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FREE BRADLEY MANNING! HANDS OFF JULIAN ASSANGE!
In a recent New York Daily News Poll the question was asked:
Should Army pfc Bradley Manning face charges for allegedly stealing classified documents and providing them for WikiLeaks?
New York Daily News Poll Results:
Yes, he's a traitor for selling out his country! ...... 28%
No, he's a hero for standing up for what's right! ..... 62%
We need to see more evidence before passing judgment.. 10%
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/03/05/2011-03-05_wikileaks_private_loses_his_underwear.html?r=news
Sign the Petition:
We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad...
We stand with accused whistle-blower
US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning
Stand with Bradley!
A 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst, Pfc. Manning faces decades in prison for allegedly leaking a video of a US helicopter attack that killed at least eleven Iraqi civilians to the website Wikileaks. Among the dead were two working Reuters reporters. Two children were also severely wounded in the attack.
In addition to this "Collateral Murder" video, Pfc. Manning is suspected of leaking the "Afghan War Diaries" - tens of thousands of battlefield reports that explicitly describe civilian deaths and cover-ups, corrupt officials, collusion with warlords, and a failing US/NATO war effort.
"We only know these crimes took place because insiders blew the whistle at great personal risk ... Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal," noted Barack Obama while on the campaign trail in 2008. While the President was referring to the Bush Administration's use of phone companies to illegally spy on Americans, Pfc. Manning's alleged actions are just as noteworthy. If the military charges against him are accurate, they show that he had a reasonable belief that war crimes were being covered up, and that he took action based on a crisis of conscience.
After nearly a decade of war and occupation waged in our name, it is odd that it apparently fell on a young Army private to provide critical answers to the questions, "What have we purchased with well over a trillion tax dollars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan?" However, history is replete with unlikely heroes.
If Bradley Manning is indeed the source of these materials, the nation owes him our gratitude. We ask Secretary of the Army, the Honorable John M. McHugh, and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General George W. Casey, Jr., to release Pfc. Manning from pre-trial confinement and drop the charges against him.
http://standwithbrad.org/
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Saturday, March 19, 2011: Resist the War Machine!
8th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq
In San Francisco, people will gather at 12 noon for a rally at UN Plaza (7th & Market Sts.) followed by a march to Lo. 2 boycotted hotels. The theme of the March 19 march and rally will be "No to War & Colonial Occupation - Fund Jobs, Healthcare & Education - Solidarity with SF Hotel Workers!" 12,000 SF hotel workers, members of UNITE-HERE Local 2, have been fighting for a new contract that protects their healthcare, wages and working conditions.
http://www.answercoalition.org/sf/index.html
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U.S./NATO HANDS OFF MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA! END ALL AID TO ISRAEL! STOP FUNDING DICTATORS ACROSS THE GLOBE! MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT FOR WAR AND OCCUPATION! LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE HERE AND EVERYWHERE!
TAX THE RICH! LEAVE WORKERS AND THEIR UNIONS ALONE! DON'T AGONIZE, ORGANIZE!...BW
RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.
THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.
WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.
WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!
WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.
WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace
TRADUCCION:
Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior
Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.
Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.
Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.
Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.
Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.
VICTORY IN EGYPT!
U.S. Hands off the Ongoing Egyptian Revolution!
End US Military Aid to Egypt and Israel!
A Statement by the United National Antiwar Committee
On Friday, February 11th, the heroic Egyptian people won a historic victory with the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. Now they are proceeding to secure this victory by moving on to eliminate the rest of this hated regime, and to win the freedom, jobs, equality and dignity which has motivated their revolution from the start.
The announcement of Mubarak's resignation was coupled with news that the officers of the Armed Forces are now running the country. This comes as more and more rank and file soldiers and lower-level officers were joining the protests, and as others stood by as protesters blockaded the state TV, parliament and other government facilities.
We can be sure that the military hierarchy in alliance with what's left of the old regime will do everything in their power to stop the blossoming revolution in its tracks, to tell the protesters they must go home now and wait for gifts from on high.
AND THE DANGER IS REAL THAT WHEN THE MASSES SAY NO THAT THE MILITARY WILL DO WHAT IT DOES BEST.
We can be equally sure that Washington will give its full blessing and backing to these efforts of the remnants of the old regime and the military. Obama has made clear that he is solidly committed to the new face of the Egyptian regime, Omar Suleiman, who has proven over the years that he will collaborate with Washington in its torture and rendition policies. Meanwhile Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted in the New York Times saying that Washington would help organize political parties for future elections in Egypt - a typical maneuver used to subvert revolutions.
The United National Antiwar Committee has repeatedly urged supporters to mobilize for demonstrations called by Egyptian organizations in the US in solidarity with the revolution in Egypt and against US military and diplomatic intervention. UNAC hails the call for today's march in Washington, DC by Egyptian groups, and takes this opportunity to point out the special obligations of antiwar activists in the US given Washington's multifaceted efforts to obstruct the wishes of the majority of the Egyptian people.
The $1.3 billion a year in military aid which the US gives to Egypt must be cut off immediately. All US soldiers serving in Egypt, such as those in the Multinational Force in the Sinai, must be immediately withdrawn. And the US warships headed for Egypt must be immediately turned around.
UNAC has from its founding opposed all US aid to Israel. That position takes on particular importance given the real danger that as the Egyptian revolution advances, Israel will intervene to derail it - or launch new attacks against Lebanon, Gaza, or elsewhere, as a diversionary tactic.
Amidst the euphoria in Cairo, Al Jazeera interviewed a young woman in the crowd, who said:
"Its not just about Mubarak stepping down. It is about the process of bringing the people to power... The issue of women, the issue of Palestine, now everything seems possible."
WE MUST ENSURE THOSE POSSIBILITIES STAY ALIVE! UNAC ENCOURAGES ALL ANTIWAR ACTIVISTS AND ORGANIZATIONS TO STEP UP SUPPORT FOR RALLIES PLANNED BY THE EGYPTIAN COMMUNITY, AND TO INITIATE THEM WHERE NONE ARE PLANNED.
Finally, we urge all supporters of the Egyptian people to redouble efforts to build the national antiwar marches called by UNAC for April 9th in New York and April 10th in San Francisco. These marches, called to demand an end to US wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, an end to support for Israeli occupation, and in favor of social justice and jobs, take on ever more importance with the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere throughout the Arab world and Washington's attempts to crush or derail them.
SUPPORT THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY AND AGAINST EXPLOITATION AND OPPRESSION THROUGHOUT THE ARAB WORLD!
BUILD THE NATIONAL ANTIWAR MARCHES ON APRIL 9TH AND 10TH!
For more information: In SF: UNACNorthernCalifornia@gmail.com; (415) 49 NO War; www.unacpeace.org, unacpeace@gmail.com. For NYC information: unac-nyc@juno.com
SAVE THE DATE: Sunday, APRIL 10, Mass antiwar/social justice march and rally, Assemble: 11 AM Dolores Park, 19th and Dolores; Rally Noon; March at 1:30 pm.
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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BUILD APRIL 10 MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS
SATURDAY, MARCH 19, help distribute April 10 fliers at the March and Rally, UN Plaza, 12:00 NOON
http://www.answercoalition.org/sf/index.html
SATURDAY, MARCH 26 AND SATURDAY APRIL 6, AND 9 WE WILL MEET AT 24TH AND MISSION AT 12 NOON TO DISTRIBUTE LEAFLETS AND PUT UP POSTERS AND GO TO VARIOUS LOCATIONS AROUND THE CITY.
These bloody wars not only costs the invaluable lives of those who are the targets of U.S. guns, bombs and torture and those who were coerced by economic necessity to become the cannon fodder for these wars--but they are costing trillions of dollars--dollars direct from the pockets of working people who are also paying trillions for corporate bailouts and bonuses!
Enough is enough! Help build a real, independent, democratic movement to fight these wars on working people everywhere!
HELP BUILD APRIL 10 MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE U.S. GOVERNMENT'S WARS AT HOME AND ABROAD!
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Saturday, March 19, 2011: Resist the War Machine!
8th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq
In San Francisco, people will gather at 12 noon for a rally at UN Plaza (7th & Market Sts.) followed by a march to Lo. 2 boycotted hotels. The theme of the March 19 march and rally will be "No to War & Colonial Occupation - Fund Jobs, Healthcare & Education - Solidarity with SF Hotel Workers!" 12,000 SF hotel workers, members of UNITE-HERE Local 2, have been fighting for a new contract that protects their healthcare, wages and working conditions.
Come to Washington, D.C., on March 19 for veterans-led civil resistance at the White House
March 19 is the 8th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Iraq today remains occupied by nearly 50,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of foreign mercenaries.
Saturday, March 19, 2011, the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, will be an international day of action against the war machine.
The war in Afghanistan is raging. The U.S. is invading and bombing Pakistan. The U.S. is financing endless atrocities against the people of Palestine, relentlessly threatening Iran and bringing Korea to the brink of a new war.
While the United States will spend $1 trillion for war, occupation and weapons in 2011, 30 million people in the United States remain unemployed or severely underemployed, and cuts in education, housing and healthcare are imposing a huge toll on the people.
Actions of civil resistance are spreading.
Last Dec. 16, a veterans-led civil resistance at the White House played an important role in bringing the anti-war movement from protest to resistance. Enduring hours of heavy snow, 131 veterans and other anti-war activists lined the White House fence and were arrested.
In Washington, D.C., on March 19 there will be an even larger veterans-led civil resistance at the White House initiated by Veterans for Peace. People from all over the country are joining together for a Noon Rally at Lafayette Park, followed by a march on the White House where the veterans-led civil resistance will take place.
Many people coming to Washington, D.C., will be also participating in the Sunday, March 20 demonstration at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia to support PFC Bradley Manning. Quantico is one hour from D.C. Manning is suspected of leaking Iraq and Afghan war logs to Wikileaks. For the last eight months, he has been held in solitary confinement, pre-trial punishment, rather than pre-trial detention.
The ANSWER Coalition is fully mobilizing its east coast and near mid-west chapters and activist networks to be at the White House.
In Los Angeles, the March 19 rally and march will gather at 12 noon at Hollywood and Vine.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org/
info@AnswerCoalition.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
Boston: 857-334-5084 | New York City: 212-694-8720 | Chicago: 773-463-0311
San Francisco: 415-821-6545| Los Angeles: 213-251-1025 | Albuquerque: 505-268-2488
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San Francisco Rally for Bradley Manning!
Sunday, March 20, 10:00 AM
Location: Yerba Buena Gardens, 720 Mission, San Francisco, CA
Learn more: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=105640796185621
Read more: http://www.bradleymanning.org/events/#ixzz1GsltuQLN
http://www.bradleymanning.org/events/#san-francisco
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Rally for Bradley! Quantico VA. Sunday, March 20
Read more: http://www.bradleymanning.org/16125/rally-for-bradley-quanitco-virginia-sun-march-20/#ixzz1Gt1TAiS1
On March 20, 2011, there will be a rally at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia to support accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. Supporters will gather for a 2pm rally at the town of Triangle (intersection of Anderson Road and Route 1/Jefferson Davis Hwy), then march to the gates of Quantico. Bradley has been held at the Quantico brig in solitary-like conditions for eight months without any meaningful exercise. We stand for truth, government transparency, and an end to our occupation wars... we stand with Bradley! Event endorsed by the Bradley Manning Support Network, Veterans for Peace, Courage to Resist, CodePink, and many other groups.
We will meet at 2pm immediately adjacent to Rt. 1 and Anderson Road. Parking can be found at the Marines Corps Museum. They have HUGE parking lot, there. About 1/4 mile walk. There might also be some parking behind church adjacent to Inn Rd and Rt. 1, behind the rally location.
The day before, on Saturday, March 19th, in Washington DC, supporters of Bradley's will be joining the noon rally at Lafayette Park and march on the White House to "Resist the War Machine!"
Reserve your seat (only $10 round trip) on our chartered bus from Washington DC at couragetoresist.org/bus. Buses will leave from in front of Union Station, Washington DC, at 12:30pm.
Download, view, print and share the event leaflet (PDF)
WHO: Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Paper's Whistleblower; Ret. Col. Ann Wright; Representatives from Veterans for Peace, Bradley Manning Support Network.
WHAT: Rally in support of Pfc. Bradley Manning
WHERE: US Marine Corps Base Quantico Entrance and neighboring Triangle. Rally to be followed by a march to the intersection of Rt. 1 and Fuller Road where the main entrance to Quantico is located.
WHEN: Sunday, March 20, 2011 at 2:00 PM ET
CONTACTS: Pete Perry, Veterans for Peace. (P) 202-631-0974 (W)pete4peace [at] gmail [dot] com; Trevor FitzGibbon, FitzGibbon Media. (P) 202.406.0646 (W) Trevor [at] FitzGibbonMedia [dot] com
Read more: http://www.bradleymanning.org/16125/rally-for-bradley-quanitco-virginia-sun-march-20/#ixzz1Gt1bnBja
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San Francisco Labor Council Resolution - Unanimously adopted 3/14/2011
Resolution in Support of April 4, 2011
No Business as Usual
Solidarity Actions
Whereas, the San Francisco Labor Council Executive Committee is calling for a mobilization in San Francisco on April 4, 2011 against union-busting and the budget cuts;
Therefore be it Resolved, that in the event that a Council affiliate votes to engage in an industrial action on April 4, the San Francisco Labor Council will call on all its affiliates with fax blast, e-mail, phone etc. to support such action by engaging, wherever possible, in work stoppages, sick-outs and any other solidarity actions.
Resolution adopted March 14, 2011 by unanimous vote of the regular Delegates Meeting of the Council, meeting in San Francisco, California.
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CWA ANNOUNCES NATIONWIDE DAY OF ACTION APRIL 4
http://www.cwa-union.org/news/entry/cohen_announces_nationwide_day_of_action_april_4
'We Have the Opportunity to Plan and Build Something Enormous'
The voice of the labor movement and its allies will roar louder than ever on April 4, the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when "it will not be business as usual at workplaces and communities across this nation," CWA President Larry Cohen said Wednesday.
Speaking to 10,000 CWA members on a nationwide phone call, Cohen said the AFL-CIO Executive Board had adopted his proposal for "movement-wide dramatic action" to honor King and the workers fighting for their rights today.
King was shot to death while he was in Memphis to support 1,300 striking city sanitation workers. "Their fight was about recognition, respect and dignity," Cohen said. "Dr. King called it a moral struggle for an economic outcome, much like the fights in the states and at the bargaining table and in every one of our organizing drives."
Cohen urged CWA locals and members to begin brainstorming ideas and making plans for April 4, challenging them and all Americans to "create events at every workplace in America."
It could be as simple as everyone wearing red that day, having workers meet outside and march into work together or standing up at noon and shouting, "Workers rights are human rights!" Cohen said.
Other ideas include candlelight vigils in parks, meetings of church congregations, rallies at statehouses and protests in front of corporate offices. Cohen said CWA locals and activists will receive an e-mail shortly asking them to submit their ideas and plans, and another town hall-style phone call will be held in advance of the events.
King's murder while fighting for city workers spurred public organizing drives across the United States. Cohen said there is no better way to honor that and King than by doing what he would do, "create a new movement for economic justice."
"We need to combine offense and defense," Cohen said. "We need to take it to every workplace, union and non union, private and public sector. We have an opportunity to plan and build something enormous."
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Are you joining us on April 8 at the Pentagon in a climate chaos protest codenamed "Operation Disarmageddon?" It has been decided that affinity groups will engage in nonviolent autonomous actions. Do you have an affinity group? Do you have an idea for an action?
So far these are some of the suggested actions:
Send a letter to Sec. of War Robert Gates demanding a meeting to disclose the Pentagon's role in destroying the planet. He will ignore the letter, so a delegation would then go to the Metro Entrance to demand a meeting.
Use crime tape around some area of the Pentagon. The idea of crime/danger taping off the building could be done just outside the main Pentagon reservation entrance (intersection of Army/Navy) making the Alexandria PD the arresting authority (if needed) and where there is no ban on photography. Hazmat suits, a 'converted' truck (or other vehicle) could be part of the street theater. The area where I am thinking is also almost directly below I-95 and there is a bridge over the intersection - making a banner drop possible. Perhaps with the hazmat/street closure at ground level with a banner from above. If possible a coordinated action could be done at other Pentagon entrances and / or other war making institutions.
A procession onto the Pentagon reservation, without reservations, and set up a camp on one of the lawns surrounding The Pentagon. This contingent would reclaim the space in the name of peace and Mother Earth. This contingent would plan to stay there until The Pentagon is turned into a 100% green building using sustainable energy employing people who work for peace and the abolishment of war and life-affirming endeavors.
Bring a potted tree to be placed on the Pentagon's property to symbolize the need to radically reduce its environmental destructiveness.
Since the Pentagon is failing to return to the taxpayers the money it has misappropriated, "Foreclose on the Pentagon."
Banner hanging from a bridge.
Hand out copies of David Swanson's book WAR IS A LIE. Try to deliver a copy to Secretary of War Robert Gates.
Have short speeches in park between Pentagon and river; nice photo with Pentagon in background.
Die-in and chalk or paint outlines of victim's bodies everywhere that remain after the arrest to point to where real crimes are really being committed.
Establish command center, Peacecom? Paxcom? Put several people in white shirts and ties plus a few generals directing their armies for "Operation Disarmageddon."
Make the linkage between the tax dollars going to the Pentagon and war tax resistance. Use the WRL pie chart and carry banners "foreclose on war" and "money for green jobs not war jobs."
Hold a rally with representative speakers before going to the Pentagon Reservation. This would be an opportunity to speak out against warmongering and the Pentagon's role in destroying the environment.
As part of "Operation Disarmageddon," we will take a tree and plant it on the reservation. Our sign reads, "Plant trees not landmines."
Use crime tape on Army/Navy Drive to declare the Pentagon a crime scene. Do street theater there as well. Other affinity groups could go to selected entrances.
Establish a Peace Command Center at the Pentagon. Hold solidarity actions at federal buildings and corporate offices.
What groups have you contacted to suggest joining us at the Pentagon? See below for those who plan to be at the Pentagon on April 8 and for what groups have been contacted.
Kagiso,
Max
April 8, 2011 participants
Beth Adams
Ellen Barfield
Tim Chadwick
Joy First
Jeffrey Halperin
Malachy Kilbride
Max Obuszewski
David Swanson
April 8 Outreach
Beth Adams -- Earth First, Puppet Underground, Emma's Revolution, Joe Gerson-AFSC Cambridge, Code Pink(national via Lisa Savage in Maine), Vets for Peace, FOR, UCC Justice & Witness Ministries, Traprock, Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist Order, (National-INt'l) Vets for Peace and WILPF, Pace e Bene, Christian Peace Witness & UCC Justice & Witness (Cleveland).
Tim Chadwick -- Brandywine, Lepoco, Witness against Torture, Vets for Peace (Thomas Paine Chapter Lehigh Valley PA), and Witness for Peace DC.
Jeffrey Halperin -- peace groups in Saratoga Spring, NY
Jack Lombardo - UNAC will add April 8 2011 to the Future Actions page on our blog, and make note in upcoming E-bulletins, but would appreciate a bit of descriptive text from the organizers and contact point to include when we do - so please advise ASAP! Also, we'll want to have such an announcement for our next print newsletter, which will be coming out in mid-December.
Max Obuszewski - Jonah House & Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore
Bonnie Urfer notified 351 individuals and groups on the Nukewatch list
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RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.
THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.
WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.
WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!
WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.
WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
Next organizing meeting Sunday, February 20, 1:00 P.M., Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street (between 15th and 16th Streets, San Francisco)
Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace
TRADUCCION:
Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior
Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.
Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.
Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.
Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.
Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.
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B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:
[Some of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:
http://bauaw.blogspot.com/ or bauaw.org ...bw]
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Dropkick Murphys - Worker's Song (with lyrics)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTafZRecy2k&feature=email&tracker=False
Worker's Song Lyrics
Artist(Band):Dropkick Murphys
Yeh, this one's for the workers who toil night and day
By hand and by brain to earn your pay
Who for centuries long past for no more than your bread
Have bled for your countries and counted your dead
In the factories and mills, in the shipyards and mines
We've often been told to keep up with the times
For our skills are not needed, they've streamlined the job
And with sliderule and stopwatch our pride they have robbed
[Chorus:]
We're the first ones to starve, we're the first ones to die
The first ones in line for that pie-in-the-sky
And we're always the last when the cream is shared out
For the worker is working when the fat cat's about
And when the sky darkens and the prospect is war
Who's given a gun and then pushed to the fore
And expected to die for the land of our birth
Though we've never owned one lousy handful of earth?
[Chorus x3]
All of these things the worker has done
From tilling the fields to carrying the gun
We've been yoked to the plough since time first began
And always expected to carry the can
Which Side Are You On - Dropkick Murphys
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKWfnO7fhQM&feature=email&tracker=False
Lyrics :
Our father was a union man
some day i'll be one too.
The bosses fired daddy
what's our family gonna do?
Come all you good workers,
Good news to you I'll tell
Of how the good old union
Has come in here to dwell.
CHORUS:
Which side are you on?
Which side are you on? (x2)
My dady was a miner,
And I'm a miner's son,
And I'll stick with the union
'Til every battle's won.
They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there.
You'll either be a union man
Or a thug for J. H. Blair.
Oh workers can you stand it?
Oh tell me how you can?
Will you be a lousy scab
Or will you be a man?
Don't scab for the bosses,
Don't listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven't got a chance
Unless we organize !
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Stephen King at Awake the State Rally in Sarasota 3.8.11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpn305Y7ToA&feature=player_embedded
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Lifting the Veil
http://metanoia-films.org/compilations.php
"Lifting the Veil is the long overdue film that powerfully, definitively, and finally exposes the deadly 21st century hypocrisy of U.S. internal and external policies, even as it imbues the viewer with a sense of urgency and an actualized hope to bring about real systemic change while there is yet time for humanity and this planet. See this film!"
Larry Pinkney
Editorial Board Member & Columnist
The Black Commentator
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'America Is NOT Broke': Michael Moore Speaks in Madison, WI -- March 5, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgNuSEZ8CDw&feature=player_embedded
Answer to Michael Moore: We ain't Gonna Play the Game No More!
By Bonnie Weinstein
info@socialistviewpoint.org
socialistviewpoint.org
The problem with Michael Moore's speech in Wisconsin March 5, 2011 is that the 14 Democratic emigres have already given away the economic security of the workers--their pay; their benefits; their vacations; their sick-days; their overtime. They have even convinced organized labor to accept the pay cuts, shorter hours--anything but unemployment, starvation and homelessness!
What noble choices the good Democrats have given to the masses of struggling working people in Wisconsin and everywhere!
In the prelude to his speech, Moore lauds those "heroic 14 Democratic" émigrés that have already given away the workers hard-won benefits and conditions for holding firm and staying away--"not one has come back!" he cheers.
Where are the rest of the Democratic politicians around the country? Where's Obama when masses of workers are being sold down the river? What about all the Democratic governors and mayors who are doing the same thing in their respective states and cities across the country. There isn't one state or city that's lavishing more on social services; on schools; on community medical centers; on healthcare--everyone everywhere EXCEPT THE TOP ONE PERCENT is being asked to give back and give up and surrender to the new middle ages--with the Democrats pretending and promising to steal a little less from workers than the Republicans! Workers can't depend upon any party that claims to represent both workers and the bosses. The jig is up!
Working people need to make democratic decisions based upon our own needs and wants and what is good for us and our families; like whether to spend trillions of OUR dollars on wars based upon lies; or on massive bailouts to corporations who have stolen and hoarded the wealth for themselves; or whether to use the fruits of our labor to pay for healthcare; schools; housing; all the things people need to live healthy, free and happy lives.
Working people produce the wealth; working people should have democratic control over that wealth and the means of production they operate to produce it.
The game of voting for one capitalist liar over another is over. It's like plea-bargaining when you are innocent. It's a lose/lose situation and certainly, the workers of the world are losing the game!
No, America is not broke. But telling workers to depend upon the capitalist electoral process, which only allows workers to vote for one capitalist representative over another, is preposterous and makes workers broke!
We workers must take that wealth that we, and we alone create, into our own hands. We can. We are the majority. And it's the only hope for creating a happy and healthy future for all of us, our children and the world. As Rosa Luxemburg said, the only choice for workers is Socialism; or else, we will continue the plunge into Barbarism!
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Michael Moore: People Still Have the Power
http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/63-63/5157-michael-moore-people-still-have-the-power
More GRITtv
"This is a movement that is not going to stop," says filmmaker Michael Moore of the uprising in Madison, Wisconsin (and across the country--all 50 states held solidarity rallies this weekend). "I knew sooner or later people would say they've had enough."
Michael joins Laura in studio for part one of a two-part conversation about the war on working people in America. He notes that it started in 1981 with Reagan's attack on the air traffic controllers, and it's mostly targeted the poor, as with Clinton's welfare reform. But the attacks on middle class families have finally reached a point where people aren't going to take it anymore.
Watch out for part two tomorrow!
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BP Oil Spill Scientist Bob Naman: Seafood Still Not Safe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3VdxvMnDls
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Exclusive: Flow Rate Scientist : How Much Oil Is Really Out There?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsHl3kn63ZA&NR=1
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Labor Beat: No Concessions Emergency Meeting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaFrWNi2gM0
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Iraq Veterans Against the War in Occupied Capitol, Madison, WI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7K0wn73uJU
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A joke:
A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are
sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a
dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies,
looks at the tea partier and says,"watch out for that union guy, he
wants a piece of your cookie."
Marc Luzietti
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Charlie Sheen on 9/11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PviXgj-yS5Y
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18th dead baby dolphin washes ashore in Northern Gulf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybFeuSNszSg&feature=player_embedded
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[This is a great video. Kipp Dawson, the school teacher in the video, is an old friend...bw]
Middle Class Revolution
Hundreds packed USW headquarters Feb. 24. 2011, to rally for the middle class and stand up against attacks on workers in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere. Check out highlights here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_UmZYlSyC5U
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Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill" Protest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TmSNPpzkWc
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solidarity
'We Stand With You as You Stood With Us': Statement to Workers of Wisconsin by Kamal Abbas of Egypt's Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services
February 20th, 2011 3:45 PM
About Kamal Abbas and the Centre for Trade Unions and Workers Services:
Kamal Abbas is General Coordinator of the CTUWS, an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt. The CTUWS, which was awarded the 1999 French Republic's Human Rights Prize, suffered repeated harassment and attack by the Mubarak regime, and played a leading role in its overthrow. Abbas, who witnessed friends killed by the regime during the 1989 Helwan steel strike and was himself arrested and threatened numerous times, has received extensive international recognition for his union and civil society leadership.
KAMAL ABBAS: I am speaking to you from a place very close to Tahrir Square in Cairo, "Liberation Square", which was the heart of the Revolution in Egypt. This is the place were many of our youth paid with their lives and blood in the struggle for our just rights.
From this place, I want you to know that we stand with you as you stood with us.
I want you to know that no power can challenge the will of the people when they believe in their rights. When they raise their voices loud and clear and struggle against exploitation.
No one believed that our revolution could succeed against the strongest dictatorship in the region. But in 18 days the revolution achieved the victory of the people. When the working class of Egypt joined the revolution on 9 and 10 February, the dictatorship was doomed and the victory of the people became inevitable.
We want you to know that we stand on your side. Stand firm and don't waiver. Don't give up on your rights. Victory always belongs to the people who stand firm and demand their just rights.
We and all the people of the world stand on your side and give you our full support.
As our just struggle for freedom, democracy and justice succeeded, your struggle will succeed. Victory belongs to you when you stand firm and remain steadfast in demanding your just rights.
We support you. we support the struggle of the peoples of Libya, Bahrain and Algeria, who are fighting for their just rights and falling martyrs in the face of the autocratic regimes. The peoples are determined to succeed no matter the sacrifices and they will be victorious.
Today is the day of the American workers. We salute you American workers! You will be victorious. Victory belongs to all the people of the world, who are fighting against exploitation, and for their just rights.
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Stop LAPD Stealing of Immigrant's Cars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0lf4kENkxo
On Februrary 19, 2011 Members of the Southern California Immigration Coalition (SCIC) organized and engaged in direct action to defend the people of Los Angeles, CA from the racist LAPD "Sobriety" Checkpoints that are a poorly disguised trap to legally steal the cars from working class people in general and undocumented people in particular. Please disseminate this link widely.
