie," she said, adding that it was inconceivable that the civilian passengers on board would have been "waiting up to fire on the Israeli military, with all its might."
"We never thought there would be any violence," she said.
At least four Israeli soldiers were wounded in the operation, some from gunfire, according to the military. Television footage from the flotilla before communications were cut showed what appeared to be commandos sliding down ropes from helicopters onto one of the vessels in the flotilla, while Israeli high-speed naval vessels surrounded the convoy.
A military statement said two activists were later found with pistols they had taken from Israeli commandos. The activists, the military said, had apparently opened fire "as evident by the empty pistol magazines."
The warships first intercepted the convoy of cargo and passenger boats shortly before midnight on Sunday, according to activists on one vessel. Israel had vowed not to let the flotilla reach the shores of Gaza.
Named the Freedom Flotilla and led by the Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish organization, Insani Yardim Vakfi, the convoy was the most ambitious attempt yet to break Israel's three-year blockade of Gaza.
About 600 passengers were said to be aboard the vessels, including the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mairead Corrigan-Maguire of Northern Ireland, and a Holocaust survivor, Hedy Epstein, 85.
"What we have seen this morning is a war crime," said Saeb Erakat, the chief Palestinian negotiator for the government in the West Bank. "These were civilian ships carrying civilians and civilian goods - medicine, wheelchairs, food, construction materials."
"What Israel does in Gaza is appalling," he added. "No informed and decent human can say otherwise."
At a news conference on Monday in Jerusalem, Israeli deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, said the flotilla's intent was "not to transfer humanitarian things to Gaza" but to break the Israeli blockade.
"This blockade is legal," he said, "and aimed at preventing the infiltration of terror and terrorists into Gaza."
Ms. Berlin, of the Free Gaza Movement, said, "They attacked us this morning in international waters. According to the coordinates, we were 70 miles off the Israeli coast."
Within hours, diplomatic repercussions began to spread from the Mediterranean to Europe where Catherine Ashton, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs, called for a full inquiry into the incident and the immediate lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Bill Burton, a deputy press secretary for the White House, said, "The United States deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries sustained and is currently working to understand the circumstances surrounding this tragedy."
A joint statement from Robert Serry and Filippo Grandi, two senior United Nations officials involved in the Middle East peace process and humanitarian aid to Gaza, condemned the raid, which they said was "apparently in international waters."
"We wish to make clear that such tragedies are entirely avoidable if Israel heeds the repeated calls of the international community to end its counterproductive and unacceptable blockade of Gaza," the officials said.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France called Israel's use of force "disproportionate," while William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said he deplored the loss of life. Tony Blair, the representative of the so-called quartet of powers seeking a Middle East settlement, said in a statement that he expressed "deep regret and shock at the tragic loss of life."
"We need a different and better way of helping the people of Gaza and avoiding the hardship and tragedy that is inherent in the current situation," the statement said. The quartet includes the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia. In London, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters blocked Whitehall, the broad avenue running past the prime minister's residence and office at 10 Downing Street.
Turkey strongly condemned the Israeli military action.
"Regardless of any reasoning, such actions against civilians engaged in only peaceful activities are unacceptable," said a statement on the Foreign Ministry's Web site on Monday. "Israel will be required to face the consequences of this act that involves violation of the international law."
"Israel launched this operation in international waters and to a ship flagged white, which is unacceptable under any clause of the international law," the head of the Turkish Grand National Assembly's Foreign Affairs Commission, Murat Mercan, said on the Turkish station NTV.
"We are going to see in the following days whether Israel has done it as a display of decisiveness or to commit political suicide."
Thousands of protesters gathered in Istanbul's Taksim Square, chanting anti-Israeli slogans and repeating Islamic verses while government officials called for calm and urged demonstrators to avoid retaliation against Israeli nationals.
Protesters met in front of the Israeli Consulate earlier and marched toward the square carrying a banner that read, "Zionist Embassy should close down," and chanting slogans including "Damn Israel" and "Long live global intifada."
Crowds also gathered outside the Ankara residence of Gabi Levi, the Israeli ambassador, who was summoned to the Foreign Ministry.
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, said Israel should provide a full explanation of what happened. News reports said the authorities in Egypt and Jordan, two Arab neighbors which have peace treaties with Israel, had summoned Israeli envoys to protest the action.
The outcry from Muslim leaders was strong and immediate. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, called the incident "a massacre," according to the official Wafa news agency. Mr. Abbas is to meet with President Obama in Washington next week.
Saad Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, denounced the raid as "a dangerous and crazy step that will exacerbate tensions in the region," while the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said it was "inhuman."
Channel 10, a private television station in Israel, quoted the Israeli trade minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, as saying 14 to 16 people had been killed. He said on Israeli Army Radio that commandos boarded the ships by sliding down on ropes from a hovering helicopter and were then struck by passengers with "batons and tools."
"The moment someone tries to snatch your weapon, to steal your weapons, that's where you begin to lose control," Mr. Ben-Eliezer said, according to Reuters.
Jamal El Shayyal, a reporter from the television broadcaster Al Jazeera, was on board the Mavi Marmara, the largest of the six ships, during the assault. He said in a video report that dozens of civilians had been injured in the fighting.
The I.D.F. said the ships from the convoy would be taken to the Israeli port of Ashdod, north of Gaza, where "naval forces will perform security checks in order to identify the people on board the ships and their equipment."
On Sunday, three Israeli Navy missile boats had left the Haifa naval base in northern Israel a few minutes after 9 p.m. local time, planning to intercept the flotilla. After asking the captains of the boats to identify themselves, the navy told them they were approaching a blockaded area and asked them either to proceed to Ashdod or return to their countries of origin.
The activists responded that they would continue toward their destination, Gaza.
Speaking by satellite phone from the Challenger 1 boat, which has foreign legislators and other high-profile figures on board, a Free Gaza Movement leader, Huwaida Arraf, said: "We communicated to them clearly that we are unarmed civilians. We asked them not to use violence."
Earlier Sunday, Ms. Arraf said the boats would keep trying to move forward "until they either disable our boats or jump on board."
Reporting was contributed by Mark McDonald in Hong Kong, Sebnem Arsu in Istanbul, Alan Cowell in London and Steven Erlanger in Paris.
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2) The Pain Caucus
By PAUL KRUGMAN
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31krugman.html?hp
What's the greatest threat to our still-fragile economic recovery? Dangers abound, of course. But what I currently find most ominous is the spread of a destructive idea: the view that now, less than a year into a weak recovery from the worst slump since World War II, is the time for policy makers to stop helping the jobless and start inflicting pain.
When the financial crisis first struck, most of the world's policy makers responded appropriately, cutting interest rates and allowing deficits to rise. And by doing the right thing, by applying the lessons learned from the 1930s, they managed to limit the damage: It was terrible, but it wasn't a second Great Depression.
Now, however, demands that governments switch from supporting their economies to punishing them have been proliferating in op-eds, speeches and reports from international organizations. Indeed, the idea that what depressed economies really need is even more suffering seems to be the new conventional wisdom, which John Kenneth Galbraith famously defined as "the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability."
The extent to which inflicting economic pain has become the accepted thing was driven home to me by the latest report on the economic outlook from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an influential Paris-based think tank supported by the governments of the world's advanced economies. The O.E.C.D. is a deeply cautious organization; what it says at any given time virtually defines that moment's conventional wisdom. And what the O.E.C.D. is saying right now is that policy makers should stop promoting economic recovery and instead begin raising interest rates and slashing spending.
What's particularly remarkable about this recommendation is that it seems disconnected not only from the real needs of the world economy, but from the organization's own economic projections.
Thus, the O.E.C.D. declares that interest rates in the United States and other nations should rise sharply over the next year and a half, so as to head off inflation. Yet inflation is low and declining, and the O.E.C.D.'s own forecasts show no hint of an inflationary threat. So why raise rates?
The answer, as best I can make it out, is that the organization believes that we must worry about the chance that markets might start expecting inflation, even though they shouldn't and currently don't: We must guard against "the possibility that longer-term inflation expectations could become unanchored in the O.E.C.D. economies, contrary to what is assumed in the central projection."
A similar argument is used to justify fiscal austerity. Both textbook economics and experience say that slashing spending when you're still suffering from high unemployment is a really bad idea - not only does it deepen the slump, but it does little to improve the budget outlook, because much of what governments save by spending less they lose as a weaker economy depresses tax receipts. And the O.E.C.D. predicts that high unemployment will persist for years. Nonetheless, the organization demands both that governments cancel any further plans for economic stimulus and that they begin "fiscal consolidation" next year.
Why do this? Again, to give markets something they shouldn't want and currently don't. Right now, investors don't seem at all worried about the solvency of the U.S. government; the interest rates on federal bonds are near historic lows. And even if markets were worried about U.S. fiscal prospects, spending cuts in the face of a depressed economy would do little to improve those prospects. But cut we must, says the O.E.C.D., because inadequate consolidation efforts "would risk adverse reactions in financial markets."
The best summary I've seen of all this comes from Martin Wolf of The Financial Times, who describes the new conventional wisdom as being that "giving the markets what we think they may want in future - even though they show little sign of insisting on it now - should be the ruling idea in policy."
Put that way, it sounds crazy. And it is. Yet it's a view that's spreading. And it's already having ugly consequences. Last week conservative members of the House, invoking the new deficit fears, scaled back a bill extending aid to the long-term unemployed - and the Senate left town without acting on even the inadequate measures that remained. As a result, many American families are about to lose unemployment benefits, health insurance, or both - and as these families are forced to slash spending, they will endanger the jobs of many more.
And that's just the beginning. More and more, conventional wisdom says that the responsible thing is to make the unemployed suffer. And while the benefits from inflicting pain are an illusion, the pain itself will be all too real.
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3) White House Tries to Regroup as Criticism Mounts Over Leak
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS, JOHN M. BRODER and JACKIE CALMES
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/31spill.html?hp
This article is by Clifford Krauss, John M. Broder and Jackie Calmes.
HOUSTON - The Obama administration scrambled to respond on Sunday after the failure of the latest effort to kill the gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. But administration officials acknowledged the possibility that tens of thousands of gallons of oil might continue pouring out until August, when two relief wells are scheduled to be completed.
"We are prepared for the worst," said Carol M. Browner, President Obama's climate change and energy policy adviser. "We have been prepared from the beginning."
Even as the White House sought to demonstrate that it was taking a more direct hand in trying to solve the problem, senior officials acknowledged that the new technique BP will use to try to cap the leak - severing the riser pipe and placing a containment dome over the cut riser - could temporarily result in as much as 20 percent more oil flowing into the water during the three days to a week before the new device could be in place.
"This is obviously a difficult situation," Ms. Browner said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, "but it's important for people to understand that from the beginning, the government has been in charge."
"We have been directing BP to take important steps," including the drilling of a second relief well, she added.
The White House said that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would make his eighth trip to the region and that the number of government and contract employees sent to work in areas affected by the spill would be tripled.
But despite the White House efforts, the criticism also intensified. Colin L. Powell, who served as secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told ABC's "This Week" that the administration must move in quickly with "decisive force and demonstrate that it's doing everything that it can do."
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, appearing on "Meet the Press," again criticized the administration's efforts, saying: "We need our federal government exactly for this kind of crisis. I think there could have been a greater sense of urgency."
The administration has left to BP most decisions about how to move forward with efforts to contain the leak. But Ms. Browner made a point of saying that the administration, led by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, had told BP that the company should stop the top kill. Government officials thought it was too dangerous to keep pumping drilling mud into the well because they worried it was putting too much pressure on it. BP announced Saturday evening that it was ending that effort.
BP engineers are now working on several containment plans, with the first being implemented over the next few days.
"According to BP, the riser cutting will likely start Monday or Tuesday," the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a statement on Sunday.
