*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
MURDERER MEHSERLE WILL WALK THE STREETS SOON
Johannes Mehserle received two years for the murder of Oscar Grant.
On June 13 [postponed from June 1], he will go before Judge Perry and COULD WALK OUT FREE.
We don't know the exact date, but we do know that in June, Murderer Mehserle will be back on the streets.
We need to be ready to show them that Oakland has NOT forgotton that justice was NOT served.
On the DAY OF HIS RELEASE: The Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant will hold events at TWO PLACES:
3:00 PM: Gather at Oscar Grant Station (Fruitvale BART)
5:30 PM: Gather on 14th & Broadway
Stay tuned for more details!!!
Click here to view Facebook Event: Mehserle the Murderer is Being Released Soon:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=115287888554806
Or call us at (510) 575-9005
The ANSWER Coalition is a member of the Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
DEFEND MUNI OPERATOR DORIAN MAXWELL
RALLY and PRESS CONFERENCE AT MUNI POTRERO DIVISION Headquarters,
2500 MARIPOSA (&BRYANT-ACROSS FROM KQED)
1PM TUESDAY, JUNE 7TH
DEFEND ALL PUBLIC WORKERS AND ILWU LOCAL 10
MUNI operator Dorian Maxwell has worked tirelessly to expose MUNI's unsafe operating conditions and equipment for its adverse effects on operators and riders. Muni management is fast tracking an attempt to fire this relatively new worker because he used his break time to help a co-worker research a work related problem. His assistance to a co-worker is protected under federal, state and contract law as protected union activity and as civil rights. Maxwell also won a decision from the San Francisco Ethics Commission stating that MUNI management had illegally withheld documents that show he was being framed on charges for his role as a WHISTLEBLOWER. Meanwhile MUNI head, Nathaniel Ford is in court here and in Atlanta for sexual harassment of both women and men and financial malfeasance. KTVU Channel 2 featured a recent report showing Ford entering a porno store, while he was taking a lunch break. All combined this is clearly an example of unfair and unequal treatment. MUNI management should stop harassing Maxwell and keep him on the job.
In the mean meantime, Sean Elsbernd's 2011 Proposition G is enabling the Municipal Transportation Authority (MTA) to attack MUNI workers in a racist and sexist manner. The contract proposed as a result of proposition G freezes wages, and causes all the following: loss of discipline hearing rights, reduced health and safety oversight, losses of overtime pay, losses of seniority rights connected to new use of part-timers, a violation of federal transportation law section 13(C) and more. Ultimately the resolution of the contract is left up to one person, an arbitrator, not the MTA and certainly not the union members who make MUNI work.
Finally, the arbitrator gets to implement the blame for MUNI's problems on MUNI workers and not on incompetent, mean-spirited and corrupt MUNI managers and executives. And while Transport Workers Union Local 250A has the MTA in court opposing Proposition G, TWU leaders are supporting a contract negotiated under the "plantation" mentality of Proposition G.
This is an attack on all San Francisco public workers mounted by 18 San Francisco billionaires who fund the ballot initiative campaigns and collaborate with Mayor Lee and anti-labor Supervisors to do so. The attack on public workers results in public service cuts, pension losses, increased retirement age and decreases the viability of local businesses. This theft from public workers and the local economy is an outrageous benefit for a few local patrician city robber barons and baronesses.
International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 should be defended against the Pacific Maritime Association for its action in solidarity with Wisconsin public workers on April 4th, 2011. Public and private workers must unite in solidarity actions to defend all workers.
MUNI WORKERS WILL HIT THE BRICKS TO DEFEND DORIAN MAXWELL -
Join our press conference and rally. Defend all PUBLIC WORKERS, MUNI workers and members of Transport Workers Local 250A.
Sponsored and/or endorsed by the Emergency Committee to Defend Dorian Maxwell, United Public Workers for Action - FYI UPWA.info
(415) 867-0628 0R (415) 867-3320 lvsf@igc.com laborsolidarity@me.com LABOR DONATED
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
From Bangladesh to the Bay Area
A Walmart Workers Truth Tour
Join worker leaders and their allies for a community educational forum on labor exploitation and worker organizing at all levels of Walmartâ€(tm)s global supply chain!
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011, 6:00pm
City College of San Francisco Mission Campus, 1125 Valencia Street (near 22nd St), Room 108
Featuring:
o Kalpona Ackter*, former Bangladeshi child garment worker turned organizer and co-founder of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity
o Walmart warehouse and retail workers organizing for respect and justice in their workplaces
o Local community and labor organizers waging campaigns for good jobs and healthy communities
o Cultural performance, food and more!
*Kalpona Akter started working in garment factories at 12 years old, working 14 hours a day for $6 a month. Fired and blacklisted for organizing at the sweatshop factory where she worked, she joined with other former garment workers to launch the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. Internationally known and respected, the Center is a grassroots organization dedicated to protecting the human and labor rights of workers and children in Bangladesh. In 2010, Walmartâ€(tm)s subcontractor filed a false criminal complaint against Kalpona, which resulted in her being arrested, imprisoned for 30 days and tortured.
For more information, contact Gordon Mar at Jobs with Justice San Francisco (415) 994-2496 or gordon@jwjsf.org.
--
Gordon Mar
Coordinator
Jobs with Justice San Francisco
1050 South Van Ness, Suite 201
San Francisco, CA 94110
Tel: (415) 994-2496
Email: gordon@jwjsf.org
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Thurs. June 9, 7pm
2969 Mission St. at 26th, SF (near 24th St. BART)
Film Showing "South of the Border"
& Report Back from Cuba
Join us for a film showing of "South of the Border" following an update by Gloria La Riva. She recently returned from Cuba, where she was awarded the Friendship Medal by the Cuban Council of State. La Riva will discuss the new Cuban economic policies, their impact on the country's economy, and other developments in the struggle for liberation in Latin America.
There's a revolution underway in South America, but most of the world doesn't know it. Oliver Stone sets out on a road trip across five countries to explore the social and political movements as well as the mainstream media's misperception of South America while interviewing seven of its elected presidents. In casual conversations with Presidents Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Lula da Silva (Brazil), Cristina Kirchner (Argentina), as well as her late husband and ex-President Nestor Kirchner, Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), and Raúl Castro (Cuba), Stone gains unprecedented access and sheds new light upon the exciting transformations in the region. (from www.southoftheborderdoc.com) 78min., 2009
$5-10 donation (no one turned away for lack of funds)
Refreshments provided. Wheelchair accessible.
Sponsored by the ANSWER Coalition. Call 415-821-6545 for more info.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
6/10 SF Action: STOP NUKES And End The Cover-UP Of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant - Close All Nuclear Plants In Japan, US And The World
STOP NUKES And End The Cover-Up Of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Catastrophe
Close All Nuclear Plants In Japan, US And the World
6/10/2011 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Rally Japan Consulate Mission and 50 Fremont St. San Francisco
With March to Bechtel Corporation 50 Beale St. San Francisco
The nuclear melt down and environmental catastrophe in Fushima, Japan
continues unabated. The nuclear workers, the communities and their children in the
Fukushima area continue to be contaminated. The Tokyo Electric Power Company TEPCO
along with the government have withheld information about this disaster to the, workers,people and their families and have changed the regulations protecting people from radioactive dangers.
At the same time, this radioactive leaking and contamination is spreading to the US and
around the world and the California nuclear power plants at San Louis Obispo and San
Onofre have been built right on faults as well. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission
has also admitted that they have no plans for a regional environmental catastrophe like
the earthquake in the Sendai/Tohoku area.
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/commission/tr/2011/20110512.pdf
This means similar events can happen right here in the US. We will also be demanding
that all US nuclear plants by closed and that there be no US tax dollars used to subsidize the nuclear industry. Funds should be used for solar/clean energy and the building of a public/community controlled energy system along with a mass public transportation system that is energy efficient and not based to support the profit of these industries.
Today even in California for example in Fresno, efforts are still being made to build nuclear plants:
http://www.fresnobee.com/2011/03/15/2311653/madera-co-oks-nuclear-support.html#storylink=mirelated
The US government in collaboration with GE, Westinghouse, Babcock-Wilcox, Bechtel and other corporations are pushing nuclear power plants and industry for profits despite the deadly dangers for humanity. It is time to call a halt to this nightmare.
Join with us to call for action to close these plants now.
NO NUKE Action Committee
http://nonuclearaction.wordpress.com/
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=218843821468487
For information or to endorse phone
(917)774-4079 or (415)867-0628
Endorsed by United Public Workers For Action UPWA, Veterans For Peace, Green Party, Peace and Freedom Party, Labor Video Project
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Next UNAC general meeting is Sunday, June 12, 2:00 PM at Redstone Bldg., 16th Street and Capp. (Capp Street is one block or so below Mission Street.) Third Floor Conference Room, San Francisco. MARK YOUR CALENDAR NOW!
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Defend Carlos Montes! Drop the Charges Now!
RESIST GOVERNMENT ATTACKS AGAINST ACTIVISTS
On May 17, 2011 at 5:00 AM the SWAT Team of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and members of the FBI raided the home of Carlos Montes, a long time Chicano activist and active member of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression. Carlos has his first court date scheduled for June 16 in Los Angeles.
BAY AREA SOLIDARITY RALLY: Stop FBI Attacks on Political Activists
Thursday June 16, 4-6pm
OAKLAND FEDERAL BUILDING
1301 Clay Street, Oakland
Downtown Oakland near 12th Street BART
FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: Arab Resource and Organizing Center, 415.861.7444 or info@araborganizing.org
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Save the Date!
NATIONAL LABOR-COMMUNITY CONFERENCE TO DEFEAT THE CORPORATE AGENDA AND FIGHT FOR A WORKING PEOPLE'S AGENDA
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio
June 24-26, 2011
Working people across the country -- from Wisconsin and Ohio to New York, Oregon, and California -- are facing unprecedented attacks by corporations and the rich with the help of the federal, state and local politicians that they fund.
The corporate agenda is clear: It is to bust unions and cut workers' pay and benefits -- both in the private and public sectors. It is to erode and privatize Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It is to dismantle the public sector and social services by denying funds for job creation, education, health care, environmental protection, and rebuilding the infrastructure. It is to ensure that taxes on the wealthy are constantly lowered while the bite on workers and the poor is constantly increased. It is to perpetuate U.S. wars and occupations whenever it serves the interests of the multinationals. It is to divide the working class by race, gender, national origin, religion, and sexual orientation. It is also to limit and restrict constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties. The list goes on.
In state capitals, communities and workplaces across the country, workers are fighting back. But if we're going to be successful in pushing back the attacks on collective bargaining, stopping the budget cuts and concessions, creating jobs, and defending social services and education, we need to build unity within our movement, including forging stronger ties with labor's allies: communities of color, students and youth, single-payer advocates, environmentalists, antiwar activists, immigrant rights supporters, and other progressive forces.
Relying on politicians to defend us -- the so-called "friends of labor" -- has proven to be disastrous. During the past three decades, working people have suffered a dramatic decline in their standard of living while the rich have amassed an unprecedented amount of wealth at the top, regardless of which of the major parties was running the government. We have had every combination imaginable: Republicans occupying the White House with a majority in Congress, Democrats occupying the White House with a majority in Congress, or some kind of "divided government." But in each case the result for working people has been the same: conditions got worse for workers while the corporations prospered even more. Why should we continue this vicious cycle?
The working class has the power to put an end to this situation. And as the debate over the debt and the deficit intensifies, the need has never been greater for an organized campaign to demand "No Cuts, No Concessions!" whether in regard to social programs or workers' wages and benefits. We say place the burden for solving the financial crises squarely where it belongs: on the rich. They caused the crisis, let them pay for it!
The Emergency Labor Network (ELN) was initiated earlier this year at a historic meeting of 100 union leaders and activists from around the country. Join us June 24-26, 2011 at Kent State University in Ohio for a national labor-community conference to spur the campaign to build a more militant fight-back movement and to launch a national campaign for an alternative agenda for working people. Together we can move forward on both fronts.
This conference is open to all who agree with its purpose, as explained in this Call. To register for the conference, please go to our website at www.laborfightback.org. If you prefer to register offline, write emergencylabor@aol.com or call 216-736-4715 for a registration form.
For more information, e-mail emergencylabor@aol.com or call 216-736-4715.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Cultures of Resistance
Thursday June 30 -- 7pm, Berkeley City College, 2050 Center Street, 1/2 block from downtown Berkeley
The Middle East Children's Alliance & the Arab Film Festival present the Berkeley premiere of bay area filmmaker & activist Iara Lee's new feature film Cultures of Resistance.
The film won Best Documentary at the Tiburon International Film Festival and is showing around the globe, from Portugal to China to Ethiopia. Journeying through five continents, it captures creative change-makers using art and activism to turn our upside-down world right-side-up, for peace with justice. Their personal stories and strategies, told in many tongues, broaden our understanding of the geopolitical fault-lines behind modern day conflicts -- inspiring audiences to further engagement and action. Filmmaker Iara Lee will introduce the film and answer questions afterwards.
Tickets $10 general, $8 students. Benefit for clean water for children in Gaza. No one turned away for lack of funds. Wheelchair accessible.
For info: 510-548-0542, www.mecaforpeace.org, events@mecaforpeace.org
Cosponsored by: Global Studies Department/Berkeley City College and more!
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Cuba Caravan Send Off Party!!
-come help send the Cuba Caravan to Cuba
Saturday, July 9, 2011
4pm- snacks and music
5pm- program
6pm- Tamale dinner and more music
Eastside Arts Alliance,C
2277 International, Oakland ( AC #1 or 1R )
Donation requested to help support the Caravan (no one turned away)
Video- "People to People" about the Caravan
Speakers- Including Graduate from the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, Cuba
Come learn about the Caravan and help send it to Cuba.
For More Info: baypeace@baypeace.org 510-863-1737
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Physicians for a National Health Program California is having our 2nd annual California Single-Payer Health Care Summer Conference at USC's Tutor Campus Center Ballroom on Saturday, July 16th, 2011 from 9am - 5pm.
Summer Conference 2011 is designed to teach attendees about just, guaranteed, comprehensive health care for ALL who live in California. We are gearing this conference toward professionals working in health, policy, advocacy, education, and organizing arenas.
This year's conference will feature Dr. Carmen Rita Nevarez, Immediate Past President, American Public Health Association as our keynote speaker, plus three Leadership Institutes that will help you develop your skills to build the movement through public speaking, coalition building or grassroots advocacy.
Ticket prices are on a sliding scale, and people who are "new to the movement" receive a discount.
For more information and to register, go to healthisahumanright.eventbrite.com. Please also download our flyer here. Please help us spread the word!
If your organization would like to sponsor this event, you can download our sponsorship form here.
Hope you can join us this summer in Los Angeles. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
Thanks,
Molly Tavella, MPH
Shearer Student Fellow
Physicians for a National Health Program California
2344 6th Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
(510) 665-8523 office
(408) 892-1255 mobile
(510) 665-6027 fax
molly@pnhpcalifornia.org
www.cahpsa.org
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Protest, March & Die-In on 10th Anniversary of Afghanistan War
Friday, Oct. 7, 2011, 4:30-6:30pm
New Federal Building, 7th & Mission Sts, SF
End All the Wars & Occupations-Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Haiti . . .
Money for Jobs, Healthcare & Schools-Not for the Pentagon
Friday, October 7, 2011 will be the exact 10th anniversary of the U.S./NATO war on the people of Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of Afghani people have been killed, wounded and displaced, and thousands of U.S. and NATO forces killed and wounded. The war costs more than $126 billion per year at a time when social programs are being slashed.
The true and brutal character of the U.S. strategy to "win hearts and minds" of the Afghani population was described by a Marine officer, quoted in a recent ANSWER Coalition statement:
"You can't just convince them [Afghani people] through projects and goodwill," another Marine officer said. "You have to show up at their door with two companies of Marines and start killing people. That's how you start convincing them." (To read the entire ANSWER statement, click here)
Mark your calendar now and help organize for the October 7 march and die-in in downtown San Francisco. There are several things you can do:
1. Reply to this email to endorse the protest and die-in.
2. Spread the word and help organize in your community, union, workplace and campus.
3. Make a donation to help with organizing expenses.
Only the people can stop the war!