Venceremos,
SCIC
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Protesters weather major snowstorm in Wausau, Wisconsin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7enVDAr1IY&feature=player_embedded
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[For subtitles, press the little red cc at the bottom, right of the screen.]
Sout Al Horeya Amir Eid - Hany Adel - Hawary On Guitar & Sherif On Keyboards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgw_zfLLvh8
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Hymn of Egyptian revolution on Youtube with EN subtitels "Saut al Hurria" (Voice of the revolution)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ5CqhL5X4o
First Responders
Wednesday, February 16th, in the State Capitol, Madison, Wisconsin, well over ten thousand citizens representing many others (teachers and students, nurses, custodial workers, firefighters, parents, families, community members and staunch union supporters) gathered to say NO! to Governor Scott Walker's so-called "Repair Bill"
The message was unequivocal and clear: no rolling back workers collective bargaining rights and to NEGOTIATE not LEGISLATE our way toward a better future.
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WikiLeaks Mirrors
Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.
In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.
Go to
http://wikileaks.ch/Mirrors.html
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Labor Beat: Labor Stands with Subpoenaed Activists Against FBI Raids and Grand Jury Investigation of antiwar and social justice activists.
"If trouble is not at your door. It's on it's way, or it just left."
"Investigate the Billionaires...Full investigation into Wall Street..." Jesse Sharkey, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNUSIGZCMQ
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Oil Spill Commission Final Report: Catfish Responds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3ZRdsccMsM
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The Most Heroic Word in All Languages is Revolution
By Eugene Debs
Eugene Debs, that greatest son of the Middle American west, wrote this in 1907 in celebration of that year's May Day events. It retains all of its vibrancy and vitality as events breathe new life into the global struggle for emancipation. "Revolution" remains the most heroic word in every language. -The Rustbelt Radical
Today the slaves of all the world are taking a fresh breath in the long and weary march; pausing a moment to clear their lungs and shout for joy; celebrating in festal fellowship their coming Freedom.
All hail the Labor Day of May!
The day of the proletarian protest;
The day of stern resolve;
The day of noble aspiration.
Raise high this day the blood-red Standard of the Revolution!
The banner of the Workingman;
The flag, the only flag, of Freedom.
Slavery, even the most abject-dumb and despairing as it may seem-has yet its inspiration. Crushed it may be, but extinguished never. Chain the slave as you will, O Masters, brutalize him as you may, yet in his soul, though dead, he yearns for freedom still.
The great discovery the modern slaves have made is that they themselves must achieve. This is the secret of their solidarity; the heart of their hope; the inspiration that nerves them all with sinews of steel.
They are still in bondage, but no longer cower;
No longer grovel in the dust,
But stand erect like men.
Conscious of their growing power the future holds up to them her outstretched hands.
As the slavery of the working class is international, so the movement for its emancipation.
The salutation of slave to slave this day is repeated in every human tongue as it goes ringing round the world.
The many millions are at last awakening. For countless ages they have suffered; drained to the dregs the bitter cup of misery and woe.
At last, at last the historic limitation has been reached, and soon a new sun will light the world.
Red is the life-tide of our common humanity and red our symbol of universal kinship.
Tyrants deny it; fear it; tremble with rage and terror when they behold it.
We reaffirm it and on this day pledge anew our fidelity-come life or death-to the blood-red Banner of the Revolution.
Socialist greetings this day to all our fellow-workers! To the god-like souls in Russia marching grimly, sublimely into the jaws of hell with the Song of the Revolution in their death-rattle; to the Orient, the Occident and all the Isles of the Sea!
VIVA LA REVOLUTION!
The most heroic word in all languages is REVOLUTION.
It thrills and vibrates; cheers and inspires. Tyrants and time-servers fear it, but the oppressed hail it with joy.
The throne trembles when this throbbing word is lisped, but to the hovel it is food for the famishing and hope for the victims of despair.
Let us glorify today the revolutions of the past and hail the Greater Revolution yet to come before Emancipation shall make all the days of the year May Days of peace and plenty for the sons and daughters of toil.
It was with Revolution as his theme that Mark Twain's soul drank deep from the fount of inspiration. His immortality will rest at last upon this royal tribute to the French Revolution:
"The ever memorable and blessed revolution, which swept a thousand years of villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood-one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two Reigns of Terror, if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death on ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror, which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."
-The Rustbelt Radical, February 25, 2011
http://rustbeltradical.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/the-most-heroic-word-in-all-languages-is-revolution/
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New music video by tommi avicolli mecca of the song "stick and stones," which is about bullying in high school, is finished and up on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of_twpu3-Nw
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New antiwar song that's bound to be a classic:
box
http://www.youtube.com/user/avimecca
by tommi avicolli mecca
(c) 2009
Credits are:
Tommi Avicolli Mecca, guitar/vocals
John Radogno, lead guitar
Diana Hartman, vocals, kazoo
Chris Weir, upright bass
Produced and recorded by Khalil Sullivan
I'm the recruiter and if truth be told/ I can lure the young and old
what I do you won't see/ til your kid's in JROTC
CHO ooh, put them in a box drape it with a flag and send them off to mom and dad
send them with a card from good ol' uncle sam, gee it's really just so sad
I'm the general and what I do/ is to teach them to be true
to god and country flag and oil/ by shedding their blood on foreign soil
CHO
I'm the corporate boss and well I know/ war is lots of dough dough dough
you won't find me over there/ they just ship the money right back here
CHO
last of all it's me the holy priest/ my part is not the least
I assure them it's god's will/ to go on out and kill kill kill
CHO
it's really just so sad
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Free Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4eNzokgRIw&feature=player_embedded
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Supermax Prison Cell Extraction - Maine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jUfK5i_lQs&feature=player_embedded
Warning, this is an extremely brutal video. What do you think? Is this torture?
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Did You Know?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY
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These videos refer to what happened at the G-20 Summit in Toronto June 26-27 of this year. The importance of this is that police were caught on tape and later confirmed that they sent police into the demonstration dressed as "rioting" protesters. One cop was caught with a large rock in his hand. Clearly, this is proof of police acting as agent provocatours. And we should expect this to continue and escalate. That's why everyone should be aware of these facts...bw
police accused of attempting to incite violence at G20 summ
Protestors at Montebello are accusing police of trying to incite violence. Video on YouTube shows union officials confronting three men that were police officers dressing up as demonstrators. The union is demanding to know if the Prime Minister's Office was involved in trying to discredit the demonstrators.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWbgnyUCC7M
quebec police admit going undercover at montebello protests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfzUOx53Rg&feature=related
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Domestic Espionage Alert - Houston PD to use surveillance drone in America!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpstrc15Ogg
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15 year old Tells Establishment to Stick-it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U_gHUiL4P8&feature=player_embedded#
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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded
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LOWKEY - TERRORIST? (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBnvajSfWU
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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
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Flashmob: Cape Town Opera say NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElyrFOnKPk
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"Don't F*** With Our Activists" - Mobilizing Against FBI Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyG3dIUGQvQ
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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The Arab Revolutions:
Guiding Principles for Peace and Justice Organizations in the US
Please email endorsement to ekishawi@yahoo.com
We, the undersigned, support the guiding principles and demands listed in this statement. We call on groups who want to express solidarity with the Arab revolutions to join our growing movement by signing this statement or keeping with the demands put forward herewith.
Background
The long-awaited Arab revolution has come. Like a geologic event with the reverberations of an earthquake, the timing and circumstances were unpredictable. In one Arab country after another, people are taking to the street demanding the fall of monarchies established during European colonial times. They are also calling to bring down dictatorships supported and manifested by neo-colonial policies. Although some of these autocratic regimes rose to power with popular support, the subsequent division and subjugation of the Arab World led to a uniform repressive political order across the region. The Arab masses in different Arab countries are therefore raising a uniform demand: "The People Want to Topple the Regimes!"
For the past two decades, the Arab people witnessed the invasion and occupation of Iraq with millions killed under blockade and occupation, Palestinians massacred with the aim to crush the anti-Zionist resistance, and Lebanon repeatedly invaded with the purposeful targeting of civilians. These actions all served to crush resistance movements longing for freedom, development, and self-determination. Meanwhile, despotic dictatorships, some going back 50 years, entrenched themselves by building police states, or fighting wars on behalf of imperialist interests.
Most Arab regimes systematically destroyed the social fabric of civil society, stifled social development, repressed all forms of political dissent and democratic expression, mortgaged their countries' wealth to foreign interests and enriched themselves and their cronies at the expense of impoverishing their populations. After pushing the Arab people to the brink, populations erupted.
The spark began in Tunisia where a police officer slapped and spat on Mohammad Bou Azizi, flipping over his produce cart for not delivering a bribe on time. . Unable to have his complaint heard, he self-immolated in protest, igniting the conscience of the Tunisian people and that of 300 million Arabs. In less than a month, the dictator, Zine El Abedine Ben Ali, was forced into exile by a Tunisian revolution. On its way out, the regime sealed its legacy by shooting at unarmed protestors and burning detention centers filled with political prisoners. Ben Ali was supported by the US and Europe in the fight against Islamic forces and organized labor.
Hosni Mubarak's brutal dictatorship fell less than a month after Tunisia's. The revolution erupted at a time when one half of the Egyptian population was living on less than $2/day while Mubarak's family amassed billions of dollars. The largest population recorded in Egyptian history was living in graveyards and raising their children among the dead while transportation and residential infrastructure was crumbling. Natural gas was supplied to Israel at 15% of the market price while the Rafah border was closed with an underground steel wall to complete the suffocation of the Palestinians in Gaza. Those who were deemed a threat swiftly met the fate of Khalid Said. 350 martyrs fell and 2,000 people were injured.
After Egypt and Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan exploded in protest. Some governments quickly reshuffled faces and ranks without any tangible change. Some, like Bahrain and Yemen, sent out their security forces to massacre civilians. Oman and Yemen represent strategic assets for the US as they are situated on the straits of Hormuz and Aden, respectively. Bahrain is an oil country that hosts a US military base, situated in the Persian Gulf. A new round of US funded blood-letting of Arab civilians has begun!
Libyan dictator Qaddafi did not prove to be an exception. He historically took anti-imperialist positions for a united Arab World and worked for an African Union. He later transformed his regime to a subservient state and opened Libya to British Petroleum and Italian interests, working diligently on privatization and political repression. He amassed more wealth than that of Mubarak. In the face of the Libyan revolution, Qaddafi exceeded the brutality of Ben Ali and Mubarak blind-folding and executing opponents, surrounding cities with tanks, and bombing his own country. Death toll is expected to be in the thousands.
Qaddafi's history makes Libya an easy target for imperialist interests. The Obama administration followed the Iraq cookbook by freezing Libyan assets amounting to 30% of the annual GDP. The White House, with the help of European governments, rapidly implemented sanctions and called for no-fly zones. These positions were precipitated shortly after the US vetoed a resolution condemning the illegal Israeli colonization of the West Bank. Special operations personnel from the UK were captured by the revolutionary commanders in Ben Ghazi and sent back. The Libyan revolutionary leadership, the National Council clearly stated: "We are completely against foreign intervention. The rest of Libya will be liberated by the people ... and Gaddafi's security forces will be eliminated by the people of Libya."
Demands of the Solidarity Movement with Arab Revolutions
1. We demand a stop to US support, financing and trade with Arab dictatorships. We oppose US policy that has favored Israeli expansionism, war, US oil interest and strategic shipping routes at the expense of Arab people's freedom and dignified living.
2. We support the people of Tunisia and Egypt as well as soon-to-be liberated nations to rid themselves of lingering remnants of the deposed dictatorships.
3. We support the Arab people's right to sovereignty and self-determination. We demand that the US government stop its interference in the internal affairs of all Arab countries and end subsidies to wars and occupation.
4. We support the Arab people's demands for political, civil and economic rights. The Arab people's movement is calling for:
a. Deposing the unelected regimes and all of its institutional remnants
b. Constitutional reform guaranteeing freedom of organizing, speech and press
c. Free and fair elections
d. Independent judiciary
e. National self-determination.
5. We oppose all forms of US and European military intervention with or without the legitimacy of the UN. Standing in solidarity with the revolution against Qaddafi, or any other dictator, does not equate to supporting direct or indirect colonization of an Arab country, its oil or its people. We therefore call for:
a. Absolute rejection of military blockades, no-fly zones and interventions.
b. Lifting all economic sanctions placed against Libya and allowing for the formation of an independent judiciary to prosecute Qaddafi and deposed dictators for their crimes.
c. Immediately withdrawing the US and NATO troops from the Arab region.
6. We support Iraq's right to sovereignty and self determination and call on the US to immediately withdraw all occupation personnel from Iraq.
7. We recognize that the borders separating Arab nations were imposed on the Arab people by the colonial agreements of Sykes-Picot and the Berlin Conference on Africa. As such, we support the anti-Zionist nature of this revolution in its call for:
a. Ending the siege and starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza
b. Supporting the right of the Palestinian people to choose their own representation, independent of Israeli and US dictates
c. Supporting the right of the Lebanese people to defend their country from Israeli violations and their call to end vestiges of the colonial constitution constructed on the basis of sectarian representation
d. Supporting the right of the Jordanian people to rid themselves of their repressive monarchy
e. Ending all US aid to Israel.
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY -- ANY DAY
to Fitzgerald, Holder and Obama
The Grand Jury is still on its witch hunt and the FBI is still
harassing activists. This must stop.
Please make these calls:
1. Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300 . Then dial 0
(zero) for operator and ask to leave a message with the Duty Clerk.
2. Call U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder 202-353-1555
3. Call President Obama at 202-456-1111
Suggested text: "My name is __________, I am from _______(city), in
______(state). I am calling _____ to demand he call off the Grand Jury
and stop FBI repression against the anti-war and Palestine solidarity
movements. I oppose U.S. government political repression and support
the right to free speech and the right to assembly of the 23 activists
subpoenaed. We will not be criminalized. Tell him to stop this
McCarthy-type witch hunt against international solidarity activists!"
If your call doesn't go through, try again later.
Update: 800 anti-war and international solidarity activists
participated in four regional conferences, in Chicago, IL; Oakland,
CA; Chapel Hill, NC and New York City to stop U.S. Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald's Grand Jury repression.
Still, in the last few weeks, the FBI has continued to call and harass
anti-war organizers, repressing free speech and the right to organize.
However, all of their intimidation tactics are bringing a movement
closer together to stop war and demand peace.
We demand:
-- Call Off the Grand Jury Witch-hunt Against International Solidarity
Activists!
-- Support Free Speech!
-- Support the Right to Organize!
-- Stop FBI Repression!
-- International Solidarity Is Not a Crime!
-- Stop the Criminalization of Arab and Muslim Communities!
Background: Fitzgerald ordered FBI raids on anti-war and solidarity
activists' homes and subpoenaed fourteen activists in Chicago,
Minneapolis, and Michigan on September 24, 2010. All 14 refused to
speak before the Grand Jury in October. Then, 9 more Palestine
solidarity activists, most Arab-Americans, were subpoenaed to appear
at the Grand Jury on January 25, 2011, launching renewed protests.
There are now 23 who assert their right to not participate in
Fitzgerald's witch-hunt.
The Grand Jury is a secret and closed inquisition, with no judge, and
no press. The U.S. Attorney controls the entire proceedings and hand
picks the jurors, and the solidarity activists are not allowed a
lawyer. Even the date when the Grand Jury ends is a secret.
So please make these calls to those in charge of the repression aimed
against anti-war leaders and the growing Palestine solidarity
movement.
Email us to let us know your results. Send to info@StopFBI.net
**Please sign and circulate our 2011 petition at http://www.stopfbi.net/petition
In Struggle,
Tom Burke,
for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression
FFI: Visit www.StopFBI.net or email info@StopFBI.net or call
612-379-3585 .
Copyright (c) 2011 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights
reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55415
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MECA Middle East Children's Alliance
Howard & Roslyn Zinn Presente! Honor Their Legacy By Providing Clean Water for Children in Gaza
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=13
Howard Zinn supported the work of the Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA) from the beginning. Over the years, he lent his name and his time countless times to support our work. Howard and Roz were both personal friends of mine and Howard helped MECA raise funds for our projects for children in Palestine by coming to the Bay Area and doing events for us.
On the first anniversary of Howard's passing, I hope you will join MECA in celebrating these two extraordinary individuals.
- Barbara Lubin, Executive Director
YES! I want to help MECA build a water purification and desalination unit at the Khan Younis Co-ed Elementary School for 1,400 students in Gaza in honor of Howard & Roslyn Zinn.
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=13
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Call for EMERGENCY RESPONSE Action if Assange Indicted,
Dear Friends:
We write in haste, trying to reach as many of you as possible although the holiday break has begun.......This plan for an urgent "The Day After" demonstration is one we hope you and many, many more organizations will take up as your own, and mobilize for. World Can't Wait asks you to do all you can to spread it through list serves, Facebook, twitter, holiday gatherings.
Our proposal is very very simple, and you can use the following announcement to mobilize - or write your own....
ANY DAY NOW . . . IN THE EVENT THAT THE U.S. INDICTS JULIAN ASSANGE
An emergency public demonstration THE DAY AFTER any U.S. criminal indictment is announced against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Spread the word and call people to come out, across the whole range of movements and groups: anti-war, human rights, freedom of information/freedom of the press, peace, anti-torture, environmental, students and youth, radicals and revolutionaries, religious, civil liberties, teachers and educators, journalists, anti-imperialists, anti-censorship, anti-police state......
At the Federal Building in San Francisco, we'll form ourselves into a human chain "surrounding" the government that meets the Wikileaked truth with repression and wants to imprison and silence leakers, whistleblowers and truthtellers - when, in fact, these people are heroes. We'll say:
HANDS OFF WIKILEAKS! FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING!
Join the HUMAN CHAIN AROUND THE FEDERAL BUILDING!
New Federal Building, 7th and Mission, San Francisco (nearest BART: Civic Center)
4:00-6:00 PM on The Day FOLLOWING U.S. indictment of Assange
Bring all your friends - signs and banners - bullhorns.
Those who dare at great risk to themselves to put the truth in the hands of the people - and others who might at this moment be thinking about doing more of this themselves -- need to see how much they are supported, and that despite harsh repression from the government and total spin by the mainstream media, the people do want the truth told.
Brad Manning's Christmas Eve statement was just released by his lawyer: "Pvt. Bradley Manning, the lone soldier who stands accused of stealing millions of pages secret US government documents and handing them over to secrets outlet WikiLeaks, wants his supporters to know that they've meant a lot to him. 'I greatly appreciate everyone's support and well wishes during this time,' he said in a Christmas Eve statement released by his lawyer...." Read more here:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/mannings-message-christmas-eve-i-gr/
Demonstrations defending Wikileaks and Assange, and Brad Manning, have already been flowering around the world. Make it happen here too.
Especially here . . .
To join into this action plan, or with questions, contact World Can't Wait or whichever organization or listserve you received this message from.
World Can't Wait, SF Bay
415-864-5153
sf@worldcantwait.org
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Email received from Lynne Stewart:
12/19/10; 12:03pm
Dear Folks:
Some nuts and bolts and trivia,
1. New Address
Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054
Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127
2. Visiting is very liberal but first I have to get people on my visiting list Wait til I or the lawyers let you know. The visits are FRI, SAT, SUN AND MON for 4 hours and on weekends 8 to 3. Bring clear plastic change purse with lots of change to buy from the machines. Brief Kiss upon arrival and departure, no touching or holding during visit (!!) On visiting forms it may be required that you knew me before I came to prison. Not a problem for most of you.
3. One hour time difference
4. Commissary Money is always welcome It is how I pay for the phone and for email. Also need it for a lot that prison doesn't supply in terms of food and "sundries" (pens!) A very big list that includes Raisins, Salad Dressing , ankle sox, mozzarella (definitely not from Antonys--more like a white cheddar, Sanitas Corn Chips but no Salsa etc. To add money, you do this by using Western Union and a credit card by phone or you can send a USPO money order or Business or Govt Check. The negotiable instruments (PAPER!) need to be sent to Federal Bureau of Prisons , 53504-054, Lynne Stewart, PO Box 474701, Des Moines Iowa 50947-001 (Payable to Lynne Stewart, 53504-054) They hold the mo or checks for 15 days. Western Union costs $10 but is within 2 hours. If you mail, your return address must be on the envelope. Unnecessarily complicated ? Of course, it's the BOP !)
5. Food is vastly improved. Just had Sunday Brunch real scrambled eggs, PORK sausage, Baked or home fried potatoes, Butter(sweet whipped M'God !!) Grapefruit juice Toast , orange. I will probably regain the weight I lost at MCC! Weighing against that is the fact that to eat we need to walk to another building (about at far as from my house to the F Train) Also included is 3 flights of stairs up and down. May try to get an elevator pass and try NOT to use it.
6. In a room with 4 bunks(small) about two tiers of rooms with same with "atrium" in middle with tv sets and tables and chairs. Estimate about 500 on Unit 2N and there are 4 units. Population Black, Mexicano and other spanish speaking (all of whom iron their underwear, Marta), White, Native Americans (few), no orientals or foreign speaking caucasians--lots are doing long bits, victims of drugs (meth etc) and boyfriends. We wear army style (khaki) pants with pockets tee shirts and dress shirts long sleeved and short sleeved. When one of the women heard that I hadn't ironed in 40 years, they offered to do the shirts for me. (This is typical of the help I get--escorted to meals and every other protection, explanations, supplies, etc. Mostly from white women.) One drawback is not having a bathroom in the room---have to go about 75 yards at all hours of the day and night --clean though.
7. Final Note--the sunsets and sunrises are gorgeous, the place is very open and outdoors there are pecan trees and birds galore (I need books for trees and birds (west) The full moon last night gladdened my heart as I realized it was shining on all of you I hold dear.
Love Struggle
Lynne
The address of her Defense Committee is:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information:
718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
Please make a generous contribution to her defense.
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Help end the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning!
Bradley Manning Support Network. December 22, 2010
The Marine Brig at Quantico, Virginia is using "injury prevention" as a vehicle to inflict extreme pre-trial punishment on accused Wikileaks whistleblower Army PFC Bradley Manning (photo right). These "maximum conditions" are not unheard-of during an inmate's first week at a military confinement facility, but when applied continuously for months and with no end in sight they amount to a form of torture. Bradley, who just turned 23-years-old last week, has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest in late May. We're now turning to Bradley's supporters worldwide to directly protest, and help bring a halt to, the extremely punitive conditions of Bradley's pre-trial detention.
We need your help in pressing the following demands:
End the inhumane, degrading conditions of pre-trial confinement and respect Bradley's human rights. Specifically, lift the "Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order". This would allow Bradley meaningful physical exercise, uninterrupted sleep during the night, and a release from isolation. We are not asking for "special treatment". In fact, we are demanding an immediate end to the special treatment.
Quantico Base Commander
Colonel Daniel Choike
3250 Catlin Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-2707 (phone)
Quantico Brig Commanding Officer
CWO4 James Averhart
3247 Elrod Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-4242 (fax)
Background
In the wake of an investigative report last week by Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com giving evidence that Bradley Manning was subject to "detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries", Bradley's attorney, David Coombs, published an article at his website on Saturday entitled "A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning". Mr. Coombs details the maximum custody conditions that Bradley is subject to at the Quantico Confinement Facility and highlights an additional set of restrictions imposed upon him under a Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order.
Usually enforced only through a detainee's first week at a confinement facility, or in cases of violent and/or suicidal inmates, the standing POI order has severely limited Manning's access to exercise, daylight and human contact for the past five months. The military's own psychologists assigned to Quantico have recommended that the POI order and the extra restrictions imposed on Bradley be lifted.
Despite not having been convicted of any crime or even yet formally indicted, the confinement regime Bradley lives under includes pronounced social isolation and a complete lack of opportunities for meaningful exercise. Additionally, Bradley's sleep is regularly interrupted. Coombs writes: "The guards are required to check on Manning every five minutes [...] At night, if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure he is okay."
Denver Nicks writes in The Daily Beast that "[Bradley Manning's] attorney [...] says the extended isolation - now more than seven months of solitary confinement - is weighing on his client's psyche. [...] Both Coombs and Manning's psychologist, Coombs says, are sure Manning is mentally healthy, that there is no evidence he's a threat to himself, and shouldn't be held in such severe conditions under the artifice of his own protection."
In an article to be published at Firedoglake.com later today, David House, a friend of Bradley's who visits him regularly at Quantico, says that Bradley "has not been outside or into the brig yard for either recreation or exercise in four full weeks. He related that visits to the outdoors have been infrequent and sporadic for the past several months."
In an average military court martial situation, a defense attorney would be able to bring these issues of pre-trial punishment to the military judge assigned to the case (known as an Article 13 hearing). However, the military is unlikely to assign a judge to Bradley's case until the pre-trial Article 32 hearing is held (similar to an arraignment in civilian court), and that is not expected until February, March, or later-followed by the actual court martial trial months after that. In short, you are Bradley's best and most immediate hope.
What can you do?
Contact the Marine Corps officers above and respectfully, but firmly, ask that they lift the extreme pre-trial confinement conditions against Army PFC Bradley Manning.
Forward this urgent appeal for action widely.
Sign the "Stand with Brad" public petition and letter campaign at www.standwithbrad.org - Sign online, and we'll mail out two letters on your behalf to Army officials.
Donate to Bradley's defense fund at www.couragetoresist.org/bradley
References:
"The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention", by Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com, 15 December 2010
"A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning", by attorney David E. Coombs, 18 December 2010
"Bradley Manning's Life Behind Bars", by Denver Nicks for the Daily Beast, 17 December 2010
Bradley Manning Support Network
Courage To Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
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KOREA: Emergency Response Actions Needed
The United National Antiwar Committee urges the antiwar movement to begin to plan now for Emergency 5pm Day-of or Day-after demonstrations, should fighting break out on the Korean Peninsula or its surrounding waters.
As in past war crisis and U.S. attacks we propose:
NYC -- Times Square, Washington, D.C. -- the White House
In Many Cities - Federal Buildings
Many tens of thousands of U.S., Japanese and South Korean troops are mobilized on land and on hundreds of warships and aircraft carriers. The danger of a general war in Asia is acute.
China and Russia have made it clear that the scheduled military maneuvers and live-fire war "exercises" from an island right off the coast of north Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) by South Korea are very dangerous. The DPRK has made it clear that they consider these live-fire war exercises to be an act of war and they will again respond if they are again fired on.
The U.S. deployment of thousands of troops, ships, and aircraft in the area while South Korea is firing thousands of rounds of live ammunition and missiles is an enormously dangerous provocation, not only to the DPRK but to China. The Yellow Sea also borders China. The island and the waters where the war maneuvers are taking place are north of the Korean Demilitarized Zone and only eight miles from the coast of the DPRK.
On Sunday, December 19 in a day-long emergency session, the U.S. blocked in the UN Security Council any actions to resolve the crisis.
UNAC action program passed in Albany at the United National Antiwar Conference, July 2010 of over 800 antiwar, social justice and community organizations included the following Resolution on Korea:
15. In solidarity with the antiwar movements of Japan and Korea, each calling for U.S. Troops to Get Out Now, and given the great increase in U.S. military preparations against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, National Peace Conference participants will organize immediate protests following any attack by the U.S. on Korea. U.S. war preparations include stockpiling hundreds of bunker-busters and conducting major war games near the territorial waters of China and Korea. In keeping with our stand for the right of self-determination and our demand of Out Now, the National Peace Conference calls for Bringing All U.S. Troops Home Now!
UNAC urges the whole antiwar movement to begin to circulate messages alerts now in preparation. Together let's join together and demand: Bring all U.S. Troops Home Now! Stop the Wars and the Threats of War.
The United National Antiwar Committee, www.UNACpeace.org
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In earnest support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
http://readersupportednews.org/julian-assange-petition
rsn:Petition
We here undersigned express our support for the work and integrity of Julian Assange. We express concern that the charges against the WikiLeaks founder appear too convenient both in terms of timing and the novelty of their nature.
We call for this modern media innovator, and fighter for human rights extraordinaire, to be afforded the same rights to defend himself before Swedish justice that all others similarly charged might expect, and that his liberty not be compromised as a courtesy to those governments whose truths he has revealed have embarrassed.
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GAP Inc: End Your Relationship with Supplier that Allows Workers to be Burned Alive
http://humanrights.change.org/blog/view/workers_burned_alive_making_clothes_for_the_gap
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT! FREE KEVIN COOPER!
Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper
Chronicle Editorial
Monday, December 13, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL
Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's death row!
http://www.savekevincooper.org/
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255
URGENT ACTION APPEAL
- From Amnesty International USA
17 December 2010
Click here to take action online:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084
To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to
http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success
For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):
http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf
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Free the Children of Palestine!
Sign Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
Published by Al-Awda, Palestine Right to Return Coalition on Dec 16, 2010
Category: Children's Rights
Region: GLOBAL
Target: President Obama
Web site: http://www.al-awda.org
Background (Preamble):
According to Israeli police, 1200 Palestinian children have been arrested, interrogated and imprisoned in the occupied city of Jerusalem alone this year. The youngest of these children was seven-years old.
Children and teen-agers were often dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, taken in handcuffs for questioning, threatened, humiliated and many were subjected to physical violence while under arrest as part of an ongoing campaign against the children of Palestine. Since the year 2000, more than 8000 have been arrested by Israel, and reports of mistreatment are commonplace.
Further, based on sworn affidavits collected in 2009 from 100 of these children, lawyers working in the occupied West Bank with Defense Children International, a Geneva-based non governmental organization, found that 69% were beaten and kicked, 49% were threatened, 14% were held in solitary confinement, 12% were threatened with sexual assault, including rape, and 32% were forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not understand.
Minors were often asked to give names and incriminate friends and relatives as a condition of their release. Such institutionalized and systematic mistreatment of Palestinian children by the state of Israel is a violation international law and specifically contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Israel is supposedly a signatory.
Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
We, the undersigned call on US President Obama to direct Israel to
1. Stop all the night raids and arrests of Palestinian Children forthwith.
2. Immediately release all Palestinian children detained in its prisons and detention centers.
3. End all forms of systematic and institutionalized abuse against all Palestinian children.
4. Implement the full restoration of Palestinian children's rights in accordance with international law including, but not limited to, their right to return to their homes of origin, to education, to medical and psychological care, and to freedom of movement and expression.
The US government, which supports Israel to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars a year while most ordinary Americans are suffering in a very bad economy, is bound by its laws and international conventions to cut off all aid to Israel until it ends all of its violations of human rights and basic freedoms in a verifiable manner.
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"Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority, which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests."..."Publishing State Secrets" By Leon Trotsky
Documents on Soviet Policy, Trotsky, iii, 2 p. 64
November 22, 1917
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/foreign-relations/1917/November/22.htm
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING! STOP THE FBI RAIDS NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
To understand how much a trillion dollars is, consider looking at it in terms of time:
A million seconds would be about eleven-and-one-half days; a billion seconds would be 31 years; and a trillion seconds would be 31,000 years!
From the novel "A Dark Tide," by Andrew Gross
Now think of it in terms of U.S. war dollars and bankster bailouts!
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For Immediate Release
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
12/2/2010
For more information: Joe Lombardo, 518-281-1968,
UNACpeace@gmail.org, NationalPeaceConference.org
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
The United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) calls for the release of Bradley Manning who is awaiting trial accused of leaking the material to Wikileaks that has been released over the past several months. We also call for an end to the harassment of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and we call for an independent, international investigation of the illegal activity exposed through the material released by Wikileaks.
Before sending the material to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning tried to get his superiors in the military to do something about what he understood to be clear violations of international law. His superiors told him to keep quiet so Manning did the right thing; he exposed the illegal activity to the world.
The Afghan material leaked earlier shows military higher-ups telling soldiers to kill enemy combatants who were trying to surrender. The Iraq Wikileaks video from 2007 shows the US military killing civilians and news reporters from a helicopter while laughing about it. The widespread corruption among U.S. allies has been exposed by the most recent leaks of diplomatic cables. Yet, instead of calling for change in these policies, we hear only a call to suppress further leaks.
At the national antiwar conference held in Albany in July, 2010, at which UNAC was founded, we heard from Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers on the ground during the helicopter attack on the civilians in Iraq exposed by Wikileaks (see: http://www.mediasanctuary.org/movie/1810 ). He talked about removing wounded children from a civilian vehicle that the US military had shot up. It affected him so powerfully that he and another soldier who witnessed the massacre wrote a letter of apology to the families of the civilians who were killed.
We ask why this material was classified in the first place. There were no state secrets in the material, only evidence of illegal and immoral activity by the US military, the US government and its allies. To try to cover this up by classifying the material is a violation of our right to know the truth about these wars. In this respect, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be held up as heroes, not hounded for exposing the truth.
UNAC calls for an end to the illegal and immoral policies exposed by Wikileaks and an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to threats against Iran and North Korea.
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Courage to Resist needs your support
By Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist.
It's been quite a ride the last four months since we took up the defense of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning. Since then, we helped form the Bradley Manning Support Network, established a defense fund, and have already paid over half of Bradley's total $100,000 in estimated legal expenses.
Now, I'm asking for your support of Courage to Resist so that we can continue to support not only Bradley, but the scores of other troops who are coming into conflict with military authorities due to reasons of conscience.
Please donate today:
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
"Soldiers sworn oath is to defend and support the Constitution. Bradley Manning has been defending and supporting our Constitution."
-Dan Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower
Iraq War over? Afghanistan occupation winding down? Not from what we see. Please take a look at, "Soldier Jeff Hanks refuses deployment, seeks PTSD help" in our December newsletter. Jeff's situation is not isolated. Actually, his story is only unique in that he has chosen to share it with us in the hopes that it may result in some change. Jeff's case also illustrates the importance of Iraq Veterans Against the War's new "Operation Recovery" campaign which calls for an end to the deployment of traumatized troops.
Most of the folks who call us for help continue to be effected by Stoploss, a program that involuntarily extends enlistments (despite Army promises of its demise), or the Individual Ready Reserve which recalls thousands of former Soldiers and Marines quarterly from civilian life.
Another example of our efforts is Kyle Wesolowski. After returning from Iraq, Kyle submitted an application for a conscientious objector discharge based on his Buddhist faith. Kyle explains, "My experience of physical threats, religious persecution, and general abuse seems to speak of a system that appears to be broken.... It appears that I have no other recourse but to now refuse all duties that prepare myself for war or aid in any way shape or form to other soldiers in conditioning them to go to war." We believe he shouldn't have to walk this path alone.
Sincerely,
Jeff Paterson
Project Director, Courage to Resist
First US military service member to refuse to fight in Iraq
Please donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
P.S. I'm asking that you consider a contribution of $50 or more, or possibly becoming a sustainer at $15 a month. Of course, now is also a perfect time to make a end of year tax-deductible donation. Thanks again for your support!
Please click here to forward this to a friend who might
also be interested in supporting GI resisters.
http://ymlp.com/forward.php?id=lS3tR&e=bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com
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Add your name! We stand with Bradley Manning.
"We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad... We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning."
Dear All,
The Bradley Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist are launching a new campaign, and we wanted to give you a chance to be among the first to add your name to this international effort. If you sign the letter online, we'll print out and mail two letters to Army officials on your behalf. With your permission, we may also use your name on the online petition and in upcoming media ads.
Read the complete public letter and add your name at:
http://standwithbrad.org/
Courage to Resist (http://couragetoresist.org)
on behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network (http://bradleymanning.org)
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
Dear Friend,
On Friday, September 24th, the FBI raided homes in Chicago and Minneapolis, and turned the Anti-War Committee office upside down. We were shocked. Our response was strong however and we jumped into action holding emergency protests. When the FBI seized activists' personal computers, cell phones, and papers claiming they were investigating "material support for terrorism", they had no idea there would be such an outpouring of support from the anti-war movement across this country! Over 61 cities protested, with crowds of 500 in Minneapolis and Chicago. Activists distributed 12,000 leaflets at the One Nation Rally in Washington D.C. Supporters made thousands of calls to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Solidarity statements from community organizations, unions, and other groups come in every day. By organizing against the attacks, the movement grows stronger.
At the same time, trusted lawyers stepped up to form a legal team and mount a defense. All fourteen activists signed letters refusing to testify. So Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox withdrew the subpoenas, but this is far from over. In fact, the repression is just starting. The FBI continues to question activists at their homes and work places. The U.S. government is trying to put people in jail for anti-war and international solidarity activism and there is no indication they are backing off. The U.S. Attorney has many options and a lot of power-he may re-issue subpoenas, attempt to force people to testify under threat of imprisonment, or make arrests.
To be successful in pushing back this attack, we need your donation. We need you to make substantial contributions like $1000, $500, and $200. We understand many of you are like us, and can only afford $50, $20, or $10, but we ask you to dig deep. The legal bills can easily run into the hundreds of thousands. We are all united to defend a movement for peace and justice that seeks friendship with people in other countries. These fourteen anti-war activists have done nothing wrong, yet their freedom is at stake.
It is essential that we defend our sisters and brothers who are facing FBI repression and the Grand Jury process. With each of your contributions, the movement grows stronger.
Please make a donation today at stopfbi.net (PayPal) on the right side of your screen. Also you can write to:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
This is a critical time for us to stand together, defend free speech, and defend those who help to organize for peace and justice, both at home and abroad!
Thank you for your generosity! Tom Burke
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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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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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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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D. ARTICLES IN FULL (Unless otherwise noted)
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1) Risk of Meltdown Spreads at Japanese Plant
By HIROKO TABUCHI and MATTHEW L. WALD
March 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/asia/15nuclear.html?ref=business
2) Radioactive Releases in Japan Could Last Months, Experts Say
By DAVID E. SANGER and MATTHEW L. WALD
March 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/japan-fukushima-nuclear-reactor.html?ref=health
3) Several Plant Workers Are Ill, but Radiation Risk in Japan Is Seen as Low for Now
By DENISE GRADY
March 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14health.html?ref=health
4) German Workers Rally in Solidarity with Wisconsin Public Employees
Teresa Casertano in the AFL-CIO Organizing Department sends us this report.
March 14, 2011
http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/03/11/german-workers-rally-in-solidarity-with-wisconsin-public-employees/
5) The Sport Needs to Change
By BOB HERBERT
March 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15herbert.html?hp
6) Workers Strain to Retake Control After Blast and Fire at Japan Plant
By KEITH BRADSHER, HIROKO TABUCHI and DAVID E. SANGER
March 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16nuclear.html?hp
7) In Fuel-Cooling Pools, a Danger for the Longer Term
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and HIROKO TABUCHI
March 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16fuel.html?hp
8) Two Protesters Dead as Bahrain Declares State of Emergency
By ETHAN BRONNER, MICHAEL SLACKMAN and J. DAVID GOODMAN
March 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/middleeast/16bahrain.html?hp
9) Haiti: U.S. Asks South Africa to Delay Aristide's Departure
By REUTERS
March 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/americas/15briefs-ART-Haiti.html?ref=world
10) Safety on the Cheap
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
RSN Special Coverage: Disaster in Japan
March 16, 2011
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/5298-safety-on-the-cheap
11) The Abuse of Private Manning
New York Times Editorial
March 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15tue3.html?scp=1&sq=editorial%20bradley%20manning&st=cse
12) U.S. Calls Radiation 'Extremely High' and Urges Deeper Caution in Japan
By DAVID E. SANGER and MATTHEW L. WALD
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/asia/17nuclear.html?hp
13) Forces Rout Protesters From Bahrain Square
By ETHAN BRONNER
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/middleeast/17bahrain.html?hp
14) China Slows Nuclear Power Plans
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/asia/17china.html?ref=world
15) Ohio Town Sees Public Job as Only Route to Middle Class
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
March 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/us/16ohio.html?ref=us
16) Agency Seizes Georgia's Supply of Execution Drug
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/us/16lethal.html?ref=us
17) NRC: No Water in Spent Fuel Pool of Japan Plant
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/03/16/business/AP-US-Japan-Quake-Spent-Fuel.html?src=busln
18) High Radiation Severely Hinders Emergency Work to Cool Japanese Plant
By NORIMITSU ONISHI, DAVID E. SANGER and MATTHEW L. WALD
March 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18nuclear.html?_r=1&hp
19) Drone Attack Reported to Kill Scores in Northwest Pakistan
By SALMAN MASOOD
March 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18pakistan.html?hp
20) Executions in Doubt in Fallout Over Drug
By KEVIN SACK
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/us/17drugs.html?hp
21) Opposition Leaders Arrested in Bahrain as Crackdown Grows
By ETHAN BRONNER
March 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/middleeast/18bahrain.html?ref=world
22) 4 Times Journalists Are Missing in Libya
By JEREMY W. PETERS
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/africa/17times.html?ref=world
23) Greek Town Rises Up Against Planned Landfill
By NIKI KITSANTONIS
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/europe/17greece.html?ref=world
24) Castro Enemy Said to Have Recounted Role in Attacks
By DAN FROSCH
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/us/17posada.html?ref=world
25) Economic Downturn Holds Fierce Grip on Border Town
By JENNIFER MEDINA
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/us/17elcentro.html?ref=us
26) Rights Group Faults U.S. on Detained Immigrants
By KIRK SEMPLE
March 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/us/18detain-1.html?ref=us
27) Danger of Spent Fuel Outweighs Reactor Threat
By KEITH BRADSHER and HIROKO TABUCHI
March 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18spent.html?scp=1&sq=Danger%20of%20Spent%20Fuel%20Outweighs%20Reactor%20Threat&st=cse
28) Dividends Will Enrich Bank Chiefs
By ERIC DASH
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/business/17dividend.html?ref=business
29) The American Dilemma in Libya: To Bomb, Invade, Partition, Or All of the Above
By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Black Agenda Report
March 16, 2011
http://blackagendareport.com/content/american-dilemma-libya-bomb-invade-partition-or-all-above
30) Support the Libyan people! No imperialist intervention in Libya!
Labour Party Pakistan statement on Libya
March 8, 2011
http://www.laborpakistan.org/
31) In Post Racial America Prisons Feast on Black Girls
By Rachel Pfeffer
March 15, 2011
http://ethnoblog.newamericamedia.org/2011/03/in-post-racial-america-prisons-feast-on-black-girls-1.php#
32) US government denies entry visa to Malalai Joya, Afghan women’s rights activist and author
March 17, 2011
http://www.afghanwomensmission.org/?p=1255
33) U.N. to Vote on Libya Airstrikes; U.S. Readies Forces
The Wall Street Journal
By JOE LAURIA, ADAM ENTOUS, YAROSLAV TROFIMOV and SAM DAGHER
MARCH 17, 2011, 2:33 P.M. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703818204576206373350344478.html
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1) Risk of Meltdown Spreads at Japanese Plant
By HIROKO TABUCHI and MATTHEW L. WALD
March 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/asia/15nuclear.html?ref=business
TOKYO - The risk of a meltdown spread to a third reactor at a stricken nuclear power plant in Japan on Monday as its cooling systems failed, exposing its fuel rods, only hours after a second explosion at a separate reactor blew the roof off a containment building.
The widening problems underscored the difficulties the Japanese authorities are having in bringing several damaged reactors under control three days after a devastating earthquake and a tsunami hit Japan's northeast coast and shut down the electricity that runs the crucial cooling systems for reactors.
Operators fear that if they cannot establish control, despite increasingly desperate measures to do so, the reactors could experience full meltdowns, which could release catastrophic amounts of radiation. The two reactors where the explosions occurred are both presumed to have already suffered partial meltdowns - a dangerous situation that, if unchecked, could lead to full meltdowns.
The chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, said that the release of large amounts of radiation was unlikely. But traces of radiation could be released into the atmosphere, and about 500 people who remained within a 12-mile radius of the plant were ordered to take cover indoors temporarily, he said.
The country's nuclear power watchdog said readings taken soon after the explosion showed no big change in radiation levels around the plant or any damage to the containment vessel, which protects the radioactive material in the reactor.
"I have received reports that the containment vessel is sound," Mr. Edano said. "I understand that there is little possibility that radioactive materials are being released in large amounts."
But later Monday Mr. Edano said cooling systems at a third reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi plant had failed. The water level inside the reactor fell, exposing the fuel rods at its core for more than two hours despite efforts to pump seawater into the reactor, he said. Exposure of the rods means they heat up, melting their outer casing and raising the risk of a meltdown.
At first, water was successfully injected into the reactor and the rods were again submerged. But new problems resulted in the rods being exposed again.
A vent that had been letting out steam from the reactor closed, leading to pent-up pressure inside the containment vessel and hampering water from being injected. Water levels then fell rapidly, leaving the fuel rods again exposed, Tokyo Electric officials said at a news conference early Tuesday.
The jury-rigged fire hose pumps being used by the workers have added to the crisis by hindering efforts to keep reactors adequately cooled. Difficulties in gauging exactly how much water remains in the containment vessel, as well as what exactly is occurring at the heart of the reactor, have also added to problems.
Earlier, Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general at Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said plant workers had renewed efforts to flood the reactor with seawater, and readings suggested that water again covered the fuel rods. Workers were also battling rising pressure within the reactor, Mr. Nishiyama said. They have opened vents in the reactor's containment vessel, which houses the fuel rods, a measure that could release small amounts of radiation. Higher-than-normal levels of radiation have been detected from at least 22 people evacuated from near the plant, the nuclear safety watchdog said, but it is not clear if the doses they received were dangerous.
The Fukushima Daiichi plant and the Fukushima Daini power station, about 10 miles away, have been under a state of emergency.
On Monday morning, Tokyo Electric, which runs both plants, said it had restored the cooling systems at two of three reactors experiencing problems at Daini. That would leave a total of four reactors at the two plants with pumping difficulties.
Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a nuclear safety expert formerly at the Research Center for Urban Safety and Security at Kobe University, said emergencies at multiple reactors in close proximity posed particular risks. "If an incident were to happen at one reactor that released high amounts radiation, the whole area would become unapproachable," Mr.
Ishibashi said. "Then the other reactors would have to be abandoned, and left to run their disastrous course."
Frank N. von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton, said he was not aware of any cases were more than one reactor had problems.
"The whole country was focused on Three Mile Island," he said, referring to the Pennsylvania nuclear plant accident in 1979. "Here you have Tokyo Electric Power and the Japanese regulators focusing on multiple plants at the same time."
In what was perhaps the clearest sign of the rising anxiety over the nuclear crisis, both the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Russian authorities issued statements on Sunday trying to allay fears, saying they did not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach their territory.
Late Sunday night, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Japan had added a third plant, Onagawa, to the list of those under a state of emergency because a low level of radioactive materials had been detected outside its walls. But on Monday morning, it quoted Japanese authorities as saying that the radioactivity levels at the Onagawa plant had returned to normal levels and that there appeared to be no leak there.
"The increased level may have been due to a release of radioactive material from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant," the agency said. The Onagawa and Daiichi plants are 75 miles apart. The operator of the Onagawa plant, Tohoku Electric Power, said that levels of radiation there were twice the allowed level, but that they did not pose health risks.
Soon after that announcement, Kyodo News reported that a plant about 75 miles north of Tokyo was having at least some cooling system problems. But a plant spokesman later said a backup pump was working.
The government was testing people who lived near the Daiichi plant, with local officials saying that about 170 residents had probably been exposed. The government earlier said that three workers had radiation illness, but Tokyo Electric said Monday that only one worker was ill.
The problems at Fukushima Daiichi appeared to be the most serious involving a nuclear plant since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. A partial meltdown can occur when radioactive fuel rods, which normally are under in water, remain partly uncovered for too long. The longer the fuel is exposed, the closer the reactor comes to a full meltdown.
Technicians are essentially fighting for time while heat generation in the fuel gradually declines, trying to keep the rods covered despite a breakdown in the normal cooling system, which runs off the electrical grid. Since that was knocked out in the earthquake, and diesel generators later failed - possibly because of the tsunami - the operators have used a makeshift system for keeping cool water on the fuel rods.
Now, they pump in new water, let it boil and then vent it to the atmosphere, releasing some radioactive material. But they are having difficulty even with that, and have sometimes allowed the water levels to drop too low, exposing the fuel to steam and air, with resulting fuel damage.
On Sunday Japanese nuclear officials said operators at the plant had suffered a setback trying to bring one of the reactors under control when a valve malfunction stopped the flow of water and left fuel rods partially uncovered. The delay raised pressure at the reactor.
At a late-night news conference, officials at Tokyo Electric said that the valve had been fixed, but that water levels had not yet begun rising.
Hiroko Tabuchi reported from Tokyo and Matthew L. Wald from Washington. Michael Wines contributed reporting from Koriyama, Japan, and Ellen Barry from Moscow. Keith Bradsher contributed from Hong Kong.
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2) Radioactive Releases in Japan Could Last Months, Experts Say
By DAVID E. SANGER and MATTHEW L. WALD
March 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/japan-fukushima-nuclear-reactor.html?ref=health
WASHINGTON - As the scale of Japan's nuclear crisis begins to come to light, experts in Japan and the United States say the country is now facing a cascade of accumulating problems that suggest that radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks or even months.
The emergency flooding of stricken reactors with seawater and the resulting steam releases are a desperate step intended to avoid a much bigger problem: a full meltdown of the nuclear cores in reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. On Monday, an explosion blew the roof off the second reactor, not damaging the core, officials said, but presumably leaking more radiation.
Later Monday, the government said cooling systems at a third reactor had failed. The Kyodo news agency reported that the damaged fuel rods at the third reactor had been temporarily exposed, increasing the risk of overheating. Sea water was being channeled into the reactor to cover the rods, Kyodo reported.
So far, Japanese officials have said the melting of the nuclear cores in the two plants is assumed to be "partial," and the amount of radioactivity measured outside the plants, though twice the level Japan considers safe, has been relatively modest.
But Pentagon officials reported Sunday that helicopters flying 60 miles from the plant picked up small amounts of radioactive particulates - still being analyzed, but presumed to include cesium-137 and iodine-121 - suggesting widening environmental contamination.
In a country where memories of a nuclear horror of a different sort in the last days of World War II weigh heavily on the national psyche and national politics, the impact of continued venting of long-lasting radioactivity from the plants is hard to overstate.
Japanese reactor operators now have little choice but to periodically release radioactive steam as part of an emergency cooling process for the fuel of the stricken reactors that may continue for a year or more even after fission has stopped. The plant's operator must constantly try to flood the reactors with seawater, then release the resulting radioactive steam into the atmosphere, several experts familiar with the design of the Daiichi facility said.
That suggests that the tens of thousands of people who have been evacuated may not be able to return to their homes for a considerable period, and that shifts in the wind could blow radioactive materials toward Japanese cities rather than out to sea.
Re-establishing normal cooling of the reactors would require restoring electric power - which was cut in the earthquake and tsunami - and now may require plant technicians working in areas that have become highly contaminated with radioactivity.
More steam releases also mean that the plume headed across the Pacific could continue to grow. On Sunday evening, the White House sought to tamp down concerns, saying that modeling done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had concluded that "Hawaii, Alaska, the U.S. Territories and the U.S. West Coast are not expected to experience any harmful levels of radioactivity."
But all weekend, after a series of intense interchanges between Tokyo and Washington and the arrival of the first American nuclear experts in Japan, officials said they were beginning to get a clearer picture of what went wrong over the past three days. And as one senior official put it, "under the best scenarios, this isn't going to end anytime soon."
The essential problem is the definition of "off" in a nuclear reactor. When the nuclear chain reaction is stopped and the reactor shuts down, the fuel is still producing about 6 percent as much heat as it did when it was running, caused by continuing radioactivity, the release of subatomic particles and of gamma rays.
Usually when a reactor is first shut down, an electric pump pulls heated water from the vessel to a heat exchanger, and cool water from a river or ocean is brought in to draw off that heat.
But at the Japanese reactors, after losing electric power, that system could not be used. Instead the operators are dumping seawater into the vessel and letting it cool the fuel by boiling. But as it boils, pressure rises too high to pump in more water, so they have to vent the vessel to the atmosphere, and feed in more water, a procedure known as "feed and bleed."
When the fuel was intact, the steam they were releasing had only modest amounts of radioactive material, in a nontroublesome form. With damaged fuel, that steam is getting dirtier.
Another potential concern is that some Japanese reactors (as well as some in France and Germany) run on a mixed fuel known as mox, or mixed oxide, that includes reclaimed plutonium. It is not clear whether the stricken reactors are among those, but if they are, the steam they release could be more toxic.
Christopher D. Wilson, a reactor operator and later a manager at Exelon's Oyster Creek plant, near Toms River, N.J., said, "normally you would just re-establish electricity supply, from the on-site diesel generator or a portable one." Portable generators have been brought into Fukushima, he said.
Fukushima was designed by General Electric, as Oyster Creek was around the same time, and the two plants are similar. The problem, he said, was that the hookup is done through electric switching equipment that is in a basement room flooded by the tsunami, he said. "Even though you have generators on site, you have to get the water out of the basement," he said.
Another nuclear engineer with long experience in reactors of this type, who now works for a government agency, was emphatic. "To completely stop venting, they're going to have to put some sort of equipment back in service," he said. He asked not to be named because his agency had not authorized him to speak.
The central problem arises from a series of failures that began after the tsunami. It easily overcame the sea walls surrounding the Fukushima plant. It swamped the diesel generators, which were placed in a low-lying area, apparently because of misplaced confidence that the sea walls would protect them. At 3:41 p.m. Friday, roughly an hour after the quake and just around the time the region would have been struck by the giant waves, the generators shut down. According to Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant switched to an emergency cooling system that operates on batteries, but these were soon depleted.
Inside the plant, according to industry executives and American experts who received briefings over the weekend, there was deep concern that spent nuclear fuel that was kept in a "cooling pond" inside one of the plants had been exposed and begun letting off potentially deadly gamma radiation. Then water levels inside the reactor cores began to fall. While estimates vary, several officials and industry experts said Sunday that the top four to nine feet of the nuclear fuel in the core and control rods appear to have been exposed to the air - a condition that that can quickly lead to melting, and ultimately to full meltdown.
At 8 p.m., just as Americans were waking up to news of the earthquake, the government declared an emergency, contradicting its earlier reassurances that there were no major problems. But the chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, stressed that there had been no radiation leak.
But one was coming: Workers inside the reactors saw that levels of coolant water were dropping. They did not know how severely. "The gauges that measure the water level don't appear to be giving accurate readings," one American official said.
What the workers knew by Saturday morning was that cooling systems at a nearby power plant, Fukushima Daini, were also starting to fail, for many of the same reasons. And the pressure in the No. 1 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi was rising so fast that engineers knew they would have to relieve it by letting steam escape.
Shortly before 4 p.m., camera crews near the Daiichi plant captured what appears to have been an explosion at the No. 1 reactor - apparently caused by a buildup of hydrogen. It was dramatic television but not especially dangerous - except to the workers injured by the force of the blast.
The explosion was in the outer container, leaving the main reactor vessel unharmed, according to Tokyo Electric's reports to the International Atomic Energy Agency. (The walls of the outer building blew apart, as they are designed to do, rather than allow a buildup of pressure that could damage the reactor vessel.)
But the dramatic blast was also a warning sign of what could happen inside the reactor vessel if the core was not cooled. The International Atomic Energy Agency said that "as a countermeasure to limit damage to the reactor core," Tokyo Electric proposed injecting seawater mixed with boron - which can choke off a nuclear reaction - and it began to do that at 10:20 p.m. Saturday.
It was a desperation move: The corrosive seawater will essentially disable the 40-year-old plant; the decision to flood the core amounted to a decision to abandon the facility. But even that operation has not been easy.
To pump in the water, the Japanese have apparently tried used firefighting equipment - hardly the usual procedure. But forcing the seawater inside the containment vessel has been difficult because the pressure in the vessel has become so great.
One American official likened the process to "trying to pour water into an inflated balloon," and said that on Sunday it was "not clear how much water they are getting in, or whether they are covering the cores."
The problem was compounded because gauges in the reactor seemed to have been damaged in the earthquake or tsunami, making it impossible to know just how much water is in the core.
And workers at the pumping operation are presumed to be exposed to radiation; several workers, according to Japanese reports, have been treated for radiation poisoning. It is not clear how severe their exposure was.
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong, Hiroko Tabuchi from Tokyo and Henry Fountain from New York.
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3) Several Plant Workers Are Ill, but Radiation Risk in Japan Is Seen as Low for Now
By DENISE GRADY
March 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/world/asia/14health.html?ref=health
Although several plant workers are ill from radioactive exposure in Japan, the radiation risk to the public appears low so far, experts said.
"At least as of now, what we're looking at is rather more like Three Mile Island than Chernobyl," said Dr. David J. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University.