Using submarine robots, technicians intend to sever the riser pipe on top of the blowout preventer, the five-story-high stack of pipes above the well that failed to shut off the leak when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers. A funnel-like containment device will be fitted above the cut riser to draw the escaping oil through tubing attached to a drilling ship.
But BP officials acknowledged that there was no certainty that this attempt would work. Robert Dudley, BP's managing director, appearing on "This Week," also said that if it did work, some oil would still seep out until relief wells provided "an end point" in August.
The failure of the most recent effort - known as a top kill, which BP officials expressed great optimism about before trying it - has underlined the gaps in knowledge and science about the spill and its potential remedies. Ever since the explosion and the resulting leak, estimates of how much oil is escaping have differed by thousands of barrels a day. Both government and BP officials said on Sunday that they had no accurate idea of how much oil was spilling into the gulf.
"We honestly do not know," Mr. Dudley said on "Meet the Press." "We've always found this a difficult oil to measure because of the huge amounts of gas in the oil."
"The one thing about this method that we're about to go into - it will and should measure the majority of the flow," he said.
Mr. Dudley said that the original estimates by the government and BP officials of 5,000 barrels a day were based on satellite pictures and that the current estimate of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels was "issued without an actual flow measurement." If the leak is not contained or slowed and continues at the higher estimated flow rate of 19,000 barrels a day until Aug. 20 - four months after the accident - it could amount to close to 2.3 million barrels spilled into the gulf.
After more than a month of diagnostic tests and the pumping of tens of thousands of barrels of drilling fluids - and everything from golf balls to shards of rubber - into the broken blowout preventer, engineers are still debating about what they think may be the inner contours of the five-story stack of pipes and how to best contain its leaking gashes.
In the end, all the mysteries of what went wrong and caused one of the greatest environmental calamities of history may not be known until the well is finally killed and the ill-fated blowout preventer is brought up from the bottom of the sea.
The final plugging of the well will have to wait until August, when the two relief wells are scheduled be completed. Those wells are being drilled diagonally to intersect with the runaway well and inject it with heavy liquids and cement. Work could be slowed by storms in what is expected to be an active summer hurricane season.
Officials from BP and the administration announced on Saturday that the top kill was a failure and had been abandoned, and that engineers were once again trying to solve the problem with a containment cap. A similar operation was tried nearly four weeks ago, but it failed because a slush of icy water and gas, known as hydrates, filled the large containment device, blocking the escaping oil from entering it. This time, engineers will pump hot sea water around the new, smaller device to keep hydrates from forming, and there will be far less space between the cap and the well for any hydrates that do form to flow in.
BP officials expressed optimism on Sunday about the new operation, though one technician working on the project warned that there were concerns that hydrates could again stymie the containment effort. The technician and outside experts also warned that by cutting the riser, the engineers may increase the flow of escaping oil.
Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, director of petroleum geoscience programs at the University of Houston, said that he thought BP's next plan had a good chance of succeeding, but that there was also a risk of increasing the flow of escaping oil by 10 percent.
"Then it just makes the situation worse for longer," he said, unless the containment cap succeeds in collecting a substantial amount of oil.
Clifford Krauss reported from Houston, John M. Broder from Washington and Jackie Calmes from Chicago.
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4) CALL FROM GAZA FOR GLOBAL RESPONSE TO KILLINGS ON THE FREEDOM FLOTILLA
PRESS RELEASE
GAZA, PALESTINE
MAY 31, 2010
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led
non-violent resistance movement committed to ending Israel's illegal
occupation of Palestinian land. We call for full compliance with all
relevant UN resolutions and international law. For specific media
inquires such as interview requests, photo usage, etc. please email the
ISM Media Office at media@palsolidarity.org
We Gaza based Palestinian Civil Society Organizations and
International activists call on the international community and civil
society to pressure their governments and Israel to cease the
abductions and killings in Israel's attacks against the Gaza Freedom
Flotilla sailing for Gaza, and begin a global response to hold Israel
accountable for the murder of foreign civilians at sea and illegal
piracy of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza.
We salute the courage of all those who have organized this aid
intervention and demand a safe passage through to Gaza for the 750
people of conscience from 40 different countries including 35
international politicians intent on breaking the Israeli-Egyptian
blockade. We offer our sincerest condolences to family and friends
who have lost loved ones in the attack.
By sailing directly to Gaza, outside of Israeli waters, with cargo
banned illegally by Israel, such as the 10,000 tonnes of badly needed
concrete, toys, workbooks, chocolate, pasta and substantial medical
supplies, the flotilla is exercising international law and upholding
article 33 of the Geneva Convention which clearly states that
collective punishment is a crime against humanity.
The hardships of Israel's closure of Gaza have been well documented
by all human rights groups operating, most recently by Amnesty
International in their Annual Human Rights Report concluding that the
siege has "deepened the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Mass
unemployment, extreme poverty, food insecurity and food price rises
caused by shortages left four out of five Gazans dependent on
humanitarian aid. The scope of the blockade and statements made by
Israeli officials about its purpose showed that it was being imposed
as a form of collective punishment of Gazans, a flagrant violation of
international law." The United Nations continuously states that only
a fraction of the required aid is entering the Strip due to what it
calls 'the medieval siege', with John Ging the Director of UNRWA in
Gaza specifically expressing the need for the Flotilla to enter Gaza.
The European Union's new foreign affairs minister Catherine Ashton has
just reiterated its call for, "an immediate, sustained and
unconditional opening of crossings for the flow of humanitarian aid,
commercial goods and persons to and from Gaza."
The people of Gaza are not dependent people, but self sufficient
people doing what they can to retain some dignity in life in the wake
of this colossal man-made devastation that deprives so many of a basic
start in life or minimal aspirations for the future.
We, from Gaza, call on you to demonstrate and support the courageous
men and women on the Flotilla and join the, many now murdered on a
humanitarian aid mission. We insist on severance of diplomatic ties
with Israel, trials for war crimes and the International protection of
the civilians of Gaza. We call on you to join the growing
international boycott, divestment and sanction campaign of a country
proving again to be so violent and yet so unchallenged. Join the
growing critical mass around the world with a commitment to the day
when Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as any other people,
when the siege is lifted, the occupation is over and the 6 million
Palestinian refugees are finally granted justice.
Press Contacts:
Dr Haidar Eid: One Democratic Sate Group and University Teachers'
Association
Dr Mona El Farra: Middle East Children's Alliance, Gaza
00.972(0)598.868.222
Adie Mormech: International Solidarity Movement 00.972(0)597.717.696
Max Ajl: Gaza Freedom March 00.972(0)597.750.798
Signatory Organisations:
The One Democratic State Group; University Teachers Association; Arab Cultural Forum; Palestinian Students' Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel; Association of Al-Quds Bank for Culture and Info; Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements; International Solidarity Movement; Palestinian Network of Non-Governmental Organisations; Palestinian Women Committees; Progressive Students Union; Medical Relief Society; The General Society for Rehabilitation; Gaza Community Mental Health Program; General Union of Palestinian Women; Afaq Jadeeda Cultural Centre for Women and Children;Deir Al-Balah Cultural Centre for Women and Children; Maghazi Cultural Centre for Children; Al-Sahel Centre for Women and Youth; Ghassan Kanfani Kindergartens; Rachel Corrie Centre, Rafah; Rafah Olympia City Sisters; Al Awda Centre, Rafah; Al Awda Hospital, Jabaliya Camp; Ajyal Association, Gaza; General Union of Palestinian Syndicates; Al Karmel Centre, Nuseirat; Local Inititiative, Beit Hanoun; Union of Health Work Committees; Red Crescent Society Gaza Strip; Beit Lahiya Cultural Centre; Al Awda Centre, Rafah
-- The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led
non-violent resistance movement committed to ending Israel's illegal
occupation of Palestinian land. We call for full compliance with all
relevant UN resolutions and international law. For specific media
inquires such as interview requests, photo usage, etc. please email the
ISM Media Office at media@palsolidarity.org
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5) Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains
By MICHAEL POWELL
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/economy/31memphis.html?hp
MEMPHIS - For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city.
A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.
Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.
"I'm going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I'm a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living," said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. "I'm proud of what I've accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring."
Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.
The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 - and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners, according to an analysis conducted by Queens College Sociology Department for The New York Times.
Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, White Haven and Cordova. As job losses mount - black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites - many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.
The repercussions will be long-lasting, in Memphis and nationwide. The most acute economic divide in America remains the steadily widening gap between the wealth of black and white families, according to a recent study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study.
The Economic Policy Institute's forthcoming "The State of Working America" analyzed the recession-driven drop in wealth. As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100. So the chasm widens, and Memphis is left to deal with the consequences.
"This cancer is metastasizing into an economic crisis for the city," said Mayor A. C. Wharton Jr. in his riverfront office. "It's done more to set us back than anything since the beginning of the civil rights movement."
The mayor and former bank loan officers point a finger of blame at large national banks - in particular, Wells Fargo. During the last decade, they say, these banks singled out blacks in Memphis to sell them risky high-cost mortgages and consumer loans.
The City of Memphis and Shelby County sued Wells Fargo late last year, asserting that the bank's foreclosure rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was nearly seven times that of the foreclosure rate in predominantly white neighborhoods. Other banks, including Citibank and Countrywide, foreclosed in more equal measure.
In a recent regulatory filing, Wells Fargo hinted that its legal troubles could multiply. "Certain government entities are conducting investigations into the mortgage lending practices of various Wells Fargo affiliated entities, including whether borrowers were steered to more costly mortgage products," the bank stated.
Wells Fargo officials are not backing down in the face of the legal attacks. They say the bank made more prime loans and has foreclosed on fewer homes than most banks, and that the worst offenders - those banks that handed out bushels of no-money-down, negative-amortization loans - have gone out of business.
"The mistake Memphis officials made is that they picked the lender who was doing the most lending as opposed to the lender who was doing the worst lending," said Brad Blackwell, executive vice president for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage.
Not every recessionary ill can be heaped upon banks. Some black homeowners contracted the buy-a-big-home fever that infected many Americans and took out ill-advised loans. And unemployment has pitched even homeowners who hold conventional mortgages into foreclosure.
Federal and state officials say that high-cost mortgages leave hard-pressed homeowners especially vulnerable and that statistical patterns are inescapable.
"The more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities," Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's civil rights division, told a Congressional committee.
The reversal of economic fortune in Memphis is particularly grievous for a black professional class that has taken root here, a group that includes Mr. Wharton, a lawyer who became mayor in 2009. Demographers forecast that Memphis will soon become the nation's first majority black metropolitan region.
That prospect, noted William Mitchell, a black real estate agent, once augured for a fine future.
"Our home values were up, income up," he said. He pauses, his frustration palpable. "What we see today, it's a new world. And not a good one."
Porch View
"You don't want to walk up there! That's the wild, wild west," a neighbor shouts. "Nothing on that block but foreclosed homes and squatters."
To roam Soulsville, a neighborhood south of downtown Memphis, is to find a place where bungalows and brick homes stand vacant amid azaleas and dogwoods, where roofs are swaybacked and thieves punch holes through walls to strip the copper piping. The weekly newspaper is swollen with foreclosure notices.
Here and there, homes are burned by arsonists.
Yet just a few years back, Howard Smith felt like a rich man. A 56-year-old African-American engineer with a gray-flecked beard, butter-brown corduroys and red sneakers, he sits with two neighbors on a porch on Richmond Avenue and talks of his miniature real estate empire: He owned a home on this block, another in nearby White Haven and another farther out. His job paid well; a pleasant retirement beckoned.
Then he was laid off. He has sent out 60 applications, obtained a dozen interviews and received no calls back. A bank foreclosed on his biggest house. He will be lucky to get $30,000 for his house here, which was assessed at $80,000 two years ago.
"It all disappeared overnight," he says.