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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]
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Detained for photography in Baltimore Parts 1 and 2:
Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iMr76atjUA
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JOFwbiI8fQ
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Arrested for Filming Police in MD?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18ew29IFVHw&NR=1
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Woman 'detained' for filming police search launches high court challenge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2MtGCp5scM&NR=1
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Adam Kokesh body slammed, choked, police brutality at Jefferson Memorial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jUU3yCy3uI&feature=player_embedded#at=575
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Kim Ives & Dan Coughlin on WikiLeaks Cables that Reveal "Secret History" of U.S. Bullying in Haiti
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL0Dk21dC-M
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Operation Empire State Rebellion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJvBlQcaaaU&feature=player_embedded#at=10
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
20 Facts About U.S. Inequality that Everyone Should Know
Click an image to learn more about a fact!
http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/facts.php
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Just Released! ANONYMOUS declares war on the system! JOIN THE RESISTANCE!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET4Ki5Tr_CQ&feature=player_embedded
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Andy Griffith Vs the Patriot Act
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZF_oZEvybw
[You gotta watch this...bw]
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
THE AUDACITY OF HOPE
ustogaza1's Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/ustogaza1
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Licensed to Kill Video
http://nirs.org/multimedia/video/l2k.htm
Gundersen Gives Testimony to NRC ACRS from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Gundersen Gives Testimony to NRC ACRS
http://fairewinds.com/updates
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards (ACRS) held a special ACRS meeting Thursday May 26, 2011 on the current status of Fukushima. Arnie Gundersen was invited to speak for 5 minutes concerning the lessons learned from the Fukushima accident as it pertains to the 23 Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactors (BWR's) in the US and containment integrity. Mr. Gundersen was the first engineer to brief the NRC on the implication of Main Steam Isolation Valve (MSIV) Leakage in 1974, and he has been studying containment integrity since 1972. The NRC has constantly maintained in all of its calculations and reviews that there is zero probability of a containment leaking. For more than six years, in testimony and in correspondence with the NRC, Mr. Gundersen has disputed the NRC's stand that containment systems simply do not and cannot leak. The events at Fukushima have proven that Gundersen was correct. The explosions at Fukushima show that Mark 1 containments will lose their integrity and release huge amounts of radiation, as Mr. Gundersen has been telling the NRC for many years.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Guy on wheelchair taken down by officers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdkJxw1mPoM
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
The Last Mountain': Appalachia vs. Big Coal
Janet Donovan
http://www.readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/60-60/6063-qthe-last-mountainq
Actor Woody Harrelson was a surprise guest at D.C. premiere of "The Last Mountain" at E Street Cinema, also attended by Sens. Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Boxer, Director Bill Haney, and Bobby Kennedy Jr. who speaks out on West Virginia's struggle.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0&feature=player_embedded
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Paradise Gray Speaks At Jordan Miles Emergency Rally 05/06/2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJOLz1EYDYE&feature=player_embedded
Police Reassigned While CAPA Student's Beatdown Investigated
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK-6IsP3dUg&NR=1&feature=fvwp
Pittsburgh Student Claims Police Brutality; Shows Hospital Photos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_j_AVsTXZc&feature=relmfu
Justice For Jordan Miles
By jasiri x
http://justiceforjordanmiles.com/
Monday, May 9, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Even though Pittsburgh Police beat Jordan Miles until he looked like this: (Photo at website)
And even though Jordan Miles, an honor student who plays the viola, broke no laws and committed no crimes, the Federal Government decided not to prosecute the 3 undercover Pittsburgh Police officers who savagely beat him.
To add insult to injury, Pittsburgh's Mayor and Police Chief immediately reinstated the 3 officers without so much as a apology. An outraged Pittsburgh community called for an emergency protest to pressure the local District Attorney to prosecute these officers to the fullest extent of the law.
Below is my good friend, and fellow One Hood founding member Paradise Gray (also a founding member of the Blackwatch Movement and the legendary rap group X-Clan) passionately demanding Justice for Jordan Miles and speaking on the futility of a war of terror overseas while black men are terrorized in their own neighborhoods.
For more information on how you can help get Justice For Jordan Miles go to http://justiceforjordanmiles.com/
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Tier Systems Cripple Middle Class Dreams for Young Workers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09pQW6TW8m4&feature=youtu.be
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Epidemiologist, Dr. Steven Wing, Discusses Global Radiation Exposures and Consequences with Gundersen
Epidemiologist, Dr. Steven Wing and nuclear engineer, Arnie Gundersen, discuss the consequences of the Fukushima radioactive fallout on Japan, the USA, and the world. What are the long-term health effects? What should the government(s) do to protect citizens?
http://vimeo.com/22706805
Epidemiologist, Dr. Steven Wing, Discusses Global Radiation Exposures and Consequences with Gundersen from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
New Video - Lupe Fiasco ft. Skylar Grey - 'Words I Never Said'
Thu, Apr 28 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22l1sf5JZD0
Lupe Fiasco addresses some heavy issues in the latest video for his new single, 'Words I Never Said,' featuring Skylar Grey. In the 5 minute and 45 second dose of reality, Lupe tackles issues such as the war on terrorism, devastation, conspiracy theories, 9/11 and genocide. From the opening lyrics of "I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullsh*t", Lupe doesn't hold back as he voices his socio-political concerns.
"If you turn on TV all you see's a bunch of what the f-ks'
Dude is dating so and so blabbering bout such and such
And that ain't Jersey Shore, homie that's the news
And these the same people that supposed to be telling us the truth
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say s-t
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either
I'm a part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful."
Skylar Grey (who also lends her vocals to Dirty money's 'Coming Home' and Eminem's 'I Need A Doctor') does an excellent job of complementing the Alex Da Kid produced track.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
BREAKING ALERT: Mass Arrests, Tear Gas, Sound Weapons used Against WIU Students
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufKv-5t0t4E
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Union Town by Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ZT71DxLuM&feature=player_embedded
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
BRADLEY MANNING "BROKE THE LAW" SAYS OBAMA!
"He broke the law!" says Obama about Bradley Manning who has yet to even be charged, let alone, gone to trial and found guilty. How horrendous is it for the President to declare someone guilty before going to trial or being charged with a crime! Justice in the U.S.A.!
Obama on FREE BRADLEY MANNING protest... San Francisco, CA. April 21, 2011-Presidential remarks on interrupt/interaction/performance art happening at fundraiser. Logan Price queries Barack after org. FRESH JUICE PARTY political action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfmtUpd4id0&feature=youtu.be
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
W.E. A.L.L. B.E.: Miss. Medical Examiner Dr. Adel Shaker On Frederick Carter Hanging (4/19/2011)
http://blip.tv/file/5057532
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Max Romeo - Socialism Is Love
http://youtu.be/eTvUs4rY4to
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Cuba: The Accidental Eden
http://video.pbs.org/video/1598230084/
[This is a stunningly beautiful portrait of the Cuban natural environment as it is today. However, several times throughout, the narrator tends to imply that if it werent for the U.S. embargo against Cuba, Cuba's natural environmet would be destroyed by the influx of tourism, ergo, the embargo is saving nature. But the Cuban scientists and naturalists tell a slightly different story. But I don't want to spoil the delightfully surprising ending. It's a beautiful film of a beautiful country full of beautiful, articulate and well-educated people....bw]
Watch the full episode. See more Nature.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
VIDEO: SWAT Team Evicts Grandmother
Take Back the Land- Rochester Eviction Defense March 28, 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2axN1zsZno&feature=player_embedded
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
B. D. S. [Boycott, Divest, Sanction against Israel]
(Jackson 5) Chicago Flashmob
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4tXe2HKqqs&feature=player_embedded
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Afghans for Peace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ror0qPcasM&NR=1
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
The Kill Team
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses - and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon
Rolling Stone
March 27, 3011
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327
Afghans respond to "Kill Team"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3guxWIorhdA
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
END THE U.S./UN/NATO KILL TEAM NOW!
WARNING: THESE ARE HORRIFIC, DISGUSTING, VIOLENT CRIMES COMMITTED BY THE U.S. MILITARY MAKING THE UPCOMING APRIL 10 [APRIL 9 IN NEW YORK] MARCH AND RALLY AGAINST THE WARS A FIRST PRIORITY FOR WE, THE PEOPLE OF THE U.S. WE DEMAND OUT NOW! END THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND EVERYWHERE! BRING ALL THE TROOPS, UN/NATO/US/ and CONTRACTORS HOME NOW!
The Kill Team Photos More war crime images the Pentagon doesn't want you to see
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327
'Death Zone' How U.S. soldiers turned a night-time airstrike into a chilling 'music video'
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/death-zone-20110327
'Motorcycle Kill' Footage of an Army patrol gunning down two men in Afghanistan
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/motorcyle-kill-20110327
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
LOWKEY - TERRORIST? (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBnvajSfWU
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
BP Oil Spill Scientist Bob Naman: Seafood Still Not Safe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3VdxvMnDls
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Exclusive: Flow Rate Scientist : How Much Oil Is Really Out There?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsHl3kn63ZA&NR=1
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Oil Spill Commission Final Report: Catfish Responds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3ZRdsccMsM
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Domestic Espionage Alert - Houston PD to use surveillance drone in America!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpstrc15Ogg
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Flashmob: Cape Town Opera say NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElyrFOnKPk
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
"Don't F*** With Our Activists" - Mobilizing Against FBI Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyG3dIUGQvQ
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
One year after Bradley's detainment, we need your support more than ever.
Dear Friends,
One year ago, on May 26, 2010, the U.S. government quietly arrested a humble young American intelligence analyst in Iraq and imprisoned him in a military camp in Kuwait. Over the coming weeks, the facts of the arrest and charges against this shy soldier would come to light. And across the world, people like you and I would step forward to help defend him.
Bradley Manning, now 23 years old, has never been to court but has already served a year in prison- including 10 months in conditions of confinement that were clear violation of the international conventions against torture. Bradley has been informally charged with releasing to the world documents that have revealed corruption by world leaders, widespread civilian deaths at the hands of U.S. forces, the true face of Guantanamo, an unvarnished view of the U.S.'s imperialistic foreign negotiations, and the murder of two employees of Reuters News Agency by American soldiers. These documents released by WikiLeaks have spurred democratic revolutions across the Arab world and have changed the face of journalism forever.
For his act of courage, Bradley Manning now faces life in prison-or even death.
But you can help save him-and we've already seen our collective power. Working together with concerned citizens around the world, the Bradley Manning Support Network has helped raise worldwide awareness about Manning's torturous confinement conditions. Through the collective actions of well over a half million people and scores of organizations, we successfully pressured the U.S. government to end the tortuous conditions of pre-trial confinement that Bradley was subjected to at the Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia. Today, Bradley is being treated humanely at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. T hanks to your support, Bradley is given leeway to interact with other pre-trial prisoners, read books, write letters, and even has a window in his cell.
Of course we didn't mount this campaign to just improve Bradley's conditions in jail. Our goal is to ensure that he can receive a fair and open trial. Our goal is to win Bradley's freedom so that he can be reunited with his family and fulfill his dream of going to college. Today, to commemorate Bradley's one year anniversary in prison, will you join me in making a donation to help support Bradley's defense?
http://bradleymanning.org/donate
We'll be facing incredible challenges in the coming months, and your tax-deductible donation today will help pay for Bradley's civilian legal counsel and the growing international grassroots campaign on his behalf. The U.S. government has already spent a year building its case against Bradley, and is now calling its witnesses to Virginia to testify before a grand jury.
What happens to Bradley may ripple through history - he is already considered by many to be the single most important person of his generation. Please show your commitment to Bradley and your support for whistle-blowers and the truth by making a donation today.
With your help, I hope we will come to remember May 26th as a day to commemorate all those who risk their lives and freedom to promote informed democracy - and as the birth of a movement that successfully defended one courageous whistle-blower against the full fury of the U.S. government.
Donate now: bradleymanning.org/donate
In solidarity,
Jeff Paterson and Loraine Reitman,
On behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network Steering Committee
www.bradleymanning.org
P.S. After you have donated, please help us by forwarding this email to your closest friends. Ask them to stand with you to support Bradley Manning, and the rights of all whistleblowers.
View the new 90 second "I am Bradley Manning" video:
I am Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-P3OXML00s
Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Drop the Charges Against Carlos Montes, Stop the FBI Attack on the Chicano and Immigrant Rights Movement, and Stop FBI Repression of Anti-War Activists NOW!Call Off the Expanding Grand Jury Witchhunt and FBI Repression of Anti-War Activists NOW!
Cancel the Subpoenas! Cancel the Grand Juries!
Condemn the FBI Raids and Harassment of Chicano, Immigrant Rights, Anti-War and International Solidarity Activists!
Tell US Attorney Fitzgerald, President Obama, Attorney General Holder, DOJ Inspector General Fine, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders, U.N. Secy Gen Ban, and members of the media to STOP THE FBI CAMPAIGN OF REPRESSION AGAINST CHICANO, IMMIGRANT RIGHTS, ANTI-WAR AND INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY ACTIVISTS NOW!
Initiated by the Committee to Stop FBI Repression stopfbi.net stopfbi@gmail.com
http://iacenter.org/stopfbi/
Petition Text:
To: U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder,
cc: Vice President Biden, DOJ Inspector General Fine, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders, the Congressional Black Caucus, U.N. Secy Gen Ban, and members of the media
** Drop All Charges against Carlos Montes, and immediately return all of his property!
** Stop the attack on the Chicano and Immigrant Rights Movements!
** Call Off the Chicago Grand Jury and Stop the Expanding Witchhunt against Anti-war and International Solidarity Activists!
** Hands Off Palestine Solidarity Activists!
** Throw Out the reactiviated subpoenas against Tracy Molm, Ann Pham and Sarah Martin in Minneapolis, and ALL of the 14 subpoenas from the September 24 FBI raids of homes of anti-war and international solidarity activists.
**Immediately return all confiscated materials: computers, cell phones, papers, documents, etc.
**End the grand jury proceedings against anti-war activists.
I am writing to oppose the continuation and expansion of the FBI campaign of harassment of immigrant rights, anti-war and Palestine and other International Solidarity Activists, including the raid on the home of Carlos Montes and his arrest and the confiscation of his property, the 9 added subpoenas in the Chicago area, and reactivation of 3 of the original 14 subpoenas from the September 24 FBI raids of anti-war and international solidarity activists' homes.
These activists are guilty of no crime but opposition to U.S. foreign policy. On Friday, September 24, 2010 the FBI raided seven houses and an office in Chicago and Minneapolis. The FBI served subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury to 13 activists in Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan. The FBI also attempted to intimidate activists in California, Wisconsin and North Carolina. This is not the action of a lone prosecutor. The raids were coordinated nationally, spanned several cities, and many other activists have been visited and personally threatened by the FBI.
The FBI confiscated computers, email and mailing lists, cell phones , cameras, videos, books, and passports. This is a dangerous attack on the constitutional rights of free speech of every social justice, antiwar and human rights activist and organization in the U.S. today. The right to speak, meet and write opinions is guaranteed under the constitution.
This suppression of civil rights is aimed at those who dedicate their time and energy to supporting the struggles of the Palestinian and Colombian peoples against U.S. funded occupation and war. Grand Jury subpoenas investigating material support of terrorism are being used to silence highly respected and well known human rights activists. This is a dangerous national effort to shut down growing opposition to U.S. wars. It cannot be allowed.
The FBI and the Grand Jury are threatening courageous individuals who have written and spoken publicly to broaden understanding of social justice issues of war and occupation. The activists are involved with many groups, including: the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, the Palestine Solidarity Group, the Colombia Action Network, Students for a Democratic Society, and Freedom Road Socialist Organization. These activists came together with many others to organize the 2008 anti-war marches on the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.
The FBI and the U.S. government must end this campaign of intimidation against anti-war and international solidarity activists. I am outraged at this disrespect of democratic rights. I ask that you intervene immediately to:
**Stop the Grand Jury Witchhunt!
**Stop the expanded repression against anti-war and international solidarity activists.
**Immediately return all confiscated materials: computers, cell phones, papers, documents, etc.
**End the grand jury proceedings against anti-war activists.
Sincerely,
(Your signature will be appended here based on the contact information you enter in the form above)
You can also call the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at 202-353-1555 and U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300 or write an email to: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov demanding an end to the FBI raids, return of all confiscated materials and an end to the Grand Jury witchhunt. Fitzgerald is in charge of the Northern District of Illinois and responsible for the FBI raids and Grand Jury investigation.
Contact the Committee to Stop FBI Repression
at stopfbi.net
stopfbi@gmail.com
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Mumia Wins Decision Against Re-Imposition Of Death Sentence, But...