The radiation release from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, where the entire reactor blew up and vaporized its radioactive fuel, was about a million times the amount released from the partial core meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, he said. The Chernobyl accident led to an epidemic of thyroid cancer and increases in leukemia, he said.
But from Three Mile Island, Dr. Brenner said, "There is no evidence that anybody at all got sick, even decades later."
At the exposure rate now being reported at the boundary of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, it would take many weeks before people exposed would notice any symptoms.
"The sorts of numbers I'm seeing are not the sort that could be linked with radiological symptoms," Dr. Brenner said.
Inside the plant, however, the three workers with radiation sickness were presumably exposed to much more radiation.
"The medical consequences depend entirely on how much radioactive material is released," Dr. Brenner said.
The duration of exposure also matters.
High levels of exposure can cause severe radiation sickness and death. Symptoms can include nausea, fatigue, vomiting, hair loss, diarrhea and hemorrhaging.
Even high doses generally take several weeks to cause death.
"It's normally due to what we call 'gut death,' " Dr. Brenner said. "The lining of the gut gets depleted."
Radiation interferes with the cells' ability to divide and reproduce, and cells in the intestine are usually replaced frequently. For the same reason, the blood-forming cells in bone marrow are also sensitive to radiation. "What you really die of in the end is infection," Dr. Brenner said.
The more likely risk for the public is that of low-level exposures, which can increase the risk of cancer many years later. Again, the danger depends on the length of exposure and what types of radioactive materials to which one is exposed.
Some radioactive materials are readily absorbed by the body and linger there. Iodine, for example, goes to the thyroid gland, and strontium to bone, and they emit radiation inside the body that over time can lead to cancer or leukemia. Other radioactive materials, like tritium, pass quickly through the body.
The Japanese government is handing out iodine pills to flood the thyroid gland with ordinary iodine in hopes of preventing it from taking up the radioactive form.
Dr. Brenner said the iodine pills were protective, but were "a bit of a myth" because their use is based on the belief that the risk is from inhaling radioactive iodine. Actually, he said, 98 percent of people's exposure comes from milk and other dairy products.
"The way radioactive iodine gets into human beings is an indirect route," he said. "It falls to the ground, cows eat it and make milk with radioactive iodine, and you get it from drinking the milk. You get very little from inhaling it. The way to prevent it is just to stop people from drinking the milk." He said that the epidemic of thyroid cancer around Chernobyl could have been prevented if the government had immediately stopped people from drinking milk.
Crops can also be contaminated. "I wouldn't be eating an apple from a tree close to the plant," Dr. Brenner said.
Children, and fetuses, are more vulnerable to radiation than are adults. Scientists estimate that about 5 percent of the population is genetically more susceptible to radiation than the rest.
The radioactive elements released from the reactor form clouds that are carried off by the prevailing winds. Again, the risk depends on how much is released. "As it's being blown away, to some extent it's being dispersed," Dr. Brenner said. "And some of it falls on the ground."
One way of measuring radiation exposure is in a unit called the rem. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, most people in the United States receive 0.3 rem per year just from normal, background radiation. Flying for 12 hours at 39,000 feet exposes a person to 0.006 rem. At 5 to 10 rem, lab tests can pick up changes in blood chemistry. Nausea starts after 50 rem, hemorrhaging at 100 rem. At 500 rem, half of people exposed will die within 30 days. At 2,000 rem, a person can die within hours or days. So far, one employee at a nuclear plant in Japan has been reported to have had an exposure of 10 rem, not enough to produce obvious symptoms. The annual dose limit for workers at nuclear plants in the United States is 5 rem.
People are so afraid of radiation that any threat of exposure can cause what Dr. Brenner called psychophysical consequences. He cited an incident in 1987 in Goiania, Brazil, in which people were exposed to radioactive material stolen from a hospital. Fearing contamination, about 125,000 sought medical exams. Thousands reported symptoms of radiation sickness, like vomiting and rashes. Ultimately, only 249 turned out to have any signs of contamination.
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4) German Workers Rally in Solidarity with Wisconsin Public Employees
Teresa Casertano in the AFL-CIO Organizing Department sends us this report.
March 14, 2011
http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/03/11/german-workers-rally-in-solidarity-with-wisconsin-public-employees/
As tens of thousands of Wisconsin residents rally and march across the state tomorrow for the fourth weekend in a row, they will receive support from union members in Berlin who are holding a solidarity rally. Members of the German telecommunications union, ver.di, will turn out to to support bargaining rights for workers in the United States. They know that collective bargaining is not possible unless workers are able to join unions and participate in their own organizations free from the fear of reprisals by their employers.
In a letter to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who is trying to take away the right of public employees to bargain for a good, middle-class life, Frank Bsirske, chairman of the United Services Union ver.di of Germany, said Walker's "proposed unilateral action" is:
"...an attack on one of the fundamental pillars in a well-developed democracy, where social dialogue and collective bargaining through trade unions secure constructive relationships between employers and employees. This kind of relationship has proved its high value in many countries, both in times of economic growth and during crisis."
The ver.di members are part of a global effort with the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the Council of Global Unions, UNI Global Union and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) to organize 40,000 T-Mobile USA technicians, call center and retail workers all over the United States. T-Mobile is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, a German company that employs nearly 132,000 workers in Germany, most of whom are ver.di members. In Germany, Deutsche Telekom respects workers' right to belong to the union and engages productively with the union through collective bargaining.
Ver.di members have learned about the reality for T-Mobile workers in the United States, as T-Mobile USA workers have told stories of being instructed to turn in their colleagues for receiving union materials or to report any gathering of workers, even if they take place in the evening or on weekends. U.S. workers described their terror of even learning about their rights fearing that any demonstration of interest in the union would result in reprimand, reprisals surrounding promotions or opportunities for advancement, or outright dismissal.
Ver.di was shocked and disappointed that a German employer that has participated in dialogue and collective bargaining in its home country would stoop to the worst union-busting practices in its operations in the United States and other countries. Because they expect better from Deutsche Telekom they have taken a leadership role along with the the global labor movement to carry out a coordinated campaign to ensure that all Deutsche Telekom/ T-Mobile workers can exercise their right to organize and bargain collectively free from fear and intimidation.
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5) The Sport Needs to Change
By BOB HERBERT
March 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15herbert.html?hp
Dave Duerson was once a world-class athlete, a perfect physical specimen whose pro football career included Super Bowl championships with the Chicago Bears and New York Giants. Friends and former teammates would tell you that he was also a bright guy - a graduate of Notre Dame with a degree in economics and, at least for awhile, a successful businessman.
When he shot himself to death in his South Florida home last month, the despondent Duerson, who was 50, fired the bullet into his chest rather than into his head. He did not want to further damage his brain. As he explained in text messages and a handwritten note, the former all-pro safety wanted his brain tissue studied, presumably to determine whether he had been suffering from a devastating degenerative disease that is taking a terrible toll on what appears to be an increasing number of pro football players and other athletes.
As The Times has reported, Duerson wrote, "Please, see that my brain is given to the N.F.L.'s brain bank."
Professional football has a big, big problem on its hands, and I'm not talking about the lockout that is jeopardizing the 2011 season. The game is chewing up players like a meat grinder. The evidence is emerging of an extraordinary number of players struggling with lifelong physical debilitation, depression, dementia and many other serious problems linked to their playing days.
Duerson's concern was believed to have been centered on chronic traumatic encephalopathy, an incurable disease associated with depression and dementia in athletes who played violent sports like football and boxing. A number of retired football players, including some who took their own lives, were found to have had the disease, which can only be diagnosed post-mortem.
Pro football, the nation's most popular sport, had been ratcheting up its violence quotient for years. Fans loved it. But a backlash has developed as more and more stories come to light about the awful price retired players are paying for a sport that increasingly resembles Colosseum-like combat. Few players escape unscathed after years of brain-rattling, joint-crippling, bone-breaking, consciousness-altering collisions. Many live out their lives in chronic pain, varying degrees of paralysis, and all manner of cognitive and emotional distress.
The N.F.L. has taken some remedial steps, especially in the area of head injuries. But pro football, always violent, is now violent in the extreme, and there is some question as to whether that violent style of play - and the consequences that flow from it - can really be changed. Paul Tagliabue, a former N.F.L. commissioner, told The New Yorker about the comments of a group of former players who had looked closely at the way defensive play has changed. "They raised the idea," said Tagliabue, "that it was no longer tackle football. It was becoming collision football. The players looked like bionic men."
I am an enormous fan of football, but I get a queasy feeling when I see one of those tremendous hits that leaves the opposing player lying as if lifeless on the turf. Or when I read about players like Andre Waters, formerly of the Philadelphia Eagles and Arizona Cardinals, who shot himself to death in 2006 at the age of 44. A forensic pathologist said Waters's brain tissue looked like that of an 85-year-old man. It turned out that he had been suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the disease that Duerson may have feared.
This is an enormous tragedy. So many players are suffering in the shadows. They need much more help from the N.F.L., the players' union and the myriad others cashing in on a sport that has become a multibillion-dollar phenomenon. And big changes are needed in the rules, equipment and culture of the sport to cut down on the carnage inflicted on current and future players.
I once was a big fan of boxing. I marveled at the breathless, elaborately detailed stories my parents' generation told about Joe Louis and the unparalleled Sugar Ray Robinson. I followed Muhammad Ali's career from beginning to end. I read biographies of the great boxers of the 20th century.
But I also saw the televised fight in March 1962 in which Emile Griffith beat Benny (Kid) Paret so savagely that Paret died 10 days later. Robinson also killed a man in the ring, Jimmy Doyle, in a fight in 1947. And it's no secret that even the greatest fighters tended to end up in bad shape, demented or enfeebled from the punishment of their trade - Louis, Robinson, Ali, so many others. I haven't been able to watch the sport in years.
It's a very bad sign that chronic traumatic encephalopathy, long associated with boxing, is now linked to football. With the carnage increasingly emerging from the shadows, there is no guarantee that football's magical hold on the public will last. Players are not just suffering, some are dying. The sport needs to change.
Roger Cohen is off today.
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6) Workers Strain to Retake Control After Blast and Fire at Japan Plant
By KEITH BRADSHER, HIROKO TABUCHI and DAVID E. SANGER
March 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16nuclear.html?hp
TOKYO - A small crew of technicians braved radiation and fire through the day on Tuesday as they fought to prevent three nuclear reactors in northeastern Japan from melting down and stop storage ponds loaded with spent uranium fuel pods from bursting into flames.
Tokyo Electric Power Company officials announced on Tuesday evening that they would consider using helicopters in an attempt to douse with cold water a boiling rooftop storage pond for spent uranium fuel rods. The rods are still radioactive and potentially as hot and dangerous as the fuel rods inside the reactors if not kept submerged in water.
"The only ideas we have right now are using a helicopter to spray water from above, or inject water from below," a power company official said at a news conference. "We believe action must be taken by tomorrow or the day after."
With hydrogen gas bubbling up from chemical reactions set off by the hot fuel rods, the storage pond produced a fire and powerful explosion on Tuesday morning that blew a 26-foot-wide hole in the side of reactor No. 4 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. There were also concerns about the storage ponds at reactors 5 and 6.
Reactors 4, 5 and 6 at the plant, 140 miles northeast of Tokyo, were not operating on Friday afternoon when an offshore earthquake with a magnitude now estimated at 9.0 suddenly shook the site. A tsunami with waves up to 30 feet high rolled into the northeast Japanese coastline minutes later, swamping the plant.
At least 750 workers evacuated on Tuesday morning after a separate explosion ruptured the inner containment building at reactor No. 2 at the Daiichi plant, which was crippled by Friday's earthquake and tsunami. The explosion released a surge of radiation 800 times more intense than the recommended hourly exposure limit in Japan.
But 50 workers stayed behind, a crew no larger than would be stationed at the plant on a quiet spring day. Taking shelter when possible in the reactor's control room, which is heavily shielded from radiation, they struggled through the morning and afternoon to keep hundreds of gallons of seawater a minute flowing through temporary fire pumps into the three stricken reactors, where overheated fuel rods continued to boil away the water at a brisk pace.
By early afternoon radiation levels had plunged, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Workers have released surges of radiation each time they bleed radioactive steam from the troubled reactors in an attempt to manage the pressure inside the reactors, but the reactors are not yet releasing high levels of radiation on a sustained basis, Japanese officials said.
In a brief morning address to the nation, Prime Minister Naoto Kan pleaded for calm but warned that radiation that had leaked earlier had already spread from the crippled reactors and that there was "a very high risk" of further leakage.
The sudden turn of events, after an explosion Monday at one reactor and then an early-morning explosion Tuesday at yet another - the third in four days at the plant - already made the crisis at the plant the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl reactor disaster a quarter century ago. It had become impossible for workers to remain at many areas within the plant for extended periods, the nuclear watchdog said. Japan has requested assistance from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Earlier Tuesday the Japanese government told people living within about 20 miles of the Daiichi plant to stay indoors, keep their windows closed and stop using air conditioning. More than 100,000 people are believed to be in that area.
In Tokyo, 170 miles south of the plant, the metropolitan government said Tuesday it had detected radiation levels 20 times above normal over the city, though it stressed that such a level posed no immediate health threat and that readings had dropped since then. The explosion in reactor No. 2, a little after 6 a.m. on Tuesday, particularly alarmed Japanese officials and nuclear power experts around the world because it was the first detonation at the plant that appeared to occur inside one of the primary containment buildings.
Those buildings are fortress-like structures of steel and reinforced concrete, designed to absorb the impact of a plane crash and minimize radiation leaks. After a series of conflicting reports about how much damage was inflicted on the reactor after that blast, Yukio Edano. the chief cabinet secretary, said that "there is a very high probability that a portion of the containment vessel was damaged."
Japanese officials subsequently said that the explosion had damaged a doughnut-shaped steel container of water, known as a torus, that surrounds the base of the reactor vessel inside the primary containment building.
Ruptures in the torus are serious, said Michael Friedlander, a senior nuclear power plant operator for 13 years at three plants in the United States, including three years at a General Electric boiling water reactor very similar to the ones in trouble in Japan. But the torus is not as important as the reactor vessel itself, which has 6.7-inch-thick steel walls and 8.4-inch-thick steel for its roof and floor, and is designed to hold very high-pressure steam as well as the uranium fuel rods.
The reactor vessel has 20 safety valves that during a shutdown of the reactor inject steam into a million-gallon "suppression pool" of water in a steel torus immediately underneath it.
"Imagine if you had a big pressure cooker and you had a tube off the pressure cooker into a big tub of water - the suppression pool is the tub of water," said Mr. Friedlander, a defender of nuclear power who is now a money manager in Hong Kong.
Steam vented into the suppression pool from the reactor vessel is not supposed to be radioactive. But the steam becomes radioactive, and potentially very radioactive, if the fuel rods in the reactor vessel above have begun to melt.
The atmosphere in the primary containment building, around the reactor vessel and above the suppression pool, is supposed to consist of inert nitrogen, with no oxygen at all. An inert atmosphere is used in the primary containment building to avoid the risk of oxygen explosions with hydrogen if the reactor starts producing much larger quantities of hydrogen gas than usual, which is highly combustible with oxygen.
The blast on Tuesday morning that broke the suppression pool at reactor No. 2 shows that the reactor vessel is producing hydrogen and that oxygen may have somehow entered the atmosphere above the suppression pool, Mr. Friedlander said.
The primary containment building, with its massive steel and concrete walls, is housed with various ducts, electrical equipment and other gear inside a bigger building, the secondary containment building. Explosions at reactors No. 1 and No. 3 blew the roofs off those reactors' secondary containment buildings, which are not designed to contain hydrogen explosions, unlike primary containment buildings.
The storage pond blast at reactor No. 4 also appears to have ripped a hole in a secondary containment building, based on initial descriptions from Japanese officials.
A senior nuclear industry executive who insisted on anonymity said that a compromised suppression pool made it much harder to bleed high-pressure steam from an overheating nuclear reactor so as to pump more seawater into it. "How are you going to bleed into something that has got a big hole in it?" he said.
Mr. Friedlander was more optimistic, saying that the rupture in the primary containment building was much more likely to have occurred above the water line of the suppression pool than below it. "The likelihood is that it is still holding water," and so can be used for some venting of vapor from the reactor, he said.
But with the atmosphere above the suppression pool no longer inert, small explosions may accompany the release of further gas from the reactor as the hydrogen reacts with oxygen.
Earlier, industry executives in close contact with officials in Japan expressed extreme concern that the authorities were close to losing control over the fuel melting in three reactors at Daiichi, especially at the crippled No. 2 reactor where the containment vessel was damaged.
Even if a full meltdown is averted, Japanese officials have been facing unpalatable options. One was to continue flooding the reactors and venting the resulting steam, while hoping that the prevailing winds did not turn south toward Tokyo or west, across northern Japan to the Korean Peninsula. The other was to hope that the worst of the overheating was over, and that with the passage of a few more days the nuclear cores would cool enough to essentially entomb the radioactivity inside the plants, which clearly will never be used again. Both approaches carried huge risks.
While Japanese officials made no comparisons to past accidents, the release of an unknown quantity of radioactive gases and particles - all signs that the reactor cores were damaged from at least partial melting of fuel - added considerable tension to the effort to cool the reactors.
"It's way past Three Mile Island already," said Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton. "The biggest risk now is that the core really melts down and you have a steam explosion."
Keith Bradsher reported from Hong Kong, Hiroko Tabuchi from Tokyo, Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong, and David E. Sanger from Washington. Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting from Washington.
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7) In Fuel-Cooling Pools, a Danger for the Longer Term
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and HIROKO TABUCHI
March 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/asia/16fuel.html?hp
Even as workers race to prevent the radioactive cores of the damaged nuclear reactors in Japan from melting down, concerns are growing that nearby pools holding spent fuel rods could pose an even greater danger.
The pools, which sit on the top level of the reactor buildings and keep spent fuel submerged in water, have lost their cooling systems and the Japanese have been unable to take emergency steps because of the multiplying crises.
By late Tuesday, the water meant to cool spent fuel rods in the No. 4 reactor was boiling, Japan's nuclear watchdog said. If the water evaporates and the rods run dry, they could overheat and catch fire, potentially spreading radioactive materials in dangerous clouds.
Shigekatsu Oomukai, a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said the substantial capacity of the pool meant that the water in it was unlikely to evaporate soon. But he said workers were having difficulty reaching the pool to cool it, because of the high temperature of the water.
Temperatures appeared to be rising in the spent fuel pools at two other reactors at the plant, No. 5 and No. 6, said Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary. Meanwhile, workers continued to pump seawater into the No. 1 and No. 3 reactors, where cooling systems remained unusable.
The pools are a worry at the stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant because at least two of the reactors have lost their roofs in explosions, exposing the spent fuel pools to the atmosphere. By contrast, reactors have strong containment vessels that stand a better chance of bottling up radiation from a meltdown of the fuel in the reactor core.
If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools do indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity.
"It's worse than a meltdown," said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. "The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open."
A spokesman for the Japanese company that runs the stricken reactors said in an interview on Monday that the spent fuel at the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini plants had been left uncooled since shortly after the quake.
The company, Tokyo Electric, has not been able to cool the spent fuel pools because power has been knocked out, said Johei Shiomi, the spokesman. "There may be some heating up," he said.
Before Tuesday's fire, some scientists said that a worst-case outcome was unlikely and that the Japanese would probably have enough time to act before too much water boiled away. Firefighters with hoses can pour in water, they said, or helicopters could drop tons of water.
"I'm still hopeful that they can contain all this," Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist in the nuclear program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group in Washington, said in an interview. "You've got time to put fire hoses up there and get it filled if it's not leaking," he said of the pool.
A 1997 study by the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island described a worst-case disaster from uncovered spent fuel in a reactor cooling pool. It estimated 100 quick deaths would occur within a range of 500 miles and 138,000 eventual deaths.
The study also found that land over 2,170 miles would be contaminated and damages would hit $546 billion.
That section of the Brookhaven study focused on boiling water reactors - the kind at the heart of the Japanese crisis.
The threat is considered so severe that at the start of the crisis Friday, immediately after the shattering earthquake, Fukushima plant officials focused their attention on a damaged storage pool for spent nuclear fuel at the No. 2 reactor at Daiichi, said a nuclear executive who requested anonymity because his company is not involved in the emergency response at the reactors and is wary of antagonizing other companies in the industry.
The damage prompted the plant's management to divert much of the attention and pumping capacity to that pool, the executive added. The shutdown of the other reactors then proceeded badly, and problems began to cascade.
Mr. Shiomi of Tokyo Electric said that in addition to the power and cooling failures, some water had spilled from the pools.
But he said that the company thought there "was relatively little danger that temperatures would rise."
"If you compare this to everything that's been going on," Mr. Shiomi said, "it's not serious."
Each of the crippled reactors in Japan has one cooling pool sitting atop the main concrete structure. Thin roofs and metal walls usually surround the pools.
In a reactor pool, the time it takes uncooled fuel to begin boiling the surrounding water depends on how much fuel is present and how old it is. Fresh fuel is hotter in terms of radiation than old fuel is.
Mr. Lochbaum, who formerly taught reactor operation for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said the pools measured about 40 feet long, 40 feet wide and 45 feet deep. The spent fuel, he added, rested at the pool's bottom and rose no higher than 15 feet from the bottom.
That means that in normal operations, the spent fuel is covered by about 30 feet of cooling water.
Depending on the freshness of the spent fuel, Mr. Lochbaum said, the water in an uncooled pool would start to boil in anywhere from days to a week. The water would boil off to a dangerous level in another week or two.
Once most of the fuel is exposed, he said, it can catch fire.
If the spent fuel is a few months old, most of the iodine 131 - one of the most dangerous radioactive byproducts in spent fuel - will have decayed into harmless forms.
But the cesium 137 in the spent fuel has a half-life of 30 years, meaning it would take about two centuries to diminish its levels of radioactivity down to 1 percent.
It is cesium 137 that still contaminates much land in Ukraine around the Chernobyl reactor, which suffered a meltdown in 1986.
"I assume they are doing triage," Mr. Lochbaum said of the Japanese, with emergency personnel first trying to avoid core meltdowns and then turning their attention to the cooling pools.
He added that the explosions at the reactors at Daiichi could complicate efforts to try to reach the cooling pools and keep them filled with water.
"There's no telling what's up there," he said.
William J. Broad reported from New York, and Hiroko Tabuchi from Tokyo. Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
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8) Two Protesters Dead as Bahrain Declares State of Emergency
By ETHAN BRONNER, MICHAEL SLACKMAN and J. DAVID GOODMAN
March 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/world/middleeast/16bahrain.html?hp
MANAMA, Bahrain -Hours after the king of Bahrain declared a three-month state of emergency, doctors at a central hospital on Tuesday said two protesters had been killed and some 200 wounded and injured in clashes with riot police in the suburban village of Sitra.
One man, Ahmed Farhan, 24, had dozens of shotgun pellet wounds on his back and a gaping head injury, while a second man had tire marks from having been run over by security forces, the doctors said. Grisly video from the hospital, including of Mr. Farhan, appeared online shortly after.
"The signs are that this is a coordinated attack," said Dr. Ali al-Aradi, an administrator at Suleimaniya Hospital. "These were not skirmishes. This was an attack on the protesters. These are the kinds of wounds we are seeing - shotgun and head injuries."
The Ministry of Information said a security officer had been also been killed in the nearby village of Ma'ameer.
The violence around Sitra, a stronghold of antigovernment activists six miles south of the capital, contrasted starkly with a large protest in downtown Manama, where more than 10,000 protesters marched peacefully on the Saudi Arabian Embassy to denounce a military intervention by Persian Gulf countries the day before.
The entrance of foreign forces, including Saudi troops and those from other Gulf nations, threatened to escalate a local political conflict into a regional showdown; on Tuesday, Tehran, which has long claimed that Bahrain is historically part of Iran, branded the move "unacceptable."
The foreign troops did not appear to take up positions in the capital early on Tuesday, heading instead for the palace neighborhood of Riffa.
Nevertheless, the city took on the feel of a ghost town: businesses were shuttered, malls closed and the streets largely deserted as residents watched apprehensively to see what role the foreign military would play to quell widespread demonstrations.
Since a violent effort to clear central Manama on Sunday failed, the authorities have appeared to hand over whole sections of the capital and surrounding villages to the protesters, who have blocked roads with rubble and trash bins.
Bahrain's Ministry of Information, which has recently used its Twitter account to announce road closures, posted two messages in close succession claiming that protesters had attacked police and security forces in villages around the capital. One message suggested that a security officer had died: "A member of security force passed away in Maameer this evening when deliberately run over by one of the rioters." Another said: "Police patrols exposed to shooting by automatic weapons by a group of vandals in Buri. No injuries."
While there were no reports of fighting between protesters and foreign troops so far, The Associated Press, citing an unnamed Saudi security official, said that one soldier had been shot and killed by a protester on Tuesday. No details were given and the report could not be immediately confirmed. Bahrain state television denied the report, Reuters said.
The decision by Saudi Arabia to send in troops on Monday threatened to further inflame the conflict and transform this teardrop of a nation in the Persian Gulf into the Middle East's next proxy battle between regional and global powers. On Monday, Iranian state-run media went so far as to call the troop movement an invasion.
"The presence of foreign forces and interference in Bahrain's internal affairs is unacceptable and will further complicate the issue," Ramin Mehmanparast, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a news conference in Tehran, according to state-run media.
Even as predominantly Shiite Muslim Iran pursues a determined crackdown against dissent at home, Tehran has supported the protests led by the Shiite majority in Bahrain.
"People have some legitimate demands, and they are expressing them peacefully," Mr. Memanparast said. "It should not be responded to violently."
He added, "We expect their demands be fulfilled through correct means."
Iran's response - while anticipated - showed the depth of the rivalry across the Persian Gulf in a contest that has far-reaching consequences in many parts of the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia has been watching uneasily as Bahrain's Shiite majority has staged weeks of protests against a Sunni monarchy, fearing that if the protesters prevailed, Iran, Saudi Arabia's bitter regional rival, could expand its influence and inspire unrest elsewhere.
On Monday, about 2,000 troops - 1,200 from Saudi Arabia and 800 from the United Arab Emirates - entered Bahrain as part of a force operating under the aegis of the Gulf Cooperation Council, a six-nation regional coalition of Sunni rulers that has grown increasingly anxious over the sustained challenge to Bahrain's king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. "This is the initial phase," a Saudi official said. "Bahrain will get whatever assistance it needs. It's open-ended."
The decision is the first time the council has used collective military action to help suppress a popular revolt - in this case a Shiite popular revolt. It was rejected by the opposition, and by Iran, as an "occupation." The troops entered Bahrain at an especially combustible moment in the standoff between protesters and the monarchy. In recent days protesters have begun to move from the encampment in Pearl Square, the symbolic center of the nation, to the actual seat of power and influence, the Royal Court and the financial district. As the troops moved in, protesters controlled the main highway and said they were determined not to leave.
"We don't know what is going to happen," Jassim Hussein Ali, a member of the opposition Wefaq party and a former member of Parliament, said in a phone interview. "Bahrain is heading toward major problems, anarchy. This is an occupation, and this is not welcome."
Rasool Nafisi, an academic and Iran expert based in Virginia, said: "Now that the Saudis have gone in, they may spur a similar reaction from Iran, and Bahrain becomes a battleground between Saudi and Iran. This may prolong the conflict rather than put an end to it, and make it an international event rather than a local uprising."
An adviser to the United States government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the news media, agreed. "Iran's preference was not to get engaged because the flow of events was in their direction," he said. "If the Saudi intervention changes the calculus, they will be more aggressive."
Though Bahrain said it had invited the force, the Saudi presence highlights the degree to which the kingdom has become concerned over Iran's growing regional influence, and demonstrates that the Saudi monarchy has drawn the line at its back door. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a close ally of Washington, has traditionally preferred to operate in the shadows through checkbook diplomacy. It has long provided an economic lifeline to Bahrain.
But it now finds itself largely standing alone to face Iran since its most important ally in that fight, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, has been ousted in a popular uprising. Iran's ally, Hezbollah, recently toppled the Saudi-backed government of Lebanon - a symbol of its regional might and Saudi Arabia's diminishing clout.
But Bahrain is right at Saudi Arabia's eastern border, where the kingdoms are connected by a causeway.
The Gulf Cooperation Council was clearly alarmed at the prospect of a Shiite political victory in Bahrain, fearing that it would inspire restive Shiite populations in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to protest as well. The majority of the population in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern provinces is Shiite, and there have already been small protests there.