"Mmm-mm, yes sir, overnight," says his neighbor, Gwen Ward. In her 50s, she, too, was laid off, from her supervisory job of 15 years, and she moved in with her elderly mother. "It seemed we were headed up and then" - she snaps her fingers - "it all went away."
Mr. Smith nods. "The banks and Wall Street have taken the middle class and shredded us," he says.
For the greater part of the last century, racial discrimination crippled black efforts to buy homes and accumulate wealth. During the post-World War II boom years, banks and real estate agents steered blacks to segregated neighborhoods, where home appreciation lagged far behind that of white neighborhoods.
Blacks only recently began to close the home ownership gap with whites, and thus accumulate wealth - progress that now is being erased. In practical terms, this means black families have less money to pay for college tuition, invest in businesses or sustain them through hard times.
"We're wiping out whatever wealth blacks have accumulated - it assures racial economic inequality for the next generation," said Thomas M. Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.
The African-American renaissance in Memphis was halting. Residential housing patterns remain deeply segregated. While big employers - FedEx and AutoZone - have headquarters here, wage growth is not robust. African-American employment is often serial rather than continuous, and many people lack retirement and health plans.
But the recession presents a crisis of a different magnitude.
Mayor Wharton walks across his office to a picture window and stares at a shimmering Mississippi River. He describes a recent drive through ailing neighborhoods. It is akin, he says, to being a doctor "looking for pulse rates in his patients and finding them near death."
He adds: "I remember riding my bike as a kid through thriving neighborhoods. Now it's like someone bombed my city."
Banking on Nothing
Camille Thomas, a 40-year-old African-American, loved working for Wells Fargo. "I felt like I could help people," she recalled over coffee.
As the subprime market heated up, she said, the bank pressure to move more loans - for autos, for furniture, for houses - edged into mania. "It was all about selling your units and getting your bonus," she said.
Ms. Thomas and three other Wells Fargo employees have given affidavits for the city's lawsuit against the bank, and their statements about bank practices reinforce one another.
"Your manager would say, 'Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,' and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods," she recalled. "We were told, 'Oh, they aren't so savvy.' "
She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went "fishing" for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral.
Several state and city regulators have placed Wells Fargo Bank in their cross hairs, and their lawsuits include similar accusations. In Illinois, the state attorney general has accused the bank of marketing high-cost loans to blacks and Latinos while selling lower-cost loans to white borrowers. John P. Relman, the Washington, D.C., lawyer handling the Memphis case, has sued Wells Fargo on behalf of the City of Baltimore, asserting that the bank systematically exploited black borrowers.
A federal judge in Baltimore dismissed that lawsuit, saying it had made overly broad claims about the damage done by Wells Fargo. City lawyers have refiled papers.
"I don't think it's going too far to say that banks are at the core of the disaster here," said Phyllis G. Betts, director of the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action at the University of Memphis, which has closely examined bank lending records.
Former employees say Wells Fargo loan officers marketed the most expensive loans to black applicants, even when they should have qualified for prime loans. This practice is known as reverse redlining.
Webb A. Brewer, a Memphis lawyer, recalls poring through piles of loan papers and coming across name after name of blacks with subprime mortgages. "This is money out of their pockets lining the purses of the banks," he said.
For a $150,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points - the typical spread between a conventional and subprime loan - tacks on $90,000 in interest payments over its 30-year life.
Wells Fargo officials say they rejected the worst subprime products, and they portray their former employees as disgruntled rogues who subverted bank policies.
"They acknowledged that they knowingly worked to defeat our fair lending policies and controls," said Mr. Blackwell, the bank executive.
Bank officials attribute the surge in black foreclosures in Memphis to the recession. They say that the average credit score in black Census tracts is 108 points lower than in white tracts.
"People who have less are more vulnerable during downturns," said Andrew L. Sandler of Buckley Sandler, a law firm representing Wells Fargo.
Mr. Relman, the lawyer representing Memphis, is unconvinced. "If a bad economy and poor credit explains it, you'd expect to see other banks with the same ratio of foreclosures in the black community," he said. "But you don't. Wells is the outlier."
Whatever the responsibility, individual or corporate, the detritus is plain to see. Within a two-block radius of that porch in Soulsville, Wells Fargo holds mortgages on nearly a dozen foreclosures. That trail of pain extends right out to the suburbs.
Begging to Stay
To turn into Tyrone Banks's subdivision in Hickory Ridge is to find his dream in seeming bloom. Stone lions guard his door, the bushes are trimmed and a freshly waxed sport utility vehicle sits in his driveway.
For years, Mr. Banks was assiduous about paying down his debt: he stayed two months ahead on his mortgage, and he helped pay off his mother's mortgage.
Two years ago, his doorbell rang, and two men from Wells Fargo offered to consolidate his consumer loans into a low-cost mortgage.
"I thought, 'This is great! ' " Mr. Banks says. "When you have four kids, college expenses, you look for any savings."
What those men did not tell Mr. Banks, he says (and Ms. Thomas, who studied his case, confirms), is that his new mortgage had an adjustable rate. When it reset last year, his payment jumped to $1,700 from $1,200.
Months later, he ruptured his Achilles tendon playing basketball, hindering his work as a janitor. And he lost his job at FedEx. Now foreclosure looms.
He is by nature an optimistic man; his smile is rueful.
"Man, I should I have stayed 'old school' with my finances," he said. "I sat down my youngest son on the couch and I told him, 'These are rough times.' "
Many neighbors are in similar straits. Foreclosure notices flutter like flags on the doors of two nearby homes, and the lawns there are overgrown and mud fills the gutters.
Wells Fargo says it has modified three mortgages for every foreclosure nationwide - although bank officials declined to provide the data for Memphis. A study by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and six nonprofit groups found that the nation's four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, had cut their prime mortgage refinancing 33 percent in predominantly minority communities, even as prime refinancing in white neighborhoods rose 32 percent from 2006 to 2008.
For Mr. Banks, it is as if he found the door wide open on his way into debt but closed as he tries to get out.
"Some days it feels like everyone I know in Memphis is in trouble," Mr. Banks says. "We're all just begging to stay in our homes, basically."
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6) Reforms Slow to Arrive at Drilling Agency
By JOHN M. BRODER and MICHAEL LUO
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/us/politics/31drill.html?ref=us
WASHINGTON - As President Obama and his top aides were convening a series of meetings that led to the announcement in March of a major expansion of offshore oil drilling, the troubled history of the agency that regulates such drilling operations was well known.
Mr. Obama, shortly after taking office, had assigned Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to clean up the agency, the Minerals Management Service. The office's history of corruption and coziness with the industry it was supposed to regulate had been the subject of years of scathing reports by government auditors, lurid headlines and a score of Congressional hearings.
But the promised reforms of the agency were slow to arrive, and the subject of the minerals service never came up at the meetings leading to the new drilling policy, according to a senior administration official involved in the discussions.
"I don't recall a conversation on how the offshore drilling and M.M.S. issues overlapped," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential deliberations involving the president.
Defending the new policy on April 2, less than three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama emphasized the safety record of offshore operations.
"It turns out, by the way," he said, "that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced."
In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the Minerals Management Service has come under intense scrutiny, and Mr. Salazar moved this month to essentially disband the agency, splitting it into three parts.
On Thursday, he asked for the resignation of the head of the service, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, and named an interim successor on Friday.
But the question remains why Mr. Obama - and members of Congress charged with oversight of the agency - did not come to grips with its obvious problems before the accident occurred.
The answer may have as much to do with the workings of business as usual in Washington and the long-entrenched influence of the oil industry in Washington politics as it does with anything more sinister.
Political expediency may have played a role. In pushing offshore drilling, Mr. Obama was hoping to placate the oil industry and its supporters in Congress, who were demanding increased access to the outer continental shelf in exchange for their possible support for broader climate change and energy legislation that Mr. Obama wants.
That focus apparently eclipsed any concerns about the minerals agency, especially since at the time no oil rig had exploded and sent hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the gulf.
The breadth of the expansion stunned oil industry representatives, who were expecting a much more restrictive policy accompanied by tough new safety and environmental rules. They were prepared to attack the new policy; instead, the American Petroleum Institute, the industry's main lobby, praised it.
"We saw the president's announcement as a positive development," said Jack Gerard, president of the institute, "a recognition that oil and natural gas play a critical role in our energy future."
But there had been warnings for years from government auditors about the Minerals Management Service, including revelations just before Mr. Obama took office that agency personnel had accepted gifts, drugs and sexual favors from oil company representatives.
Shortly after he was appointed in 2009, Mr. Salazar visited the agency's Denver office and declared at a news conference that he was the "new sheriff in town" who would bring significant changes. He issued new ethics guidelines and eliminated a controversial royalty program.
But it is now clear that he did little else, focusing his energies elsewhere, for example on offshore wind projects.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama acknowledged that he should have paid more attention to the problems at the service and moved more quickly to correct them.
"At M.M.S., Ken Salazar was in the process of making these reforms," Mr. Obama said at a news conference. "But the point that I'm making is that, obviously, they weren't happening fast enough."
For lawmakers on the Congressional committees that oversee the agency, there was also little to gain politically in taking it on. Many of those committee members come from states where the energy industry is important. And members also draw an outsize share of oil industry contributions.
Members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, for instance, have taken in an average of about $52,000 from individuals and groups associated with the oil and gas industry this election cycle, compared with $24,000 for others in the Senate, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, an ardent foe of offshore drilling who in 2008 introduced unsuccessful legislation to impose new ethics and disclosure guidelines on employees of the minerals service, said that the industry played a powerful role in shaping the agenda on energy legislation, and that overhauling the minerals service obviously was not on that agenda.
"They've got every interest in the world to have a cozy relationship with the regulators," he said of the oil companies.
Still, Mr. Nelson added, the failure of his bill was more a function of poor timing. He proposed it toward the end of the legislative session, and in the rush to complete other business after the presidential election, it had no chance.
And, he said, the fact a Democratic administration was coming in reassured him that changes were coming.
The unusual structure of the agency has also helped thwart efforts to overhaul it, despite its problems. Established in 1982 by Interior Secretary James G. Watt, it was created by secretarial order, not legislation, a set-up that some lawmakers said made Congress pay less attention to it.
And because it is financed by the $13 billion a year it collects in oil royalties, it largely escapes the kind of scrutiny that other regulatory bodies get in the appropriations process.
Serious concerns about the agency were raised as early as 2006, when Representative Darrell E. Issa, Republican of California, led the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in a series of hearings on problems in deepwater oil leases during the Clinton administration that freed companies from paying billions of dollars in royalties.
Earl E. Devaney, the Interior Department's inspector general, testified at those hearings about a culture of "managerial irresponsibility and a lack of accountability" at the agency.
But Mr. Issa recalled in an interview last week that he had trouble getting his fellow committee members, both Democrats and Republicans, to attend the hearings, because the agency operated in relative obscurity and its problems were not of intense interest on Capitol Hill.
"It was kind of lonely," he said.
Two years later, the department's inspector general released new reports of misconduct, this time accompanied by more attention from the news media and outrage in Congress. Both the House and Senate held hearings. Several lawmakers, including Mr. Issa, Mr. Nelson and Representative Nick Rahall, a West Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, introduced bills to fix the minerals service.
But none of the measures went anywhere. Mr. Rahall drew parallels with the regulation of the coal mining industry, where changes often occur only after tragic accidents. "It's unfortunate that it takes such before we enact safety legislation," he said.
Griff Palmer contributed reporting from New York.
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7) Fears Rise in Europe Over Potential for Deflation
By JACK EWING
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/global/31deflation.html?ref=business
FRANKFURT - If the European Central Bank has one monetary dragon it considers essential to slay, it is inflation.