The Battle Is Still On To
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610
www.laboractionmumia.org
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
U.S. Attorney Escalates Attacks on Civil Liberties of Anti-War,
Palestinian Human Rights Activists
Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald first thing Monday morning! (contact info at bottom of this email)
On Friday, May 6, the U.S. government froze the bank accounts of Hatem Abudayyeh and his wife, Naima. This unwarranted attack on a leading member of the Palestinian community in Chicago is the latest escalation of the repression of anti-war and Palestinian community organizers by the FBI, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Hatem Abudayyeh is one of 23 activists from Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in Chicago, and his home was raided by the FBI in September of last year. Neither Hatem Abudayyeh nor Naima Abudayyeh have been charged with any crime.
One of the bank accounts frozen was exclusively in Naima Abudayyeh's name. Leaders of the national Committee to Stop FBI Repression, as well as Chicago's Coalition to Protect People's Rights are appalled at the government's attempt to restrict the family's access to its finances, especially so soon before Mothers' Day. Not only does the government's action seriously disrupt the lives of the Abudayyehs and their five-year-old daughter, but it represents an attack on Chicago's Arab community and activist community and the fundamental rights of Americans to freedom of speech.
The persecution of the Abudayyeh family is another example of the criminalization of Palestinians, their supporters, and their movement for justice and liberation. There has been widespread criticism of the FBI and local law enforcement for their racial profiling and scapegoating of Arab and Muslim Americans. These repressive tactics include infiltration of community centers and mosques, entrapment of young men, and the prominent case of 11 students from the University of California campuses at Irvine and Riverside who have been subpoenaed to a grand jury and persecuted for disrupting a speech by Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the US. The government's attempt to conflate the anti-war and human rights movements with terrorism is a cynical attempt to capitalize on the current political climate in order to silence Palestinians and other people of conscience who exercise their First Amendment rights in a manner which does not conform to the administration's foreign policy agenda in the Middle East.
The issuance of subpoenas against the 23 activists has been met with widespread opposition and criticism across the country. Six members of the U.S. Congress, including five in the past month, have sent letters to either Holder or President Obama, expressing grave concern for the violations of the civil liberties and rights of the 23 activists whose freedom is on the line. Three additional U.S. representatives have also promised letters, as thousands of constituents and other people of conscience across the U.S. have demanded an end to this assault on legitimate political activism and dissent. Over 60 Minnesota state legislators also issued a resolution condemning the subpoenas.
The Midwest activists have been expecting indictments for some time. The freezing of the Abudayyeh family's bank accounts suggests that the danger of indictments is imminent.
Take action:
Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300.
Then dial 0 (zero) for the operator and ask to leave a message with the Duty Clerk.
Demand Fitzgerald
-- Unfreeze the bank accounts of the Abudayyeh family and
-- Stop repression against Palestinian, anti-war and international solidarity activists.
In solidarity,
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression and
The Coalition to Protect People's Rights
For more info go to StopFBI.net
follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend
Copyright (c) 2011 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55415
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Abolish the Death Penalty Blog
http://www.ncadp.org/blog.cfm?postID=165
Abolish the Death Penalty is a blog dedicated to...well, you know. The purpose of Abolish is to tell the personal stories of crime victims and their loved ones, people on death row and their loved ones and those activists who are working toward abolition. You may, from time to time, see news articles or press releases here, but that is not the primary mission of Abolish the Death Penalty. Our mission is to put a human face on the debate over capital punishment.
You can also follow death penalty news by reading our News page and by following us on Facebook and Twitter.
1 Million Tweets for Troy! April 12, 2011
Take Action! Tweet for Troy!
The state of Georgia is seeking to change the drugs they use to carry out executions so they can resume scheduling execution dates, including that of Troy Davis, a man with a strong claim of innocence. Doubts in the case persist, including the fact that no physical evidence links him to the murder, most of the witnesses have recanted or contradicted their testimony and newer testimony implicates a different person (including an eyewitness account).
The Davis case has already generated hundreds of thousands of emails, calls, and letters in support of clemency, including from leaders such as the Pope, Jimmy Carter and former FBI chief Bill Sessions. We need to continue to amass petitions in support of clemency, demonstrating the widespread concern about this case and what it represents.
Please help us send a message to Georgia officials that they can do the right thing - they can intervene as the final failsafe by commuting Davis' sentence. Please help us generate 1 million tweets for Troy Davis!
Share this tweet alert with your friends and family that care about justice and life as soon as you can.
More information about the case is available at www.justicefortroy.org
Here are some sample tweets:
When in doubt, don't execute!! Sign the petition for #TroyDavis! www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
Too much doubt! Stop the execution! #TroyDavis needs us! www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
No room for doubt! Stop the execution of #TroyDavis . Retweet, sign petition www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
Case not "ironclad", yet Georgiacould execute #TroyDavis ! Not on our watch! Petition: www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
No murder weapon. No physical evidence. Stop the execution! #TroyDavis petition: www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
7 out of 9 eyewitnesses recanted. No physical evidence. Stop the execution of Troy Davis www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition #TroyDavis
Thanks!
Exonerated Death Row Survivors Urge Georgia to:
Stop the Execution of Troy Davis
Chairman James E. Donald
Georgia State Board of Pardons & Paroles
2 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, SE
Suite 458, Balcony Level, East Tower
Atlanta, GA 30334
May 1, 2011
Dear Chairperson Donald and Members of the Board:
We, the undersigned, are alive today because some individual or small group of individuals decided that our insistent and persistent proclamations of innocence warranted one more look before we were sent to our death by execution. We are among the 138 individuals who have been legally exonerated and released from death rows in the United States since 1973. We are alive because a few thoughtful persons-attorneys, journalists, judges, jurists, etc.-had lingering doubts about our cases that caused them to say "stop" at a critical moment and halt the march to the execution chamber. When our innocence was ultimately revealed, when our lives were saved, and when our freedom was won, we thanked God and those individuals of conscience who took actions that allowed the truth to eventually come to light.
We are America's exonerated death row survivors. We are living proof that a system operated by human beings is capable of making an irreversible mistake. And while we have had our wrongful convictions overturned and have been freed from death row, we know that we are extremely fortunate to have been able to establish our innocence. We also know that many innocent people who have been executed or who face execution have not been so fortunate. Not all those with innocence claims have had access to the kinds of physical evidence, like DNA, that our courts accept as most reliable. However, we strongly believe that the examples of our cases are reason enough for those with power over life and death to choose life. We also believe that those in authority have a unique moral consideration when encountering individuals with cases where doubt still lingers about innocence or guilt.
One such case is the case of Troy Anthony Davis, whose 1991 conviction for killing Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail rested almost solely on witness testimony. We know that today, 20 years later, witness evidence is considered much less reliable than it was then. This has meant that, even though most of the witnesses who testified against him have now recanted, Troy Davis has been unable to convince the courts to overturn his conviction, or even his death sentence.
Troy Davis has been able to raise serious doubts about his guilt, however. Several witnesses testified at the evidentiary hearing last summer that they had been coerced by police into making false statements against Troy Davis. This courtroom testimony reinforced previous statements in sworn affidavits. Also at this hearing, one witness testified for the first time that he saw an alternative suspect, and not Troy Davis, commit the crime. We don't know if Troy Davis is in fact innocent, but, as people who were wrongfully sentenced to death (and in some cases scheduled for execution), we believe it is vitally important that no execution go forward when there are doubts about guilt. It is absolutely essential to ensuring that the innocent are not executed.
When you issued a temporary stay for Troy Davis in 2007, you stated that the Board "will not allow an execution to proceed in this State unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused." This standard is a welcome development, and we urge you to apply it again now. Doubts persist in the case of Troy Davis, and commuting his sentence will reassure the people of Georgia that you will never permit an innocent person to be put to death in their name.
Freddie Lee Pitts, an exonerated death row survivor who faced execution by the state of Florida for a crime he didn't commit, once said, "You can release an innocent man from prison, but you can't release him from the grave."
Thank you for considering our request.
Respectfully,
Kirk Bloodsworth, Exonerated and freed from death row Maryland; Clarence Brandley, Exonerated and freed from death row in Texas; Dan Bright, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Albert Burrell, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Perry Cobb, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Gary Drinkard, Exonerated and freed from death row in Alabama; Nathson Fields, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Gary Gauger, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Michael Graham, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Shujaa Graham, Exonerated and freed from death row in California; Paul House, Exonerated and freed from death row in Tennessee; Derrick Jamison, Exonerated and freed from death row in Ohio; Dale Johnston, Exonerated and freed from death row in Ohio; Ron Keine, Exonerated and freed from death row in New Mexico; Ron Kitchen, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Ray Krone, Exonerated and freed from death row in Arizona; Herman Lindsey, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Juan Melendez, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Randal Padgett, Exonerated and freed from death row in Alabama; Freddie Lee Pitts, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Randy Steidl, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; John Thompson, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Delbert Tibbs, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; David Keaton, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Greg Wilhoit, Exonerated and freed from death row in Oklahoma; Harold Wilson, Exonerated and freed from death row in Pennsylvania.
-Witness to Innocence, May 11, 2011
http://www.witnesstoinnocence.com/view_news.php?Exonerated-Death-Row-Survivors-Urge-George-to-Stop-the-Execution-of-Troy-Davis-181
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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/
Bulletin from the cause: Bradley Manning Support Network
Go to Cause
Posted By: Tom Baxter
To: Members in Bradley Manning Support Network
A Good Address for Bradley!!!
We have a good address for Bradley,
"A Fort Leavenworth mailing address has been released for Bradley Manning:
Bradley Manning 89289
830 Sabalu Road
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027
The receptionist at the military barracks confirmed that if someone sends Bradley Manning a letter to that address, it will be delivered to him."
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/update-42811
This is also a Facebook event
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=207100509321891#!/event.php?eid=207100509321891
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
DEFEND LYNNE STEWART!
Write to Lynne Stewart at:
Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054
Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127
Visiting Lynne:
Visiting is very liberal but first she has to get people on her visiting list; wait til she 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.
Commissary Money:
Commissary Money is always welcome It is how Lynne pay for the phone and for email. Also 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 !)
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.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
"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!
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
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
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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!
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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/
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
D. ARTICLES IN FULL (Unless otherwise noted)
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Our Racist Justice System: How Troy Davis Has Spent 20 Years on Death Row, With Little Evidence Against Him
By Jen Marlowe, ColorLines
Posted on June 1, 2011, Printed on June 4, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151165/our_racist_justice_system%3A_how_troy_davis_has_spent_20_years_on_death_row%2C_with_little_evidence_against_him
2) Israel Clashes With Protesters on Syrian Border
By ISABEL KERSHNER
June 5, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/world/middleeast/06mideast.html?_r=1&hp
3) Gates Wants Afghan Withdrawal to Leave Combat Troops
"At each stop, the troops asked Mr. Gates about future force levels. He noted that many of the logistical, engineering and construction units sent to build housing and lay runways to support the surge now could be sent home while leaving the combat force undiminished."
By THOM SHANKER
June 5, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/world/asia/06gates.html?hp
4) A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself
By JUSTIN GILLIS
June 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html?hp
5) NATO Begins Helicopter Attacks in Hopes of Ending the Stalemate With Qaddafi
By JOHN F. BURNS
June 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/world/africa/05libya.html?ref=world
6) For the Jobless, Little U.S. Help on Foreclosure
"As part of the bank bailout, the Treasury Department was given $46 billion to spend on keeping homeowners in their houses; to date, the agency has spent about $1.85 billion."
By ANDREW MARTIN
June 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/business/economy/05housing.html?ref=us
7) In Connecticut, Paid Sick Leave for Service Workers Is Approved
By PETER APPLEBOME
June 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/nyregion/connecticut-service-workers-to-get-paid-sick-leave.html?ref=nyregion
9) Former Political Prisoner Geronimo Pratt Dies
By Stephen Lendman
June 5, 2011
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Former-Political-Prisoner-by-Stephen-Lendman-110605-3.html
10) Just How Contaminated Is the Fish and Meat That We Eat?
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
Posted on June 5, 2011, Printed on June 6, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151206/just_how_contaminated_is_the_fish_and_meat_that_we_eat
11) The Return of Back-Alley Abortions
by Michelle Goldberg
June 3, 2011
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-06-03/abortions-return-to-back-alleys-amid-restrictive-new-state-laws/
11) The Return of Back-Alley Abortions
by Michelle Goldberg
June 3, 2011
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-06-03/abortions-return-to-back-alleys-amid-restrictive-new-state-laws/
12) Indignant movement draws largest crowd
Tens of thousands of people cram in and around Syntagma Square for peaceful rally.
ekathimerini.com
Sunday June 5, 2011
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite1_23590_05/06/2011_393635
13) So Much More Than Plasma and Poison
By NATALIE ANGIER
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/science/07jellyfish.html?hp
14) U.S. Drones Reported to Strike 3 Targets in Pakistan
[Obama continues to murder "suspects." Since when did it become acceptable to murder suspects? Oh! I forgot! It's just good 'ol U.S. democracy in action...bw]
By SALMAN MASOOD
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/world/asia/07pakistan.html?ref=world
15) Greece Sells Stake in Phone Company to Help Close Budget Gap
By JACK EWING
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/business/global/07euro.html?ref=world
16) Stranded Whales Now Far From Alone
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
June 5, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/us/06whale.html?ref=us
17) Fla. Couple Threatens Bank With Foreclosure
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/06/06/business/AP-US-Foreclosure-Mistake.html?src=busln
18) U.S. Plans Private Guard Force for Iraq
State Department Prepares to Hire 5,100-Strong Security Detail and Take Over Military Hardware for After Army Leaves
By NATHAN HODGE
JUNE 7, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304906004576369801913947130.html?mod=djemITP_h#printMode
19) Police war on videographers filming police brutality
To Protect and To Serve
by digby
Hullabaloo
June 05, 2011
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/
20) Nurses Open Letter to Wisconsinites - Carry on!
Peaceful Protests are Important Tools to Protect our patients and our community
By Jean Ross, RN and Co-President for National Nurses United
June 7, 2011
http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/blog/entry/nurses-open-letter-to-wisconsinites-carry-on/
21) NATO Warplanes Pound Tripoli in Daylight Attack
By JOHN F. BURNS
June 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/world/africa/08tripoli.html?hp
22) An Awakening That Keeps Them Up All Night
By SUZANNE DALEY
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/world/europe/07spain.html
23) Radiation Understated After Quake, Japan Says
By HIROKO TABUCHI
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/world/asia/07japan.html?ref=world
24) Radiation's Unknowns Weigh on Japan
By MATTHEW L. WALD
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/business/energy-environment/07radiation.html?ref=business
25) Oil Sands Project in Canada Will Go On if Pipeline Is Blocked
By IAN AUSTEN
"Environmentalists are using the project as a proxy for their general antagonism toward oil sands production, which consumes large amounts of water and energy and can be destructive to the boreal forest that sits on top of the tarry rock from which the oil is extracted. 'This is really a campaign against tar sands expansion rather than a single pipeline,' said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, the director of the international program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that is a leading American critic of the process."
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/business/energy-environment/07pipeline.html?ref=business
26) Government to Sell £10 Billion of Public Land to Developers
By REUTERS
June 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/06/07/business/business-us-public-land-housing.html?src=busln
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
1) Our Racist Justice System: How Troy Davis Has Spent 20 Years on Death Row, With Little Evidence Against Him
By Jen Marlowe, ColorLines
Posted on June 1, 2011, Printed on June 4, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151165/our_racist_justice_system%3A_how_troy_davis_has_spent_20_years_on_death_row%2C_with_little_evidence_against_him
"De'Jaun, come over here, I want to talk to you."
De'Jaun Correia, a slender 13-year-old with thick corn-rows in his hair, sat down next to his uncle Troy Davis in the corner of the room. Troy described to De'Jaun what to expect now that he was approaching adolescence. "Your body's gonna be changing.... Women, they go through things, and us guys, we go through things, too. The same thing happened to me when I was a young boy growing up."
De'Jaun listened intently as his uncle explained the birds and the bees. It wasn't the first time De'Jaun and Troy had had an intimate one on one. De'Jaun was more comfortable talking to his uncle, a sturdily built man with warm brown eyes, than anyone else.
Martina Davis-Correia, De'Jaun's mother and Troy's older sister, encouraged the close relationship that Troy had with her son. Troy helped Martina chastise De'Jaun if he got in trouble at school. "You don't go to school to talk in class, you go to school to learn!" Troy would scold the boy. And then, once he felt sure that De'Jaun got the message, Troy grew gentle. "Now come here, and give me a hug." Nephew and uncle embraced.
"He gets his discipline [from Troy]," Martina said. "But then he gets his love to back it up."
Those uncle-and-nephew exchanges could be deemed ordinary, if not for their setting. The interactions took place in a narrow concrete room with locks and bars on its only door in the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison, where Troy Davis is a prisoner on death row. When De'Juan was still little, death-row inmates and their visitors could be in the visiting room together; contact visits were taken away a year and a half ago. Now, De'Jaun receives his uncle's counsel through phones mounted on either side of a plexiglass window.