"If the opposition in Bahrain wins, then Saudi loses," said Mustafa el-Labbad, director of Al Sharq Center for Regional and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "In this regional context, the decision to move troops into Bahrain is not to help the monarchy of Bahrain, but to help Saudi Arabia itself ."
The Bahrain government said that it had invited the force in to help restore and preserve public order. The United States - which has continued to back the monarchy - said Monday that the move was not an occupation. The United States has long been allied with Bahrain's royal family and has based the Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain for many years.
Though the United States eventually sided with the demonstrators in Egypt, in Bahrain it has instead supported the leadership while calling for restraint and democratic change. The Saudi official said the United States was informed Sunday that the Saudi troops would enter Bahrain on Monday.
Saudi and council officials said the military forces would not engage with the demonstrators, but would protect infrastructure, government offices and industries, even though the protests had largely been peaceful. The mobilization would allow Bahrain to free up its own police and military forces to deal with the demonstrators, the officials said.
The Gulf Cooperation Council "forces are not there to kill people," said a Saudi official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press. "This is a G.C.C. decision; we do not violate international law."
But the officials also acknowledged that it was a message to Iran. "There is no doubt Iran is involved," said the official, though no proof has been offered that Iran has had anything to do with the political unrest.
Political analysts said that it was likely that the United States did not object to the deployment in part because it, too, saw a weakened monarchy as a net benefit to Iran at a time when the United States wants to move troops out of Iraq, where Iran has already established an influence.
The White House issued a statement calling on "the government of Bahrain to pursue a peaceful and meaningful dialogue with the opposition" and for the "G.C.C. partners to show restraint."
The assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, Jeffrey D. Feltman, traveled to Bahrain on Tuesday to meet with "government and nongovernmental leaders," according to a statement from the American Embassy, "in order to support a made-in-Bahrain approach to the political, social and economic challenges that Bahrain faces."
The military force is one part of a Gulf Cooperation Council effort to try to contain the crisis in Bahrain that broke out Feb. 14, when young people called for a Day of Rage, fashioned after events in Egypt and Tunisia. The police and then the army killed seven demonstrators, leading Washington to press Bahrain to remove its forces from the street.
The royal family allowed thousands of demonstrators to camp at Pearl Square. It freed some political prisoners, allowed an exiled opposition leader to return and reshuffled the cabinet. And it called for a national dialogue.
But the concessions - after the killings - seemed to embolden a movement that went from calling for a true constitutional monarchy to demanding the downfall of the monarchy. The monarchy has said it will consider instituting a fairly elected Parliament, but it insisted that the first step would be opening a national dialogue - a position the opposition has rejected, though it was unclear whether the protesters were speaking with one voice.
The council moved troops in after deciding earlier to help prop up the king with a contribution of $10 billion over 10 years, and said that it might increase that figure. But if the goal was to intimidate Iran, or the protesters, that clearly was not the first response.
Bahrain's opposition groups issued a statement: "We consider the entry of any soldier or military machinery into the Kingdom of Bahrain's air, sea or land territories a blatant occupation."
Ethan Bronner reported from Manama, Bahrain, Michael Slackman from Berlin and J. David Goodman from New York. Nada Bakri contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, Steven Lee Myers from Paris, Eric Schmitt from Washington and Alan Cowell from London.
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9) Haiti: U.S. Asks South Africa to Delay Aristide's Departure
By REUTERS
March 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/americas/15briefs-ART-Haiti.html?ref=world
The Obama administration said Monday that the former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide should refrain from returning to Haiti before the presidential runoff election on Sunday. A State Department spokesman, Mark Toner, said that Mr. Aristide, above, had the right to return, but doing so this week "can only be seen as a conscious choice to impact Haiti's elections." A delay, Mr. Toner said, would "permit the Haitian people to cast their ballots in a peaceful atmosphere." He said the United States was asking South Africa, where Mr. Aristide has lived in exile since 2004, to delay his departure. Mr. Aristide's lawyer, Ira Kurzban, said the United States "should leave that decision to the democratically elected government instead of seeking to dictate the terms under which a Haitian citizen may return to his country."
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10) Safety on the Cheap
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
RSN Special Coverage: Disaster in Japan
March 16, 2011
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/5298-safety-on-the-cheap
an we please agree that in the real world corporations exist for one purpose, and one purpose only - to make as much money as possible, which means cutting costs as much as possible?
The New York Times reports that GE marketed the Mark 1 boiling water reactors, used in TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi plant, as cheaper to build than other reactors because they used a comparatively smaller and less expensive containment structure.
Yet American safety officials have long thought the smaller design more vulnerable to explosion and rupture in emergencies than competing designs. (By the way, the same design is used in 23 American nuclear reactors at 16 plants.)
In the mid-1980s, Harold Denton, then an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting should the fuel rods overheat and melt in an accident. A follow-up report from a study group convened by the Commission concluded that "Mark 1 failure within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather likely."
Sound familiar?
The National Commission appointed to investigate the giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last April recently concluded that BP failed to adequately supervise Halliburton Company's work on installing the well.
This was the case even though BP knew Halliburton lacked experience testing cement to prevent blowouts and hadn't performed adequately before on a similar job. In short: Neither company bothered to spend the money to ensure adequate testing of the cement.
Nor did Massey Energy spend the money needed to ensure its mines were safe.
And so on.
Don't get me wrong. No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil well, a coal mine, or anything else that's one hundred percent safe under all circumstances. The costs would be prohibitive. It's unreasonable to expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential accident.
Inevitably there's a tradeoff. Reasonable precaution means spending as much on safety as the probability of a particular disaster occurring, multiplied by its likely harm to human beings and the environment if it does occur.
Here's the problem. Profit-making corporations have every incentive to underestimate these probabilities and lowball the likely harms.
This is why it's necessary to have such things as government regulators, why regulators must be independent of the industries they regulate, and why regulators need enough resources to enforce the regulations.
It's also why the public in every nation is endangered if the political clout of its biggest corporations - BP, Halliburton, Massey, GE, or TEPCO - grows too large.
Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written twelve books, including "The Work of Nations," "Locked in the Cabinet," "Supercapitalism" and his latest book, "AFTERSHOCK: The Next Economy and America's Future." His 'Marketplace' commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.
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11) The Abuse of Private Manning
New York Times Editorial
March 14, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15tue3.html?scp=1&sq=editorial%20bradley%20manning&st=cse
Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been imprisoned for nine months on charges of handing government files to WikiLeaks, has not even been tried let alone convicted. Yet the military has been treating him abusively, in a way that conjures creepy memories of how the Bush administration used to treat terror suspects. Inexplicably, it appears to have President Obama's support to do so.
Private Manning is in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va. For one hour a day, he is allowed to walk around a room in shackles. He is forced to remove all his clothes every night. And every morning he is required to stand outside his cell, naked, until he passes inspection and is given his clothes back.
Military officials say, without explanation, that these precautions are necessary to prevent Private Manning from injuring himself. They have put him on "prevention of injury" watch, yet his lawyers say there is no indication that he is suicidal and the military has not placed him on a suicide watch. (He apparently made a sarcastic comment about suicide.)
Forced nudity is a classic humiliation technique. During the early years of the Bush administration's war on terror, C.I.A. interrogators regularly stripped prisoners to break down barriers of resistance, increase compliance and extract information. One C.I.A. report from 2004 said that nudity, along with sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation, was used to create a mind-set in which the prisoner "learns to perceive and value his personal welfare, comfort and immediate needs more than the information he is protecting."
Private Manning is not an enemy combatant, and there is no indication that the military is trying to extract information from him. Many military and government officials remain furious at the huge dump of classified materials to WikiLeaks. But if this treatment is someone's way of expressing that emotion, it would be useful to revisit the presumption of innocence and the Constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
Philip Crowley, a State Department spokesman, committed the classic mistake of a Washington mouthpiece by telling the truth about Private Manning to a small group (including a blogger): that the military's treatment of Private Manning was "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid." He resigned on Sunday.
Far more troubling is why President Obama, who has forcefully denounced prisoner abuse, is condoning this treatment. Last week, at a news conference, he said the Pentagon had assured him that the terms of the private's confinement "are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards." He said he could not go into details, but details are precisely what is needed to explain and correct an abuse that should never have begun.
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12) U.S. Calls Radiation 'Extremely High' and Urges Deeper Caution in Japan
By DAVID E. SANGER and MATTHEW L. WALD
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/asia/17nuclear.html?hp
WASHINGTON - The chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave a significantly bleaker appraisal of threat posed by the Japanese nuclear crisis than the Japanese government, saying on Wednesday that the damage at one crippled reactor was much more serious than Japanese officials had acknowledged and advising to Americans to evacuate a wider area around the plant than ordered by the Japanese government.
Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the commission, said in Congressional testimony that the commission believed that all the water in the spent fuel pool at the No. 4 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station had boiled dry, leaving fuel rods stored there completely exposed. As a result, he said, "We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures."
If his analysis is accurate and Japanese workers have been unable to keep the spent fuel at that inoperative reactor properly cooled - covered with water at all times - radiation could make it difficult not only to fix the problem at reactor No. 4, but to keep workers at the Daiichi complex from servicing any of the other crippled reactors at the plant.
Mr. Jaczko said radiation levels may make it impossible to continue what he called the "backup backup" cooling functions that have so far prevented full nuclear meltdowns at the other reactors. Those efforts consist of dumping water on overheated fuel and then letting the radioactive steam vent into the atmosphere.
The emergency measures are all that has prevented the disaster at Daiichi from becoming a full blow meltdown.
Mr. Jaczko's testimony came as the American Embassy, on advice from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told American to evacuate a radius of "approximately 50 miles" from the Fukushima plant.
The advice represents a far more grave assessment of the situation at the stricken reactors than the decisions made by the Japanese themselves, who have told everyone within 20 kilometers, about 12 miles, to evacuate, and those between 20 and 30 kilometers to take shelter. And the recommendation comes as the Japanese government has said it will be giving less information about the situation.
Earlier in the day, Japanese authorities announced another escalation of the crisis at Daiichi when they said that a second reactor unit at the plant may have suffered damage to its primary containment structure and appeared to be releasing radioactive steam.
The break, at the No. 3 reactor unit, worsened the already perilous conditions at the plant, a day after officials said the containment vessel in the No. 2 reactor had also cracked.
The possibility of high radiation levels above the plant prompted the Japanese military to put off a highly unusual plan to dump water from helicopters - a tactic normally used to combat forest fires - to lower temperatures in a pool containing spent fuel rods that was dangerously overheating at the No. 4 reactor. The operation would have meant flying a helicopter into the steam rising from the plant.
But in one of a series of rapid and at times confusing pronouncements on the crisis, the authorities insisted that damage to the containment vessel at the No. 3 reactor - the main focus of concern earlier on Wednesday - was unlikely to be severe.
Yukio Edano, the chief cabinet secretary, said the possibility that the No. 3 reactor had "suffered severe damage to its containment vessel is low." Earlier he said only that the vessel might have been damaged; columns of steam were seen rising from it in live television coverage.
The reactor's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said it had been able to double the number of people battling the crisis at the plant to 100 from 50, but that was before the clouds of radioactive steam began billowing from the plant. On Tuesday, 750 workers were evacuated, leaving a skeleton crew of 50 struggling to reduce temperatures in the damaged facility. An increasing proportion of the people at the plant are soldiers, but the exact number is not known.
The Pentagon said Wednesday that American military forces in Japan were not allowed within 50 miles of the plant and that some flight crews who might take part in relief missions were being given potassium iodide to protect against the effects of radiation. Tokyo Electric said Wednesday that some of those at the plant had taken cover for 45 minutes on site, and left water pumps running at reactors Nos. 1, 2 and 3. There was no suspension of cooling operations, said Kazuo Yamanaka, an official at Tokyo Electric. The vessel that possibly ruptured on Wednesday had been seen as the last fully intact line of defense against large-scale releases of radioactive material from the stricken reactor, but it was not clear how serious the possible breach might be.
The possible rupture, five days after a devastating earthquake and tsunami crippled the plant, followed a series of explosions and other problems there that have resulted in the world's worst nuclear crisis since the Chernobyl accident in 1986.
The head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, who is Japanese, said he would leave for Japan as soon as possible to assess the situation.
The revised official assessment of the severity of the damage at the No. 3 reactor may have been intended to reduce some concerns about the containment vessel, which encloses the core, but the implications of overheating in the fuel rod pool at No. 4 seemed potentially dire.
There are six reactors at the plant, all of which have pools holding spent fuel rods at the top level of the reactor building. Reactors 4, 5 and 6 were out of service when the earthquake and tsunami struck, and there were concerns about the pools at 5 and 6 as well, and possibly those at the other reactors.
At a hearing in Washington on Wednesday held by two subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said, "We think there is a partial meltdown" at the plant.
"We are trying to monitor it very closely," he said. "We hear conflicting reports about exactly what is happening in the several reactors now at risk. I would not want to speculate about what is happening."
He said that his agency had sent 39 people to the American Embassy and to United States consulates in Japan "with the skills, expertise and equipment to help assess, survey and monitor areas." The department has also shipped survey equipment that can measure radiation levels from the air, he said.
The developments were the latest in Japan's swirling tragedy since the quake and tsunami struck the country with unbridled ferocity last Friday. Emperor Akihito made his first ever televised appearance on Wednesday to tell the nation he was "deeply worried" about the nuclear crisis.
International alarm about the nuclear crisis appeared to be growing, as several nations urged their citizens in Japan to head to safer areas in the south or leave the country. Prior advisories had largely been limited to simply avoiding nonessential travel. Germany urged its citizens to move to areas farther away from the stricken nuclear plant.
Earlier Wednesday morning, Tokyo Electric reported that a fire was burning at the No. 4 reactor building, just hours after officials said flames that erupted Tuesday had been doused.
A government official at Japan's nuclear regulatory agency soon after said that flames and smoke were no longer visible, but he cautioned that it was unclear if the fire had died out. He also was not clear if it was a new fire or if the fire Tuesday had never gone out.
Hiroko Tabuchi contributed reporting from Tokyo, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.
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13) Forces Rout Protesters From Bahrain Square
By ETHAN BRONNER
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/middleeast/17bahrain.html?hp
MANAMA, Bahrain - Hundreds of riot police and military troops moved early Wednesday into Pearl Square, the stronghold of the antigovernment protest movement here, using tanks, helicopters and jeeps with machine guns mounted on their roofs to expel demonstrators clamoring for reform.
Two days after the Sunni monarchy of Bahrain brought in 2,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and other neighboring allies under the auspices of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the day after it declared martial law, security forces rolled across the center of town, taking it from the Shiite protesters who had moved in a month ago and leaving it in flames.
"The G.C.C. troops are for fighting against foreign forces," a protester, Syed al-Alawi, told Al Jazeera. "Instead they are targeting the people of Bahrain."
Enormous plumes of black smoke choked the central city landscape as troops repeatedly fired tear gas canisters, rubber bullets and what sounded like live ammunition, igniting fires in tents, trees and brush. The flames were so extensive that the security forces used water cannons normally used to break up crowds to extinguish the fires.
There was no immediate word on casualties. Protesters put up only token resistance, throwing rocks as most of the hundreds in the square fled from the huge display of military might.
Witnesses also said the army had taken over the main Salmaniya Hospital, which became an opposition stronghold in earlier attempts by the government to expel protesters modeling their occupation of Pearl Square on the demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square that forced President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt from office.
Details were sparse as the crackdown continued and government spokesmen said that they, too, were seeking information.
Activists said soldiers had arrived in villages outside the capital, including Sanabis and Sitra. There were reports on Facebook and Twitter of injured civilians unable to get to hospitals because ambulances were said to be barred from operating.
"Right now, no one is allowed to leave their houses and the hospital is under siege," a private doctor who volunteers at Salmaniya Hospital said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he feared arrest.
"They are not allowing ambulances in," he said.
"Doctors are being attacked and asked to leave" at gunpoint, he said. "The army has control of the roads and questions any movement." He said makeshift first-aid areas were being set up in mosques and private homes but few had medical supplies.
One doctor told Al Jazeera that protesters were arriving with "lethal wounds" of the "chest, abdomen and brain," and said it was "like a genocide."
Around Pearl Square, where military helicopters hovered, uniformed police accompanied by men in civilian clothes were seen smashing parked cars and pulling open trunks and doors. Journalists were warned not to wander the streets, and one was seen being arrested by soldiers in an armored vehicle.
In Iraq, home to the region's second largest Shiite population after Iran, followers of Moktada al-Sadr, the powerful anti-American cleric, rallied in the streets of Sadr City on Wednesday to protest the crackdown in Bahrain. Mr. Sadr, who is currently in Qom, Iran, but has perhaps more power than any Iraqi official to fill the streets with protesters, called for a much wider demonstration across Iraq on Friday.
On Wednesday, as Iraqi state television provided steady coverage of the unrest in Bahrain, about a thousand people rallied in Sadr City, chanting, "Yes, Yes for Bahrain! Yes, yes for Islam," and burning an effigy of Bahrain's prince.
By the time first light came to the waters of the Persian Gulf, scores of jeeps and tanks were drawn up along the coastal area. Some reports said tanks had also rolled toward the financial district. Buildings neighboring Pearl Square lost electricity and Internet connections at around 6:30 a.m., as the authorities sought to block the communications that had enabled demonstrators to marshal their forces here, just as they had across the Arab world.
The situation in Bahrain is "alarming," said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking to reporters in Cairo before boarding a plane to Tunisia, where a wave of popular unrest sweeping the Middle East began. She urged Bahrain's rulers to focus on the economic and political grievances raised by the protests: "We have said not only to the Bahrainis but to our Gulf partners that we do not think the security is the answer to what is going on."
It was not clear if any of the foreign troops brought into Bahrain were involved in the operation.
On Tuesday, the battle for control of this strategic island kingdom intensified as Iran lashed out at the arrival of Saudi and other troops. Two men were killed by security forces in a growing wave of unrest.
A senior American diplomat arrived Tuesday on an unplanned visit and sought ways to calm the chaos while pressing the government to exercise restraint. Long-simmering popular anger at the autocratic government and Sunni Muslim domination over a Shiite majority has been ratcheted up by recent revolts across the Arab world.
"We are not an exact copy of what happened in Egypt, but we have been inspired by it," Redha Hayat, a petroleum technician manning a protester checkpoint in the village of Sanabis, said Tuesday.
Since Sunday, much of Manama, the capital, and many surrounding villages have taken on the quality of a war zone, with overturned trash hauling bins and piles of rubble blocking empty streets lined with shuttered malls. Protesters and the police have set up competing checkpoints, schools are closed, gasoline stations have no fuel, cash machines are empty and there are daily encounters between tear-gas-lobbing police officers and demonstrators.
Doctors at Salmaniya Hospital in Manama estimated that 200 people had been injured on Tuesday and said two had been killed in the village of Sitra in clashes with the riot police. One man, Ahmed Farhan, 24, had dozens of shotgun pellet wounds in his back and a gaping head injury. The second man, a foreign worker from Bangladesh, had tire marks from having been run over by security forces, the doctors said.
"The signs are that this is a coordinated attack," said Dr. Ali al-Aradi, a hospital administrator. "These were not skirmishes. This was an attack on the protesters. These are the kinds of wounds we are seeing - shotgun and head injuries."
The government, meanwhile, accused the protesters of running over and killing at least two members of the security forces and directing automatic weapons fire at others. It was impossible to verify such claims.
Iran, the center of Shiite Islam which has sometimes called Bahrain one of its own provinces, objected angrily to the troops' arrival. On Tuesday, the state media called it an invasion and the Foreign Ministry spokesman told a news conference in Tehran that the presence of foreign troops in Bahrain was "unacceptable."
There is little evidence that the Shiite-led protests here have an Iranian sponsor or flavor. In fact, they are at least as much about demands for a democratic government as about sectarianism. But the risk of Iranian interference is clearly on the minds of the Saudis and the Americans.
Bahrain, a longtime American ally, is home to the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet, which patrols the Persian Gulf and helps support the war in Afghanistan. The kingdom also allows American military aircraft to operate from its main air base.
But the Obama administration has been urging the royal family to step up long-promised political reforms. On Saturday, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates stopped here to tell King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa that "baby steps" toward change were not enough. Jeffrey D. Feltman, an assistant secretary of state, was in Manama on Tuesday seeking solutions to what an American Embassy statement called "rising tensions and increased incidents of violence in Bahrain."
A White House spokesman called for "calm and restraint on all sides." He added: "We are particularly concerned by the increasing reports of provocative acts and sectarian violence by all groups. The use of force and violence from any source will only worsen the situation. One thing is clear: there is no military solution to the problems in Bahrain. A political solution is necessary and all sides must now work to produce a dialogue that addresses the needs of all of Bahrain's citizens."
Shortly after arriving in Cairo on Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton telephoned Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, to express concern about the intervention in Bahrain. At a news conference, she said, "The use of force and violence from any source will only worsen the situation." And she repeated the American call for a negotiated resolution between protesters and Bahrain's government that seems more remote than ever after a declaration of a national emergency.
Although she declined to characterize the Saudi action, she said she told Prince Saud that "the security challenges cannot be a substitute for a political resolution."
At the same time, the British Foreign Office said Wednesday that its embassy in Manama would be closed until further notice. On Tuesday afternoon, about 10,000 people marched from Pearl Square to the Saudi Embassy to urge the Saudis to take their troops back. It was peaceful and flowers were placed at the embassy's gate.
But in the village of Sitra, a center of antimonarchy activism where the two men were killed, the mood was entirely different on Tuesday. Hundreds of young men, many armed with sticks, dominated the intersections and sought to confront dozens of policemen.
Several truck drivers had placed their trucks in the middle of the main road to block the police who mostly stayed on the outskirts shooting tear gas canisters.
People sympathetic to the protesters drove through by flashing a pre-established code with their headlights. Women draped in black sliced onions and pieces of citrus fruit useful in staving off the effects of tear gas.
"This is one of the poorest and most active villages in Bahrain," said Jalila Alawi, a social worker who was watching with her two teenage daughters. The village is entirely Shiite. The royal family is Sunni, as is the group of elites, about 30 percent of the population, that runs most of the country's institutions.
In another activist village, Sanabis, Ghada Nasser, an English teacher at the local primary girls' school, said armed gangs that she believed were sponsored by the security services had been entering the village and causing trouble. She said no one had been sleeping since Sunday because of the turmoil.
"I wish the Americans would help us," she said. "But the day after your defense minister came here, the Saudi troops came in. What is the United States doing to end this situation?"
Reporting was contributed by Nadim Audi from Manama, Steven Lee Myers from Cairo, Alan Cowell from London, Tim Arango from Baghdad, and J. David Goodman from New York.
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14) China Slows Nuclear Power Plans
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/asia/17china.html?ref=world
BEIJING - China, the world's leader in construction of new nuclear power plants, announced that it was suspending new plant approvals until it could strengthen safety standards. It also announced stepped-up inspections at its existing plants.
China plans to add more than 25 reactors, but most are already under construction, and it was unclear how many would be affected by the new order.
The announcement came after Premier Wen Jiabao discussed Japan's nuclear crisis with the State Council, a body roughly equivalent to the White House cabinet.
"We must fully grasp the importance and urgency of nuclear safety, and development of nuclear power must make safety the top priority," the government said on its Web site. "Any hazards must be thoroughly dealt with, and those that do not conform to safety standards must immediately cease construction."
The government also said that levels of radiation remained normal in China and that experts had concluded that the wind would scatter the radiation from Japan's stricken Daiichi nuclear complex to the east over the Pacific Ocean, away from China. "This will not affect the health of our public," the statement said. Officials have portrayed nuclear energy as a way for the nation to reduce its reliance on coal and cut its carbon dioxide emissions while at the same time meeting its surging demands for electricity. The country has never had a serious nuclear accident, though the speed of its construction program has raised safety concerns.
International experts complained in 2009 that China was short on nuclear inspectors, a problem the government pledged to remedy by quintupling the number of staff at its safety agency by the end of that year.
Also in 2009, the government-appointed head of China National Nuclear Corp., which overseas China's nuclear program, was detained because of allegations of bid-rigging in nuclear power construction contracts. That scandal raised fears that contractors were being allowed to cut corners and evade safety standards.
Some specialists also worried that China was building plants too close to urban areas or earthquake fault lines. In late February, just a few weeks before the crisis at Japan's Daiichi nuclear complex began to unfold, the Ministry of Environmental Protection announced new regulations prohibiting the construction near earthquake zones or major cities.
As recently as Saturday, before the gravity of the nuclear disaster in Japan was clear, a top Chinese official restated China's commitment to nuclear power.
"Some lessons we learn from Japan will be considered in the making of China's nuclear power plans," Zhang Lijun, vice minister of Environmental Protection, said then. "But China will not change its determination and plan for developing nuclear power."
He also said that China uses a more modern design for its plants than Japan's stricken reactors.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 16, 2011
An earlier version of this article referred to incorrectly to the number of nuclear plants China has. The country has 13 reactors and plans to add more than 25; it does not have that many nuclear plants.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 16, 2011
An earlier version of this article also incorrectly attributed a quote. The statement of support of China's nuclear expansion on Saturday was made by Zhang Lijun, vice minister of Environmental Protection, not by Liu Tienan, chief of China's National Energy Bureau.
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15) Ohio Town Sees Public Job as Only Route to Middle Class
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
March 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/us/16ohio.html?ref=us
GALLIPOLIS, Ohio - Jodi and Ralph Taylor are public workers whose jobs as a janitor and a sewer manager cover life's basics. They have moved out of a trailer into a house, do not have to rely on food stamps and sometimes even splurge for the spicy wing specials at the Courtside Bar and Grill.
While that might not seem like much, jobs like theirs, with benefits and higher-than-minimum wages, are considered plum in this depressed corner of southern Ohio. Decades of industrial decline have eroded private-sector jobs here, leaving a thin crust of low-paying service work that makes public-sector jobs look great in comparison.
Now, as Ohio's legislature moves toward final approval of a bill that would chip away at public-sector unions, those workers say they see it as the opening bell in a race to the bottom. At stake, they say, is what little they have that makes them middle class.
"These jobs let you put good food on the table and send your kids on school trips," said Monty Blanton, a retired electrician and union worker. "The gap between low and middle is collapsing."
Gallipolis (pronounced gal-uh-POLICE) is a faded town on the Ohio River, one whose fortunes fell with the decline in industries like steel in bigger cities along the river. That erased a swath of middle-income jobs in the area, said Bob Walton, who, as a commissioner for the Southern Ohio Port Authority, an economic development agency, has tracked the economic history of the area for decades.
"It's a real big change," Mr. Walton said. "It has changed the complexion of our community."
Today, storefronts are mostly dark. About one in three people live in poverty. Billboards advertise oxygen tanks and motorized wheelchairs. Old photographs in a local diner look like an exhibit from a town obituary. The region has some of the highest rates of prescription drug abuse in the state, with more people dying from overdoses than car crashes, according to Ed Hughes, executive director of the Counseling Center in Portsmouth, about 55 miles west of here.
David Beaver, 65, a barber, said that when he got out of high school, "you could go anywhere you wanted to and pick your job."
"Now, it's depressing," Mr. Beaver said. "I hear the boys talking. They can't find anything."
It is not that there are no jobs, but rather that the jobs available pay too little and have no benefits, resulting in, as Mr. Beaver put it, "just scraping by." A private hospital and two power plants do offer good jobs, but they are highly competitive and many require some higher education, something that fewer than one in five people here have, according to 2009 census data.
So most people scrape by, as Ms. Taylor did before landing her state job in 1996. At the time, she was living in a trailer and working in low-wage jobs at Wendy's, Dairy Queen and a Big Lots discount store. Her hourly wage jumped to $9 when she started at the Gallipolis Developmental Center, a state home for mentally retarded people, up from $5.25 at a private nursing home.
"If I wasn't working at the G.D.C., I'd have to work around the clock," said Chris Smith, Ms. Taylor's colleague, referring to the center, where she has worked for 20 years. "I'd have to work two or three jobs to keep at this level."
The Taylors are not college educated, but their public-sector jobs have made them middle class. Together they earn about $63,000 a year, a sum that puts them squarely at the middle point of earnings for American families, and higher than the $50,000 earned by the typical Gallipolis family.
Money is still tight. When their washing machine broke in November, they had to put the new one on a credit card. They could not afford college for either of their sons. One is in the Marines, and the other, a high school senior, just enlisted.