Keeping inflation under control is the central bank's primary legal responsibility, and as Europe struggles to overcome economic problems caused by the sovereign debt crisis, inflation has remained the bank's primary focus.
But some economists say it has become a driving obsession that has blinded the bank to a potentially bigger threat to Europe: deflation.
The central bank's doubters grew louder after it made a big show of taking measures to cancel out the supposed inflationary impact of the government bond purchases it began on May 10 to help keep Greece and several other euro zone countries from defaulting on their debts.
"It's nuts: how can they be concerned about the inflationary impact of this?" said Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist of High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, N.Y. "If I were the head of the E.C.B., I would be printing money to avert the decline in the money supply."
Many economists regard deflation as more dangerous than inflation, because it prompts consumers to delay purchases as they wait for lower prices, creating a downward spiral of lower demand and production. Deflation is also bad for debtors like Greece, because they may have to pay back money that would be worth more than it was when they borrowed it.
Economists like Mr. Weinberg - and a few policy makers as well - are beginning to worry that a danger of deflation in Europe, similar to the one that strangled Japanese growth for most of the 1990s, is a bigger threat than inflation.
Prices fell in Ireland in April, while inflation was below 1 percent in five other euro zone countries. The problem also extends outside the euro zone.
"We all share some risks and problems in common with Japan circa 1995," Adam S. Posen, a member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, told an audience at the London School of Economics on May 2.
The United States is also at risk, Mr. Posen said, though he rated the chances of deflation there as low. But just as Japan did in the 1990s, the European Central Bank and the United States Federal Reserve have cut interest rates close to zero while pumping huge amounts of credit into their economies. That means the two central banks would have limited policy tools left with which to combat a collapse in prices and demand.
The downward pressure on prices has its roots in the economic decline that followed the 2008 financial crisis, but Europe's sovereign debt problems are likely to add extra impetus. Governments, including those of Spain and Germany, are sharply reducing spending to lower their deficits, which will inevitably curb consumer demand and employment, hindering growth.
Inflation in the euro zone - the 16 countries that use the euro - rose slightly in April, to an annual rate of 1.5 percent, from 1.4 percent in March. Declines in categories like recreation and culture, communications and vacation tour packages blunted the impact of higher transportation costs. And so-called core inflation - which excludes energy prices and which most economists consider a better measure for policy-making purposes - declined to 0.7 percent in April from 0.8 percent in March. By either measure, the overall rate was still well below the central bank's target of about 2 percent.
The real challenge for policy makers will occur in the coming months and years as Spain, Greece and Portugal struggle to regain their competitiveness on international markets. Without their own currencies to devalue, they have little choice but to cut wages and keep them well below those in countries like Germany and France. Pay cuts and lower government spending will put downward pressure on prices.
Spanish core inflation already turned negative in April.
A mild decline in prices in a few euro zone countries can be managed, economists say, but it will add to the risks of deflation. And the central bank will face more difficulty than usual in devising a monetary policy that fits both the ailing countries and the faster-growing economies like Germany and France.
"The E.C.B. has a careful balancing act to do," said Dennis Snower, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany.
The central bank has remained firm in its focus on containing inflation. Jean-Claude Trichet, the bank's president, has said he considers inflation a tax on the poor. And the bank's charter obliges it to serve foremost as guardian of price stability.
As recently as Friday, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a member of the bank's executive board, defended the wisdom of the mandate. In a speech in Rabat, Morocco, he said permitting inflation to rise to make it easier for European nations to repay their debts, as some have urged, would backfire.
The resulting decline in the value of government bonds would inflict "major losses on the banks and financial institutions which have been heavily investing in these markets, potentially undermining the recovery," he said.
Nevertheless, Mr. Trichet has been under fire, especially from critics in Germany, ever since the central bank began the unprecedented bond purchases to halt a sell-off of Greek, Portuguese and Spanish government debt.
By buying government bonds on the open market, and being coy about how much it was spending, the bank was able to reduce the high premiums investors were demanding for debt from the weakest countries. A continuation of the market rout would have raised the interest rates that Spain and other countries had to pay to sell new bonds, aggravating their already grave fiscal problems.
The problem was that, to buy the bonds, the bank had to expand the assets it held on its books. So to prove that it had not stooped to printing money, the bank promised to offset the bond purchases, which totaled 26.5 billion euros ($32.6 billion as of May 24, the most recent data available), by taking in a like amount in short-term deposits from banks. In effect, it siphoned off as much liquidity as it had added.
The bond purchases were only the latest of a series of extraordinary moves that Mr. Trichet has pursued to stabilize the European banking system. Since the beginning of the financial crisis, the central bank has been essentially keeping banks afloat by providing almost unlimited loans at 1 percent interest.
Mr. Trichet is eager to squash any doubts that such moves represent a shift in the bank's focus on inflation, said Mr. Snower of the Kiel Institute. "The E.C.B. is showing very clearly that its objectives have not changed."
Other economists say that scale of the bond purchases would not increase the money supply enough to pose an inflation risk. And the money supply is falling because of a decline in bank lending.
In addition, factories are operating below capacity and euro zone unemployment is at 10 percent. Extra money in the system would not create scarcities of goods or labor that could drive up prices, Mr. Weinberg of High Frequency Economics said.
"You don't have to pay any more to get those workers to come out of unemployment," Mr. Weinberg said.
The recent decline of the euro against the dollar could create some inflation. Oil and other commodities are priced in dollars and could become more expensive in euros.
Still, few economists see prices rising. "There is no reason to fear high inflation for the time being," Simon Junker, a Commerzbank analyst, said in a note.
Much of Mr. Trichet's anti-inflation stance seems aimed at mollifying Germany's anxiety over the bank's bond purchases.
After the purchases, Mr. Trichet gave interviews to three leading German publications, an unusually high number in such a short period. In each case, he tried to reassure Germans on inflation and convince them that the euro is as solid as the German mark that they reluctantly gave up 11 years ago.
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8) Questions About the Gulf
New York Times Editorial
May 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/opinion/31mon1.html?hp
BP's latest failure to plug the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is one more crushing disappointment to Louisiana's beleaguered people, one more strike against the company and one more signal to President Obama to redouble efforts to contain and clean the spill.
BP now pins its hopes - and those of the country - on yet another containment strategy, its fifth since the April 20 explosion. It does so amid mounting public anger and a report in The Times on Sunday that the company may have violated its own safety standards by ignoring warnings about design flaws in the well.
These disclosures add to the growing list of questions that must be addressed by the special commission President Obama has appointed to examine the root causes of the spill and recommend ways to prevent future catastrophes.
Here are others:
WHAT HAPPENED, AND WHY Five weeks after the blowout, there is no clear picture of the fatal sequence of events. Gas somehow escaped up the well, then exploded, collapsing the rig. The blowout preventer - a giant set of valves on the ocean floor - failed to work, and oil began spurting into the gulf at a rate recently estimated at 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day. The total spill now exceeds the estimated 250,000 barrels that leaked from the stricken tanker Exxon Valdez in 1989. The public needs to get an honest accounting of the spill's size, and BP's word is not enough since it has to pay for the cleanup.
A joint Interior Department-Coast Guard investigative committee in Louisiana, and numerous Congressional panels, have been seeking clarity. Their search has not been helped by industry grandstanding and finger-pointing, with BP blaming the rig operator, Transocean, for the faulty blowout preventer.
It is also unclear which company was calling the shots on the rig, and there have been ominous suggestions that BP short-circuited standard drilling procedures to cut costs.
THE RESPONSE The questions about whether BP and the government responded quickly enough, and with the right weapons, could fill a book - and probably will. Both parties seem to have underestimated the size of the spill, and neither had a coherent underwater response plan in place. Though the oil industry had experienced blowouts at shallower depths, BP's disjointed response suggested it had given little thought to the possibility of a blowout at 5,000 feet.
Partly as a result of laws passed after the Exxon Valdez, industry and the Coast Guard were better prepared to deal with the oil when it hit the surface. But the techniques - the controlled burns, the skimmers, the booms, the dispersants - were little more sophisticated than they were in 1989. Why no progress? And why was there only one dispersant available (and a toxic one at that) made by one company, Nalco?
REGULATORY FAILURE Much has been said - including by President Obama - about the incestuous relationship between the oil industry and its chief regulator, the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, which routinely ignored basic environmental laws and its own rules to fast track drilling permits.
But while these were terrible failures, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's promise to reform the agency is overdue, it is hard to believe that other agencies in Washington, and even the Congressional oversight committees, were not also culpable.
NEW WEAPONS One outside-the-box question that looms large is whether the federal government should now develop its own capacity to deal with a huge blowout. As things stand now, industry has all the equipment and experience. In an interim report to the president on Thursday, Mr. Salazar suggested the creation of a kind of parallel technological universe in which government would have the robots, the coffer dams and the other tools necessary to help control a big blowout.
That could be expensive, but Mr. Obama indicated on Friday that he had been thinking along the same lines. As well he should be. The images from the last month - Washington essentially powerless, BP flailing away - have been deeply disheartening.
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9) Israel Holds Hundreds Seized During Raid on Flotilla
By ISABEL KERSHNER and ALAN COWELL
June 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/middleeast/02flotilla.html?hp
JERUSALEM - The fallout from Israel's attack on a flotilla trying to breach the blockade of Gaza widened Tuesday amid growing criticism of the raid, which left nine activists dead. Egypt reopened its border with Gaza to allow humanitarian aid to flow through, and activists said they had sent another ship to the area.
As international pressure mounted for Israel to end its blockade of Gaza, fresh reports of violence between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants underscored the fraught security situation along the border. The Israeli military said two militants who infiltrated from Gaza had been killed in a clash with troops, and news reports said three other militants had been killed in an airstrike after a rocket attack from Gaza.
Monday's confrontation at sea strained relations between Israel and the United States just as American-sponsored proximity talks involving Palestinians and Israelis were getting under way.
And Turkish animosity seemed to deepen as Israel announced that four of the nine killed in the military operation aboard the Turkish vessel were Turkish citizens, the Anatolian News Agency reported. In a speech, Turkey's prime minister called on Israel to be punished for the raid. In New York, after protracted wrangling, the United Nations Security Council condemned "acts" leading to the loss of life in the operation by Israeli commandos in international waters on Monday.
The Security Council also urged an impartial inquiry - a call echoed in a separate forum by Russia and the European Union on Tuesday at a meeting of senior officials in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
For its part, Turkey, once seen as Israel's most important friend in the Muslim world, recalled its ambassador on Monday and canceled planned military exercises with Israel as the countries' already tense relations soured even further. "This irresponsible, heedless, unlawful attitude that defies any human virtue should definitely, but definitely, be punished," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday in his regular weekly address to his party in the capital, Ankara.
"No one should dare to challenge Turkey or test her patience for that the strength of Turkey's animosity is as strong as the value of its friendship."
In his speech, which was often interrupted by loud applause, Mr. Erdogan called on Israel to end the embargo on Gaza and asked the Israeli people to rise against the violent policies of their government. And Egypt's official Middle East News Service said that President Hosni Mubarak was moving to temporarily reopen the Rafah border crossing - the only crossing not controlled by Israel - to "alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian people in the besieged Gaza Strip."
Egypt has kept its border with Gaza largely sealed since Hamas took power there in 2007.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, meanwhile, was flying home after canceling a Tuesday meeting with President Obama.
Mr. Netanyahu has defended the Israeli military's actions, saying the commandos, enforcing what Israel says is a legal blockade, were set upon by passengers on the Turkish ship they boarded and fired only in self-defense. The military released a video of the early moments of the raid to support that claim.
Israel said the violence was instigated by pro-Palestinian activists who presented themselves as humanitarians but had come ready for a fight. Organizers of the flotilla accused the Israeli forces of opening fire as soon as they landed on the deck, and released videos to support their case. On Tuesday, activists promised more confrontation. Greta Berlin of the Free Gaza Movement, which organized the flotilla, said that another cargo boat was heading to Gaza from the coast of Italy , but said the vessel would be picking up additional activists and journalists, and was not expected to reach Gaza until Monday.