Davis is on death row for the 1989 murder of white Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail. On Aug. 19, MacPhail was gunned down while rushing to the rescue of a homeless man being pistol-whipped in the parking lot of a Greyhound bus station. The day after the murder, a man named Sylvester "Red" Coles told the police that Troy Davis was the shooter. Davis was arrested and was convicted in 1991, primarily on the basis of eye-witness testimony.
There is no physical evidence linking Davis to the crime. The murder weapon was never recovered. Yet, Davis was sentenced to death. He has remained on death row for 20 years, despite the fact that the case against him has completely unraveled. He now awaits an execution date, which could be set any moment, having had his final appeal rejected by the Supreme Court.
Major human rights and civil liberty groups, including the NAACP, Amnesty International, and the ACLU, have taken up Davis's case, and individuals ranging from President Jimmy Carter to Archbishop Desmond Tutu have spoken up on his behalf.
Davis's case has become an emblem for much of what is problematic about a capital punishment system that is riddled with racism, economic disparity and error. Public capital defenders do not have the resources to properly investigate or litigate their overburdened case loads. Those with the means to hire decent legal representation are unlikely to end up on death row. Over 130 death row inmates have been exonerated since 1973, demonstrating just how many innocent people are convicted and sentenced to death.
Meanwhile, there's considerable evidence of a racial imbalance in who the government decides to kill. According to a 2001 study from the University of North Carolina, a defendant whose victim was white was 3.5 times as likely to receive the death penalty in North Carolina than if the victim were non-white. A 2005 study in California found the defendant of a white victim three times as likely to be penalized by death. Growing realizations of these problems have led more and more states to question their death penalty policies. Earlier this year, Illinois became the 16th state to abolish capital punishment.
Even pro-death penalty advocates, such as former FBI director and federal judge William Sessions and former Republican Congressman from Georgia Bob Barr, have spoken out against executing Davis, citing "crucial unanswered questions" (Sessions) and a lack of the requisite fairness and accuracy required to apply the death penalty (Barr).
The "crucial, unanswered questions" include the fact that seven of the nine non-police witnesses later recanted or changed their testimonies, many stating that police coercion and intimidation led to their initial implication of Davis.
"After a couple of hours of the detectives yelling at me and threatening me, I finally broke down and told them what they wanted to hear," witness Darrell Collins wrote in an affidavit in 2002. Collins was 16 years old the night of the murder, and had been interrogated by the police for hours without his parents present. "They would tell me things that they said had happened and I would repeat whatever they said."
New witnesses have come forth identifying Coles himself as the shooter. "I saw Sylvester Coles-I know him by the name Red-shoot the police officer. I am positive it was Red who shot the police officer," Joseph Washington wrote in a 1996 affidavit.
Ballistics were used at trial to attempt to connect Davis to an earlier non-fatal shooting. However, that victim later denied that Davis shot him and a later report by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation stated that there was no conclusive evidence to link the shell casings at the crime scenes.
For years, Davis tried to get his possibly exculpatory evidence heard in a court of law. Appeal after appeal was denied on procedural grounds, in closely divided rulings. Finally, in August 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a highly unusual move, ordered an evidentiary hearing for Davis. The hearing took place in June 2010 in a Georgia federal courtroom. But the burden of proof was on Davis. Rather than presumed innocent, as Davis would be were he granted a re-trial, the Supreme Court ordered Davis to "clearly establish innocence."
There was no physical evidence, so DNA testing could not assist Davis. Four witnesses took the stand to recant their 1991 testimony against Davis. Though their original testimony had been determined credible enough to place Davis on death row, the state now vehemently attacked the witnesses' credibility. New testimony from witnesses who stated that they saw Coles pull the trigger, or that Coles confessed to them, was treated as hearsay. Presiding Judge William Moore determined that Davis did not meet the extremely high standard of "clearly establishing innocence," though even Moore admitted in his ruling that the hearing did cast some additional doubt as to Davis's guilt and that the case was "not ironclad." Davis's conviction, and death sentence, remain.
On March 28, 2011, the Supreme Court denied Davis's final appeal, clearing the way for the state of Georgia to set a fourth execution date in as many years.
Truths Children Can See
De'Jaun remembers the first execution date vividly. It was July 17, 2007. He was 13 years old. "We went to go see him, and he wasn't really worrying about himself. He was mostly worried about his family. About us. I was looking at my grandmother. She was praying, praying, praying. It was a lot of people constantly praying, constantly praying."
Troy gave each family member a duty. With what did he task his young nephew? "He told me, just continue to do good in school, do what's right, pick the right friends, watch over the family, and just respect the family. Respect my mom, my grandmother, my aunties. Do what you love and have a good profession."
The execution was stayed less than 24 hours before it was to be carried out. The following year, Davis came within 90 minutes of lethal injection.
In addition to dealing with his uncle facing execution, and while carrying a full load of advanced placement classes in his high-school's International Baccalaureate program, De'Jaun lives with the stress of his mother being critically ill. Martina has been battling stage-four breast cancer since De'Jaun was six years old. Her original diagnosis was six months or less. That was ten years ago, and Martina, who is far tougher than her willowy frame might suggest, is still fighting.
De'Jaun has always turned to his Uncle Troy during hard times. Martina first brought De'Jaun to death row to meet his uncle when he was six weeks old.
"You would think I gave [Troy] a gold bar," Martina recounted. "Troy was scared to hold him. I literally had to just put De'Jaun in his arms and walk away. And he was like, 'But he's so little. Come, get him, get him, get him.' And I was like, 'No, you get him. You hold him.' " Martina smiled at the memory. "It was just such a magical moment, because it was like I was giving my brother this gift."
As a tiny boy, De'Jaun didn't understand that his uncle was incarcerated, much less slated for death. De'Jaun told me, "When the family was getting ready to leave after a visit, I'd say, 'Come on, Troy, let's go, let's go!' But he couldn't go with us, and my mom would say, 'He's in school. He can't come. One day, he'll come home with us.'"
As De'Jaun grew older, Martina explained to him that his uncle was in prison. But she had not yet told him that Georgia planned to kill him. When De'Jaun was 12 years old, it became clear to Martina that her son understood far more than she had realized.
Their dog, Egypt, had gotten out of the yard and had been hit by a car. Martina and De'Jaun immediately brought Egypt to a vet who told them that the dog's leg was broken in three places and would need extensive surgery to be repaired. If Egypt did not have the surgery, she would have to be put to sleep. The cost of the surgery, the vet told Martina, was upwards of $10,000.
As Martina drove De'Juan home, she wondered how in the world would she come up with $10,000. Putting Egypt down might be the only realistic possibility.
In the silence of the ride, De'Jaun turned to his mother. "Mom, are you going put my dog to sleep like they're trying to put my Uncle Troy to sleep?"
"I looked at my son, and he was looking at me.... I had to swallow this giant lump in my throat to hold back the tears," Martina recounted. "I didn't know that he related the two things. That he knew they were trying to kill his Uncle Troy. And he knew about which method that they wanted to [use to] kill him. At that point, I decided ... [even] if I had to pawn my car, I wasn't going to be able to put my dog to sleep."
Killing Troy Davis
De'Jaun's realization that the state of Georgia wants to kill his uncle using methods similar to putting an animal to sleep has added relevance today. Georgia traditionally used a three-drug cocktail in its lethal injections. One of the drugs, sodium thiopental, anesthetized the victim. But the only domestic manufacturer of sodium thiopental, Hospira, discontinued its production of the drug last year, which sent states scrambling to obtain a stockpile.
Georgia acquired a stash of the drug from Dream Pharma, a shady British company that operates from the back of a London driving school. Georgia imported the drug without declaring it with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which is a violation of federal regulations. So in March, the DEA confiscated Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental, temporarily placing the brakes on the state's ability to implement death sentences.
On May 20, however, Georgia announced that it would substitute sodium thiopental with pentobarbital, opening the way to execute once more. As De'Jaun suggested, pentobarbital is, indeed, what is used to euthenize animals.
Troy's execution will likely be the first to be scheduled under this new procedure, though there may be some grace time. The Chatham County District Attorney's office said it would not immediately seek a warrant for Davis's execution, presumably out of compassion for the fact that Virginia Davis, Troy's mother, passed away on April 12. The Davis family matriarch, who had just received a clean bill of health from her doctor the day before, died of "natural causes" just two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court denied Davis's final appeal.
Martina believes that her mother died from a broken heart. "I don't think my mother could have taken another execution date," she told a reporter. It was De'Jaun who found his 65-year-old grandmother slumped over in her chair when he came home from school.
Troy was not permitted to attend his mother's funeral. Instead, he wrote a goodbye letter, which a poised, stoic De'Jaun read aloud to a packed Savannah church at the funeral:
"To my dearest Mama,
Who would have thought this would be the last letter between us? I feared this day would come before I came home to you.... All these years I've refused to cry but you, my mother, sure made me cry a river the day you close your eyes. All I know is that I will walk out here a Free Man very soon and keep the family strong just like you would expect me to..."
Davis's advocates do not expect him to walk out of prison in the immediate future. They are focused, first and foremost, on preventing the impending execution. The sympathy delay granted by the Chatham County DA could be short lived. Once an execution date is set, the final line of defense between Davis and death lies with the Georgia Board of Pardons & Parole, who have the power to grant Davis clemency.
Amnesty USA, the NAACP and the ACLU have banded together again, calling on legal professionals, religious leaders and concerned individuals to send a strong message to the Board of Pardons & Parole: when there's doubt, don't execute.
Martina was always central to the advocacy efforts. She spent years struggling to expose her brother's case until finally, human rights groups, and eventually, the media, began to pay attention. De'Jaun, now a tall young man of nearly 17 years, with close-cropped hair and a wide, easy smile, has grown into an activist in his own right. He has traveled all over the U.S. and to London, speaking about his uncle's case and advocating against capital punishment.
"There are so many other cases out there like [my uncle's]," De'Jaun says. "My uncle is not the only one going through this type of pain ... a lot of people really want someone to hear their case but they don't have the power and resources. I see myself as an activist, helping people."
When asked where he gets the inner reserves to handle all that is facing him, De'Jaun speaks about his faith in God. And, he says, he has two chief role models for strength, courage, tenacity, humanity and dignity. His mother, Martina, is one. The other: his Uncle Troy.
Jen Marlowe is a human rights activist, author and filmmaker. She has also produced a short video about Troy Davis's case. Her most recent book is "The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian's Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker" (Nation Books, 2011). She is the founder of "donkeysaddle projects."
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
2) Israel Clashes With Protesters on Syrian Border
By ISABEL KERSHNER
June 5, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/world/middleeast/06mideast.html?_r=1&hp
JERUSALEM - Israeli forces fired at protesters on the Syrian frontier on Sunday after protesters tried to breach the border for the second time in three weeks.
Wave after wave of Syrian and Palestinian protesters from Syria approached the frontier with the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Israeli soldiers opened fire at activists who crossed a newly dug trench and tried to breach the border fence near the Golan town of Majdal Shams.
The Syrian news agency SANA reported that 19 protesters were killed and more than 270 were wounded. Citing the director of a Syrian hospital in the border town of Quneitra, the agency said that two of the dead, aged 19 and 29, had been shot in the chest and the head respectively.
An Israeli military spokeswoman, speaking on condition of anonymity under army rules, said that "despite numerous warnings, both verbal and later warning shots in the air, dozens of Syrians continued to approach the border."
She said the soldiers tried to disperse the crowds with non-lethal means, including teargas, but that did not deter them. The Israeli forces were "left with no choice," she said, "but to open fire at the feet of the protesters in order to deter them from further actions."
In the West Bank, there were clashes between Israeli soldiers and scores of Palestinian youths who tried to march on the Qalandia checkpoint, the main gateway between Ramallah and Jerusalem. Some of the youths had slingshots and hurled stones at the soldiers. The soldiers fired tear gas and, according to some reports, rubber bullets.
But the borders with Gaza, Lebanon and Jordan were quiet as governments there prevented protesters from reaching the frontier.
Conversely, the thousands of protesters at the Syrian border, which cannot be approached without government acquiescence, appeared to reflect a calculated strategy to divert attention from the uprising there. President Bashar al-Assad, who is facing the greatest challenge to his family's rule in four decades, also opened the border three weeks ago; four Syrian protesters were killed then.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed "extremist elements" for trying to break through Israel's borders.
"We will not allow them to do so," he said at the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, adding, "I have instructed the security forces to act with determination, with maximum restraint, but with determination to maintain our sovereignty, our borders, our communities and our citizens."
In Gaza, only a few dozen Palestinians tried to walk to the Erez checkpoint on the border with Israel, but Hamas forces stopped them well before the crossing and they dispersed peacefully.
Israel had braced for clashes after Palestinian activists in the region called for protest marches on Sunday to mark the anniversary of the June 1967 Middle East war, which Palestinians call the "naksa," or setback. The Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza were among the territories Israel captured in that war.
There were also calls for Palestinians in Lebanon to march at the Israeli border, but activists there canceled those plans after the Lebanese authorities declared the border area a closed military zone.
The confrontations on Sunday echoed the events of May 15, the day Palestinians mark as the "nakba," or catastrophe, of Israel's establishment in 1948. Taking a cue from the so-called Arab Spring movement, organizers in multiple countries and territories called for a coordinated action against Israel, and huge crowds of Palestinians responded.
They clashed with Israeli troops on four fronts, and breached the border between Syria and the Golan Heights for the first time in more than 30 years. At least 14 protesters from Lebanon and Syria were killed, stoking outrage in Palestinian camps across the region and intensifying pressure on Israel to create the conditions for a return to peace talks.
The Israeli military had been preparing for a repeat of the May 15 protests, and Israeli television reports showed soldiers repairing and fortifying fences and bulldozers digging trenches and laying barbed wire along the borders in the north.
On Saturday, Palestinian officials signaled another possible source of pressure on Israel, saying they would accept a French proposal to attend a peace conference in Paris next month with the aim of restarting negotiations based on the broad principles laid out by President Obama last month.
Mr. Obama said that talks should be for a future Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps. He also suggested that talks should focus first on the issues of borders and security, and deal later with the contentious issues of the status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war and their descendants.
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said that in principle, the French proposal was acceptable. He told the Reuters news agency on Saturday that under the plan, neither Israel nor the Palestinians would carry out "unilateral actions." The Palestinians have demanded a freeze in Israeli settlement building, while the Israelis oppose Palestinian plans to bypass negotiations and seek recognition for statehood at the United Nations this fall.
There has been no public response to the French plan from the Israeli side, but Israel has previously rejected talks based on the 1967 lines. Moshe Yaalon, the minister for strategic affairs in the Israeli government, told Israeli television on Saturday that Israeli leaders would discuss the French proposal this week.
In a sign of growing frustration in Gaza, travelers tried to force their way through a crossing on the border with Egypt that was temporarily closed Saturday, a week after the new Egyptian government declared it open permanently in a move hailed by Palestinians as an end of the Israeli-led blockade of the coastal enclave.
Officials of Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza, said they had not been told in advance about the closing. Egypt said it was a result of delays in renovation work that should have been completed on Friday.
Dozens of Palestinian travelers gathered in front of the closed gate leading to the Egyptian side of the crossing in the morning. Peering through barbed wire next to the gate, they realized that it would be impossible for buses to pass through because of the work on the other side. After waiting for three hours, the travelers forced open the gate and entered the Egyptian section. The Egyptian police persuaded them to return peacefully.
After Hamas took full control of Gaza in 2007, Israel responded by cutting off the territory, and Egypt kept the crossing mostly closed. In June 2010, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt ordered the crossing to reopen on a regular basis, but conditions for travel remained tightly restricted. The border was sealed again in January, when Egypt was rocked by protests that eventually ousted Mr. Mubarak.
The re-opening of the crossing last Saturday was seen as a sign of a new approach, giving Gazans a gateway to the world that bypassed Israel. But complications have already emerged. By Tuesday, Hamas officials were complaining that the movement of travelers was being limited and that dozens had been returned from the Egyptian side.
Rina Castelnuovo contributed reporting from Majdal Shams, Golan Heights, and Fares Akram from Gaza.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
3) Gates Wants Afghan Withdrawal to Leave Combat Troops
"At each stop, the troops asked Mr. Gates about future force levels. He noted that many of the logistical, engineering and construction units sent to build housing and lay runways to support the surge now could be sent home while leaving the combat force undiminished."