"We're not living in any rich, high-income way," said Ms. Taylor, 37, who, together with her husband, protested the public-sector bill in Columbus this month.
"What are they wanting?" she said of the bill. "For everyone to be making minimum wage?"
Wages at the bottom of the labor market have stagnated since 1970, with inflation gobbling up gains made over the years. The federal minimum wage buys a lot less today; it represented just 38 percent of the average hourly wage for private, nonsupervisory workers in 2010, down from 47 percent in 1970, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"The wage story is incredibly bleak for everyone from the middle on down," said Jacob S. Hacker, a political science professor at Yale University and co-author of "Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class." "We've gotten dramatically richer as a society, but if you're a wage earner below the median, you've seen your wages stagnate or shrink."
Retirement is less secure for private workers. Jeanie Norton, 49, ended up earning less than minimum wage when her job as an airlines reservation agent was eliminated in 2008. At the time, she and her husband, a carpenter who is now unemployed, were building their dream house. She lost her health insurance and had to break into her 401(k) to keep them afloat. Now she drives an hour each way to work as a waitress in Gallipolis.
"I thought I had it all figured out," Ms. Norton said, "but now I'm just making it. I'm going on faith in God."
Pensions have shriveled. In 1985, medium- and large-size companies paid full pensions to four out of five workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2010, that number was down to one in three. Four out of five public workers still receive the full benefit.
For those on the lowest rungs of the income ladder, wages are so skimpy that the state sometimes picks up the slack. Jeremy Bostic, 27, who supports several relatives on his small salary as a manager at Kmart, has to supplement his earnings with food stamps.
Dim prospects push young people here toward another government solution. Brynna Frazier, 30, said the most popular choice among her friends was the military, which, at $1,600 a month with health insurance, was the best job around. Ms. Frazier, a waitress, has not had health insurance in any job she has ever worked, including Wal-Mart, Taco Bell and a telemarketing firm.
A third of all private-sector workers under 30 have no health insurance, up from 15 percent in 1988, according to the census data.
"Around here, you either choose drugs or the military," said Kandi Marcum, a cashier at a dollar store, whose 19-year-old daughter, a McDonald's worker, is leaving for basic training this month. "I want to get her away from this," Ms. Marcum said, waving her arm angrily. "I hate that she's here."
Ms. Taylor was washing dishes when the State Senate passed the labor bill this month. She sat down and cried when she heard the news. It does away with seniority and leaves out any job protection for workers with longer service, putting public workers - most of whom are not eligible for Social Security - at risk of losing their retirement income.
"I'm scared," Ms. Taylor said. "You just start to think, what about this, what about that? This is going to hurt a lot of people."
Robert Gebeloff contributed reporting from New York.
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16) Agency Seizes Georgia's Supply of Execution Drug
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/us/16lethal.html?ref=us
ATLANTA (AP) - The Drug Enforcement Administration said Tuesday that it had seized Georgia's supply of a lethal injection drug because of questions about how it was imported.
Chuvalo Truesdell, an agency spokesman, said he did not know if other states' supplies of the drug, sodium thiopental, were being collected. The seizure comes less than two months after a convicted killer was executed in Georgia, despite his raising questions about where the state had obtained the drug, an anesthetic, and whether it had expired.
Corrections officials released documents this year that showed Georgia obtained the drug from Link Pharmaceuticals, which was bought five years ago by Archimedes Pharma Ltd. Both are British companies.
The drug was used in January to execute Emmanuel Hammond, who was convicted of killing a preschool teacher. Mr. Hammond's lawyers sought a delay, claiming the drug came from a "fly-by-night supplier operating from the back of a driving school in England." They said it could have been counterfeit.
The United States Supreme Court rejected the argument.
Joan Heath, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Department of Corrections, said state officials were not concerned with the quality of the drug. "We contacted the D.E.A. and asked them for a regulatory review, and that's what we're doing," she said.
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17) NRC: No Water in Spent Fuel Pool of Japan Plant
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/03/16/business/AP-US-Japan-Quake-Spent-Fuel.html?src=busln
WASHINGTON (AP) - The chief of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday that all the water is gone from one of the spent fuel pools at Japan's most troubled nuclear plant, but Japanese officials denied it.
If NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko is correct, this would mean there's nothing to stop the fuel rods from getting hotter and ultimately melting down. The outer shell of the rods could also ignite with enough force to propel the radioactive fuel inside over a wide area.
Jaczko did not say Wednesday how the information was obtained, but the NRC and U.S. Department of Energy both have experts on site at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex of six reactors. He said the spent fuel pool of the complex's Unit 4 reactor has lost water.
Jaczko said officials believe radiation levels are extremely high, and that could affect workers' ability to stop temperatures from escalating.
Japan's nuclear safety agency and Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the complex, deny water is gone from the pool. Utility spokesman Hajime Motojuku said the "condition is stable" at Unit 4.
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18) High Radiation Severely Hinders Emergency Work to Cool Japanese Plant
By NORIMITSU ONISHI, DAVID E. SANGER and MATTHEW L. WALD
March 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18nuclear.html?_r=1&hp
TOKYO - Amid widening alarm in the United States and elsewhere about Japan's nuclear crisis, military fire trucks began spraying cooling water on spent fuel rods at the country's stricken nuclear power station late Thursday after earlier efforts to cool the rods failed, Japanese officials said.
The development came as the authorities reached for ever more desperate and unconventional methods to cool damaged reactors, deploying helicopters and water cannons in a race to prevent perilous overheating in the spent rods of the No. 3 reactor.
Moments before the military began spraying, police officers in water cannon trucks were forced back by high levels of radiation in the same area. The police had been trying to get within 50 yards of the reactor, one of six at the plant.
The five specially fitted military trucks sprayed water for an hour, but the full impact of the tactic was not immediately clear.
The Japanese efforts focused on a different part of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, 140 miles northeast of here, from the reactor - No. 4. - depicted in Washington on Wednesday as presenting a far bleaker threat than the Japanese government had offered.
The decision to focus on the No. 3 reactor appeared to suggest that Japanese officials believe it is a greater threat, since it is the only one at the site loaded with a mixed fuel known as mox, for mixed oxide, which includes reclaimed plutonium.
Western nuclear engineers have said that the release of mox into the atmosphere would produce a more dangerous radioactive plume than the dispersal of uranium fuel rods at the site. The Japanese authorities also expressed concern on Wednesday that the pressure in the No. 3 reactor had plunged and that either gauges were malfunctioning or a rupture had already occurred.
After the military's effort to cool the spent fuel atop the reactor with fire trucks, Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said it was too early to assess the success of the attempt.
Mr. Nishiyama also said that radiation of about 250 millisievert an hour had been detected 100 feet above the plant. In the United States the limit for police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers engaged in life-saving activity as a once-in-a-lifetime exposure is equal to being exposed to 250 millisieverts for a full hour. The radiation figures provided by the Japanese Self-Defense Force may provide an indication of why a helicopter turned back on Wednesday from an attempt to dump cold water on a storage pool at the plant.
A White House statement late Wednesday said that President Obama had "briefed Prime Minister Kan on the additional support being provided by the U.S., including specialized military assets with expertise in nuclear response and consequence management."
On Thursday a Pentagon spokesman, Col. David Lapan, said the military expertise made available to the Japanese included a nine-person assessment team that has or will shortly arrive there to work with the Japanese military and government.
The team members, Colonel Lapan said, will then recommend whether additional American military forces are needed to assist in the effort.
The American military is also gathering information on the damaged nuclear power plant. Officials said that a Global Hawk drone was flying missions over the reactor. In addition, U-2 spy planes were providing images to help the Japanese government map out its response to the quake and tsunami.Earlier Thursday Japanese military forces dumped seawater from a helicopter on Reactor No. 3, making four passes and dropping a total of about 8,000 gallons over it as a plume of white smoke billowed. The Japanese government said that the reactor typically needs 50 tons of water, or about 12,000 gallons, a day to keep from overheating.
The Japanese military later said the measure had little effect on reducing the temperature in the pool where the spent rods are stored.
It also announced that it had postponed plans to drop water on Reactor No. 4, which Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on Wednesday pinpointed as a cause for serious alarm.
On Thursday afternoon, the Self-Defense Forces and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police had begun deploying eight water cannon trucks to Reactor No. 3. Before the radiation level drove them back, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police planned to use the trucks, which are usually used in riot control, to spray at least 12 tons of seawater into the reactor.
Tokyo Electric Power Company, which operates the reactors, was also working to restore the electricity needed to run the cooling systems, according to a senior Japanese nuclear industry executive.
Some of the maneuvers seemed at odds with the most startling assertion by Mr. Jaczko (pronounced YAZZ-koe) that there was little or no water in the pool storing spent nuclear fuel at the No. 4 reactor, leaving fuel rods stored there exposed and bleeding radiation into the atmosphere. His testimony before Congress was the first time the Obama administration had given its own assessment of the condition of the plant, apparently mixing information it had received from Japan with data it had collected independently. "We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which could possibly impact the ability to take corrective measures," Mr. Jaczko said.
His statement was quickly but not definitively rebutted by officials of Tokyo Electric, the plant's operator.
"We can't get inside to check, but we've been carefully watching the building's environs, and there has not been any particular problem," Hajime Motojuku, a spokesman for Tokyo Electric, said Thursday morning in Japan.
Later, a spokesman for Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, Yoshitaka Nagayama, was more equivocal, saying, "Because we have been unable to go to the scene, we cannot confirm whether there is water left or not in the spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4."
At the same time, officials raised concerns about two other reactors where spent fuel rods were stored, Nos. 5 and 6, saying they had experienced a slight rise in temperature.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Jaczko reiterated his earlier statement and added that commission representatives in Tokyo had confirmed that the pool at No. 4 was empty. He said Tokyo Electric and other officials in Japan had confirmed that, and also emphasized that high radiation fields were going to make it very difficult to continue having people work at the plant.
If the American analysis is accurate and emergency crews at the plant have been unable to keep the spent fuel at that inoperative reactor properly cooled - it needs to remain covered with water at all times - radiation levels could make it difficult not only to fix the problem at No. 4, but also to keep servicing any of the other problem reactors at the plant. In the worst case, experts say, workers could be forced to vacate the plant altogether, and the fuel rods in reactors and spent fuel pools would be left to melt down, leading to much larger releases of radioactive materials.
While radiation levels at the plant have varied tremendously, Mr. Jaczko said that the peak levels reported there "would be lethal within a fairly short period of time." He added that another spent fuel pool, at Reactor No. 3, might also be losing water and could soon be in the same condition.
On Wednesday, the American Embassy in Tokyo, on advice from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told Americans to evacuate a radius of "approximately 50 miles" from the Fukushima plant. South Korea, Australia and New Zealand followed suit in advice to their citizens, and Spanish authorities on Thursday recommended an either wider berth, about 75 miles, news agencies reported. The advice to Americans in Japan represents a graver assessment of the risk in the immediate vicinity of Daiichi than the warnings made by the Japanese themselves, who have told everyone within 20 kilometers, about 12 miles, to evacuate, and those within about 20 miles to take shelter.
While maps of the plume of radiation being given off by the plant show that an elongated cloud will stretch across the Pacific, American officials said it would be so dissipated by the time it reached the West Coast of the United States that it would not pose a health threat.
Close to the site, however, Mr. Jaczko said, "We would recommend an evacuation to a much larger radius than has currently been provided by Japan." That assessment seems bound to embarrass, if not anger, Japanese officials, suggesting they have miscalculated the danger or deliberately played down the risks.
Late Wednesday night the State Department announced what it described as a "voluntary" evacuation of dependents of American government personnel in northeastern Japan, and down to Tokyo and Yokohama. The undersecretary of state for administration, Patrick Kennedy, said that no one would be ordered to leave, but that the government would provide charter flights for dependents who wanted to leave.
On Thursday evening the American Embassy in Tokyo began offering seats aboard chartered flights to Americans wishing to evacuate from Japan. Americans who show up at the two main airports serving Tokyo, Narita and Haneda, would be flown to still unspecified "safe haven locations" from where they would be expected to arrange onward travel on their own, said Karen Kelley, a spokeswoman for the embassy.
The American move followed advisory notices from several European countries urging their citizens to move away from Tokyo or leave Japan altogether.
American officials who have been dealing with their Japanese counterparts report that the country's political and bureaucratic leadership has appeared frozen in place, unwilling to communicate clearly about the problem's scope and, in some cases, unwilling to accept outside assistance. Two American officials said they believed that the Japanese government itself was not getting a clear picture from Tokyo Electric.
General Electric said it would send about 10 gas turbine generators to Japan to help replace lost power generating capacity. Michael Tetuan, a spokesman for the company, said that the operators of the damaged plant had requested generators, but he did not know what they would be used for. The units can produce roughly the same amount of power as the diesel generators at nuclear plants.
Though the plant's reactors shut down automatically when the quake struck on Friday, the subsequent tsunami wiped out the backup electronic pumping and cooling system necessary to keep the fuel rods in the reactors and the storage pools for spent nuclear fuel covered with cool water.
Norimitsu Onishi reported from Tokyo, and David E. Sanger and Matthew L. Wald from Washington. Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong, Hiroko Tabuchi from Tokyo, Alan Cowell from London, and Thom Shanker from Washington.
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19) Drone Attack Reported to Kill Scores in Northwest Pakistan
By SALMAN MASOOD
March 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18pakistan.html?hp
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Drone aircraft heavily pounded the semiautonomous tribal region of North Waziristan in northwest Pakistan with missiles on Thursday, killing at least 40 people, according to news agencies and local media reports. A local television news network put the number of dead at 80.
The attack by drone aircraft, suspected of being operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, came a day after the United States secured the release of an American intelligence contractor jailed for the killing of two Pakistanis after paying compensation to the families of the victims.
Several missiles struck Datta Khel on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where Taliban and Qaeda fighters have found a safe haven to stage attacks inside Afghanistan. A local warlord and Taliban commander, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, holds sway in Datta Khel, and reports suggested that the drones had targeted a gathering of fighters loyal to him.
Attacks by the American drones are immensely unpopular in Pakistan and have been a rallying point for anti-American sentiment. At the same time, top Pakistani civil and military leadership have privately acknowledged the benefit of these strikes in targeting Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Many in Pakistan saw a link between the stepped-up drone strikes and the release of Raymond A. Davis, the C.I.A. contractor who managed to get out of the country Wednesday after weeks of secret negotiations between American and Pakistani officials.
"The timing of such a heavy attack, in terms of number of missiles fired, is unlikely to be a coincidence, following the departure of Raymond Davis from Pakistan," said Omar R. Quraishi, the editorial page editor of The Express Tribune, a Karachi-based English daily (a local partner of The International Herald Tribune). "It could well be that either the U.S. was holding back till this issue was sorted out, or that the C.I.A. may have been told to reduce its physical presence in Pakistan in exchange for greater leeway on drone attacks."
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How comfortable they are talking about deals made for drone murders and the best drugs to use for lethal injections. What a great society!...bw
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20) Executions in Doubt in Fallout Over Drug
By KEVIN SACK
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/us/17drugs.html?hp
ATLANTA - The worldwide shortage of a drug used in executions reverberated this week in two of the most active death-penalty states as Texas announced it would replace the anesthetic in its three-drug regimen and federal agents seized Georgia's supply.
The seizure on Tuesday of the powerful barbiturate - sodium thiopental - at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, site of the state's death row, has at least temporarily blocked future executions, although none are now scheduled.
In Texas, where the administrative change was announced Wednesday, lawyers for an inmate scheduled to die next month are preparing to challenge the substitution of the new drug.
The moves in both states continue the fallout from the January announcement that Hospira Inc., the only American producer of sodium thiopental, had stopped making the anesthetic. The shortages began after the company suspended production in 2009 because of problems obtaining an ingredient. They now have become dire because the drug's shelf life is typically no more than two years.
Many of the 34 states with the death penalty (Illinois repealed its law last week) have been scrambling for months to find stores of sodium thiopental or to replace it with other drugs with similar effects. Several states have delayed executions because of its unavailability. Texas has 314 inmates on death row; Georgia has 99.
In most state lethal injection protocols, sodium thiopental is first used to anesthetize the inmate, and then other drugs are administered to paralyze the body and stop the heart.
Tuesday's seizure by the Drug Enforcement Administration presumably responded to a February complaint lodged by a lawyer for Andrew Grant DeYoung, who faces execution for killing his parents and sister in 1993.
The lawyer, John T. Bentivoglio of Washington, wrote Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Feb. 24 that Georgia's Department of Corrections appeared to be importing sodium thiopental from a British distributor. Because the state does not have a federal license to import controlled substances, that would violate the Controlled Substances Act, Mr. Bentivoglio charged.
Drug Enforcement Administration officials declined to comment Wednesday about the precise nature of their investigation. The Georgia Department of Corrections said it was cooperating and would otherwise reserve comment.
Mr. Bentivoglio said lawyers learned through e-mails produced by an open-records request regarding another Georgia death penalty case that the state bought 50 vials of sodium thiopental in July from Dream Pharma Ltd., a London wholesaler.
He said the seizure demonstrated that the federal drug agency had taken his assertions seriously. "It's clear that the potential unlawful import of this drug was more than a mere paperwork violation," he said.
In Texas, the Department of Criminal Justice announced that it would replace sodium thiopental in its three-drug process with pentobarbital, another sedative. The state's supply of sodium thiopental expires this month.
The Texas change follows a procedure adopted by Oklahoma, which first substituted pentobarbital in its executions in December. Last Thursday, Ohio executed an inmate using only pentobarbital in a large dose.
The Danish company that makes pentobarbital, Lundbeck Inc., has informed states that it is "adamantly opposed" to the use of its product in executions. But a number of states continue to explore its use as a substitute.
"Obviously, there is a precedent for its use in executions," said Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas agency, who said Texas law allowed corrections officials to change the drugs without legislative approval.
Maurie Levin, a lawyer who represents Cleve Foster, a murderer scheduled to die in Texas on April 5, said she would challenge the timing and process for making the change.
"We believe that under state law they are required to have some sort of vetting process," Ms. Levin said.
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21) Opposition Leaders Arrested in Bahrain as Crackdown Grows
By ETHAN BRONNER
March 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/middleeast/18bahrain.html?ref=world
MANAMA, Bahrain - A day after hundreds of Bahraini troops forcefully cleared out a central square of reform-seeking protesters, the authorities arrested major opposition figures early Thursday, the next stage of a crackdown that has the opposition in a tailspin.
The Bahrain state news agency said the leaders were arrested for having "intelligence contacts with foreign countries" and because they "incited killing of citizens and destruction of public and private property."
Hassan Mushaima, a Shiite and Islamist dissident politician, who arrived here last month from London to great fanfare as a potentially charismatic leader, was among those detained overnight, officials from his party said. In addition, Ebrahim Sharif, leader of a secular party, was taken in by the police, his associates said.
A number of other political opponents were also detained by security officials as it became clear that the Bahraini government, which sought last month to mollify protesters clamoring for democratic reform, had decisively shifted tactics to forceful repression.
"We feel cornered and are trying to find a way out," said Jalal Fairooz, a leader of the Wefaq opposition party and one of 18 members of the Council of Representatives from the party who resigned en masse last month.
The streets remained littered with rubble and tanks held positions at intersections and outside the main hospital. Traffic was light and most shops remained shuttered although the government announced that the stock market had reopened.
These steps followed the military's retaking of Pearl Square in central Manama, the capital, on Wednesday and the arrival on Monday of 2,000 troops from Saudi Arabia and other neighboring allies.
King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa toured the capital's downtown financial district on Thursday, hailing the actions of Bahrain's security forces there the day before, the state news agency reported.
On Wednesday, popular protests here modeled on the hopeful events in Egypt took on the darkness of those in Libya as hundreds of Bahraini troops, backed by helicopters and tanks, cleared Pearl Square of demonstrators. Three protesters and two security officers were killed.
Security forces roared through downtown Manama, wresting it from the protesters who had in recent days taken charge of neighborhoods and nearby villages. As skirmishes continued into the evening, a curfew was announced for the center of the city.
"They broke everything, they shot at kids, there was no humanity, no respect," said Hassan Ali Ibrahim, 35, a gardener, who had spent the night in Pearl Square, a protest tent camp over the past month like Tahrir Square in Cairo. "When we saw the tanks and the cars, about a hundred of us went towards them, and started chanting, 'Peacefully! Peacefully!' This is when they started shooting, from the ground and from the bridge, from everywhere."
The crackdown placed the United States in an awkward bind. The United States, which bases its Fifth Fleet here, has struggled to balance its strategic interest in placating Bahrain and its ally, Saudi Arabia, its fears that Iran is exploiting the anger of Bahrain's majority Shiite protesters, and American democratic principles. American officials have held off backing the protesters while urging Bahrain's leaders to exercise restraint. That advice was ignored.
President Obama on Tuesday telephoned both King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and King Hamad to stress "the need for maximum restraint," said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.
He added that Mr. Obama "also stressed the importance of a political process as the only way to peacefully address the legitimate grievances of Bahrainis and to lead to a Bahrain that is stable, just, more unified and responsive to its people."
Plumes of black smoke choked the city landscape as troops repeatedly fired tear gas canisters, rubber bullets and what sounded like live ammunition in their dawn assault. Telephone and Internet service were cut. Tents, trees and brush burned quickly in the desert wind. Security forces extinguished the fires with water cannons normally used to break up crowds. "This was not an attack aimed at just dispersing the people in the square, it was meant to hurt us, and the way they were advancing, with the helicopters above them, and the tanks, and the machine guns - it really felt like a war, not a police operation," said Hussein Ali Eid, 32, a demonstrator.
Simultaneously, troops and tanks surrounded and invaded Salmaniya Hospital, an opposition stronghold. The crackdown continued in villages outside Manama, and opposition leaders reported scores of people sent to local clinics and hospitals.
"The hospital was controlled by terrorists, and we liberated it," an army commander at Salmaniya who declined to provide his name or rank said at the complex's entrance. Like nearly all the troops on duty, he covered his face with a mask to prevent identification. It remained unclear whether the foreign troops had participated directly in the assault on Pearl Square or other actions during the day, though officials had said they were there only to protect strategically important ministries and institutions, like the monarchy itself.
A government announcement said it had lost two soldiers to demonstrators who had repeatedly run them over. It also asserted that the forces had not moved on the demonstrators at first but responded to their gunfire and that the fires were set by the demonstrators themselves.
The pro-democracy movement of Bahrain, a tiny island off the Saudi coast, is like many in the Arab world, seeking to wrest total power from the hands of the royal family and set up a government of accountability, especially in light of rising economic difficulty. It has been fed by a bulging youth population and access to social media. But it is more fraught, because 70 percent of the country, especially its poorest citizens, is Shiite Muslim while the king and the elite are Sunni.
This means that the dispute is over ethnicity and class as well as over governance, but also that outside forces have a keen interest. Iran, the center of Shiism, and which sometimes refers to Bahrain as one of its provinces, supports the majority population here. It has condemned the actions of the king, and labeled the Saudi military intervention an occupation. Saudi Arabia, which has a Shiite minority of its own to contend with, firmly backs the government and fears growing Iranian influence.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters in Cairo on Wednesday that the military move here was "alarming." She added: "It is unfortunately diverting attention and effort away from the political and economic track that is the only way forward to resolve the legitimate differences of the Bahrainis themselves. We have made that clear time and time again. We have deplored the use of force. We have said not only to the Bahrainis but to our gulf partners that we do not think security is the answer to what is going on."
Opposition politicians said that a number of Bahraini officials, all Shiite, had resigned as a result of Wednesday' s crackdown. They said they included the ministers of health and housing, four members of the Shura, or advisory council, and perhaps some judges. It was not possible to confirm the resignations, however.
The early morning attack on Pearl Square - named to honor pearl fishing in Bahraini culture - was observed from a neighboring building. By the time the first light came to the waters of the Persian Gulf, scores of jeeps and tanks were drawn up along the coastal area. As the attack unfolded, the hundreds of protesters there were forced into side streets and fled as security vehicles rolled through.
Participants said they had expected the attack after they heard that Saudi troops had been brought in on Monday and then that martial law had been declared. "So we were looking out for signs, we were watching out," Mr. Eid said. "We went to pray at a mosque nearby, and on the way back to the square, we looked at our phones and realized the network was out. It was about 6. At that point, we knew what was going to happen. So we took the women to a place on the safer side of the square."
He said that a group headed toward the soldiers, and then he heard dozens of explosions.
After the square had been cleared of people, with military helicopters still hovering, uniformed police officers accompanied by men in civilian clothes could be seen smashing windshields of parked cars. Meanwhile, tanks rolled toward the financial district. It was last Sunday's action by the protesters, taking over the streets leading to the financial district, that set the king on the path of smashing the movement. Bahrain calls itself "business friendly" and viewed that move as beyond the pale.
Mr. Eid added that Wednesday's action would not end the protests: "I'm unemployed. What do they want from me? They think I'm going to sit at home? With two kids? I need to ask for my rights, for my dignity. This is not going to go away, until we get all our rights."
Nadim Audi contributed reporting.
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22) 4 Times Journalists Are Missing in Libya
By JEREMY W. PETERS
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/africa/17times.html?ref=world
The New York Times said Wednesday that four of its journalists reporting on the conflict in Libya were missing.
Editors said they were last in contact with the journalists, who were reporting from the eastern city of Ajdabiya, on Tuesday morning New York time. And despite secondhand reports that they had been swept up by Libyan government forces, the newspaper said it could not confirm that information.
"We have talked with officials of the Libyan government in Tripoli, and they tell us they are attempting to ascertain the whereabouts of our journalists," said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times. "We are grateful to the Libyan government for their assurance that if our journalists were captured they would be released promptly and unharmed."
The missing journalists are Anthony Shadid, the Beirut bureau chief and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting; Stephen Farrell, a reporter and videographer who was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2009 and rescued by British commandos; and two photographers, Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario, who have worked extensively in the Middle East and Africa.
Mr. Keller said there was some speculation that they had been detained at a government checkpoint between Ajdabiya and Benghazi, a rebel stronghold in eastern Libya. If that is the case, he said, they would eventually be taken to Tripoli. "Beyond that, we're still pretty much in the dark," he added.
The uprisings in the Arab world have made the region a perilous place for journalists. During the revolt that toppled Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, journalists were assaulted, accosted, detained and killed. Two Times reporters were detained there and eventually released unharmed. Lara Logan of CBS News was sexually assaulted by a group of men. An Egyptian reporter was shot and killed.
Journalists' safety in Libya has become only more uncertain since the month-old revolt began. Last week, the BBC reported that four of its journalists had been detained by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's security forces. They were beaten with rifles and subjected to mock executions, the network said. Also last week, a cameraman for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based television network, was gunned down in what it said was apparently an ambush near Benghazi.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented more than 300 cases of attacks on journalists in the Middle East and North Africa since uprisings began there in January. More than 40 of those have occurred in Libya.
Joel Simon, the group's executive director, said news organizations never had easy answers when it came to balancing safety with decisions about how to cover stories that put journalists in harm's way.
"In every one of these countries there are vital stories unfolding, stories of crucial significance that need to be told, so it's understandable that news organizations are accepting a certain level of risk," Mr. Simon said. "But how do you balance those risks? Those are very tough calls that journalists and news organizations have to make on an ongoing basis. But the starting point, I think, has to be these are crucially important stories."
The Times, like many news organizations, has procedures in place to carefully track its journalists' whereabouts in war zones and areas of conflict.
Susan Chira, foreign editor of The Times, said that each night, editors discuss plans for the following day with their correspondents, who are expected to check in regularly.
"We expect to hear from them several times a day - and so do their colleagues in the field, who are often our early warning system of any trouble," Ms. Chira said.
The Times's foreign picture editor, David Furst, said he requires photographers to check in with him at a designated time each day.
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23) Greek Town Rises Up Against Planned Landfill
By NIKI KITSANTONIS
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/world/europe/17greece.html?ref=world
KERATEA, GREECE - For three months, the residents of this small town, 40 kilometers southeast of Athens, have been locked in a violent standoff with the police over the planned construction of a huge landfill that aims to solve the capital's garbage problem.
The scenes broadcast on Greek television and on amateur videos on the Internet have been stark: middle-aged protesters hurling firebombs at the police, overturned cars in flames, Orthodox priests in black robes wailing amid clouds of tear gas.
Many residents and police officers have been hurt in the fighting. And though there have been dozens of arrests, the locals vow not to back down.