"We will not let her go in unprotected," Ms. Berlin said in a telephone interview.
An Israeli police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said 634 activists, mostly from the Turkish passenger ship, who had refused to identify themselves were being detained at a prison in southern Israel, where they were awaiting deportation procedures. Forty-five others had agreed to identify themselves and were being deported.
Immigration officials said the people to be deported included Henning Mankell, a best-selling Swedish author.
While the Israeli public seemed largely to support the navy, policy experts questioned preparations for the military operation, whether there had been an intelligence failure and whether the Israeli insistence on stopping the flotilla had been counterproductive. Some commentators were calling for the resignation of Ehud Barak, the defense minister.
"The government failed the test of results; blaming the organizers of the flotilla for causing the deaths by ignoring Israel's orders to turn back is inadequate," wrote Aluf Benn, a columnist for Haaretz, on the newspaper's Web site on Monday, calling for a national committee of inquiry. "Decisions taken by the responsible authorities must be probed."
The flotilla of six cargo ships and passenger boats was carrying 10,000 tons of aid for Gaza. But the raid and its deadly consequences have thrown Israel's policy of blockading Gaza into the international limelight. The statement by the United Nations Security Council early on Tuesday stressed "the need for sustained and regular flow of goods and people to Gaza."
Israel had vowed not to let the flotilla reach the shores of Gaza, held by Hamas, an organization sworn to Israel's destruction.
Named the Freedom Flotilla, and led by the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement and a Turkish organization, Insani Yardim Vakfi, the convoy had converged at sea near Cyprus and set out on the final leg of its journey on Sunday afternoon. Israel warned the vessels to abort their mission, describing it as a provocation.
The confrontation began shortly before midnight on Sunday when Israeli warships intercepted the aid flotilla, according to a person on one boat. The Israeli military warned the vessels that they were entering a hostile area and that the Gaza shore was under blockade.
The vessels refused the military's request to dock at the Israeli port of Ashdod, north of Gaza, and continued toward their destination.
About 4 a.m. Monday, naval commandos came aboard the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, having been lowered by ropes from helicopters onto the decks.
At that point, the operation seems to have gone badly wrong.
Israeli officials say that the soldiers were dropped into an ambush and were attacked with clubs, metal rods and knives.
An Israeli official said that the navy was planning to stop five of the six vessels of the flotilla with large nets that interfere with propellers, but that the sixth was too large for that. The official said there was clearly an intelligence failure in that the commandos were expecting to face passive resistance, and not an angry, violent reaction.
The Israelis had planned to commandeer the vessels and steer them to Ashdod, where their cargo would be unloaded and, the authorities said, transferred overland to Gaza after inspection.
The military said in a statement that two activists were later found with pistols taken from Israeli commandos. It accused the activists of opening fire, "as evident by the empty pistol magazines."
Another soldier said the orders were to neutralize the passengers, not to kill them.
But the forces "had to open fire in order to defend themselves," the navy commander, Vice Adm. Eliezer Marom, said at a news conference in Tel Aviv, adding, "Their lives were at risk."
At least seven soldiers were wounded, one of them seriously. The military said that some suffered gunshot wounds; at least one had been stabbed.
Einat Wilf, a Labor Party member of Parliament who sits on the influential Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said that she had warned Mr. Barak and others well in advance that the flotilla was a public relations issue and should not be dealt with by military means.
The fatalities all occurred aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish passenger vessel that was carrying about 600 activists under the auspices of Insani Yardim Vakfi, an organization also known as I.H.H. Israeli officials have characterized it as a dangerous Islamic organization with terrorist links.
Yet the organization, founded in 1992 to collect aid for the Bosnians, is now active in 120 countries and has been present at recent disaster areas like Haiti and New Orleans.
"Our volunteers were not trained military personnel," said Yavuz Dede, deputy director of the organization. "They were civilians trying to get aid to Gaza. There were artists, intellectuals and journalists among them. Such an offensive cannot be explained by any terms."
There were no immediate accounts available from the passengers of the Turkish ship, which arrived at the naval base in Ashdod on Monday evening, where nearly three dozen were arrested, many for not giving their names. The base was off limits to the news media and declared a closed military zone.
The Free Gaza Movement has organized several aid voyages since the summer of 2008, usually consisting of one or two vessels. The earliest ones were allowed to reach Gaza. Others have been intercepted and forced back, and one, last June, was commandeered by the Israeli Navy and towed to Ashdod. This six-boat fleet was the most ambitious attempt yet to break the blockade.
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, and Alan Cowell from London. Reporting was contributed by Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul; Dina Kraft from Tel Aviv; Rina Castelnuovo from Ashdod, Israel; Fares Akram from Gaza; Mona El-Naggar from Cairo; and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.
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10) BP Tries Again to Divert Oil Leak With Dome
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
June 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/us/02spill.html?hp
HOUSTON - Unable for six weeks to plug the gushing oil well beneath the Gulf of Mexico, BP turned its attention Tuesday to the effort to use a dome to funnel some of the leaking crude to a tanker on the surface. A similar attempt failed three weeks ago, but officials said they had resolved some of the technical problems that forced them to abort last time.
If successful - and after the string of failures so far, there is no guarantee it will be - the containment dome may be able to capture most of the oil, but it would not plug the leak. Its failure would mean continued environmental and economic damage to the gulf region, as well as greater public pressure on BP and the Obama administration, with few options remaining for trying to contain the spill any time soon.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. plans to visit the Gulf Coast on Tuesday and meet with state attorneys general. Several senators have asked the Justice Department to determine whether any laws were broken in the spill.
President Barack Obama was scheduled to meet Tuesday with Bob Graham, a former Florida governor and U.S. senator, and William K. Reilly, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, the co-chairmen of an independent commission investigating the spill. The commission is charged with also looking into the safety of offshore oil drilling and the government agencies that oversee drilling.
BP shares fell steeply on Tuesday, the first trading day since announcing over the weekend the failure the "top kill" effort to cap the oil spill.
A lasting solution for the leak may be months away, after engineers complete the drilling of a relief well, which would allow them to plug the leaking well with cement.On Monday, engineers positioned submarine robots that will try to shear off a collapsed 21-inch riser pipe with a razorlike wire studded with bits of industrial diamonds. If that is achieved, officials will need at least a couple of days to position a domelike cap over the blowout preventer, which failed to shut off the well when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers.
The trapped oil would then be funneled through a hose to ships floating near the well.
But, like all of BP's efforts so far, this method had never been tried at such depths before this spill. Moreover, if kinks in the riser are now reducing the amount of oil escaping, cutting the riser could unleash a greater flow. And the greatest worry of all may be the potential arrival of hurricanes in the gulf; hurricane season officially begins on Tuesday.
Speaking on ABC's Good Morning America on Tuesday, Carol M. Browner, President Obama's climate change and energy policy adviser, said she wasn't "going to put odd on" the liklihood this latest attempt to stem the flow of oil will succeed. She said she is concerned about the impact the hurricane season could have on this ongoing environmental crisis.
"Everyone, I think, is hoping for the best, but we continue to plan for the worst," she said.Engineers and technicians working on the response said that an active hurricane season, which is predicted by meteorologists, could not only push more oil ashore, but also cause weeks of delays in efforts to contain the spill.
Once a hurricane appears to be heading for the gulf, officials will have to disconnect the hose from the container on top of the well and retreat to port, leaving an unabated flow of oil into the water.
"Safety first," said Andrew Gowers, a BP spokesman. "We build in hurricane preparedness in operations, and that requires us to take the necessary precautions."
Such precautions may stall the drilling of relief wells for weeks or more if a hurricane threatens.
"Will hurricanes trump the capping procedures or even the whole operation?" said Donald Van Nieuwenhuise, director of petroleum geoscience programs at the University of Houston. "That's the wild card."
Pressure is building on the Obama administration from Congress to take greater control over relief operations, and Gulf Coast residents are increasingly directing their frustration at BP as more oil washes ashore each day.
Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, drew criticism on Sunday when he said his company's sampling of water had suggested that all the leaking oil was coming to the surface, despite several reports from independent researchers that underwater plumes were stretching for miles.
Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, said Monday that he had sent a letter to Mr. Hayward requesting documentation to substantiate his claims.Meanwhile, attention turned to the latest dome effort.
"Everything is at stake," said Larry Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, an organization partly financed by the oil industry. "If this doesn't work, you are looking at August before you can kill the well. That would mean oil would be seeping into the gulf, into our wetlands and into our way of life at the rate of 15,000 or 20,000 barrels a day - you pick the number."
An immediate challenge lies in severing the riser without causing an even bigger leak. Carol M. Browner, the White House environmental and energy adviser, has warned that the well could leak an additional 20 percent. The hope is that this would be a temporary problem until the containment dome is installed.
The dome procedure began two days after a maneuver known as a top kill was aborted late Saturday, when officials were unable to stanch the flow of oil with heavy drilling mud and other materials.
"This is a containment operation that is more straightforward," Robert Dudley, BP's managing director, told CNN on Sunday morning. He said containing most of the escaping oil until a relief well could be drilled was "not a bad outcome compared to where we are today."
Mr. Dudley and other senior company officials have said they do not expect that the operation, even if it fails, will worsen the flow of oil significantly. BP officials said a week ago that they estimated that a 10 to 15 percent increase was possible until the cap is firmly in place.
But a technician working on the project expressed concerns that engineers cannot be sure how much more oil might escape if the operation fails.
"We're all concerned about it," said the technician, who spoke on condition of remaining unnamed because he is not authorized to speak publicly for the company. "We simply do not have the data about the internal geometry of the blowout preventer" to determine what volume of oil is being contained by the damaged blowout preventer and any damaged equipment or debris inside it.
During the previous attempt to install a containment dome, icy water rushed into the box and filled it with natural gas hydrates. Ice crystals formed from water and natural gas under the high pressure a mile down. There was no room left for escaping oil in the dome, which also became buoyant and rose to the surface.
This time, tubes will deliver heated sea water and antifreeze to the vessel. But the technician said that the formation of hydrates was still possible.
Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, Austin, said he believed there was a good chance the new effort would work, "if they can stop the hydrates from forming." But he cautioned that a worst-case scenario existed in which hydrates disrupt the effort and more oil is released from the severed riser.
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11) Mere Silence Doesn't Invoke Miranda, Justices Rule
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 1, 2010
Filed at 10:59 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/01/us/politics/AP-US-Supreme-Court-Miranda-Rights.html?_r=1&hp
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations, a decision one dissenting justice said turns defendants' rights ''upside down.''
A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are the first of the Miranda rights warnings, which police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations. But the justices said in a 5-4 decision that suspects must tell police they are going to remain silent to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.
The ruling comes in a case where a suspect, Van Chester Thompkins, remained mostly silent for a three-hour police interrogation before implicating himself in a Jan. 10, 2000, murder in Southfield, Mich. He appealed his conviction, saying that he invoked his Miranda right to remain silent by remaining silent.
But Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the court's conservatives, said that wasn't enough.
''Thompkins did not say that he wanted to remain silent or that he did not want to talk to police,'' Kennedy said. ''Had he made either of these simple, unambiguous statements, he would have invoked his 'right to cut off questioning.' Here he did neither, so he did not invoke his right to remain silent.''
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court's newest member, wrote a strongly worded dissent for the court's liberals, saying the majority's decision ''turns Miranda upside down.''
''Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent -- which counterintuitively, requires them to speak,'' she said. ''At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded.''
Van Chester Thompkins was arrested for murder in 2001 and interrogated by police for three hours. At the beginning, Thompkins was read his Miranda rights and said he understood.