By THOM SHANKER
June 5, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/world/asia/06gates.html?hp
FORWARD OPERATING BASE DWYER, Afghanistan - Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Sunday that the administration's pending decision on withdrawing troops from Afghanistan should preserve as much of the fighting force as possible during the initial drawdown.
"I would try and maximize my combat capability as long as this process goes on - I think that's a no-brainer," he said. "I'd opt to keep the shooters, and take the support out first."
Mr. Gates also said he anticipated that the administration would conduct a review of force levels in Afghanistan that went far beyond simply announcing the number of troops returning home starting in July, as pledged by President Obama.
The administration was likely to create what Mr. Gates called "bookends," an initial number to be withdrawn beginning in July and a date by which all of the 30,000 reinforcements sent last year would have departed Afghanistan.
His comments came during a farewell tour across south and southwestern Afghanistan, home to most of the 30,000 additional troops sent by Mr. Obama to push back a tenacious insurgency.
At each stop, the troops asked Mr. Gates about future force levels. He noted that many of the logistical, engineering and construction units sent to build housing and lay runways to support the surge now could be sent home while leaving the combat force undiminished.
He said that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Afghanistan, had not yet given the president formal options for withdrawing the 30,000 surge troops. A separate timetable would manage the departure of all foreign troops, including the rest of the American combat force beside the surge units, about 70,000 troops, by the end of 2014 as agreed by NATO and the Afghan government.
The decisions on forces in Afghanistan could mirror how Mr. Obama managed the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. While a status of forces agreement between Washington and Baghdad requires American combat forces to leave by the end of this year, Mr. Obama unilaterally set an earlier date by which the military first reduced its presence to 50,000.
Senior Pentagon officials noted that after Mr. Obama set a firm deadline for dropping to 50,000 troops in Iraq, he then let his commanders in Baghdad manage the specifics of which units to order home and when, so long as they met the president's ultimate timeline.
A similar system may be decided by the administration to manage the withdrawal of the surge units from Afghanistan, officials said, with General Petraeus, and his nominated successor, Lt. Gen. John R. Allen, given the leeway to decide how to draw down forces to meet the president's deadline.
Mr. Gates advocated sustaining the combat force to continue pressing the insurgency to give up the fight and negotiate reconciliation with the government in Kabul. With continued success on the battlefield, Mr. Gates said, such talks could begin in earnest by late this year.
Mr. Gates also said the reduction of American troops should be carefully calibrated so as not to give allied nations "reason to rush to the exits."
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
4) A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself
By JUSTIN GILLIS
June 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html?hp
CIUDAD OBREGÓN, Mexico - The dun wheat field spreading out at Ravi P. Singh's feet offered a possible clue to human destiny. Baked by a desert sun and deliberately starved of water, the plants were parched and nearly dead.
Dr. Singh, a wheat breeder, grabbed seed heads that should have been plump with the staff of life. His practiced fingers found empty husks.
"You're not going to feed the people with that," he said.
But then, over in Plot 88, his eyes settled on a healthier plant, one that had managed to thrive in spite of the drought, producing plump kernels of wheat. "This is beautiful!" he shouted as wheat beards rustled in the wind.
Hope in a stalk of grain: It is a hope the world needs these days, for the great agricultural system that feeds the human race is in trouble.
The rapid growth in farm output that defined the late 20th century has slowed to the point that it is failing to keep up with the demand for food, driven by population increases and rising affluence in once-poor countries.
Consumption of the four staples that supply most human calories - wheat, rice, corn and soybeans - has outstripped production for much of the past decade, drawing once-large stockpiles down to worrisome levels. The imbalance between supply and demand has resulted in two huge spikes in international grain prices since 2007, with some grains more than doubling in cost.
Those price jumps, though felt only moderately in the West, have worsened hunger for tens of millions of poor people, destabilizing politics in scores of countries, from Mexico to Uzbekistan to Yemen. The Haitian government was ousted in 2008 amid food riots, and anger over high prices has played a role in the recent Arab uprisings.
Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change.
Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming.
Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.
For nearly two decades, scientists had predicted that climate change would be relatively manageable for agriculture, suggesting that even under worst-case assumptions, it would probably take until 2080 for food prices to double.
In part, they were counting on a counterintuitive ace in the hole: that rising carbon dioxide levels, the primary contributor to global warming, would act as a powerful plant fertilizer and offset many of the ill effects of climate change.
Until a few years ago, these assumptions went largely unchallenged. But lately, the destabilization of the food system and the soaring prices have rattled many leading scientists.
"The success of agriculture has been astounding," said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a researcher at NASA who helped pioneer the study of climate change and agriculture. "But I think there's starting to be premonitions that it may not continue forever."
A scramble is on to figure out whether climate science has been too sanguine about the risks. Some researchers, analyzing computer forecasts that are used to advise governments on future crop prospects, are pointing out what they consider to be gaping holes. These include a failure to consider the effects of extreme weather, like the floods and the heat waves that are increasing as the earth warms.
A rising unease about the future of the world's food supply came through during interviews this year with more than 50 agricultural experts working in nine countries.
These experts say that in coming decades, farmers need to withstand whatever climate shocks come their way while roughly doubling the amount of food they produce to meet rising demand. And they need to do it while reducing the considerable environmental damage caused by the business of agriculture.
Agronomists emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless. Examples are already available, from the deserts of Mexico to the rice paddies of India, to show that it may be possible to make agriculture more productive and more resilient in the face of climate change. Farmers have achieved huge gains in output in the past, and rising prices are a powerful incentive to do so again.
But new crop varieties and new techniques are required, far beyond those available now, scientists said. Despite the urgent need, they added, promised financing has been slow to materialize, much of the necessary work has yet to begin and, once it does, it is likely to take decades to bear results.
"There's just such a tremendous disconnect, with people not understanding the highly dangerous situation we are in," said Marianne Bänziger, deputy chief of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a leading research institute in Mexico.
A wheat physiologist at the center, Matthew Reynolds, fretted over the potential consequences of not attacking the problem vigorously.
"What a horrible world it will be if food really becomes short from one year to the next," he said. "What will that do to society?"
'The World Is Talking'
Sitting with a group of his fellow wheat farmers, Francisco Javier Ramos Bours voiced a suspicion. Water shortages had already arrived in recent years for growers in his region, the Yaqui Valley, which sits in the Sonoran Desert of northwestern Mexico. In his view, global climate change could well be responsible.
"All the world is talking about it," Mr. Ramos said as the other farmers nodded.
Farmers everywhere face rising difficulties: water shortages as well as flash floods. Their crops are afflicted by emerging pests and diseases and by blasts of heat beyond anything they remember.
In a recent interview on the far side of the world, in northeastern India, a rice farmer named Ram Khatri Yadav offered his own complaint about the changing climate. "It will not rain in the rainy season, but it will rain in the nonrainy season," he said. "The cold season is also shrinking."
Decades ago, the wheat farmers in the Yaqui Valley of Mexico were the vanguard of a broad development in agriculture called the Green Revolution, which used improved crop varieties and more intensive farming methods to raise food production across much of the developing world.
When Norman E. Borlaug, a young American agronomist, began working here in the 1940s under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Yaqui Valley farmers embraced him. His successes as a breeder helped farmers raise Mexico's wheat output sixfold.
In the 1960s, Dr. Borlaug spread his approach to India and Pakistan, where mass starvation was feared. Output soared there, too.
Other countries joined the Green Revolution, and food production outstripped population growth through the latter half of the 20th century. Dr. Borlaug became the only agronomist ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1970, for helping to "provide bread for a hungry world."
As he accepted the prize in Oslo, he issued a stern warning. "We may be at high tide now," he said, "but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts."
As output rose, staple grains - which feed people directly or are used to produce meat, eggs, dairy products and farmed fish - became cheaper and cheaper. Poverty still prevented many people in poor countries from buying enough food, but over all, the percentage of hungry people in the world shrank.
By the late 1980s, food production seemed under control. Governments and foundations began to cut back on agricultural research, or to redirect money into the problems created by intensive farming, like environmental damage. Over a 20-year period, Western aid for agricultural development in poor countries fell by almost half, with some of the world's most important research centers suffering mass layoffs.
Just as Dr. Borlaug had predicted, the consequences of this loss of focus began to show up in the world's food system toward the end of the century. Output continued to rise, but because fewer innovations were reaching farmers, the growth rate slowed.
That lull occurred just as food and feed demand was starting to take off, thanks in part to rising affluence across much of Asia. Millions of people added meat and dairy products to their diets, requiring considerable grain to produce. Other factors contributed to demand, including a policy of converting much of the American corn crop into ethanol.
And erratic weather began eating into yields. A 2003 heat wave in Europe that some researchers believe was worsened by human-induced global warming slashed agricultural output in some countries by as much as 30 percent. A long drought in Australia, also possibly linked to climate change, cut wheat and rice production.
In 2007 and 2008, with grain stockpiles low, prices doubled and in some cases tripled. Whole countries began hoarding food, and panic buying ensued in some markets, notably for rice. Food riots broke out in more than 30 countries.
Farmers responded to the high prices by planting as much as possible, and healthy harvests in 2008 and 2009 helped rebuild stocks, to a degree. That factor, plus the global recession, drove prices down in 2009. But by last year, more weather-related harvest failures sent them soaring again. This year, rice supplies are adequate, but with bad weather threatening the wheat and corn crops in some areas, markets remain jittery.
Experts are starting to fear that the era of cheap food may be over. "Our mindset was surpluses," said Dan Glickman, a former United States secretary of agriculture. "That has just changed overnight."
Forty years ago, a third of the population in the developing world was undernourished. By the tail end of the Green Revolution, in the mid-1990s, the share had fallen below 20 percent, and the absolute number of hungry people dipped below 800 million for the first time in modern history.
But the recent price spikes have helped cause the largest increases in world hunger in decades. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated the number of hungry people at 925 million last year, and the number is expected to be higher when a fresh estimate is completed this year. The World Bank says the figure could be as high as 940 million.
Dr. Borlaug's latest successor at the corn and wheat institute, Hans-Joachim Braun, recently outlined the challenges facing the world's farmers. On top of the weather disasters, he said, booming cities are chewing up agricultural land and competing with farmers for water. In some of the world's breadbaskets, farmers have achieved high output only by pumping groundwater much faster than nature can replenish it.
"This is in no way sustainable," Dr. Braun said.
The farmers of the Yaqui Valley grow their wheat in a near-desert, relying on irrigation. Their water comes by aqueduct from nearby mountains, but for parts of the past decade, rainfall was below normal. Scientists do not know if this has been a consequence of climate change, but Northern Mexico falls squarely within a global belt that is expected to dry further because of human emissions of greenhouse gases.
Dr. Braun is leading efforts to tackle problems of this sort with new wheat varieties that would be able to withstand many kinds of stress, including scant water. Descendants of the plant that one of his breeders, Dr. Singh, found in a wheat field one recent day might eventually wind up in farmers' fields the world over.
But budgets for this kind of research remain exceedingly tight, frustrating agronomists who feel that the problems are growing more urgent by the year.
"There are biological limitations on how fast we can do this work," Dr. Braun said. "If we don't get started now, we are going to be in serious trouble."
Shaken Assumptions
For decades, scientists believed that the human dependence on fossil fuels, for all the problems it was expected to cause, would offer one enormous benefit.
Carbon dioxide, the main gas released by combustion, is also the primary fuel for the growth of plants. They draw it out of the air and, using the energy from sunlight, convert the carbon into energy-dense compounds like glucose. All human and animal life runs on these compounds.
Humans have already raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and are on course to double or triple it over the coming century. Studies have long suggested that the extra gas would supercharge the world's food crops, and might be especially helpful in years when the weather is difficult.
But many of those studies were done in artificial conditions, like greenhouses or special growth chambers. For the past decade, scientists at the University of Illinois have been putting the "CO2 fertilization effect" to a real-world test in the two most important crops grown in the United States.
They started by planting soybeans in a field, then sprayed extra carbon dioxide from a giant tank. Based on the earlier research, they hoped the gas might bump yields as much as 30 percent under optimal growing conditions.
But when they harvested their soybeans, they got a rude surprise: the bump was only half as large. "When we measured the yields, it was like, wait a minute - this is not what we expected," said Elizabeth A. Ainsworth, a Department of Agriculture researcher who played a leading role in the work.
When they grew the soybeans in the sort of conditions expected to prevail in a future climate, with high temperatures or low water, the extra carbon dioxide could not fully offset the yield decline caused by those factors.
They also ran tests using corn, America's single most valuable crop and the basis for its meat production and its biofuel industry. While that crop was already known to be less responsive to carbon dioxide, a yield bump was still expected - especially during droughts. The Illinois researchers got no bump.
Their work has contributed to a broader body of research suggesting that extra carbon dioxide does act as plant fertilizer, but that the benefits are less than previously believed - and probably less than needed to avert food shortages. "One of the things that we're starting to believe is that the positives of CO2 are unlikely to outweigh the negatives of the other factors," said Andrew D. B. Leakey, another of the Illinois researchers.
Other recent evidence suggests that longstanding assumptions about food production on a warming planet may have been too optimistic.
Two economists, Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University and Michael J. Roberts of North Carolina State University, have pioneered ways to compare crop yields and natural temperature variability at a fine scale. Their work shows that when crops are subjected to temperatures above a certain threshold - about 84 degrees for corn and 86 degrees for soybeans - yields fall sharply.
This line of research suggests that in the type of climate predicted for the United States by the end of the century, with more scorching days in the growing season, yields of today's crop varieties could fall by 30 percent or more.
Though it has not yet happened in the United States, many important agricultural countries are already warming rapidly in the growing season, with average increases of several degrees. A few weeks ago, David B. Lobell of Stanford University published a paper with Dr. Schlenker suggesting that temperature increases in France, Russia, China and other countries were suppressing crop yields, adding to the pressures on the food system.
"I think there's been an under-recognition of just how sensitive crops are to heat, and how fast heat exposure is increasing," Dr. Lobell said.
Such research has provoked controversy. The findings go somewhat beyond those of a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that episodically reviews climate science and advises governments.
That report found that while climate change was likely to pose severe challenges for agriculture in the tropics, it would probably be beneficial in some of the chillier regions of the Northern Hemisphere, and that the carbon dioxide effect should offset many problems.
In an interview at the University of Illinois, one of the leading scientists behind the work there, Stephen P. Long, sharply criticized the 2007 report, saying it had failed to sound a sufficient alarm. "I felt it needed to be much more honest in saying this is our best guess at the moment, but there are probably huge errors in there," Dr. Long said. "We're talking about the future food supply of the world."
William E. Easterling, dean of earth sciences at Pennsylvania State University and a primary author of the 2007 report, said in an interview that the recent research had slightly altered his perspective. "We have probably to some extent overestimated" the benefits of carbon dioxide in computerized crop forecasts, he said. But he added that applying a "correction factor" would probably take care of the problem, and he doubted that the estimates in the report would change drastically as a result.
The 2007 report did point out a hole in the existing body of research: most forecasts had failed to consider several factors that could conceivably produce nasty surprises, like a projected rise in extreme weather events. No sooner had the report been published than food prices began rising, partly because of crop failures caused by just such extremes.
Oxfam, the international relief group, projected recently that food prices would more than double by 2030 from today's high levels, with climate change responsible for perhaps half the increase. As worries like that proliferate, some scientists are ready to go back to the drawing board regarding agriculture and climate change.
Dr. Rosenzweig, the NASA climate scientist, played a leading role in forming the old consensus. But in an interview at her office in Manhattan, she ticked off recent stresses on the food system and said they had led her to take a fresh look.
She is pulling together a global consortium of researchers whose goal will be to produce more detailed and realistic computer forecasts; she won high-level endorsement for the project at a recent meeting between British and United States officials. "We absolutely have to get the science lined up to provide these answers," Dr. Rosenzweig said.
Promises Unkept
At the end of a dirt road in northeastern India, nestled between two streams, lies the remote village of Samhauta. Anand Kumar Singh, a farmer there, recently related a story that he could scarcely believe himself.
Last June, he planted 10 acres of a new variety of rice. On Aug. 23, the area was struck by a severe flood that submerged his field for 10 days. In years past, such a flood would have destroyed his crop. But the new variety sprang back to life, yielding a robust harvest.
"That was a miracle," Mr. Singh said.
The miracle was the product not of divine intervention but of technology - an illustration of how far scientists may be able to go in helping farmers adapt to the problems that bedevil them.
"It's the best example in agriculture," said Julia Bailey-Serres, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside, who has done genetic work on the rice variety that Mr. Singh used. "The submergence-tolerant rice essentially sits and waits out the flood."