The Keratea campaign has been compared by some commentators to milder forms of civil disobedience appearing in a debt-stricken Greece, including a small movement of citizens who refuse to pay higher road toll charges and more for tickets for public transportation.
But fare-evasion is quite different than waging an armed standoff with the police, said Karolos Kavoulakos, a lecturer in social sciences at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
"This is about trash, and trash has been fueling violent protests for years," he said. "The fact that this dispute coincides with the economic crisis makes it all the more explosive."
Residents of Keratea say they will not become a dumping ground for the capital's population, about four million, and argue that the chosen site - covering 50 hectares, or 125 acres, of hillside on the town's outskirts - hides archaeological treasures.
But the government says the facility must go forward since the capital's existing landfill is full.
The dispute originated last year when Greece faced millions of euros in fines after missing a July 2010 deadline for razing hundreds of illegal landfills around the country. In January, the European Union froze these fines on the condition that the government carried out a waste-management program that increased recycling and replaced the illegal dumps with "sanitary" landfills that met E.U. health and safety standards.
But no town in Greece wants a landfill in its backyard, as is clear from the reaction in other communities over the years. In 2009, residents of Grammatiko, a town east of Athens, scuffled with the police for weeks over a landfill that is now under construction as locals fight the project in court. In 2008, a 43-year-old woman died when riots broke out on Corfu over the planned construction of a landfill there; the project has been held up as locals mount court challenges. In the northern port of Thessaloniki, residents have opposed landfill projects for years.
In Keratea, however, protest has given way to systematic civil disobedience and violence involving a large section of the town, including the middle-aged and the elderly. The residents' reactions appear to have taken the government by surprise and have provoked a political rift. The Citizen Protection Ministry says the heavy police presence in Keratea is a drain on resources, while the Interior Ministry insists that the authorities cannot back down.
Meanwhile, residents say they are under attack. "It's simple - we are being threatened, so we defend ourselves," said Sotiris Iatrou, a municipal councilor.
Asked about the involvement of anarchists in protests - frequently described in the Greek press and not denied on anarchist Web sites that proclaim support for Keratea residents - Mr. Iatrou responded, "We have solidarity from many sides."
He also referred to backing from leftist political groups and said locals had been instructed how to make firebombs. "We were taught," Mr. Iatrou said, smiling.
On most days, he joins fellow residents in a wooden hut set up alongside the road leading to the proposed site.
Locals guard a plastic barricade on the road, so construction workers cannot enter the site. About a kilometer away, some 400 police officers guard three excavators that have been vandalized since their transfer there in December.
On most nights, residents clash with police officers on the road and in the fields around the site. Residents also guard the barricade by day, playing resistance songs from the early 1970s, when the military ruled Greece, and drinking coffee around a wood-burning stove. The walls of the hut are covered with news articles about their efforts and children's drawings, many depicting stickmen in opposite camps.
"We are at war and this is our garrison," said Nikos Filippou, 64. "People are ready to die. It's a matter of honor."
Many hut regulars seem unlikely resistance fighters but defend locals wielding firebombs. "What can we do? No one listens to us," said Eleni Giorda, 60. "We will use guns if we have to."
Ioannis Andrianopoulos, 40, a shopkeeper, and his wife Sofia, 39, often leave their children, 8 and 10, at home for guard duty. Mr. Andrianopoulos said, "If they start building, we'll set fire to the garbage trucks."
His wife added, "We're not crazy, and we're not anarchists, but we are being provoked."
Concerned about Keratea's defiance, the government has appealed for discussions. But the locals will not talk until the police withdraw and the government will not talk until the residents' dismantle their barricade.
"You can't have dialogue in a hostile environment with firebombs' being thrown," said Theodora Tzakri, deputy interior minister, in a telephone interview. "We will not tolerate lawlessness."
The government has appealed a decision by a local court suspending work on the proposed landfill until environmental and archaeological assessments are carried out; residents have appealed a ruling by a higher court allowing construction to proceed.
Ms. Tzakri insisted that the Keratea project was non-negotiable. "We won't let Athens turn into Naples," she said, referring to the Italian port that has been swamped in garbage in recent years as a result of strenuous opposition by residents to the creation of more landfills.
But she said the government was willing to discuss making the Keratea landfill environmentally friendly by setting up a recycling plant and composting unit on the site. "If the mayor can guarantee us that police cars won't be firebombed, and workers' lives won't be threatened, we'll sit down and talk," Ms. Tzakri said.
Costas Levantis, the mayor of Lavreotiki, a municipality comprising Keratea and two other towns, said he could not guarantee anything. "People won't back down," he said. "If the machines start up, the whole town will come out and we'll have casualties."
The mayor said tensions between locals and police are at fever pitch. "There's trouble nearly every night."
And it is not only residents involved. Mr. Levantis said that last week 300 people from Exarchia, a central Athens hangout for anarchists who are often accused of violence,tried to torch the local police precinct.
Residents played down the role of anarchists, noting that 37 people arrested since December are locals. Five residents, including the former mayor, last month were charged with possession of explosives and other offenses and released pending trial. Keratea's ex-mayor Stavros Iatrou (no relation to the municipal councilor) said he has been falsely accused of plotting to blow up a gas station next to the police precinct. He said two policemen submitted fake testimonies.
"Keratea used to be a conservative community where the policeman was the resident's best friend," the ex-mayor said. This changed when police were sent to the landfill site in December.
When officers entered the town in early February and searched houses, huge clashes erupted. Locals said a plainclothes officer threatened protesters with a gun.
"It was the final straw," Mr. Iatrou said.
"Attacks on police officers in the area - with firebombs, stones and other objects - occur almost every day," said Lt. Col. Thanassis Kokkalakis, spokesman for the Greek Police. He said that police were in the area "to protect the public interest" but that this role had been "misunderstood by some residents."
The police say they are regularly pelted with firebombs and have been shot at by a sniper. They want to withdraw, said Christos Fotopoulos, who heads the police workers' union. "Keratea doesn't need policing," he said. "It needs a political solution."
The impasse will be difficult to break, said Mr. Kavoulakos, the university lecturer. The landfill is perceived not only as an environmental scourge but also as a threat to subsistence at a time of rising unemployment. "All people have is their property, and the landfill will devalue this," he said. "They are desperate."
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24) Castro Enemy Said to Have Recounted Role in Attacks
By DAN FROSCH
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/us/17posada.html?ref=world
EL PASO - A journalist called as a key prosecution witness in the perjury trial of an elderly anti-Castro militant testified on Wednesday that the defendant had described in detailed interviews his role in a wave of bombings that tore through Havana in 1997.
The witness, Ann Louise Bardach, was a contract writer for The New York Times when she interviewed the man, Luis Posada Carriles, in 1998. The interviews were the foundation for articles she wrote that year with Larry Rohter, a reporter for The Times, in which Mr. Posada spoke about coordinating the bombs at hotels and restaurants to frighten tourists.
Mr. Posada, 83, has been on trial in federal court here for two months, but not for the attacks in Havana that killed an Italian tourist, or in connection with the downing of a Cuban jet in 1976 that killed 73 people - both of which have made him a wanted man in Cuba and Venezuela.
He is charged instead with perjury, obstruction of federal proceedings and making false statements during a naturalization hearing. Ms. Bardach's testimony is critical to the prosecution's case.
Federal prosecutors say Mr. Posada, who was on the C.I.A.'s payroll during the 1960s and '70s, lied during immigration hearings more than five years ago about how he had gotten into the United States and about his involvement in the Havana bombings.
In her testimony, Ms. Bardach described how she had arranged a meeting with Mr. Posada in Aruba after he left a mysterious message on her answering machine while she was researching a series on Cuban exiles for The Times.
Mr. Posada was unhappy with how he was portrayed in articles published in The Miami Herald at the time and wanted to shed light from his perspective on "the heroic nature of what he was doing in Cuba with the campaign," Ms. Bardach said, referring to the bombings in Havana.
Courteous and polite, Mr. Posada shared lemonade, dinners and conversation with Ms. Bardach in interviews over three days, during which, she said, Mr. Posada told a tale of insurgency against the Castro regime stretching from Miami to Guatemala to Cuba.
The lead prosecutor, Timothy J. Reardon, played tape recordings from the interviews - much of which was referred to in the articles in The Times - in which Mr. Posada discussed the bombings with Ms. Bardach at a cafe in Aruba.
At one point Ms. Bardach was heard asking Mr. Posada about the reasons behind the attacks. He replied 'No mas tourismo,' and Ms. Bardach said she took his answer to mean that the bombings were intended to stymie the flow of tourists to Cuba, which anti-Castro militants feared was giving the regime new life.
Mr. Posada, drifting in and out of Spanish, said on the recordings that the bombings were not intended to hurt anyone and that he felt sad for the Italian tourist who was killed.
But when prompted by Ms. Bardach, Mr. Posada told her he slept "like a baby."
"My conscience is very clean," he said.
Prosecutors also introduced a handwritten note that Mr. Posada gave Ms. Bardach after their interviews clarifying that he neither admitted nor denied responsibility for the bombings.
White-haired and wizened, one side of his face shattered from bullet wounds sustained in an assassination attempt, Mr. Posada stared expressionless during the testimony.
His lawyer, Arturo V. Hernandez, who has yet to cross-examine Ms. Bardach in front of the jury, said in his opening statement that the prosecution's case was riddled with unreliable witnesses and that there was a series of erasures in the tapes.
Mr. Hernandez has said that Mr. Posada never admitted to the bombings in the interviews but had instead attributed them to internal dissent in Cuba.
Ms. Bardach and The Times had initially fought a subpoena seeking her interview tapes as part of a 2007 investigation into whether Mr. Posada had received financing for terrorist attacks from Cuban exiles in New Jersey. But a federal judge ruled against the newspaper. That investigation never led to an indictment.
Declassified F.B.I. documents placed Mr. Posada at planning meetings for the bombing of the Cubana jet in 1976. He was held in a Venezuelan prison for nine years on charges of conspiring with the bombers and escaped disguised as a priest. He has long denied involvement in the jet bombing.
In 2000, Mr. Posada was arrested in Panama in connection with a plot to kill Fidel Castro. He was pardoned after serving four years in prison, before allegedly sneaking into the United States on a shrimp boat in 2005
Mr. Posada faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison on 10 counts in the indictment, and 10 years on the last count.
During a break in the proceedings, Ms. Bardach found herself face to face with Mr. Posada. Ms. Bardach asked him how he was doing.
"He told me, in Spanish, 'It is what it is,' " she said.
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25) Economic Downturn Holds Fierce Grip on Border Town
By JENNIFER MEDINA
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/us/17elcentro.html?ref=us
EL CENTRO, Calif. - This is the desert, not meant for lush fields and tight cul-de-sacs. But here they are, a few miles from the Mexican border. For a time, this was a thriving place that represented the promise of a new middle-class life, full of hope and optimism.
Now, some of that hope, too, is drying out in the sun.
For two years, El Centro has struggled with the highest unemployment rate in the country. The latest official figures put it at 28 percent, an improvement from the peak of 32 percent last summer. At unemployment centers, often the most bustling places in town, it is something of a competition to talk about how long a job search has lasted.
Eleven months hardly raises an eyebrow. Two years might draw a little sympathy.
The job losses here began as fewer workers were needed to pluck asparagus and lettuce from the fields. Then the housing boom collapsed, devastating thousands who once had steady construction work. The same two forces have pummeled other cities around the country. But El Centro has taken a third, crippling hit: with tighter security making lines at the border longer each day, restaurants and shops that once relied on Mexican tourists are struggling.
Visitors still come from the other side, from the metropolis of Mexicali to the strip malls and small towns that make up the Imperial Valley, about 100 miles east of San Diego and less than a mile from the border. But there are fewer of them.
Now, many come to collect unemployment checks. After working legally in the United States, they are eligible for the same benefits as any resident, a situation that some say drives up the unemployment rate. It is impossible to know how much, because California does not track those figures. But each month, their checks are delivered to relatives or post office boxes near the border.
"People don't understand what we learn to live with here," said Sam Couchman, the director of the Imperial County Workforce Development Office here. Mr. Couchman has spent more than three decades guiding work training programs in the county and said he does not expect the unemployment rate drop to below 20 percent in the next decade. "We have all kinds of up and downs, but it doesn't send us into a panic. This is the way life is here."
California's agricultural heartland has been hit particularly hard in the downturn - 8 of the 10 metro areas with the highest jobless rates are in the state, in central inland cities like Fresno, Modesto and Merced. But the only area that comes close to El Centro's unemployment rate is Yuma, Ariz., another border town about 55 miles east of here.
"You have someone who is considered a local resident but lives in another country," Mr. Couchman said. "We don't have that problem in Fresno. But it also means that we have tens of thousands of people a day visiting us to make purchases and go shopping."
The county has grown over the last decade, but still has fewer than 200,000 residents. And the local economy has long depended on the other side of the border - "If Mexicali sneezes, we get pneumonia," people around here like to say. So when tougher security measures at the border came after threats related to terrorism and Mexico's drug war, businesses here almost immediately felt the pinch. A decade ago, crossing the border was a 20-minute inconvenience. Now the wait in the morning can stretch into a two- or three-hour ordeal.
Carlton Hargrave, the owner of the Family Buffet restaurant in Calexico, the town that hugs the Mexican border, said that since he opened in 1993, the vast majority of customers travel from the other side.
In the last year or so, Mr. Hargrave has laid off more than half of his roughly 40 employees. Most of them live in Mexicali, he said, and few return. "People used to say they were coming to take your jobs," he said. "Now, we know that's not true. They are coming to make your jobs."
Some El Centro neighborhoods look like a ghost town. Downtown is pockmarked with shuttered storefronts and broken signs. But in other areas, the city is more like quintessential suburbia, with cookie-cutter housing tracts and huge parking lots outside big box stores. Border Patrol agents are just as likely to roam the streets as city police officers.
The year-round sun and the affordability make the city an attractive place to live. The cost of living is much less than in Los Angeles or San Diego, yet it is possible to get to either place within hours. Some young people can hardly wait to escape, but for many, staying in the town their grandparents helped create nearly a century ago is a point of pride. When the annual county fair comes along, neighbors routinely pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for animals raised by local schoolchildren.
"That unemployment rate is a black eye, but it's a real misnomer," said Timothy E. Kelly, president of the Imperial Valley Economic Development Corporation, who considers marketing the area a personal mission. "You don't come here seeing people on the streets. We've got a ready and eager work force."
For some people, the unemployment numbers are more of a nuisance than anything. Some relatively well-heeled residents say they do not know anyone without a job. If anyone is not working, they say, it must be because they are not really looking. They point to the large hiring banner in front of the International House of Pancakes.
There has long been a promise that the heat and sunshine will provide work. Local leaders speak excitedly about geothermal plants and solar projects bringing more jobs. Several training programs offer courses to develop skills for that kind of work. But Jesse Aguilar, who completed such a class last year, said that of the 30 in his class, only two have found jobs. Both of them are at fast food outlets.
"People tell us to be hopeful, but that's pretty hard sometimes," Mr. Aguilar said. These days, he visits the local unemployment center about once a week, combing through job listings. His wife has a steady income, working at one of the centers helping people like him try to find jobs. "Every night I pray for it - to be able to take care of everybody again."
Mr. Aguilar moved from San Jose in 2003, knowing there would be construction work. And there was. He made as much as $960 a week, plus a bit on side jobs and landscaping. Now there are no construction crews here, so Mr. Aguilar takes his résumé to Home Depot and Costco.
There are no hard numbers, but unemployment seems to have hit men here particularly hard. They were more likely to work in construction and other jobs hurt by the economy, while women took more stable jobs in government, which remains the largest employer in the region.
Edward Castenon has kept careful notes about every job posting he has responded to. With each application, he marks a note in red on his computer calendar. Entire months are filled with red, going back to when he first lost his job as a technician for Starbucks in 2009. Because he is a military veteran, Mr. Castenon, 43, is eligible for a program that would pay half his salary in any job he receives. He sends a letter explaining the program to every potential employer. But they rarely respond.
"I'm not even overqualified," he said one recent afternoon, sitting at his dining room table with his wife. They married two years ago, each with two teenage daughters from first marriages. As a technician, repairing coffee machines all over the area, he earned about $23 an hour. Now he applies for jobs that would pay far less.
"Before I have to work at McDonald's or a Jack in the Box, I need to pursue every other option," he said. "There is honor in every job, but I have a family to be loyal to."
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26) Rights Group Faults U.S. on Detained Immigrants
By KIRK SEMPLE
March 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/us/18detain-1.html?ref=us
Immigration enforcement in the United States is plagued by unjust treatment of detainees, including inadequate access to lawyers and insufficient medical care, and by the excessive use of prison-style detention, an international human rights group said Thursday.
The group, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, issued those findings in a report that also criticized a federal program that allows county and state law enforcement officials to enforce federal immigration laws. The report said the government had failed to ensure that local police were not singling out people by race or detaining illegal immigrants on the pretext of investigating crimes.
The commission, an arm of the Organization of American States, recommended that the federal government cancel the program, known as 287(g).
While many of the findings reiterated criticisms that have been made before by immigrant advocates and others, the report appeared to be the first comprehensive review of American immigration enforcement in recent years by an international body of the organization's stature.
The commission, based in Washington, has no enforcement powers, but it has considerable moral authority and a record of cooperation by member countries, including the United States.
The 155-page report was based on hearings and research that began in 2008, including visits in July 2009 by a team of investigators to six American detention centers in Arizona and Texas.
Since much of the research was completed, however, the Obama administration has begun a major overhaul of the detention system. A month after the commission's visits, immigration officials announced a sweeping plan to establish more centralized authority over the system and to renovate centers designed for penal detention to make them more appropriate for detainees facing deportation, particularly those accused of administrative violations.
The administration said it would also close centers that were rarely used or failed to meet its standards, and would consolidate the nation's patchwork of detention centers to meet increasing demand in specific areas, especially near big cities. It also said it would explore alternatives to detention.
Felipe González, president of the commission, acknowledged those plans but said the commission would withhold judgment on the efficacy of the reforms. "According to the information that we have so far, it's not clear that it's been implemented or will satisfy the international standards" of human rights, he said in an interview.
The commission will continue monitoring immigration enforcement to ensure that its grievances were addressed, Mr. González added.
A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees enforcement, said Thursday that the department would review the report, and made no further comment.
Earlier, however, the Obama administration was given a draft. In their response, according to the report, administration officials pointed out that they had conducted their own comprehensive review of immigration enforcement and made "important changes."
Still, the commission said it was "deeply troubled by the continual and widespread use of detention in immigration cases," the report said.
"The Inter-American Commission is convinced that in many if not the majority of cases, detention is a disproportionate measure and the alternatives to detention programs would be a more balanced means of serving the State's legitimate interest in ensuring compliance with immigration laws," the report said.
Mr. González also expressed skepticism that the administration would provide less penal settings for immigrants held on administrative, rather than criminal, charges. "It's not clear to us whether the new system will really mean that the facility will provide migrants in detention with a system that is fully respectful of human rights," he said.
Mr. González said his commission was inspired to investigate the system after receiving numerous requests from human rights advocates and civil society organizations. The group, he added, is now planning to investigate other immigration detention systems in the hemisphere.
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27) Scientists Project Path of Radiation Plume
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/science/17plume.html?ref=us
A United Nations forecast of the possible movement of the radioactive plume coming from crippled Japanese reactors shows it churning across the Pacific, and touching the Aleutian Islands on Thursday before hitting Southern California late Friday.
Health and nuclear experts emphasize that radiation in the plume will be diluted as it travels and, at worst, would have extremely minor health consequences in the United States, even if hints of it are ultimately detectable. In a similar way, radiation from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 spread around the globe and reached the West Coast of the United States in 10 days, its levels measurable but minuscule.
The projection, by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, an arm of the United Nations in Vienna, gives no information about actual radiation levels but only shows how a radioactive plume would probably move and disperse.
The forecast, calculated Tuesday, is based on patterns of Pacific winds at that time and the predicted path is likely to change as weather patterns shift.
On Sunday, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it expected that no "harmful levels of radioactivity" would travel from Japan to the United States "given the thousands of miles between the two countries."
The test ban treaty group routinely does radiation projections in an effort to understand which of its global stations to activate for monitoring the worldwide ban on nuclear arms testing. It has more than 60 stations that sniff the air for radiation spikes and uses weather forecasts and powerful computers to model the transport of radiation on the winds.
On Wednesday, the agency declined to release its Japanese forecast, which The New York Times obtained from other sources. The forecast was distributed widely to the agency's member states.
But in interviews, the technical specialists of the agency did address how and why the forecast had been drawn up.
"It's simply an indication," said Lassina Zerbo, head of the agency's International Data Center. "We have global coverage. So when something happens, it's important for us to know which station can pick up the event."
For instance, the Japan forecast shows that the radioactive plume will probably miss the agency's monitoring stations at Midway and in the Hawaiian Islands but is likely to be detected in the Aleutians and at a monitoring station in Sacramento.
The forecast assumes that radioactivity in Japan is released continuously and forms a rising plume. It ends with the plume heading into Southern California and the American Southwest, including Nevada, Utah and Arizona. The plume would have continued eastward if the United Nations scientists had run the projection forward.
Earlier this week, the leading edge of the tangible plume was detected by the Navy's Seventh Fleet when it was operating about 100 miles northeast of the Japanese reactor complex. On Monday, the Navy said it had repositioned its ships and aircraft off Japan "as a precautionary measure."
The United Nations agency has also detected radiation from the stricken reactor complex at its detector station in Gunma, Japan, which lies about 130 miles to the southwest.
The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko, said Monday that the plume posed no danger to the United States. "You just aren't going to have any radiological material that, by the time it traveled those large distances, could present any risk to the American public," he said in a White House briefing.
Mr. Jaczko was asked if the meltdown of a core of one of the reactors would increase the chance of harmful radiation reaching Hawaii or the West Coast.
"I don't want to speculate on various scenarios," he replied. "But based on the design and the distances involved, it is very unlikely that there would be any harmful impacts."
The likely path of the main Japanese plume across the Pacific has also caught the attention of Europeans, many of whom recall how the much closer Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine began spewing radiation.
In Germany on Wednesday, the Federal Office for Radiation Protection held a news conference that described the threat from the Japanese plume as trifling and said there was no need for people to take iodine tablets. The pills can prevent poisoning from the atmospheric release of iodine-131, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear plants. The United States is also carefully monitoring and forecasting the plume's movements. The agencies include the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy.
On Wednesday, Steven Chu, the energy secretary, told Congress that the United States was planning to deploy equipment in Japan that could detect radiation exposure on the ground and in the air. In total, the department's team includes 39 people and more than eight tons of equipment.
"We continue to offer assistance in any way we can," Dr. Chu said at a hearing, "as well as informing ourselves of what the situation is."
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27) Danger of Spent Fuel Outweighs Reactor Threat
By KEITH BRADSHER and HIROKO TABUCHI
March 17, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18spent.html?scp=1&sq=Danger%20of%20Spent%20Fuel%20Outweighs%20Reactor%20Threat&st=cse
Years of procrastination in deciding on long-term disposal of highly radioactive fuel rods from nuclear reactors is now coming back to haunt Japanese authorities as they try to control fires and explosions at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.
Some countries have tried to limit the number of spent fuel rods that accumulate at nuclear power plants - Germany stores them in costly casks, for example, while Chinese nuclear reactors send them to a desert storage compound in western China's Gansu province. But Japan, like the United States, has kept ever larger numbers of spent fuel rods in temporary storage pools at the power plants, where they can be guarded with the same security provided for the power plant.
Figures provided by Tokyo Electric Power on Thursday show that most of the dangerous uranium at the power plant is actually in the spent fuel rods, not the reactor cores themselves. The electric utility said that a total of 11,195 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at the site.
That is in addition to 400 to 600 fuel rod assemblies that had been in active service in each of the three troubled reactors. In other words, the vast majority of the fuel assemblies at the troubled reactors are in the storage pools, not the reactors.
Now those temporary pools are proving the power plant's Achilles heel, as the water in the pools either boils away or leaks out of their containments, and efforts to add more water have gone awry. While spent fuel rods generate significantly less heat than newer ones, there are strong indications that the fuel rods have begun to melt and release extremely high levels of radiation. Japanese authorities struggled Thursday to add more water to the storage pool at reactor No. 3.
Four helicopters dropped water, only to have it scattered by strong breezes. Water cannons mounted on police trucks - equipment designed to disperse rioters - were deployed in an effort to spray water on the pools. It is unclear if they managed to achieve that.
Nuclear engineers around the world have been expressing surprise this week that the storage pools have become such a problem. "I'm amazed that they couldn't keep the water in the pools," said Robert Albrecht, a longtime nuclear engineer who worked as a consultant to the Japanese nuclear reactor manufacturing industry in the 1980s and visited the Fukushima Daiichi reactor then.
Very high levels of radiation above the storage pools suggest that the water has drained in the 39-foot-deep pools to the point that the 13-foot-high fuel rod assemblies have been exposed to air for hours and are starting to melt, he said. Spent fuel rod assemblies emit less heat than fresh fuel rod assemblies inside reactor cores, but the spent assemblies still emit enough heat and radioactivity that they must still be kept covered with 26 feet of water that is circulated to prevent it from growing too warm.
Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, made the startling assertion on Wednesday that there was little or no water left in the storage pool located on top of reactor No. 4, and expressed grave concern about the radioactivity that would be released as a result. The spent fuel rod assemblies there include 548 assemblies that were only removed from the reactor in November and December to prepare the reactor for maintenance, and may be emitting more heat than the older assemblies in other storage pools.
Even without recirculating water, it should take many days for the water in a storage pool to evaporate, nuclear engineers said. So the rapid evaporation and even boiling of water in the storage pools now is a mystery, raising the question of whether the pools may also be leaking.
Michael Friedlander, a former senior nuclear power plant operator who worked 13 years at three American reactors, said that storage pools typically have a liner of stainless steel that is three-eighths of an inch thick, and they rest on reinforced concrete bases. So even if the liner ruptures, "unless the concrete was torn apart, there's no place for the water to go," he said.
At each end of a pool are 16-foot-tall steel gates with rubber seals, used to swing fresh fuel rod assemblies into a reactor and to swing out and store the spent assemblies. The gates are designed to withstand earthquakes, Mr. Friedlander said, but could have sprung leaks given the power of last Friday's quake, now estimated to have had a magnitude of 9.0.
Even if water gushed out of the gates, there would still be about 10 feet of water left on top of the fuel rod assemblies.
When the water in a storage pool disappears, residual heat in the fuel rods' uranium left over from their time in a nuclear reactor continues to heat the rods' zirconium cladding. This causes the zirconium to oxidize, or rust, and even catch fire. This breaks the seal of the rods, and pressurized radioactive gases like iodine, which accumulated in the rods while they were in the reactor, suddenly spurt out, Mr. Albrecht said.
Each rod inside the assembly holds a vertical stack of cylindrical uranium oxide pellets. These pellets sometimes become fused together while in the reactor, in which case they may stay standing up even as the cladding burns off. If the pellets stay standing up, then even with the water and zirconium gone, nuclear fission will not take place, Mr. Albrecht said.
But Tokyo Electric said this week that there was a chance of "recriticality" in the storage ponds - that is to say, the uranium in the fuel rods could become critical in nuclear terms and resume the fission that previously took place inside the reactor, spewing out radioactive byproducts.
Mr. Albrecht said this was very unlikely, but could happen if the stacks of pellets slumped over and became jumbled together on the floor of the storage pool. Tokyo Electric has reconfigured the storage racks in its pools in recent years so as to pack more fuel rod assemblies together in limited space.
If recriticality occurs, pouring on pure water could actually cause fission to take place even faster. The authorities would need to add water with lots of boron, as they have been trying to do, because the boron absorbs neutrons and interrupts nuclear chain reactions.
If recriticality takes place, the uranium starts to warm. If a lot of fission occurs, which may only happen in an extreme case, the uranium would melt through anything underneath it. If it encounters water as it descends, a steam explosion may then scatter the molten uranium.
At Daiichi, each assembly has either 64 large fuel rods or 81 slightly smaller fuel rods, depending on the vendor who supplied it. A typical fuel rod assembly has a total of roughly 380 pounds of uranium.
One big worry for Japanese officials is that reactor No. 3, the main target of the helicopters and water cannons on Thursday, uses a new and different fuel. It uses mixed oxides, or mox, which contains a mixture of uranium and plutonium, and can produce a more dangerous radioactive plume if scattered by fire or explosions.