The officers in the room said Thompkins said little during the interrogation, occasionally answering ''yes,'' ''no,'' ''I don't know,'' nodding his head and making eye contact as his responses. But when one of the officers asked him if he prayed for forgiveness for ''shooting that boy down,'' Thompkins said, ''Yes.''
He was convicted, but on appeal he wanted that statement thrown out because he said he invoked his Miranda rights by being uncommunicative with the interrogating officers.
The Cincinnati-based appeals court agreed and threw out his confession and conviction. The high court reversed that decision.
The case is Berghuis v. Thompkins, 08-1470.
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12) Job Outlook for Teenagers Worsens
By MICKEY MEECE
May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/business/01jobs.html
This year is shaping up to be even worse than last for the millions of high school and college students looking for summer jobs.
State and local governments, traditionally among the biggest seasonal employers, are knee-deep in budget woes, and the stimulus money that helped cushion some government job programs last summer is running out. Private employers are also reluctant to hire until the economy shows more solid signs of recovery.
So expect fewer lifeguards on duty at public beaches this summer in California, fewer workers at some Massachusetts state parks and camping grounds and taller grass outside state buildings in Kentucky.
Students seeking summer jobs, generally 16 to 24 years old, are at the end of the job line, behind the jobless baby boomers who are competing with new college graduates who, in turn, are trying to elbow out undergraduates and high school students.
With so many people competing for so few jobs, unemployed youth "are the silent victims of the economy," said Adele McKeon, a career specialist with the Boston Private Industry Council who counsels students on matters like workplace etiquette, professionalism and résumé writing.
Getting that first job "is an accomplishment, and it's independence," Ms. McKeon said. "If you don't have it, where are you going to learn that stuff?"
The unemployment rate for the 16-to-24 age group reached a record 19.6 percent in April, double the national average. For those job seekers, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, "This is the worst year, definitely since the early '80s recession and very likely since the Great Depression."
Or as researchers at Northeastern University, who issued a report in April on youth unemployment, put it, "The summer job outlook does not appear to be very bright in the absence of a massive new summer jobs intervention."
Still, the poor numbers this year are not solely a symptom of the continued weak economy. For generations, government data shows, at least half of all teenagers were in the labor force in June, July and August. Starting this decade, though, the number of employed teenagers began to drop, and by 2009, less than a third of teenagers had jobs. This year, the number could fall below 30 percent.
That is a stark contrast to the job market for recent college graduates seeking full-time employment - a market where this is actually a slight increase from this time last year.
There is no simple explanation for the large drop-off in summer jobs this decade, though experts say that more high school students are choosing to volunteer and do internships to burnish their college applications. But the Northeastern researchers said a large number of youths had been left out of the work force and wanted to get back in.
The forecast for this summer is so dire that high school students took to the streets this year in Washington, Boston and New York to push lawmakers to come up with money for summer youth jobs programs as Congress did last year, allocating $1.2 billion for a program for low-income youths.
On Friday, the House passed a measure that included the summer jobs provision, though its future in the Senate this week is uncertain.
The Northeastern researchers estimated that an additional $1 billion federal infusion would create some 300,000 job slots this summer, barely putting a dent in the demand for jobs.
Still, those types of positions are desperately needed, said Neil Sullivan, executive director of the Boston Private Industry Council, which works with private and public employers to place students.
For students like Anthony Roberts, 18, and Deandre Briber, 18, at the Prologue Early College High School in Chicago, the federal money offers some hope. Both are applying to the alternative school's summer jobs program.
Last summer, with the aid of stimulus money, the school hired dozens of students, according to its principal, Pa Joof. This summer, without the money, the school can afford just 10.
"It was great last summer," he said. "We had 80 to 90 kids kept off of the street seven or eight weeks. They were able to come right back to school without any problem" in the fall, he added. "What's happening right now in Chicago, you let these kids out there for four or five weeks, we are going to lose some of them. That's just the nature of the streets."
Mr. Briber, who graduates next January, said he had applied at T.J. Maxx, Target, Kmart, and at a local docking company, with no luck. Having an income will help ease the burden on his mother, he said. Also, he said, "I feel like I do need to get a job because I'm kind of a handful. I want things, clothes, and to take care of myself. I just want to be on my own, to help out with bills."
Mr. Roberts, who graduates in June and plans to attend college, said he had been searching for a job for a year and a half. Everywhere he goes, Mr. Roberts says, there are other teenagers ahead of him. "It bothers me, but at the same time," he said, "I try not to let it bother me."
In Boston, at the Charlestown High School, Jamila Hussein, 19, said she had been running into the same problem in looking for a part-time job in retail or restaurants. "It's harder than it sounds," said Ms. Hussein, who has a summer internship lined up in July to clerk for a judge. "Right now, some of the things, even if they are available, you have adults looking."
Last week, Ms. Hussein was at the office of Ms. McKeon, the career specialist with the Boston Private Industry Council. The partnership with the private industry council and public schools is well entrenched, about 30 years old, Ms. McKeon said. Even so, she said, "we've never seen it like it is now."
Jada Bonner, 15, another student at Charlestown High, was at Ms. McKeon's office applying for a summer job through a community program. "I just want a job, independence. I don't want to ask my mom 24/7 for pocket money, and she might not even have it," she said.
While cities like Boston and New York have had to cut summer youth jobs programs, Cincinnati has maintained a $1 million budget for its youth initiative the last few years because of the mayor's commitment to the program, according to Jason Barron of the mayor's office.
About 700 high school and college-age youths will be hired to create murals, landscape, work in the parks department, serve as junior counselors and intern at neighborhood recreation centers, he said.
Elsewhere, the Interior Department has committed to hiring at least 12,000 youth in 2010 - a 50 percent increase over the 8,000 in 2009 as part of its Youth in the Great Outdoors initiative.
But for the second consecutive year, CareerBuilder.com found in its summer hiring forecast that a vast majority of employers did not intend to hire seasonal help. "Summer hiring plans clearly show that they are still waiting to see what the future brings before they move forward with recruitment," said Rosemary Haefner, vice president for human resources.
Still, Ms. Haefner said, there have been some positive signs, like an increase in job postings.
Retailers like American Eagle Outfitters are hiring at various locations, including its flagship stores in New York City, where it plans job fairs in June. In tourist spots like Atlantic City, businesses are expecting a rebound in seasonal hires, according to the Convention and Visitors Authority.
Indeed, career specialists say job seekers who persevere can find work. "It's still going to be a tough summer for teens," said Renée Ward, who runs the job help site, teens4hire.org.
To which Mr. Sullivan of the Boston Private Industry Council, said, "Everyone has fond memories of their summer jobs as they grew up."
"For almost half of this generation," he said, "that has been lost."
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13) Louisianan Becomes Face of Anger on Spill
"To hear Mr. Nungesser tell it, the big boys - BP, the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers - have all been better at pointing fingers than solving problems."
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/us/01parish.html?ref=us
BELLE CHASSE, La. - The Plaquemines Parish emergency operations center, which looks like a suitable place to plan an invasion of Europe, sits on the third floor of a nondescript government building off the highway.
At 8 a.m. every day, a collection of officials from the parish, the state, the National Guard, the Coast Guard and BP gather for a staff meeting. On a recent morning, the group sat, waiting, surrounded by television screens, a buffet counter of walkie-talkies and placards emblazoned with serious-looking acronyms that hang from the ceiling over a long conference table.
They were waiting for Billy Nungesser. When he marched in, he had already been up for hours, as usual, appearing on the morning TV news shows. He sat down and yanked an eyedropper out of a paper bag - a bug had flown into his eye during an interview with Anderson Cooper of CNN. He squeezed out some drops, then got down to business.
Mr. Nungesser, a native Louisianan, is president of Plaquemines Parish, an elongated rural jurisdiction that runs southeast from New Orleans and escorts the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico.
Within hours of the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Mr. Nungesser, 51, became a go-to guy for the news media. In the ensuing weeks, he has turned into the angry everyman of the oil spill, whether delivering a broadside against the government and BP's response efforts on CNN or standing in the gymnasium of Boothville-Venice Elementary School (Home of the Oilers!) before an anxious crowd of shrimpers and fishermen.
"I know it's going to be rough," he said to the crowd in a speech that sounded at times like a locker room pep talk. "I know everything's not going to go our way. But they're not going to beat us."
"Go get 'em, Billy," someone shouted from the bleachers.
To hear Mr. Nungesser tell it, the big boys - BP, the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers - have all been better at pointing fingers than solving problems.
Along with Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Mr. Nungesser has been a dogged advocate for a plan to build barrier islands out of dredged material to keep the oil off the shores.
There are a number of experts, including the Army Corps of Engineers, who think this is a bad idea, citing cost, time and environmental impact. In Mr. Nungesser's gospel, that kind of response, even if it turns out to be true, is only half an answer. Come up with a better idea, he tells critics, or keep your reservations to yourself.
"These guys have no clue and no ability to think outside the box," he said at the morning staff meeting.
Despite an affinity for the spotlight, Mr. Nungesser is a hard man to pin down. Between a cellphone that buzzes like an angry wasp, an unending string of interview requests, a visit by the president and the actual work of managing the parish, it is nearly impossible to slow him down long enough to confirm some basic biographical facts.
For example: How did Mr. Nungesser come to own an elk ranch in the parish?
The elk, he said late Thursday night over a 10-minute dinner of Sun Chips and soda, were bought from a man in Nebraska with the money he got from selling his house to his sister when he went to live in a shipping container.
Mr. Nungesser throws out sentences like that, and before one has a chance to ask him to elaborate, he is back on the phone, talking to a state trooper or a parish official or his fiancée, who needs to know that a television camera crew was following him home that night.
Back to the shipping container.
"I had a Jacuzzi," he clarified. "It was nice."
In his 20s and early 30s, Mr. Nungesser worked for his father's business, a catering company that served offshore drilling rigs. In 1991, before he got involved with the elk (he sells the velvet off the antlers for arthritis medicine), Mr. Nungesser realized that metal shipping containers could be modified and used as living quarters for workers on offshore rigs.
He had a hard time at first selling the idea to investors, mainly friends and friends of friends, and so he moved into a container himself. The company, General Marine Leasing, eventually reached $20 million in sales, and now, instead of a shipping container, he lives on a palatial estate built on a man-made hill in front of an artificial lake.
Mr. Nungesser rode out Hurricane Katrina on this estate and decided to run for parish president as a Republican in 2006, he said, out of frustration over the local response to the recovery.
It was a big decision. A run for state representative in his early 20s had left him cynical about politics, despite his pedigree: his father was the chairman of the State Republican Party when there was not much of one to speak of, and he was the chief of staff for Gov. David C. Treen, the state's first Republican governor since Reconstruction, in the early 1980s.
Mr. Nungesser's preparations for public office had come from running a business, an experience that made him good at laying into uncooperative oil companies but not always agile when it came to the give and take of a democracy.
"In private business, Billy was, in essence, the chief cook and bottle washer," said Anthony Buras, a member of the parish council. "In the private business mentality, you move forward the minute you make a decision. Sometimes in government that isn't always doable. There have been some times where there's been some conflict with that."
Mr. Nungesser's impatience with the parish council is not something he takes pains to hide, railing against "the egos and the jealousy" of his political opponents with the same irritation he displays when criticizing the response to the oil spill.
That is the mode he seems to enjoy most, and one he was fully engaged in late Thursday night on the front porch of the Myrtle Grove Marina.
He had just taken a regiment of journalists out in boats to see oiled pelicans, and now, his clothes drenched from a sudden downpour, he was balancing a flurry of phone calls with the demands of the news media.
Standing in white shrimp boots that he called his Cajun Reeboks, he kept up the phone conversation while hooking up his microphone for a CNN interview like a seasoned correspondent.