In the heyday of the Green Revolution, the 1960s, leaders like Dr. Borlaug founded an international network of research centers to focus on the world's major crops. The corn and wheat center in Mexico is one. The new rice variety that is exciting farmers in India is the product of another, the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
Leading researchers say it is possible to create crop varieties that are more resistant to drought and flooding and that respond especially well to rising carbon dioxide. The scientists are less certain that crops can be made to withstand withering heat, though genetic engineering may eventually do the trick.
The flood-tolerant rice was created from an old strain grown in a small area of India, but decades of work were required to improve it. Money was so tight that even after the rice had been proven to survive floods for twice as long as previous varieties, distribution to farmers was not assured. Then an American charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, stepped in with a $20 million grant to finance final development and distribution of the rice in India and other countries. It may get into a million farmers' hands this year.
The Gateses, widely known for their work in public health, have also become leading backers of agricultural projects in recent years. "I'm an optimist," Mr. Gates said in an interview. "I think we can get crops that will mitigate many of our problems."
The Gates Foundation has awarded $1.7 billion for agricultural projects since 2006, but even a charity as large as it is cannot solve humanity's food problems on its own. Governments have recognized that far more effort is needed on their part, but they have been slow to deliver.
In 2008 and 2009, in the midst of the political crises set off by food prices, the world's governments outbid one another to offer support. At a conference in L'Aquila, Italy, they pledged about $22 billion for agricultural development.
It later turned out, however, that no more than half of that was new money not previously committed to agriculture, and two years later, the extra financing has not fully materialized. "It's a disappointment," Mr. Gates said.
The Obama administration has won high marks from antihunger advocates for focusing on the issue. President Obama pledged $3.5 billion at L'Aquila, more than any other country, and the United States has begun an ambitious initiative called Feed the Future to support agricultural development in 20 of the neediest countries.
So far, the administration has won $1.9 billion from Congress. Amid the budget struggles in Washington, it remains to be seen whether the United States will fully honor its pledge.
Perhaps the most hopeful sign nowadays is that poor countries themselves are starting to invest in agriculture in a serious way, as many did not do in the years when food was cheap.
In Africa, largely bypassed by the Green Revolution but with enormous potential, a dozen countries are on the verge of fulfilling a promise to devote 10 percent of their budgets to farm development, up from 5 percent or less.
"In my country, every penny counts," Agnes Kalibata, the agriculture minister of Rwanda, said in an interview. With difficulty, Rwanda has met the 10 percent pledge, and she cited a terracing project in the country's highlands that has raised potato yields by 600 percent for some farmers.
Yet the leading agricultural experts say that poor countries cannot solve the problems by themselves. The United Nations recently projected that global population would hit 10 billion by the end of the century, 3 billion more than today. Coupled with the demand for diets richer in protein, the projections mean that food production may need to double by later in the century.
Unlike in the past, that demand must somehow be met on a planet where little new land is available for farming, where water supplies are tightening, where the temperature is rising, where the weather has become erratic and where the food system is already showing serious signs of instability.
"We've doubled the world's food production several times before in history, and now we have to do it one more time," said Jonathan A. Foley, a researcher at the University of Minnesota. "The last doubling is the hardest. It is possible, but it's not going to be easy."
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
5) NATO Begins Helicopter Attacks in Hopes of Ending the Stalemate With Qaddafi
By JOHN F. BURNS
June 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/world/africa/05libya.html?ref=world
TRIPOLI, Libya - In a move to intensify pressure on Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's forces, NATO introduced attack helicopters into its air campaign against Libyan forces for the first time on Saturday, military officials said.
Two American-built Apache helicopters operating from a British helicopter-carrier ship plying the Mediterranean 20 miles off the Libyan coast attacked targets before dawn near the oil city of Brega. British reporters aboard the Royal Navy ship Ocean said that both helicopters returned safely after missions lasting less than two hours. Defense officials in Paris said that French helicopters flying from the helicopter carrier Tonnerre also joined in the Brega strikes.
NATO said in a statement that the British helicopters had successfully attacked "military vehicles, military equipment and fielded forces."
NATO officials have said that they regard the introduction of attack helicopters - the British Apaches and two French helicopter types, the Tigre and the Gazelle - as potential game changers in a conflict that has shown signs of settling into a stalemate. They say the helicopters' advantage over airstrikes conducted from fast jets flying as high as 20,000 feet is their enhanced ability to carry out precision strikes against Qaddafi forces operating in urban areas, and to pinpoint targets like snipers or small groups of loyalist fighters hiding among civilians or close to schools and hospitals.
But the helicopters also introduce a new level of vulnerability for NATO pilots. Libya still has some scattered air defenses, consisting mainly of portable antiaircraft missiles and truck-mounted systems, which could pose dangers to relatively slow, low-flying helicopters.
The helicopter attacks were begun a week after Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France approved the deployment of attack helicopters from each of their forces, describing the move as intended to increase the military pressure on Colonel Qaddafi. NATO leaders, including President Obama, have called on the Libyan leader to abandon power and leave Libya, demands that he has repeatedly rejected.
Previously, all of 3,640 strike sorties flown during the 11-week air campaign had been by fixed-wing attack jets or missile-carrying Predator drones, following up on an initial barrage by cruise missiles.
The British version of the Apache flies at a maximum speed of about 160 miles an hour, compared with the potentially supersonic Tornado, Typhoon and Rafale jets that have conducted most of the British and French attacks in the air campaign.
The commander of the British helicopter carrier told reporters aboard the ship that the targets struck early on Saturday included a radar site and an "armed checkpoint" near Brega, a Qaddafi-held port in eastern Libya that has been a major export point and servicing center for Libya's oil industry. French officials said that French helicopters attacked a military camp, apparently one that a NATO statement described as comprising 14 military vehicles, as well as "two shelters and 12 tents."
With the costs of the air campaign mounting, and the stresses growing on air crews, finding a way of breaking the stalemate has become a priority for NATO, and particularly for Britain and France, which are carrying the brunt of the campaign.
Mr. Obama has let NATO allies take the lead in the Libyan operations, an unusual role for them in the history of such operations. The United States' role has been confined primarily to air refueling, airborne command and control, surveillance and the deployment of missile-carrying drones.
Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard, the Canadian commander who oversees the air campaign from a base in Naples, Italy, issued a statement on Saturday calling the helicopters' first missions successful and adding: "We will continue to use these assets whenever and wherever needed."
Within hours of the Brega attacks, Britain's Foreign Office announced that Foreign Secretary William Hague had arrived in the rebel capital, Benghazi, for talks with rebel leaders. The London statement said that Mr. Hague's trip was "meant to show support for citizens fighting the rule" of Colonel Qaddafi.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
6) For the Jobless, Little U.S. Help on Foreclosure
"As part of the bank bailout, the Treasury Department was given $46 billion to spend on keeping homeowners in their houses; to date, the agency has spent about $1.85 billion."
By ANDREW MARTIN
June 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/business/economy/05housing.html?ref=us
The Obama administration's main program to keep distressed homeowners from falling into foreclosure has been aimed at those who took out subprime loans or other risky mortgages during the heady days of the housing boom. But these days, the primary cause of foreclosures is unemployment.
As a result, there is a mismatch between the homeowner program's design and the country's economic realities - and a new round of finger-pointing about how best to fix it.
The administration's housing effort does include programs to help unemployed homeowners, but they have been plagued by delays, dubious benefits and abysmal participation. For example, a Treasury Department effort started in early 2010 allows the jobless to postpone mortgage payments for three months, but the average length of unemployment is now nine months. As of March 31, there were only 7,397 participants.
"So far, I think the public record will show that programs to help unemployed homeowners have not been very successful," said Jeffrey C. Fuhrer, an executive vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
Data released last week suggests that the administration's task is only growing more difficult as the problems created by unemployment and housing persist. New job growth in May was anemic, and unemployment inched up to 9.1 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday.
Earlier in the week, a widely watched index found that housing prices had dropped to their lowest level in nearly a decade. And while the rate of homes falling into foreclosure has slowed, the reason is delays in processing foreclosures, not a housing recovery, according to RealtyTrac, a company that tracks foreclosures. There were 219,258 foreclosure filings in April, the latest month available.
Critics of the Obama administration's approach to preventing foreclosures have pressed for two years to get officials to focus more of their attention on unemployed homeowners, with meager results. As part of the bank bailout, the Treasury Department was given $46 billion to spend on keeping homeowners in their houses; to date, the agency has spent about $1.85 billion.
Morris A. Davis, a former Federal Reserve economist, estimates that as many as a million homeowners slipped into foreclosure because of insufficient help for the unemployed.
"The money was there and they didn't spend it," said Mr. Davis, an associate real estate professor at the University of Wisconsin. "I don't mean to sound outraged, but I am pretty outraged."
Administration officials said their programs have had a positive impact, albeit not as large as they had hoped. But they say that the problems of unemployment and negative equity on homes are not easily solved. They also say programs to curb foreclosure are voluntary, so they are limited in how far they can push mortgage servicers and investors, who often make more from foreclosures than from offering aid.
"We are trying to be careful in designing programs that at the end of the day aren't just about spending money but getting people back on their feet," said James Parrott, a senior adviser at the White House's National Economic Council.
President Obama has been scrambling to curb the number of foreclosures ever since he arrived at the White House.
At the start of 2009, the administration announced its primary foreclosure prevention initiative, the Home Affordable Modification Program. It provides incentives to banks to modify mortgages, reducing monthly payments for eligible homeowners.
The administration said the program would help three million to four million homeowners, but so far, only 670,000 homeowners have received permanent modifications. In addition, the program was primarily meant for homeowners with risky mortgages; jobless owners are often ineligible because some payment, albeit reduced, is required.
Administration officials said the program was helping homeowners whose income had been reduced. Sixty-one percent of homeowners who received permanent modifications listed "curtailment of income" as their reason for applying, though it is not known how many of them are unemployed or simply had their hours or pay reduced.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development received $1 billion as part of the financial regulatory reforms that passed last year to help unemployed homeowners. That money will be used to provide government loans to unemployed homeowners for up to 24 months.
Though the program was announced last fall, so far applications are being accepted in only five states; the others are delayed because of "implementation challenges," a HUD spokeswoman said.
Critics do acknowledge one bright spot - the Hardest Hit Fund, a federal program that will provide $7.6 billion so that some states can administer their own programs for struggling homeowners. Of that, 70 percent will be directed to unemployed homeowners, said Andrea Risotto, a Treasury spokeswoman.
So far, $455 million has been spent. Over the last several years, academics, housing groups and government economists offered proposals to Treasury officials to help the unemployed avoid foreclosure.
One, which Mr. Fuhrer of the Boston Fed helped write, called on the government to provide loans, or grants, to unemployed or underemployed homeowners to make up for the amount of income they lost. The loan would have to be repaid once the homeowner found a new job.
Another proposal, by a non-profit group called the PICO National Network, a coalition of faith-based community organizations, would have allowed unemployed homeowners to postpone much or all of their mortgage payments for a year or more.
But administration officials have balked, arguing that regulators and "other industry stakeholders expressed strong reservations" about allowing unemployed homeowners to extend payments for longer terms, according to a Dec. 23 letter that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner sent to Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who had pressed for measures that would more directly aid the unemployed.
The debate is playing out on the sidelines of partisan Washington politics, since Republican lawmakers have made clear they would like to get rid of anti-foreclosure programs altogether, and would block any new programs. Instead, it is setting homeowner advocates against administration officials over how to spend money already appropriated.
Administration officials maintain that the decision on whether to offer mortgage relief to homeowners ultimately was up to mortgage servicers and investors, not the government, which can provide incentives but not compel action.
"We as an administration have limited levers," Mr. Parrot said. "We can push them on the margins."
But Lewis Finfer, a PICO organizer, said he could not understand why the administration had not been more receptive given the extent of unemployment.
"We have a program to deal with this," he said.
Many unemployed or underemployed homeowners said they would welcome an extended break in mortgage payments.
Mary Ernest, 51, of Blackstone, Mass., lost her job as a school aide and said she had been "reduced to begging, more or less," to keep her home. Adam Heyman, 41, of Chelsea, Mass., scraped together enough money to pay the mortgage on his condominium for about 18 months. Though he finally got another full-time job, his bank had already foreclosed on his condo.
"If I had a way to slow down the process or stop it for a while, that would have been nice," Mr. Heyman said, adding, "Now I can certainly afford to pay."
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
7) In Connecticut, Paid Sick Leave for Service Workers Is Approved
By PETER APPLEBOME
June 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/nyregion/connecticut-service-workers-to-get-paid-sick-leave.html?ref=nyregion
After 11 hours of debate in Hartford, state legislators approved a bill on Saturday to make Connecticut the first state in the nation to mandate paid sick leave for hundreds of thousands of service workers.
At about 3 a.m., the House voted 76 to 65 on the bill, which had been approved by an 18-to-17 vote in the Senate on May 25. About a dozen fiscally conservative House Democrats voted with the Republicans against the measure, which, while watered down from earlier proposals, had been vigorously denounced by business interests.
Proponents hailed the vote as a landmark victory for workers' rights and public health at a time that similar measures are pending or about to be introduced in Philadelphia and Seattle and are being pushed elsewhere. Only San Francisco and Washington, D.C., now require employers to give paid sick days to workers.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a first-term Democrat who had named paid sick days as a campaign issue, said in a statement that the bill was measured and fair. But Republicans and business interests called it onerous and ill-timed at a period in which businesses are struggling and job growth is anemic.
The bill applies only to businesses with 50 or more employees. It exempts manufacturing companies and nationally chartered nonprofit organizations, day laborers, independent contractors and temporary workers.
The measure covers only service workers who receive an hourly wage, an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 of them, including waiters, cashiers, fast-food cooks, hair stylists, security guards and nursing home aides. It allows each employee to earn one hour of paid sick time for every 40 hours worked, with the number of days capped at five per year.
Still, even in its limited form, it became a flashpoint at a time of widespread economic stress and pressure on workers.
Governor Malloy said, "This is good public policy and specifically, good public health." He added: "Why would you want to eat food from a sick restaurant cook? Or have your children taken care of by a sick day care worker? The simple answer is - you wouldn't. And now, you won't have to."
Before the vote, the House Republican leader, Larry Cafero, said that passing the bill was "the absolutely worst thing we could do, the worst signal we could send." He added, "What we need in the state of Connecticut is jobs, jobs, jobs."
But proponents said there was no evidence that the legislation put an unfair burden on business.
Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, said that more than 40 million American workers do not have a single paid sick day.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
8) Secret Wars of CIA Have Cost Taxpayers Billions
By Sherwood Ross
June 5, 2011
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Secret-Wars-of-CIA-Have-Co-by-Sherwood-Ross-110605-267.html
It's been estimated the Iraq war, besides making that country pretty much unlivable, will flush $3 trillion in U.S. taxpayer dollars down the Pentagon drain. Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz, who made that cost estimate, wrote with co-author Linda Bilmes in The Washington Post March 9, 2008, "The Iraq adventure has seriously weakened the U.S. Economy...you can't spend $3 trillion---yes, $3 trillion ---on a failed war abroad and not feel the pain at home."
The Stiglitz study is well known and is a factor in making many Americans want to get out of Iraq. (A CNN poll this January found two-thirds opposed the war.) But other costly wars have been waged by the White House, Pentagon, and CIA that have been kept largely secret. Their costs ran into the billions of dollars and not only cheated uninformed taxpayers but lacerated innocent nations, turning their populations against us, and ruined for American business countries that should have been harmonious trading partners.
Take El Salvador. President John Kennedy in the early Sixties worked to help El Salvador's military set up ORDEN, a rural paramilitary network, and ANSESAL, an intelligence agency, that were the forerunners of the dreaded Death Squads. Between 1980 and 1992, the U.S. literally waged a war to help the government suppress El Salvador's poverty-struck people. The CIA created right-wing Death Squads to murder labor leaders who fought on behalf of the poor for decent wages. By the time those killer bands had finished their slaughter, 75,000 civilians lay dead and "the U.S. Treasury depleted by six billion dollars," according to journalist William Blum's "Rogue State" from Common Courage Press.
" Officially, the U.S. Military presence in El Salvador was limited to an advisory capacity. In actuality, military and CIA personnel played a more active role on a continuous basis," Blum writes. "About 20 Americans were killed or wounded in helicopter and plane crashes while flying reconnaissance or other missions over combat areas, and considerable evidence surfaced of a U.S. role in the ground fighting as well."