According to Tokyo Electric, 32 of the 514 fuel rod assemblies in the storage pond at reactor No. 3 contain mox.
Tokyo Electric has said very little about the biggest repository of spent fuel assemblies at the site: 6,291 assemblies located in a common storage pool immediately inland from reactor No. 4.
Japan had hoped to solve the spent fuel buildup with a large-scale plan to recycle the rods into fuel that would go back into its nuclear program. But even before Friday's quake, that plan had been hit with massive setbacks.
Central to Japan's plans is a $28 billion reprocessing facility in Rokkasho village, north of the quake zone, which would extract uranium and plutonium from the rods for use in making MOX fuel. After countless construction delays, test runs began in 2006, and the plant's operator, Japan Nuclear Fuel, said operations would begin in 2010. However, in late 2010, its opening was delayed by another two years. A facility for making MOX fuel is also under construction.
To close the nuclear fuel recycle process, Japan also built the Monju, a fast breeder reactor, which started running in full in 1994. But a year later, a fire caused by a sodium leak shut down the plant.
Despite revelations that the operator, the quasi-governmental Japan Atomic Energy Agency, had covered up the seriousness of the accident, Monju again started operating at a reduced capacity, reaching criticality, or sustained nuclear chain reactions within the reactor, in May.
Another nuclear reprocessing facility in Tokaimura has been shut down since 1999, when an accident at an experimental fast breeder showered hundreds in the vicinity with radiation, and two workers were killed.
Many of these facilities were hit by Friday's massive quake. A spent fuel pool at Rokkasho spilled over, and power at the plant was knocked out, triggering back-up generators, Japan Nuclear Fuel said. According to the Citizens Nuclear Information Center, an anti-nuclear NGO, about 3,000 tons of fuel are stored at Rokkasho. But the plant, built 55 meters (180 feet) above sea level, was spared from the destructive tsunami that followed the quake. Grid power was restored on Monday, the company said.
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28) Dividends Will Enrich Bank Chiefs
By ERIC DASH
March 16, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/17/business/17dividend.html?ref=business
Even as ordinary investors look forward to the prospect of larger dividend payouts by the big banks, another group is poised for a rich payday: bank chief executives. In the next few days, the Federal Reserve is expected to give a handful of institutions, including JPMorgan Chase and Capital One, permission to pay higher dividends, another sign of the remarkable comeback of banks since the depths of the financial crisis.
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, stands to eventually reap nearly $6 million a year in dividend payments from the stock he owns, an amount that equals almost a third of his total pay in 2010. Capital One's chief executive, Richard D. Fairbank, could earn nearly $3 million a year as the credit card giant weighs a similar move.
These figures are based on the number of shares the executives own and estimates from the banks about the percentage of earnings they plan to earmark for dividend payments. The increase in dividends is likely to occur in stages, so it may take until 2012 for the executives to collect the entire amount.
A JPMorgan spokesman said the payouts were on shares Mr. Dimon accumulated while at the bank, including 2.6 million he bought with his own money. A Capital One spokeswoman said Mr. Fairbank had been paid entirely in stock during his tenure.
To some extent, the expected windfall comes because banks have been paying executives a greater portion of their compensation in stock instead of salaries or bonuses.
Regulators hoped that if banks handed out more shares and other forms of deferred pay, executives would avoid the type of excessive risk-taking that contributed to the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.
At that time, regulators also pressured lenders to cut dividends and shore up their finances as loan losses mounted. Even some of the strongest institutions halted their stock repurchase programs and cut their quarterly dividend to a mere nickel or penny a share. As part of the financial bailout in 2008, banks need federal approval before they could increase the dividends. Dividends for financial companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index fell to $19 billion in 2010, from $51 billion in 2007. JPMorgan Chase, for example, now has an annual dividend of 20 cents a share, compared to $1.52 before the crisis.
The larger dividends will also put billions of dollars into the pockets of big investors, like pension and hedge funds, as well as retirees who rely on the quarterly payouts as a steady source of income. JPMorgan has said it plans to pay roughly 30 percent of earnings as dividends. With analysts projecting the company to earn over $19 billion in 2011, that would translate to an annual dividend of $1.13 a share.
Several other banks have said they plan to pay a similar percentage of earnings to shareholders. So chief executives stand to reap especially large gains because they are traditionally among the biggest holders of company stock.
Corporate governance experts do not typically fret about such payouts since they help align the interests of management with those of investors more equally than other compensation practices. However, the dividends collected by chief executives will not be broken out in the compensation tables found in corporate filings. Investors must crunch the numbers themselves.
"Even a small dividend can add up to a pretty substantial amount of money," said Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate at GovernanceMetrics International. "It could be just another bonus for some C.E.O.'s. For others, it is a huge windfall."
The likely approval on dividends comes as the Federal Reserve completes a second round of stress tests for the nation's 19 largest banks. Regulators are gauging whether they have stockpiled enough capital to weather a still-anemic economic recovery and meet the higher requirements put in place by new international accords.
The top banks will learn the results of the examinations by Monday, including whether they can raise dividends and buy back shares. With the Fed's expected blessing in hand, financial stocks could get a lift in the coming days, as one bank after another announces their plans.
"Allowing some dividends to go up is a big vote of confidence in our banks," said Jeffery Harte, an analyst at Sandler O'Neill.
In addition to JPMorgan Chase and Capital One, other institutions hoping for dividend increases include BB&T, Bank of New York Mellon, U.S. Bancorp, PNC Financial and Wells Fargo.
If Wells Fargo pays 30 percent of earnings to shareholders, its chief executive, John G. Stumpf, would reap nearly $400,000 a year in dividends, based on the bank's expected profit in 2011. Using similar assumptions, PNC Financial's chief executive, James E. Rohr, stands to earn close to $1 million a year.
Other chief executives, like Brian T. Moynihan of Bank of America and Vikram S. Pandit of Citigroup, may have to wait until the second half of 2011 or even into 2012 for a modest dividend increase, because their companies are recovering more slowly.
American Express, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have told investors they may eschew dividend increases in favor of things like investing in their businesses or buying back stock. Goldman expects to use some of the money to repurchase the preferred shares it sold Warren E. Buffett at the height of the 2008 financial crisis.
Some regional banks, like SunTrust Banks and KeyCorp, are forbidden by the federal government to raise dividends because they have yet to return the billions in federal bailout money they received in 2008. Depending on how those banks fare in the stress tests, the Fed may let them start repaying the government in the coming weeks.
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29) The American Dilemma in Libya: To Bomb, Invade, Partition, Or All of the Above
By BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Black Agenda Report
March 16, 2011
http://blackagendareport.com/content/american-dilemma-libya-bomb-invade-partition-or-all-above
The Obama administration insists it is retaining "all options" to bring down Libyan leader Muamar Khadafi-meaning, legalities don't matter. Absent permission from the United Nations Security Council, the Americans and Europeans, separately or in concert, have no right to intervene militarily in the Libyan conflict. With Khadafi's forces on a roll toward Benghazi, the rebel stronghold, the possibility of permanent Security Council members China and Russia providing legal cover becomes remote to nonexistent. But that doesn't stop the Americans from loudly pondering end runs around international law, or from making up law out of whole cloth.
"R2P"-Responsibility to Protect-is the Obama regime's favored formula for pouring mud in the otherwise clear waters of international law. The philosophy-actually, a political position seeking legal recognition-amounts to a kind of super-power judicial waiver couched in the language of nobles oblige, the obligation of the strong to help the weak. In the real world, the strong only help themselves-in this case, to Libya's oil reserves, the largest in Africa.
Obama UN Ambassador Susan Rice, a far meaner junkyard dog than George Bush's Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is the administration's loudest and most bellicose proponent of so-called "humanitarian" intervention. Even before the Democrats won the White House, Susan Rice proposed a sea and air blockade and "no-fly zone" against Sudan. Having finally succeeded in partitioning Sudan, after decades of fomenting civil war, the West is clearly considering the "option" of partitioning Libya, where most of the oil is conveniently located in the eastern part of the country, near Benghazi.
The workings of the imperial brain are plainly visible in the output of the corporate press, which act as ventriloquist dummies to power. Suddenly, the media have all undergone a crash course in the intractable nature of Libyan tribal politics-a subject until now totally unknown to the western press. After a quick education from the State Department and designated think tankers, corporate media dutifully prepare the public for the possible drawing of an American "line in the sand" somewhere before the gates of Benghazi, a town that would then be dubbed a "hero city"-the opposite of Fallujah, the demon-city leveled by the U.S. in 2004 at the cost of tens-of-thousands of Iraqi lives, to the cheers of U.S. corporate media.
Western reporters, who are such quick studies when it comes to tribalism's and other perceived pathologies of exotic, non-western peoples, have not yet figured out who the rebels are, politically. This is quite strange, since corporate correspondents have for weeks spent all their waking hours among the rebels, profiling individuals and rushing to the battlefronts. Yet, they cannot-or will not-provide a coherent overview of rebel politics, beyond an incandescent hatred of Khadafi, the man. Khadafi's narrative of the conflict, that the rebels are largely Al Qaida-type elements, is dismissed as nonsensical. But no one disputes that Benghazi was the center of an Islamic revolt in the Nineties, and that resentments from that period fester. The presence of Islamic militants among the rebels is now widely acknowledged, although corporate correspondents can't seem to find many in the flesh to profile.
The western media, and the governments they serve, are caught in a crossfire of contradictions. The U.S. wants desperately to position itself on the "right" side of some aspect of the unfolding Arab Reawakening. The West dearly wishes to appropriate to itself a section of the "Arab revolt," so as to bomb an evil "dictator" on their behalf. The western media's job is to do the public relations work, presenting these "pro-western" combatants in the most attractive light. However, it appears the media are having trouble packaging the Libyan rebels as sufficiently virtuous "freedom fighters"-one suspects because, on closer inspection, many turn out to be fundamentalists or tribalists.
Ironically, the merest presence of Islamic fundamentalist fighters would have, in previous times, been reason for a U.S. attack and invasion-against those harboring such elements.
And, what happened to the estimated 6,000 former regime troops that deserted at the start of the rebellion? Some former Khadafi officers occupy high profile positions in the rebel ranks, but the equivalent of several brigades' worth of deserters is not in evidence. This, again, raises the question of who the rebel leaders really are; why are they apparently incapable of taking advantage of mass desertions from the armed forces? One cannot help but suspect the presence of unwholesome elements around whom former soldiers and others cannot bring themselves to effectively coalesce.
The most unwholesome elements of all, of course, are the U.S. and European imperialists, whose intervention represents the overarching threat to the Libyan and Arab nation. Much is made of the Arab League's request for a no-fly zone over Libya. But the League's rather ambiguous proposal-it cautions against an "attack" on Libya, as if a no-fly zone can be imposed without attacking anybody-has no more force of law than a NATO no-fly decision, or an African Union decision to attack Europe!
The United States has paid no attention to countless Arab League resolutions regarding Israel's six decades of lawless behavior in the region, or to the Jewish State's constant violations of UN resolutions. No one in the Arab world believes the West has suddenly developed a new respect for either Arabs or the rule of law. What's new is western fear that, at long last, the empire is finally slipping away.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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30) Support the Libyan people! No imperialist intervention in Libya!
Labour Party Pakistan statement on Libya
March 8, 2011
http://www.laborpakistan.org/
The shock waves of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions continue to spread throughout the Arab world and beyond. For several days, it has been Libya which is at the centre of the revolutionary upheaval. Events are evolving from day to day, from hour to hour, but everything depends today on the extraordinary mobilisation of the Libyan people.
Hundreds of thousands of Libyans have risen up to attack the dictatorship of Gaddafi, often with their bare hands. Whole cities and regions have fallen into to the hands of the insurgent people. The answer of the dictatorship has been ruthless: pitiless repression, massacres, bombardment of populations with heavy arms and air strikes.
Today, it is a fight to the death between the people and the dictatorship. One of the characteristics of the Libyan revolution, compared to the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, is the splintering of the police and military apparatuses. There are confrontations within the army itself, a territorial division, with confrontation between regions and cities controlled by the insurgents and the area of Tripoli based on the military force of the dictatorship. The Libyan dictatorship represents too many social and democratic injustices and, too much repression, too many attacks on elementary liberties and rights. It must be driven out.
The Libyan revolution is part of a whole process which covers the whole Arab world, and beyond, in Iran and China. The revolutionary processes in Tunisia and Egypt are radicalising. In Tunisia, governments fall one after the other. Youth and the workers' movement are pushing their movement still further. All the forms of continuity with the old regime are called into question. The demand for a constituent assembly, opposed to all the rescue operations of the regime, is becoming increasingly strong.
In both countries, Tunisia and Egypt, the workers' movement is reorganising itself in the fire of a wave of strikes for the satisfaction of vital social demands. This revolutionary rise takes forms that are particular and unequal, according to the countries: violent confrontations in Yemen and Bahrain, demonstrations in Jordan, Morocco and Algeria. Iran is also once again affected by an outbreak of struggles and demonstrations against the regime of Ahmadinejad and for democracy.
It is in this context that the situation in Libya takes on strategic importance. This new rise already carries within it historical changes, but its development may depend on the battle of Libya. If Gaddafi takes control of the situation again, with thousands of deaths, the process will be slowed down, contained or even blocked. If Gaddafi is overthrown, the whole movement will as a result be stimulated and amplified. For this reason, all the ruling classes, all the governments, all the reactionary regimes of the Arab world are more or less supporting the Libyan dictatorship.
It is also in this context that US imperialism, the European Union and NATO are multiplying operations to try to control the process that is underway. The revolutions that are in progress weaken, over and above what the imperialists say in their speeches, the positions of the Western imperialist powers. So, as is often the case, imperialism uses the pretext of a "situation of chaos", as it calls it, or of "humanitarian catastrophe" to prepare an intervention and to take control of the situation again. We are totally against any military or other interventions by the Imperialist forces in Libya.
No one should be fooled about the aims of the NATO powers: they want to confiscate the revolutions in progress from the peoples of the region, and even to take advantage of the situation to occupy new positions, in particular concerning control of the oil regions. It is for this fundamental reason that it is necessary to reject any military intervention by American imperialism. It is up to the Libyan people, who have begun the job, to finish it, with the support of the peoples of the region, and all progressive forces on the international level must contribute to that by their solidarity and their support.
There is a lot of confusion among the activists in Pakistan on the question of Libya. Gaddafi was seen as one of the progressive leaders of the Arab world and who was opposed to US imperialism. He had many followers in Pakistan. One of them was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, father of Benazir Bhutto, who named one of the main support stadiums of Pakistan as Qazafi [Gaddafi] Stadium. Gaddafi was not seen the same as Hosni Mubarak, Ben Ali and others. Now the threat of NATO intervention is also creating some confusion among the progressive activists.
You do not oppose imperialism by supporting dictators who massacre their people who are making a revolution. That can only reinforce imperialism. The fundamental task of the revolutionary movement on an international level is to defend these revolutions and to oppose imperialism by supporting these revolutions, not the dictators.
We are on the side of the Libyan people and the Arab revolutions that are in progress. We must express our unconditional solidarity, for the civil, democratic and social rights which are emerging in this revolution. One of the priorities consists of supporting all aid to the Libyan people -- medical aid coming from Egypt or Tunisia, the food aid which is needed, demanding the cancellation of all commercial contracts with Libya and the suspension of all delivery of arms. We have to prevent the massacre of the Libyan people.
Solidarity with the Arab revolutions!
Support the Libyan people!
No imperialist intervention in Libya!
Hands off Libya!
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31) In Post Racial America Prisons Feast on Black Girls
By Rachel Pfeffer
March 15, 2011
http://ethnoblog.newamericamedia.org/2011/03/in-post-racial-america-prisons-feast-on-black-girls-1.php#
African American girls and young women have become the fastest growing population of incarcerated young people in the country. Efforts to stop mass incarceration focused on black girls are almost nonexistant in government policy, the media, foundations and academia.
Recently, the Thelton Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley's Boalt Law School took the bold and necessary step of organizing a day-and-a-half free event titled, "African American Girls and Young Women and Juvenile Justice System: A Call to Action."
The beauty of this conference was the focus on black girls and the passionate energy to create a path for action among the participants.
Academics and activists, among them formerly incarcerated African American girls and young women, gathered together from across the divides of class, age, race and place to talk about what we know about these young people, their interaction with the criminal justice system--and what we are going to do about it.
Sociologist Nikki Jones of UC Santa Barbara, and Meda Chesney-Lind, University of Hawaii opened up the conference with a look at the statistics.
"No", said Jones, "Black girls are not committing more crimes, even though they are being incarcerated in record numbers."
"I've been studying this for decades," said Chesney-Lind. She added, "We have never seen these kind of numbers before. National policies like zero tolerance are responsible for the school to prison pipeline. And a dual justice system that treats white girls differently from black girls is disproportionately impacting African American girls."
She continued, "In 2008, we knew the arrest rate in California was 49 out of every 1,000 for black girls, 8.9 per 1,000 for white girls and 14.9 per 1,000 for Latinas."
The cause of the over criminalization of African American young women is best understood by looking back through the lens of American history and the ideological construction of black criminality.
"The shackles of slavery endured into other eras, including convict leasing systems and chain gangs," said Prisicilla Ocen, a professor at UCLA's Critical Race Studies.
"In order to sustain these systems, de-humanizing stereotypes of black women were created to maintain the difference between white and African American women," she said. "Black girls are still dealing with racial and gendered stereotypes that were used to justify punishment."
Ocen continued, "These historical stereotypes laid the groundwork for the creation of a dual criminal justice system - one where African American women and girls are treated differently for the same behaviors."
Many participants saw the treatment of African American girls in the justice system as criminal with little accountability. "Adults are committing crimes too; this is part of the story that needs to be told," said Barry Krisberg, Research and Policy Director at UC Berkeley's Earl Warren Institute on Law.
Krisberg went on, "Once in the criminal justice system, African American girls are treated with brutality, so much emotional and sexual abuse. We are violating African American girls' human rights everyday in all 58 counties of California. Where are the lawsuits? Where is the accountability?"
The breadth of the problem seems overwhelming, yet no one at the conference seemed daunted. The resolve in the room at Boalt Law School was palpable and the ideas for action began to flow. Formerly incarcerated participants, who work at the Center for Young Women's Development (CYWD), and other formerly incarcerated African American girls will lead these efforts. They are the experts.
For the past 17 years, young women at CYWD have been leaving jail, the street economies and gangs to work for self healing, social justice, policy change and a meaningful place in their communities.
"The call to action is the task before us-there are a number of things we can do," said Lateefah Simon, activist and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights San Francisco.
"The Henderson Center can provide institutional support for African American Leaders, who are engaging in the criminal justice system. We can convene all the judges, we can organize ourselves locally and nationally to focus on African American girl," said Simon. "Yes, let's do that--we want our girls to be free."
There is room for everyone to have a meaningful part in efforts to stop the over incarceration of African American girls or young women. For more information about how to get involved in this effort please contact: african.american.girls.a.call.to.action@lists.berkeley.edu
Rachel Pfeffer is the founder of the Center for Young Women's Development and currently on the Advisory Board. For more information www.cywd.org.=
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32) US government denies entry visa to Malalai Joya, Afghan women’s rights activist and author
March 17, 2011
http://www.afghanwomensmission.org/?p=1255
For Immediate Release –
The United States has denied a travel visa to Malalai Joya, an acclaimed women’s rights activist and former member of Afghanistan’s parliament. Ms. Joya, who was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2010, was set to begin a three-week US tour to promote an updated edition of her memoir, A Woman Among Warlords, published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
Joya’s publisher at Scribner, Alexis Gargagliano, said, “We had the privilege to publish Ms. Joya, and her earlier 2009 book tour met with wide acclaim. The right of authors to travel and promote their work is central to freedom of expression and the full exchange of ideas.” Joya’s memoir has been translated into over a dozen languages, and she has toured widely including Australia, the UK, Canada, Norway, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands in support of the book over the past two years.
Colleagues of Ms. Joya’s report that when she presented herself as scheduled at the U.S. embassy, she was told she was being denied because she was “unemployed” and “lives underground.” Then 27, Joya was the youngest woman elected to Afghanistan’s parliament in 2005. Because of her harsh criticism of warlords and fundamentalists in Afghanistan, she has been the target of at least five assassination attempts. “The reason Joya lives underground is because she faces the constant threat of death for having had the courage to speak up for women’s rights – it’s obscene that the U.S. government would deny her entry,” said Sonali Kolhatkar of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a U.S. based organization that has hosted Joya for speaking tours in the past and is a sponsor of this year’s national tour.
Joya has also become an internationally known critic of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan. Organizers argue that the denial of Joya’s visa appears to be a case of what the American Civil Liberties Union describes as “Ideological Exclusion,” which they say violates Americans’ First Amendment right to hear constitutionally protected speech by denying foreign scholars, artists, politicians and others entry to the United States.
Events featuring Malalai Joya are planned, from March 20 until April 10, in New York, New Jersey, Washington DC, Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington and California. Organizers of her speaking tour are encouraging people to contact the Department of State to ask them to fulfill the promise from the Obama Administration of “promoting the global marketplace of ideas” and grant Joya’s visa immediately.
Malalai Joya is available for a limited number of interviews. Contact Sonali Kolhatkar (626-676-7884), Prachi Patankar (917-415-0659), or Natalie Reyes (562) 319-3046).
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Praise for Malalai Joya and A Woman Among Warlords:
‘The youngest and most famous of all the women in the Afghan parliament…a powerful symbol of change’
- Guardian
‘A courageous female MP’
- The Times
‘… one of the few symbols of hope for Afghanistan’s future.’
- New Statesman
‘Quite simply the most passionate and devastating critique of Western intervention in Afghanistan I have ever read.’
- Peace News
‘[Has] spoken her mind as few Afghan women dare to do’
- New York Times
‘Malalai Joya leaves us with hope that the tormented people of Afghanistan can take their fate into their own hands if they are released from the grip of foreign powers.’
- Noam Chomsky
‘Unwavering in her mission to bring true democracy to her country…Women have been known to walk for miles just to touch her. For them, she is their only real hope for a better future’
- Telegraph
‘Joya is a model for women everywhere seeking to make the world more just.’
- Six women Nobel Peace Prize laureates
‘Joya’s pain and bravery are genuine and can be felt on almost every page’
- Christina Lamb, Sunday Times
‘A fascinating account of Afghanistan’s political reality…Malalai Joya has been compared to Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi’
- Irish Times
‘Malalai Joya is a staunch defender of human rights and a powerful voice for Afghan women.’
- Human Rights Watch
‘Heroic’
- John Pilger
‘Extraordinary’
- The Independent
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33) U.N. to Vote on Libya Airstrikes; U.S. Readies Forces
The Wall Street Journal
By JOE LAURIA, ADAM ENTOUS, YAROSLAV TROFIMOV and SAM DAGHER
MARCH 17, 2011, 2:33 P.M. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703818204576206373350344478.html
The United Nations Security Council was set to vote at 6 p.m. on a
resolution that would authorize airstrikes on Libya, several diplomats
said, as Col. Moammar Gadhafi's air force bombed the opposition's capital
of Benghazi in a push to end the month-long revolt against his rule.
The U.S. joined Britain and France Thursday in pushing for the vote.
"We need to act quickly," said Chinese Ambassador Li Baodong, the current
Security Council president. Mr. Li didn't indicate how China would vote.
Beijing has been considered a possible obstacle to passage of a resolution.
French Ambassador Gerard Araud said there would no unanimity. "There will
be some suprises and more than one abstention," he said. Diplomats
speculated that as many as five nations could abstain, including China,
Russia, Germany, India and South Africa.
The measure would pass with nine votes and no vetoes on the 15-member
council.
In anticipation of authorization to use force, the Pentagon was
fine-tuning military options for "serious" strikes against ground and air
targets in Libya, military and defense officials said.
A defense official said the U.S. military has enough assets in place to
begin strikes almost immediately.
"There is significant, serious planning going on right now," an official
said. The options would be "more aggressive than a show of force," the
official added.
Options included using cruise missiles to take out fixed Libyan military
sites and air-defense systems. Manned and unmanned aircraft could be used
against Col. Gadhafi's tanks, personnel carriers and infantry positions.
Sorties could be flown out of U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization
bases in the southern Mediterranean.
Officials said the goal would be to protect civilians in Benghazi, push
Col. Gadhafi's forces back, and sow enough confusion and disorder within
military ranks that officers will turn against Col. Gadhafi.
A Libyan defense committee, quoted on state television, said any foreign
military intervention in Libya would be met with attacks against military
and civilian ships and aircraft in the Mediterranean. "The Mediterranean
Sea basin will be in grave danger not only in the short-term but in the
long-term as well," the committee said.
Libya's military could "cause harm but it is obsolete and it can be dealt
with swiftly" by NATO assets, said Riad Kahwaji, of the Institute for Near
East and Gulf military studies, in Dubai. Because of sanctions that lasted
almost ten years and were only lifted in 2003, Libya hasn't been able yet
to renovate its military arsenal, he said.
The U.K. Thursday said it welcomed what it said was a "significant change"
in the U.S. position, after a week of frustration from Britain and France
at what they saw as foot-dragging by other nations on the issue of a
military response.
In discussions with other U.N. Security Council members, the Obama
administration has made the case that simply establishing a no-fly zone to
ground Col. Gadhafi's air force would be "insufficient" to save Benghazi,
in eastern Libya since Col. Gadhafi could strike the city with ground
forces, officials said.
The draft resolution, however, included the authorization of a no-fly
zone, which would set up a ban on all flights in Libyan airspace "in order
to help protect civilians," with the exception of humanitarian aircraft or
planes evacuating foreign nationals.
Leaders of the month-old Libyan uprising insisted that Benghazi, a city of
700,000 residents where opposition to Col. Gadhafi has always been strong,
won't fall easily—even if the international community doesn't intervene.
"Benghazi is a hard city to conquer, and we're not afraid," said Maj. Gen.
Ahmad Gothrani, a senior commander in the rebel army. "We're fighting for a
cause, while Gadhafi is fighting to keep a rusty chair."
The head of the rebel council managing the city, Saleh el Gazal, a
70-year-old businessman who spent 18 years in jail for opposing Col.
Gadhafi's rule, said Benghazi would be able to hold out for a long time.
"We have no fear of running out of supplies—our stocks will last three or
four months," he said.
Col. Gadhafi's forces bombed the city for the second day in a row
Thursday, near the airport on the southern edge of the city, killing one
shepherd and injuring at least 12 civilians, rebel officials said.
The bombing brought Col. Gadhafi's forces the closest to the rebels'
stronghold since the uprising began. The raids and the advances made by
Col. Gadhafi's forces prompted stores and businesses in Benghazi, which
maintained an air of surprising normality until just a couple of days
earlier, to close down on Thursday.
Meanwhile, rebel resistance appeared to be vanishing in the recently
captured city of Ajdabiya.
In the port of Tobruq, the influx of refugees from Ajdabiya stopped on
Thursday, as Col. Gadhafi's forces appeared to have shut down the only exit
route from the strategic city.
Rebel spirits were buoyed somewhat on Thursday by reports that their
anti-aircraft artillery managed to shoot down at least one Gadhafi warplane
near Benghazi.
Shelling resumed Thursday against the coastal city of Misrata, the only
rebel-controlled city in western Libya, one day after pro-Gadhafi troops
tried to storm the center from the south, east and west.
A doctor inside the city said at least 21 people were killed over the two
days of fighting, including three rebels who died in clashes with
government troops on Thursday. The doctor said surgical supplies were
running low in the city, 130 miles east of Tripoli.
Photographs coming out of the city showed damage to several buildings
including a mosque and a library in the center.
A resident, who is affiliated with the rebel military and civilian
councils that were established after rebels took control of the city last
month, said Misrata had been without water for almost one week and that
cellular phone coverage was disconnected Tuesday.
He said troops were stationed in farmland to the west and east as well as
at the air force academy and civilian airport in the south and that they
were targeting anyone affiliated with the rebels through assassination,
kidnapping or the use of snipers on rooftops in areas close to the center.
He said one of his relatives was killed over the weekend when his vehicle
was sprayed with bullets while traveling to his farm on the outskirts.
Rebels planted roadside bombs at the entrances of the city to impede the
advance of government troops, according to this person.
"Our goal is the toppling of the regime, no dialogue, no negotiations," he
said.
The government in Tripoli couldn't be immediately reached for comment on
events in Misrata.
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