Then there was a moment of quiet as the cameraman counted down to the broadcast, a calmness that was striking. Mr. Nungesser was still for a full minute.
Then he heard something in his earpiece, and he began telling Mr. Cooper why things just were not working right.
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14) Owners Stop Paying Mortgages, and Stop Fretting
By DAVID STREITFELD
May 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/business/01nopay.html?ref=business
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - For Alex Pemberton and Susan Reboyras, foreclosure is becoming a way of life - something they did not want but are in no hurry to get out of.
Foreclosure has allowed them to stabilize the family business. Go to Outback occasionally for a steak. Take their gas-guzzling airboat out for the weekend. Visit the Hard Rock Casino.
"Instead of the house dragging us down, it's become a life raft," said Mr. Pemberton, who stopped paying the mortgage on their house here last summer. "It's really been a blessing."
A growing number of the people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of homemade mortgage modification, one that brings their payments all the way down to zero. They use the money they save to get back on their feet or just get by.
This type of modification does not beg for a lender's permission but is delivered as an ultimatum: Force me out if you can. Any moral qualms are overshadowed by a conviction that the banks created the crisis by snookering homeowners with loans that got them in over their heads.
"I tried to explain my situation to the lender, but they wouldn't help," said Mr. Pemberton's mother, Wendy Pemberton, herself in foreclosure on a small house a few blocks away from her son's. She stopped paying her mortgage two years ago after a bout with lung cancer. "They're all crooks."
Foreclosure procedures have been initiated against 1.7 million of the nation's households. The pace of resolving these problem loans is slow and getting slower because of legal challenges, foreclosure moratoriums, government pressure to offer modifications and the inability of the lenders to cope with so many souring mortgages.
The average borrower in foreclosure has been delinquent for 438 days before actually being evicted, up from 251 days in January 2008, according to LPS Applied Analytics.
While there are no firm figures on how many households are following the Pemberton-Reboyras path of passive resistance, real estate agents and other experts say the number of overextended borrowers taking the "free rent" approach is on the rise.
There is no question, though, that for some borrowers in default, foreclosure is only a theoretical threat for a long time.
More than 650,000 households had not paid in 18 months, LPS calculated earlier this year. With 19 percent of those homes, the lender had not even begun to take action to repossess the property - double the rate of a year earlier.
In some states, including California and Texas, lenders can pursue foreclosures outside of the courts. With the lender in control, the pace can be brisk. But in Florida, New York and 19 other states, judicial foreclosure is the rule, which slows the process substantially.
In Pinellas and Pasco counties, which include St. Petersburg and the suburbs to the north, there are 34,000 open foreclosure cases, said J. Thomas McGrady, chief judge of the Pinellas-Pasco Circuit. Ten years ago, the average was about 4,000. "The volume is killing us," Judge McGrady said.
Mr. Pemberton and Ms. Reboyras decided to stop paying because their business, which restores attics that have been invaded by pests, was on the verge of failing. Scrambling to get by, their credit already shot, they had little to lose.
"We could pay the mortgage company way more than the house is worth and starve to death," said Mr. Pemberton, 43. "Or we could pay ourselves so our business could sustain us and people who work for us over a long period of time. It may sound very horrible, but it comes down to a self-preservation thing."
They used the $1,837 a month that they were not paying their lender to publicize A Plus Restorations, first with print ads, then local television. Word apparently got around, because the business is recovering.
The couple owe $280,000 on the house, where they live with Ms. Reboyras's two daughters, their two dogs and a very round pet raccoon named Roxanne. The house is worth less than half that amount - which they say would be their starting point in future negotiations with their lender.
"If they took the house from us, that's all they would end up getting for it anyway," said Ms. Reboyras, 46.
One reason the house is worth so much less than the debt is because of the real estate crash. But the couple also refinanced at the height of the market, taking out cash to buy a truck they used as a contest prize for their hired animal trappers.
It was a stupid move by their lender, according to Mr. Pemberton. "They went outside their own guidelines on debt to income," he said. "And when they did, they put themselves in jeopardy."
His mother, Wendy Pemberton, who has been cutting hair at the same barber shop for 30 years, has been in default since spring 2008. Mrs. Pemberton, 68, refinanced several times during the boom but says she benefited only once, when she got enough money for a new roof. The other times, she said, unscrupulous salesmen promised her lower rates but simply charged her high fees.
Even without the burden of paying $938 a month for her decaying house, Mrs. Pemberton is having a tough time. Most of her customers are senior citizens who pay only $8 for a cut, and they are spacing out their visits.
"The longer I'm in foreclosure, the better," she said.
In Florida, the average property spends 518 days in foreclosure, second only to New York's 561 days. Defense attorneys stress they can keep this number high.
Both generations of Pembertons have hired a local lawyer, Mark P. Stopa. He sends out letters - 1,700 in a recent week - to Floridians who have had a foreclosure suit filed against them by a lender.
Even if you have "no defenses," the form letter says, "you may be able to keep living in your home for weeks, months or even years without paying your mortgage."
About 10 new clients a week sign up, according to Mr. Stopa, who says he now has 350 clients in foreclosure, each of whom pays $1,500 a year for a maximum of six hours of attorney time. "I just do as much as needs to be done to force the bank to prove its case," Mr. Stopa said.
Many mortgages were sold by the original lender, a circumstance that homeowners' lawyers try to exploit by asking them to prove they own the loan. In Mrs. Pemberton's case, Mr. Stopa filed a motion to dismiss on March 17, 2009, and the case has not moved since then. He filed a similar motion in her son's case last December.
From the lenders' standpoint, people who stay in their homes without paying the mortgage or actively trying to work out some other solution, like selling it, are "milking the process," said Kyle Lundstedt, managing director of Lender Processing Service's analytics group. LPS provides technology, services and data to the mortgage industry.
These "free riders" are "the unintended and unfortunate consequence" of lenders struggling to work out a solution, Mr. Lundstedt said. "These people are playing a dangerous game. There are processes in many states to go after folks who have substantial assets postforeclosure."
But for borrowers like Jim Tsiogas, the benefits of not paying now outweigh any worries about the future.
"I stopped paying in August 2008," said Mr. Tsiogas, who is in foreclosure on his house and two rental properties. "I told the lady at the bank, 'I can't afford $2,500. I can only afford $1,300.' "
Mr. Tsiogas, who lives on the coast south of St. Petersburg, blames his lenders for being unwilling to help when the crash began and his properties needed shoring up.
Their attitude seems to have changed since he went into foreclosure. Now their letters say things like "we're willing to work with you." But Mr. Tsiogas feels little urge to respond.
"I need another year," he said, "and I'm going to be pretty comfortable."
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15) Not in My Jewish Name
By Rob Kall
June 1, 2010
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Not-in-My-Jewish-Name-by-Rob-Kall-100601-960.html
I am a Jew and I am outraged and ashamed by the acts Israel has perpetrated. I am not a self hating Jew, not an anti-semite, as some religious extremist Jews have accused me and other Jews who criticize Israel.
I am a Jew who knows right from wrong, who can see that the band of evil idiots in Israel who are making decisions are doing the wrong thing, doing things that are bad for the Jewish people. I stand up now declaring that Israel does not act in my name. AIPAC, the lobbying group for Israel does not act in my name.
I was ashamed and outraged when Israel attacked Gaza, killing over 1000 innocents. I told my son it would be like him throwing a balled up peice of paper at me and me coming back with a hammer smashing him in the head and face repeatedly.
There's no other way to explain it. The Israeli leadership have become psychopaths, without conscience. I know that there are Jews who are bigots, who see the Palestinians as less than human. These are usually the same racist haters who listen to Rush Limbaugh like the Christian racist haters who treat all Muslims and blacks the same way. It's not a Jewish or Zionist thing. People who like to hate Jews tend to think that way. Sorry, It's not the case.
Israel is now controlled by a small minority of extreme, ultra-orthodox Jews. They have the power because they have small minority power bases in the Knesset that they use to help larger groups to gain power-- as long as these fringe groups get specific things they want. These ultra-orthodox are extremist fundamentalists, just like the crazy, rabid right wingers we have here in the USA.
It is time for the US to deal with Israel, facing the reality that these extremists are controlling too much. The US should tell AIPAC that the curtain has been lifted, it no longer will be paid attention to and it should go away.
There are a few million Jews in the US. They're a powerful voting bloc and they tend to vote liberal-- about 75-80 percent. An awful lot of them are very unhappy today. If you know any, talk to them. If you are one, speak out, as a Jew, that you refuse to allow Israel to act as though it represents the Jewish people. Demand it. NOT IN MY NAME!! Tell them.
The members of congress are terrified of Israel's main lobbying arm, AIPAC, and jump like frightened puppies when AIPAC barks. I've written about this before, thatAIPAC IS Bad for Israel, but it is also bad for the Jewish people. Israel's crimes against humanity have done more to increase anti-Semitism in recent years than any other cause.
AIPAC's reign of fear over congress must stop. It will only end if constituents show that they care. Whether you are Jewish or not, tell your representatives that Israel's actions against the Palestinians and Humanitarians aiding the Palestinians must not stand. I wrote some ideas on how to fight back against AIPAC here. One thing that is still true, attacking Jews and going into anti-zionist rants will only help AIPAC. This is about Israel, not Zionism. Attacking Zionists or Israeli Jews in general does smack of anti-Semitism and serves the Israeli propagandists, even if it may make some who hate Israel feel good. If you want to help the people of Gaza talk Israeli crimes. If you want to vent your spleen and help Israel and AIPAC, talk Zionists and Zionism.
We are facing terrible times, with the possibility that Gulf could become a dead zone and a president who does not have what it takes to call what the Israelis did wrong.
That must change. We need to go to the local offices of the members of the House of Representatives and show them, with big numbers, that Israel does not have a blank check. It is time to pull the plug on the bottomless money we've been sending to Israel. Force them to change their policies by voting out the insane leaders who believe that they can commit the CRIMES they've committed and the US will do nothing.
It is time. It is past time.
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16) Nigeria's agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it
The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades
By John Vidal, environment editor
The Observer
Sunday 30 May 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
We reached the edge of the oil spill near the Nigerian village of Otuegwe after a long hike through cassava plantations. Ahead of us lay swamp. We waded into the warm tropical water and began swimming, cameras and notebooks held above our heads. We could smell the oil long before we saw it - the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation hanging thickly in the air.
The farther we travelled, the more nauseous it became. Soon we were swimming in pools of light Nigerian crude, the best-quality oil in the world. One of the many hundreds of 40-year-old pipelines that crisscross the Niger delta had corroded and spewed oil for several months.
Forest and farmland were now covered in a sheen of greasy oil. Drinking wells were polluted and people were distraught. No one knew how much oil had leaked. "We lost our nets, huts and fishing pots," said Chief Promise, village leader of Otuegwe and our guide. "This is where we fished and farmed. We have lost our forest. We told Shell of the spill within days, but they did nothing for six months."
That was the Niger delta a few years ago, where, according to Nigerian academics, writers and environment groups, oil companies have acted with such impunity and recklessness that much of the region has been devastated by leaks.
In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month.
That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11 rig workers, has made headlines round the world. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger delta. Yet the destruction there provides us with a far more accurate picture of the price we have to pay for drilling oil today.
On 1 May this year a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped. Local people demonstrated against the company but say they were attacked by security guards. Community leaders are now demanding $1bn in compensation for the illness and loss of livelihood they suffered. Few expect they will succeed. In the meantime, thick balls of tar are being washed up along the coast.
Within days of the Ibeno spill, thousands of barrels of oil were spilled when the nearby Shell Trans Niger pipeline was attacked by rebels. A few days after that, a large oil slick was found floating on Lake Adibawa in Bayelsa state and another in Ogoniland. "We are faced with incessant oil spills from rusty pipes, some of which are 40 years old," said Bonny Otavie, a Bayelsa MP.