That the CIA was involved up to its ears in the blood-bath is more than a hollow assertion. The man known as the "father" of El Salvador's notorious Death Squads, General Jose Alberto Medrano, told The Progressive magazine at the time that his killer outfits were established with the support of the CIA. What's more, Covert Action magazine reported that in 1963 the Pentagon's Green Beret Col. Arthur Simons of Panama sent 10 Army Special Forces men to help Medrano set up the first paramilitary Death Squad. These Green Berets carried out political assassinations in coordination with Salvadoran military, that magazine said.
Besides Green Berets, The Progressive identified both the State Department and the Agency for International Development(AID) as participating in the concerted effort to suppress dissent. As far as Medrano was concerned, anyone who took the side of employees against corporate owners was a Communist. "You discover the communist by the way he talks," Gen. Medrano said. "Generally, he speaks against Yankee imperialism, he speaks against the oligarchy, he speaks against military men. We can spot them easily."
Medrano added, "In this revolutionary war, the enemy comes from our people. They don't have the rights of Geneva. They are traitors to the country. What can the troops do? When they find them, they kill them." (So much for free speech and human rights.)
One of the "enemies" was Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero who urged soldiers to stop killing on grounds they were "not obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God"---a comment that is as relevant today as the hour it was uttered. The very next day while saying mass in a cancer hospital chapel, Romero was shot dead. According to Craig Pyes, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, the Salvadoran National Guard also set up safe houses "where they tortured and then murdered those they considered 'subversives.' Their idea was to cleanse the country of hundreds of thousands of people."
President Reagan not only funded the savage El Salvador government, he used that nation, as well as Guatemala and Honduras, as springboards to attack Nicaragua. James Carroll, in his award-winning "House of War"( Houghton Mifflin), said Reagan "increased what had been relatively modest support to three of the most repressive regimes in the world, just as their police-state methods reached new levels of savagery, all in the name of staving off the Marxists."
Just why the U.S. Developed Death Squads in El Salvador may have something to do with profit-hungry US corporations operating Central America. As Carroll sees it, "More than two thirds of the region's people had been made desperately poor over three generations by an American-sponsored, single-crop, agri-business economy that had made a mere 5 percent of the population fabulously wealthy."
" The Latin oligarchs were not owners, exactly," Carroll explains, "but in effect agents of such American companies as United Fruit and Domino Sugar, and multinational corporations like Gulf & Western. Dictators had been installed in these countries to protect this U.S. dominance."
The slaughter in El Salvador, in which the CIA played a primary role, expresses the duality of U.S. foreign policy---where the White House espouses freedom and self-determination for all peoples while the reality, kept from the knowledge of the American public, is a policy of oppression to serve the interests of misguided U.S. corporate officials exploiting foreign labor. Should it be a surprise that after years of busting labor unions from El Salvador to Iraq, US politicians are attempting to do the same Stateside? Is it surprising that after denying millions of people the world over their fundamental right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the U.S. Congress has extended the Patriot Act and President Obama has assumed kingly powers, including the right to arrest anyone and throw away the key?
In this stunning disintegration of American democracy, the CIA is regularly found siding with the worst corporate interests---big oil companies such as BP that want government to punish those who expect them to agree to a fair profit; agricultural giants that want cheap labor to maximize short-term profits; and so forth. Such firms are afraid of both free enterprise and fair enterprise, and have turned the face of the nation towards unbridled corporate fascism. Like the Ku Klux Klan of old, the CIA is the new illegal, "invisible empire," one that works harmoniously with its one-time employee, President Obama, to serve the needs of the Empire. The Republic is dead.#
Sherwood Ross worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and contributed a regular "Workplace" column for Reuters. He has contributed to national magazines and hosted a talk show on WOL, Washington, D.C. In the Sixties he was active as public relations director for a major civil rights organization.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
9) Former Political Prisoner Geronimo Pratt Dies
By Stephen Lendman
June 5, 2011
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Former-Political-Prisoner-by-Stephen-Lendman-110605-3.html
Former Political Prisoner Geronimo Pratt Dies - by Stephen Lendman
Reporting his death, AP said:
"Former Black Panther Party leader Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt" died at age 63 in a small (Tanzania village) "where he had lived for at least half a decade, a friend of Pratt's in Arusha, former Black Panther Pete O'Neal, said."
He lived a peaceful life in Tanzania, O'Neal explained, adding:
"He's my hero. He was and will continue to be. Geronimo was a symbol of steadfast resistance against all (he) considered wrong and improper. His whole life was dedicated to standing opposition to oppression and exploitation....He gave all that he had and his life, I believe, struggling, trying to help people lift themselves up."
His lawyer and longtime friend, Stuart Hanlon, who spent years working for his release, also announced his death, saying:
"What happened to him is the horror story of the United States. This became a microcosm of when the government decides what's politically right or wrong. The COINTELPRO program was awful. He became a symbol for what they did."
He had southern, rural roots, and hardworking parents who sent all their kids to college. "He (went) to the military, (fought) and (was awarded two Bronze Stars, a Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts) in Vietnam, (came) home, (and became) a football star in college. That would be an American hero. It was different because he was black and he became a Panther and then the road went the wrong way."
Calling Pratt one of his closest friends, Hanlon said his case "defined me as a lawyer."
David Hilliard helped recruit Pratt to provide leadership for the Los Angeles Panther chapter. "He symbolized the best human spirit," he said. "His spirit of endurance, his strength, his service to his people. He (was) very positive and a real example for young people who want to look into the direction of Che Guevara, Malcolm X and the leader of our party, Huey P. Newton. He (was) one of the true heros of our era. He dedicated his life to (serve) his people. There is nothing more honorable than that."
On June 3, Los Angeles Times writer Robert Lopez headlined, "Former Black Panther whose murder conviction was overturned dies at 63," saying:
He became "a symbol of racial injustices during the turbulent 1960s....a cause celebre for a range of supporters, including elected officials, activists, Amnesty International, clergy and celebrities, who believed he was framed by Los Angeles police and the FBI" because he was Black and a Panther member.
In fact, he was under FBI surveillance in Oakland when the murder he was convicted of happened in Santa Monica, hundreds of miles south. Nonetheless, he was unjustly framed and served 27 years until freed.
In 1970, he was arrested and falsely charged with Caroline Olsen's murder, a Los Angeles teacher. In 1968, she and her husband Kenneth were attacked on a Santa Monica tennis court by two Black men. Three years later, Kenneth said Pratt was one of the assailants, pressured to name him after first identifying three other suspects from LAPD photos. In 1972, he was falsely convicted.
In fact, Pratt was framed, victimized by LAPD authorities working with the FBI's illegal COINTELPRO counterintelligence program against political dissidents, including communists; anti-war, human and civil rights activists; the American Indian Movement; and Black Panther Party members, among others.
In their book "Agents of Repression," Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall said:
"(T)he term came to signify the whole context of clandestine (mostly illegal) political repression activities, (including) a massive surveillance (program via) wiretaps, surreptitious entries and burglaries, electronic devices, live 'tails' and....bogus mail" (to induce paranoia and) foster 'splits' within or between organizations."
Other tactics included black propaganda, disinformation or gray propaganda, rumor spreading, manufactured evidence, harassment arrests on bogus charges, and assassinations, notably against Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December 4, 1969 by Chicago police while they slept.
In Pratt's case, Julius Butler was the prosecution's main witness, an FBI/LAPD informant, expelled from the Panthers by Pratt for advocating violence. At trial, he falsely claimed Pratt confessed to the killing.
Later, when Butler was outed as an informer, paid to lie, LA authorities denied Pratt a retrial, keeping him imprisoned wrongfully for another 20 years.
Moreover, according to former FBI agent Wesley Swearingen, Los Angeles Panther headquaters wiretap information showed Pratt was in Oakland when it happened, also confirmed by agency surveillance evidence there. Pratt's defense wasn't told. In addition, in both cities, tapes and other evidence were destroyed to keep an innocent man wrongfully imprisoned for 27 years, eight in solitary confinement, as well as parole denied 16 times.
Delayed Justice Finally Achieved
On May 29, 1997, Judge Everett W. Dickey (an Orange County Reagan appointee), in a sharply worded opinion, reversed Pratt's conviction, ruling prosecutors suppressed evidence to unjustly imprison him in ordering a new trial. At the time, he was America's longest held political prisoner, yet to be fully exonerated.
Over 30 years later in February 1999, it came in a four paragraph Los Angeles County District Attorney, Gil Garcetti, statement, saying:
"We accept the decision of the court of appeals. The murder at issue in this case occurred over 30 years ago. Most of the witnesses to the case are deceased. It would be virtually impossible to retry this case. In our professional judgment, there would be no reasonable likelihood of conviction."
Omitted was any admission of FBI, LAPD, or prosecutorial wrongdoing. In fact, Hanlon at the time said Garcetti fought him and fellow Pratt attorney Johnnie Cochran, Jr. "every step of the way," trying to keep him wrongfully imprisoned.
In May 2000, in a civil rights lawsuit, a federal judge awarded Pratt $4.5 million for false imprisonment, but couldn't return his 27 lost years, or undo the toll it took even on someone with his inner strength.
Journalist and author Jack Olsen wrote about Pratt's ordeal in his book titled, "Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triumph of Geronimo Pratt," recounting his southern roots, loving parents, self-reliance and dedication to right over wrong.
At UCLA, in fact, his awareness of police brutality and racial injustice inspired him to join the Panthers at a time FBI and local police harassed the organization nationally to undermine its solidarity by neutralizing its leaders. As a result, Pratt became a prime target, culminating in his arrest and wrongful conviction, nearly keeping him imprisoned for life.
While there, Olsen explained, he spent years in solitary confinement, his only toilet a hole in the floor that routinely backed up. In addition, he got only three hours of daylight a week, and was routinely harassed, beaten, drugged, moved from one "dungeon" to another, targeted for assassination at times, and falsely accused of other offenses, including attempted murder of guards, inciting riots, planning mass escapes, and masterminding Patty Hearst's kidnapping.
Only his inner strength saved him, using meditation, chanting, astral projection and yoga, along with studying law and other self-help practices to survive despite everything prison authorities threw at him to destroy him. They couldn't, but at age 63 he passed, a major loss to those who loved him, but not his spirit inspiring others to fight the good fight against injustice affecting anyone.
A Final Comment
In October 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. It was progressive, activist, militantly for ethnic justice, racial emancipation, and real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines. Radical ideas then and now, the party's ten-point program stood for:
(1) freedom and "power to determine the destiny of our black community;"
(2) full employment for Black people and everyone;
(3) "an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black community;"
(4) decent housing;
(5) education to expose "the true nature of this decadent American society (and teach) us our true history and our role in the present-day society;"
(6) for "all Black men to be exempt from military service" at a time they were drafted for foreign wars;
(7) "an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people;"
(8) "freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails;"
(9) for Black people in court "to be tried....by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black communities;" and
(10) "land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace."
They also added words from the Declaration of Independence, saying:
-- "all men are created equal";
-- "to secure (their) rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;"
-- "that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and institute a new government;"
-- "to throw off (despotism), and to provide new guards for (peoples') future security."
They believed in rule of law principles, published a newspaper with 250,000 readers, and articulated fundamental wants and needs. They also practiced what they preached with:
-- nutritious breakfasts for poor children;
-- food for needy families;
-- free clinics for medical care;
-- a free ambulance service;
-- help for the homeless;
-- free legal aids and bussing to prisons;
-- after-school and summer classes teaching Black history; and
-- Black voter registration drives.
They helped elect Oakland's first Black mayor, Lionel Wilson, in the city where the Panthers were founded.
They were young and idealistic, willing to put their lives on the line for their beliefs and activism. Their goal - to make the world a better place for Black people and everyone.
They were revolutionaries for justice, hostile to repression. In Huey Newton's words, they were "never a group of angry young militants full of fury toward the 'white establishment.' "
The Party, in fact, advocated love for Black people, not hate for Whites. They fought for change from over 30 branches throughout the country with over 2,000 members at their peak.
They wanted redress of longstanding grievances, including slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, discrimination, neglect and abuse. Practicing what Jefferson preached, they were targeted viciously and illegally for destruction, an agenda still ongoing against other activists and dissident groups to make America safe for wealth and power at the expense of beneficial social change, what heroic Panthers and others like them fought and died for and still do. What better reason to do it for than that.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
10) Just How Contaminated Is the Fish and Meat That We Eat?
By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet
Posted on June 5, 2011, Printed on June 6, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151206/just_how_contaminated_is_the_fish_and_meat_that_we_eat
Over five years ago the Chicago Tribune reported that tuna was unequivocally contaminated with mercury. "The tuna industry has failed to adequately warn consumers about the risks of eating canned tuna, while federal regulators have been reluctant to include the fish in their mercury advisories - at times amid heavy lobbying by industry," said the paper. Three years later, the New York Times found similar contamination in area sushi.
But rather than a safer product, clearer warnings or regulatory distance between federal officials and the industry they are supposed to oversee, tuna fish consumers have gotten nothing but more studies.
Last year Time magazine reported 100 samples of both lean red tuna and fatty tuna from 54 restaurants and 15 supermarkets in Colorado, New Jersey and New York, exceed recommended amounts of mercury.
And this year Consumer Reports says every tuna sample tested at an outside lab "contained measurable levels of mercury, ranging from 0.018 to 0.774 parts per million. The Food and Drug Administration can take legal action to pull products containing 1 ppm or more from the market. (It never has, according to an FDA spokesman.)"
In fact mercury-filled tuna is so rampant in the food supply, it was what inspired Fischer Stevens to make the Oscar winning-documentary about the Japanese dolphin fishing industry, The Cove. He personally came down with mercury poisoning, he told NBCLA, after eating tuna three or four times a week which caused him to investigate the entire seafood industry.
Nor is much of the meat necessarily safe. Even though you can cook pathogens like E. coli, salmonella, listeria and campylobacter out, veterinary drugs, pesticides and heavy metals like copper and arsenic remain after cooking says a government report.
According to a 2010 Office of Inspector General report, of 23 pesticides designated by the EPA and FDA as high risk, the Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service only tests for one. Four carcasses contaminated with "violative levels of veterinary drugs" were released onto the public dinner plate in just six months, says the report.
"Farmers are prohibited from selling milk for human consumption from cows that have been medicated with antibiotics (as well as other drugs) until the withdrawal period is over; so instead of just disposing of this tainted milk, producers feed it to their calves," says the report, sounding more like an animal activist group than the U.S. government. "When the calves are slaughtered, the drug residue from the feed or milk remains in their meat, which is then sold to consumers."
FDA records corroborate the OIM report, finding that Templeton Feed & Grain and Darr Feedlots recently sold antibiotic-tainted animal feed and that Land Dairy and Martin Feed Lot sold cows with the antibiotic sulfamethazine in their livers to be sold as human food.
While consumers are told to cook meat thoroughly to remove pathogens that are eliminated by intense heat, there are even dangers from over-cooking! Frying, broiling and grilling beef, pork, poultry and even fish can produce cancer causing compounds from dripping fat called heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons says the National Cancer Institute They are linked to stomach, colon, bladder and several other cancers and to be avoided.
Processed foods like luncheon meat, ham and hot dogs are pre-treated with nitrites to kill food-borne germs. Nitrites become nitrosamines which top the list of well known carcinogens. Nitrites also maintain lunch meat's "natural" color - as natural as factory farmed salmon which are given orange dyes.
Martha Rosenberg frequently writes about the impact of the pharmaceutical, food and gun industries on public health. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and other outlets.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
11) The Return of Back-Alley Abortions
by Michelle Goldberg
June 3, 2011
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-06-03/abortions-return-to-back-alleys-amid-restrictive-new-state-laws/
In states across the country, women are being arrested for the crime of ending their own pregnancies-though they have a constitutional right to do so in a doctor's office. Michelle Goldberg on a worrisome new trend.
Underground abortions have returned to the United States, just as pro-choice activists have warned for years. And women have started going to jail for the crime of ending their own pregnancies, or trying to.
This week Jennie L. McCormack, a 32-year-old mother of three from eastern Idaho, was arrested for self-inducing an abortion. According to the Associated Press, McCormack couldn't afford a legal procedure, and so took pills that her sister had ordered online. For some reason, she kept the fetus, which police found after they were called by a disapproving acquaintance. She now faces up to five years in prison, as well as a $5,000 fine.
Idaho recently banned abortions after 20 weeks, and McCormack's fetus was reportedly between five and six months old. But according to Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, a staff attorney for the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, under Idaho law, McCormack could have been arrested even if she'd been in her first trimester because self-induced abortion is illegal in all circumstances. "It doesn't matter if it's an 8- or 10- or 12-week abortion," says Kolbi-Molinas. "If you do what you could get lawfully in a doctor's office-what you have a constitutional right to access in a doctor's office-they can throw you in jail and make you a convicted felon."