This point was backed by Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: "Oil companies do not value our life; they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable."
With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. Locals blame the oil that pollutes their land and can scarcely believe the contrast with the steps taken by BP and the US government to try to stop the Gulf oil leak and to protect the Louisiana shoreline from pollution.
"If this Gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention," said the writer Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people. "This kind of spill happens all the time in the delta."
"The oil companies just ignore it. The lawmakers do not care and people must live with pollution daily. The situation is now worse than it was 30 years ago. Nothing is changing. When I see the efforts that are being made in the US I feel a great sense of sadness at the double standards. What they do in the US or in Europe is very different."
"We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US," said Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International. "But in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments. The Gulf spill can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening daily in the oilfields of Nigeria and other parts of Africa.
"This has gone on for 50 years in Nigeria. People depend completely on the environment for their drinking water and farming and fishing. They are amazed that the president of the US can be making speeches daily, because in Nigeria people there would not hear a whimper," he said.
It is impossible to know how much oil is spilled in the Niger delta each year because the companies and the government keep that secret. However, two major independent investigations over the past four years suggest that as much is spilled at sea, in the swamps and on land every year as has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico so far.
One report, compiled by WWF UK, the World Conservation Union and representatives from the Nigerian federal government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, calculated in 2006 that up to 1.5m tons of oil - 50 times the pollution unleashed in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska - has been spilled in the delta over the past half century. Last year Amnesty calculated that the equivalent of at least 9m barrels of oil was spilled and accused the oil companies of a human rights outrage.
According to Nigerian federal government figures, there were more than 7,000 spills between 1970 and 2000, and there are 2,000 official major spillages sites, many going back decades, with thousands of smaller ones still waiting to be cleared up. More than 1,000 spill cases have been filed against Shell alone.
Last month Shell admitted to spilling 14,000 tonnes of oil in 2009. The majority, said the company, was lost through two incidents - one in which the company claims that thieves damaged a wellhead at its Odidi field and another where militants bombed the Trans Escravos pipeline.
Shell, which works in partnership with the Nigerian government in the delta, says that 98% of all its oil spills are caused by vandalism, theft or sabotage by militants and only a minimal amount by deteriorating infrastructure. "We had 132 spills last year, as against 175 on average. Safety valves were vandalised; one pipe had 300 illegal taps. We found five explosive devices on one. Sometimes communities do not give us access to clean up the pollution because they can make more money from compensation," said a spokesman.
"We have a full-time oil spill response team. Last year we replaced 197 miles of pipeline and are using every known way to clean up pollution, including microbes. We are committed to cleaning up any spill as fast as possible as soon as and for whatever reason they occur."
These claims are hotly disputed by communities and environmental watchdog groups. They mostly blame the companies' vast network of rusting pipes and storage tanks, corroding pipelines, semi-derelict pumping stations and old wellheads, as well as tankers and vessels cleaning out tanks.
The scale of the pollution is mind-boggling. The government's national oil spill detection and response agency (Nosdra) says that between 1976 and 1996 alone, more than 2.4m barrels contaminated the environment. "Oil spills and the dumping of oil into waterways has been extensive, often poisoning drinking water and destroying vegetation. These incidents have become common due to the lack of laws and enforcement measures within the existing political regime," said a spokesman for Nosdra.
The sense of outrage is widespread. "There are more than 300 spills, major and minor, a year," said Bassey. "It happens all the year round. The whole environment is devastated. The latest revelations highlight the massive difference in the response to oil spills. In Nigeria, both companies and government have come to treat an extraordinary level of oil spills as the norm."
A spokesman for the Stakeholder Democracy Network in Lagos, which works to empower those in communities affected by the oil companies' activities, said: "The response to the spill in the United States should serve as a stiff reminder as to how far spill management in Nigeria has drifted from standards across the world."
Other voices of protest point out that the world has overlooked the scale of the environmental impact. Activist Ben Amunwa, of the London-based oil watch group Platform, said: "Deepwater Horizon may have exceed Exxon Valdez, but within a few years in Nigeria offshore spills from four locations dwarfed the scale of the Exxon Valdez disaster many times over. Estimates put spill volumes in the Niger delta among the worst on the planet, but they do not include the crude oil from waste water and gas flares. Companies such as Shell continue to avoid independent monitoring and keep key data secret."
Worse may be to come. One industry insider, who asked not to be named, said: "Major spills are likely to increase in the coming years as the industry strives to extract oil from increasingly remote and difficult terrains. Future supplies will be offshore, deeper and harder to work. When things go wrong, it will be harder to respond."
Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, said: "Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care."
There is an overwhelming sense that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law. Bassey said: "What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident is that the oil companies are out of control.
"It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice."
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17) Veterans For Peace Responds to Armed Attack on Aid Flotilla
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Organized locally. Recognized nationally. Exposing the true costs of war since 1985.
Veterans For Peace, 216 S. Meramec, St. Louis, MO 63105, 314-725-6005
www.veteransforpeace.org
The world is reacting in righteous outrage at this moment to Israel's high seas attack on an international aid flotilla, reportedly killing up to 20 people escorting tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza in an effort to break Israel's three-year blockade. "Made in the U.S.A." is stamped on the weapons commandos used to kill and wound the international peace activists. Reports from the first eyewitnesses interviewed are that Israeli troops opened fire before boarding the flotilla.
We are saddened and we are angry. At least one of our own members, retired Army Col., Ann Wright, is among the 700 people aboard the boats attacked in the middle of the night. But we cannot say we are very surprised. Palestinians die quietly and unnoticed every day in Gaza, the world's largest open air prison, as a result of Israel's blockade and violent repression.
Veterans For Peace Board Member, Cherie Eichholz, traveled to Gaza in May and had this to say about the situation in Gaza, "Surrounded by a massive wall and a naval blockade, Gazans are imprisoned, suffering without the most basic of necessities, including enough food and safe drinking water. The situation on the ground is grave."
Another Board Member, Elliott Adams, also traveled to Gaza in May said, "On our Memorial Day we veterans are presented with the ugly specter of US citizens having their lives threatened and being held captive in an act of piracy. Making it more painful, this is being done with US weapons. While the people of Gaza cry out for basic humanitarian needs, a neighboring nation is willing to kill to deny them basic life support."
Many of our 7,000 members in over 100 chapters are already organizing or will soon join the protests being organized across the U.S. We urge our members to use every nonviolent tactic available in the streets and in local Congressional offices to protest this attack. At the same time we demand Congress cut off U.S. military aid to Israel which has totaled over 32 billion dollars since 1997.
Call (202) 224-3121 to speak to your Congressional Representative and Senator!!
LINKS FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Democracy Now! - At Least 10 Activists Killed in Israeli Attack on Gaza-Bound Aid Ship:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/1/headlines#1
The Guardian - Israelis Opened Fire Before Boarding Gaza Flotilla, Say Released Activists:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/01/gaza-flotilla-eyewitness-accounts-gunfire
Al Jazeera - Israel Attacks Gaza Aid Flotilla:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/05/201053133047995359.html
YouTube - Ann Wright taken into custody:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td8WsdsY0FY&feature=youtu.be
The Hindu - Nobel Elders Deplore Gaza Flotilla Attack:
http://beta.thehindu.com/news/international/article442925.ece
Organized locally. Recognized nationally. Exposing the true costs of war since 1985.
Veterans For Peace, 216 S. Meramec, St. Louis, MO 63105, 314-725-6005
www.veteransforpeace.org
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18) U.N. Security Council Condemns 'Acts' in Israeli Raid
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and ALAN COWELL
June 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/middleeast/02nations.html?hp
UNITED NATIONS - After hours of negotiations, the United Nations Security Council early on Tuesday condemned "acts" resulting in the deaths of nine civilians in Israel's attack on an aid flotilla trying to breach the Gaza blockade.
In a formal statement that seemed less forceful than what had been demanded by the Palestinians, Arab nations and Turkey, the council also demanded an impartial investigation into the confrontation.
The statement urged that aid ships seized in the raid on Monday be released along with civilians held by Israel.
"The Security Council deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries resulting from the use of force during the Israeli military operation in international waters against the convoy sailing to Gaza," the statement said, adding that the 15-member body "in this context, condemns those acts which resulted in the loss" of lives.
The wording seemed designed to dilute demands for condemnation exclusively of Israel, which argues that its soldiers acted in self-defense in response to violent resistance to their interception of the vessels from passengers on board. After the raid, Israel seized hundreds of activists as well as the ships.
"The Security Council requests the immediate release of the ships as well as the civilians held by Israel," the United Nations statement said, calling for "a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation conforming to international standards."
It also said the situation in Gaza, under blockade by Israel, was "not sustainable" and called for a "sustained and regular flow of goods and people to Gaza, as well as unimpeded provision and distribution of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza."
On the broader Palestinian-Israeli confrontation, the Security Council renewed calls for a two-state solution and voiced concern that the raid on the flotilla took place while United States-sponsored so-called "proximity talks" were under way.
Earlier, Turkey - the unofficial sponsor of the convoy - had proposed a statement that would have condemned Israel for violating international law and demanded a United Nations investigation, the prosecution of those responsible for the raid and compensation for the victims. It also called for the end of the blockade.
But the Obama administration refused to endorse a statement that singled out Israel, and it proposed a broader condemnation of the violence that would include the assault by passengers of the Israeli commandos as they landed on the deck of the ship.
As the wrangling continued late Monday night and in the early hours Tuesday, the two countries were trying to work out their differences on the wording, including whether to specify that the investigation should be conducted by outsiders, diplomats said.
While condemnation of Israel in the Security Council is not uncommon, the criticism at the emergency session called by Turkey and Lebanon was notable for both its vehemence and for the broad array of countries demanding an independent investigation into the decision to fire on civilians in what they described as a humanitarian mission.
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, whose country's once close relations with Israel have deteriorated markedly since Israel's invasion of Gaza in 2009, called the attack "tantamount to banditry and piracy; it is murder conducted by a state."
Noting that the ships were carrying items such as a playground equipment, cancer medicine and milk powder, he said that given the history of the Jews the Israelis should be more conscious than others of "the dangers and inhumanity of ghettoes as the one we currently witness in occupied Gaza."
Gerard Araud, the French ambassador, said the death toll indicated "there was disproportionate use of force and a level of violence which nothing justifies and which we condemn."
Nawaf Salam, the Lebanese ambassador, said even the laws of war require the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Several envoys said Israel was in violation of international law, not least because Security Council resolution 1860, passed in January 2009 during the Gaza war, had called for ending the blockade and opening unfettered access to humanitarian assistance throughout the strip. The diplomats also demanded immediate access to their citizens, with some 32 different nationalities among the estimated 600 to 700 people on the flotilla. Israel seized all six ships and forced them into port.
The United States, which habitually defends Israel in the council, said that the attempt to run the blockade by sea was ill advised.
"Direct delivery by sea is neither appropriate nor responsible, and certainly not effective, under the circumstances," said Alejandro Wolff, the deputy permanent representative of the United States. But he also described the situation in Gaza as "unsustainable" and called on Israel to undertake a credible investigation.
Daniel Carmon, the deputy Israeli ambassador, scoffed at the idea that the ships were a humanitarian convoy - Israel had offered to bring the goods into Gaza over land - and said Israeli commandos acted in self-defense after being attacked with "life threatening means; live ammunition, knives, clubs, deck furniture and others types of weaponry."
He described the organizers as linked to a variety of Islamic terrorist organizations, which the Turkish foreign minister called a lie.
The International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization which seeks to end conflicts, issued a statement condemning the attack but noted that it was an outcome of the failed policy of many countries, not just Israel, in trying to isolate the Hamas government which controls the Gaza strip and thus turn the population against it.
Neil MacFarquhar reported from the United Nations, and Alan Cowell from London.
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