While horrific, McCormack's case is not unique. In recent years, several women have been arrested on suspicion of causing their own abortions, or attempting to. Most have come from conservative rural states with few clinics and numerous restrictions on abortion. In America's urban centers and liberal enclaves, the idea of women being prosecuted for taking desperate measures to end their pregnancies might seem inconceivable, a never-again remnant of the era before Roe v. Wade. In fact, it's a slowly encroaching reality.
Even more, these cases demonstrate that criminalizing abortion means turning women who have abortions into criminals.
In 2005, Gabriela Flores, a 22-year-old Mexican migrant worker, was arrested in South Carolina. Like McCormack, she had three children and said she couldn't afford a fourth, and so she turned to clandestinely acquired pills. (The drug she took, Misoprostol, is an ulcer medicine that also works as an abortifacient and is widely used in Latin American countries where abortion is illegal.) Initially facing two years in prison, she ended up being sentenced to 90 days.
In 2009, a 17-year-old Utah girl known in court filings as J.M.S. found herself pregnant by an older man who is now facing charges of using her in child pornography. J.M.S. lived in house without electricity or running water in a remote part of the state, several hours' drive from the nearest clinic, which was in Salt Lake City. Getting there would have required not just a car-her area had no public transportation-but money for a hotel in order to comply with Utah's 24-hour-waiting period, as well as for the cost of the abortion itself.
According to prosecutors, when J.M.S. was in her third trimester, she paid a man $150 to beat her in the hopes of inducing a miscarriage. The fetus survived, but she was charged with criminal solicitation to commit murder. When her case was thrown out on the grounds that her actions weren't illegal under the state's definition of abortion, legislators changed the law so they would be able to punish women like her in the future. Meanwhile, prosecutors have appealed J.M.S.' case to the Supreme Court, and observers expect it to rule against her. She could still face a trial and prison time.
A woman doesn't even have to be trying to abort to find herself under arrest. Last year, a pregnant 22-year-old in Iowa named Christine Taylor ended up in the hospital after falling down a flight of stairs. A mother of two, she told a nurse she'd tripped after an upsetting phone conversation with her estranged husband. Though she'd gone to the hospital to make sure her fetus was OK, she confessed that she'd been ambivalent about the pregnancy and unsure whether she was ready to become a single mother of three.
Suspecting Taylor had hurled herself down the stairs on purpose, the nurse called a doctor, and at some point the police were brought in. Taylor was arrested on charges of attempted feticide. She spent two days in jail before the charges were dropped because she was in her second trimester, and Iowa's feticide laws don't kick in until the third.
These cases are a harbinger of what's to come as abortion laws become increasingly strict and abortion clinics harder to access in the more conservative parts of the country. They demonstrate the lengths to which women will go to end unwanted pregnancies. But even more, they demonstrate that criminalizing abortion means turning women who have abortions into criminals.
The antiabortion movement likes to see itself as pro-woman. Most of its spokespeople talk about protecting women from abortion, insisting they're not interested in seeing them punished. "It's tragic that this young woman felt that this was her only way out," National Right to Life President Carol Tobias said in a statement in response to questions about the McCormack case. "The pro-life movement has never supported jail sentences for women who are victims of the abortion culture and abortion industry."
Tobias said her group calls on Idaho officials "to engage in more publicity about the network of pregnancy resource centers and about the existence of Idaho's safe haven law-either of which would have helped this young mother and saved her child." But she didn't call on them to release McCormack or to change the laws under which she's being charged. If these sorts of prosecutions aren't what the antiabortion movement had in mind when it pushed wave after wave of state-level legislation, now might be a good time to speak up.
Michelle Goldberg is a senior contributing writer for The Daily Beast/Newsweek. She is the author of The New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, winner of the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Goldberg's work has appeared in Glamour, Rolling Stone, The Nation, New York magazine, The Guardian, and The New Republic. Her third book, about the world-traveling adventuress, actress and yoga evangelist Indra Devi, will be published by Knopf in 2012.
Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
12) Indignant movement draws largest crowd
Tens of thousands of people cram in and around Syntagma Square for peaceful rally.
ekathimerini.com
Sunday June 5, 2011
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite1_23590_05/06/2011_393635
Tens of thousands of demonstrators converged in and around Syntagma Square on Sunday for a 12th day of protests against the goverment's ongoing austerity drive.
The crowd in central Athens was the largest since the campaign began with the turnout estimated at 80,000 and police out in force. Following a dip in numbers at rallies toward the end of last week, yesterday's crowd spilled out of Syntagma Square and into surrounding streets.
It appears that a larger number of Greeks were inspired to join Sunday's protest as rallies were also taking place in Spain and Portugal, which have similar economic problems. Greece's self-professed "Indignant Citizens" -modeled on a movement with the same name that was launched in Spain last month - have pledged to continue their protests until the government reacts.
A few government backbenchers have expressed support though most have dismissed the movement as vague and lacking direction.
Critics outside the government have drawn attention to the range of slogans on the banners raised by protesters. Apart from anti-austerity slogans such as "Take back your measures" and "Greece is not for sale," other messages rail against racism and demand more rights for migrants.
Organizers of the Indignant movement say that their unifying themes are opposition to austerity and their independence from the labor unions that usually organize protest rallies in Greece.
On Saturday, members of the Communist-backed labor union PAME organized a demonstration in Athens to protest rising unemployment and ongoing austerity.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
13) So Much More Than Plasma and Poison
By NATALIE ANGIER
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/science/07jellyfish.html?hp
BALTIMORE - Until I met Doug Allen, the wiry, ponytailed senior aquarist who guided me through the extremely popular jellyfish exhibit at the National Aquarium, my personal experience with jellyfish consisted mainly of using them as yet another excuse not to go swimming: "Hey, I could get stung by a jellyfish!" Isn't that what happened to 1,800 people off the coast of Florida last week? So when Mr. Allen suddenly stopped, clambered a ladder to the top of one of the tanks and called down, "You want to try holding a moon jelly?" my first impulse was to knock a few schoolchildren out of the way as I bolted for the door. My second impulse ...
Too late. A three-inch-wide moon jellyfish had been plopped in my hands, and my fear quickly dissolved into fascination. The jellyfish shimmered and glowed. With its tendrils retracted, it looked like a round bar of glycerin soap, or maybe a translucent diaphragm, and it felt equal parts firm, jiggly and slimy, like a slice of liver coated in raw egg. And for all the vigor of my fondlings, I detected no sting.
"The poison of a common moon jellyfish is very weak," said Anders Garm, who studies jellyfish at the University of Copenhagen. "You'd have to kiss the jellyfish to feel it." There was no risk of that, but when we parted, the jellyfish left behind a kiss of its own on the palm of my hand: a sticky film that was surprisingly hard to remove. Thanks, my little honey moon.
Among nature's grand inventory of multicellular creatures, jellyfish seem like the ultimate other, as alien from us as mobile beings can be while still remaining within the kingdom Animalia. Where is the head, the heart, the back, the front, the matched sets of parts and organs? Where is the bilateral symmetry?
Yet if any taxonomic dynasty is entitled to the originalist mantle, to the designation of genuine emblematic earthling animal, and also to brand the rest of us the alien arrivistes, it is the jellyfish. A diverse group of thousands of species of gooey, saclike invertebrates found throughout the world, the jellyfish are preposterously ancient, dating back 600 million to 700 million years or longer. That's roughly twice as old as the earliest bony fish and insects, three times the age of the first dinosaurs.
"Jellyfish are the most ancient multiorgan animal on earth," said David J. Albert, a jellyfish expert at the Roscoe Bay Marine Biological Laboratory in Vancouver, British Columbia.
For all their noble antiquity, jellyfish have long been ignored or misunderstood by mainstream science, dismissed as so much mindless protoplasm with a mouth. Now, in a series of new studies, researchers have found that there is far more complexity and nuance to a jellyfish than meets the eye - or eyes. In the May 10 issue of the journal Current Biology, Dr. Garm and his colleagues describe the astonishing visual system of the box jellyfish, in which an interactive matrix of 24 eyes of four distinct types - two of them very similar to our own eyes - allow the jellies to navigate like seasoned sailors through the mangrove swamps they inhabit.
In The Journal of Experimental Biology, Richard A. Satterlie, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, recently disputed the conventional wisdom that jellyfish lack any semblance of the central nervous system that we higher vertebrates are so proud of. The distribution of a jellyfish's nerve cells may be comparatively more diffuse than in an animal with an obvious brain and spinal cord, said Dr. Satterlie, but the layout is hardly helter-skelter. Recent detailed investigations of jellyfish neural architecture and activity reveal evidence of "neuronal condensation," places where the neurons coalesce to form distinctive structures that act as integrating centers - taking in sensory information and translating it into the appropriate response.
"The bottom line is, jellyfish do a lot more than people think," said Dr. Satterlie, "and when college textbooks claim they have no centralized nervous system, that's flat-out wrong."
Dr. Albert goes further, insisting it is fair to declare that a jellyfish has a brain. He spent years studying the resident population of moon jellyfish in Roscoe Bay, starting with the simple question, how can there even be a resident population? The tides flow in and out of the bay each day. The jellies were supposed to be like plankton, at the mercy of the tides. So why aren't they simply flushed by the tides into the open sea, without so much as a goodnight moon?
Dr. Albert discovered that the jellies aren't passive floaters at all. When the tide starts flowing out, they ride the wave until they hit a gravel bar, and then dive down to reach still waters. They remain in the calm oasis until the tide starts flowing back in, at which point they come up and get swept back into the bay. He also learned that the jellies have salinity meters and in summer avoid the fresh water dumped into the bay from mountain snowmelt, again by diving until they find salt enough to suit their taste. They like to aggregate into schools and through molecular signatures on the outside of their bells can distinguish between a friendly fellow jelly and any predatory species of jellyfish that might eat them.
"If a moon jelly gets touched by a predatory jellyfish, it turns and swims up," Dr. Albert said. When it bumps into other benign species of jellyfish, though, as it often does, "nothing happens."
The jellyfish activity log grew too lengthy to ignore. "If you look at all these behaviors, you have to ask, what would it take to organize and execute them?" he said in a telephone interview. "These are not simple reflexes; they're organized behaviors."
Dr. Albert concluded that the jellyfish must have some kind of brain. "That's what a brain does," he said. "It controls behaviors."
Writing earlier this year in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Dr. Albert summarized his behavioral observations under the title "What's on the Mind of a Jellyfish?" to which he answered, "a lot." Brains and beauty, and campiness, too. Among the jellyfish on display in Baltimore were ones that looked like beating hearts, others like spotted toadstools, still others like parasols with a few too many ruffled streamers, and this one over here would make a swell hat for a royal wedding.
"They're living lava lamps," said Jack Cover, general curator of the aquarium. And they're so mesmerizing to visitors that, Mr. Allen said, "the jellies are right up there in popularity next to the dolphins." Which is a good thing, considering that the infrastructure needed to keep the tender-fleshed sylphs hale and whole can cost millions. "Keeping jellyfish is a fine art," said Vicky Poole, the exhibit manager. "It's a little like maintaining phlegm."
Jellies have no trouble maintaining themselves in the wild, however. They are found in open oceans, along coasts and in lagoons, and a few can handle fresh water. With their modest oxygen requirements, jellies can grow in post-algal "dead zones" and other polluted waters where most marine life can't - not surprising for a group that has weathered five past mass extinctions.
Adult jellies range in size from the Australian Irukandji, which is about the size of a fingernail, to the lion's mane jelly, with a bell 8 to 10 feet wide and tentacles trailing 100 or more feet behind it.
A hallmark of jellies is their radial symmetry, a concentric body plan that is more commonly associated with flowers than with animals but that allows the jellies to swim or drift through the water in straight lines.
All jellies are carnivorous, feeding on plankton, crustaceans, fish eggs, small fish and other jellyfish, ingesting and voiding through the same convenient hole in the middle of the bell. Jellies do not actively hunt but instead use their tentacles as drift nets. Should a fish brush against the often invisible extensions, the pressure prompts the tentacles' stinging cells to release tiny harpoons packed with neurotoxins. In the most venomous jellyfish, the toxins are designed to work quickly and unequivocally, to forfend any damage to the predator's delicate tissue.
"If a jellyfish were to swallow a prawn that wasn't completely dead," said Dr. Garm, "the prawn would puncture its stomach." Some of these take-no-chances poisons turn out to be powerful enough to kill very large animals the jellyfish have no intention of eating, including humans. Most notorious is an Australian box jellyfish called the sea wasp, whose sting can kill a grown man in a matter of seconds or minutes. Because the harpoons are so shallow, however, Australians have learned that they can protect themselves while swimming in sea wasp waters simply by covering their exposed skin with pantyhose.
Jellyfish in the box clade apparently take many things to extremes. In their new report on box jellyfish, Dr. Garm and his colleagues sought to understand why the creatures have evolved such a complex battery of eyes. Some of the eye types are simple light-and-shadow meters similar to those of other jellies. The team concentrated on an elaborate eye type unique to box jellies. Not only are the eyes equipped with a cornea, lens and retina, as human eyes are, but they are also suspended on stalks with heavy crystals on one end, a gyroscopelike arrangement that ensures the eyes are focused unerringly skyward.
"The crystal works as a weight," Dr. Garm said. "No matter how the jellyfish reorients itself, the stalk bends and the eyes face up."
Why stare fixedly toward the heavens? The researchers determined that the jellyfish look upward for navigational guidance. The animals live and feed among the underwater tree roots in murky mangrove swamps. Every night, they are swept away from the trees and sink to the muddy bottom of the open lagoon. Every morning they must return to the roots or risk starvation. They rise toward the surface and their upturned eyes scan the sky, until at last they spy the mangrove canopy, and they start swimming home.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
14) U.S. Drones Reported to Strike 3 Targets in Pakistan
[Obama continues to murder "suspects." Since when did it become acceptable to murder suspects? Oh! I forgot! It's just good 'ol U.S. democracy in action...bw]
By SALMAN MASOOD
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/world/asia/07pakistan.html?ref=world
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - American drone aircraft struck the tribal region of South Waziristan in at least three attacks on Monday, killing at least 18 people, according to Pakistani officials.
The first strike targeted a house in the Shalam Raghzai region of South Waziristan, a semiautonomous mountainous tribal region straddling the border with Afghanistan. At least three missiles were fired in that attack. The second attack targeted a suspected militant compound in Wacha Dana, about seven miles northwest of Wana, the main town of South Waziristan.
At least 14 people were killed in these attacks. The exact number of foreign and local militants killed in the attack could not be independently confirmed.
A few hours later, at least four people were killed when a vehicle was targeted in the third strike at Darnashtra in the Shawal area of the region.
A local army commander in Wana, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Pakistani Army troops were not present in the areas that were targeted in Monday's drone strike. "We don't have troops on ground, so information is hard to verify," the commander said. "Local residents do not necessarily provide accurate information on the number of casualties."
"Most of those killed in the drone strikes are said to be foreigners," he added. "Their nationalities are described to be Arabs, Uzbeks and at least one Turk."
The drone strikes - in which American forces use unmanned remotely guided aircraft to fire missiles at suspected members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the restive tribal areas - are highly unpopular in Pakistan.
But despite the protests by opposition political parties, drones continue to be the American weapon of choice.
In recent days, there has been a surge in the number of aerial attacks that have targeted suspected militants in South Waziristan. On Friday night, local residents and officials said that Ilyas Kashmiri, one of the most feared Pakistani militants and a senior Al Qaeda operational commander, was killed in a drone attack in the Laman area of South Waziristan.
This was the second time Mr. Kashmiri was reported to have been killed. Pakistani officials had claimed in September 2009 that he had died in a drone strike.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
15) Greece Sells Stake in Phone Company to Help Close Budget Gap
By JACK EWING
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/business/global/07euro.html?ref=world
FRANKFURT - Greece took the first step to raise money from the sale of government assets Monday, as a top official at the European Central Bank argued that the country is not insolvent and should not be excused from paying its debts.
Greece exercised an agreement to sell a 10 percent stake in the state-owned telecommunications company, known as OTE, to Deutsche Telekom for about €400 million, or $585 million. The German company said it would honor the agreement.
While that sum will make only a small dent in Greece's total debt of €330 billion, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a member of the executive board of the European Central Bank, said the country has marketable assets worth €300 billion and is not bankrupt.
"Greece should be considered solvent and should be asked to service its debts," Mr. Bini Smaghi said Monday, signaling that the E.C.B. remains firmly opposed to any plan to allow Greece to stretch out its debt payments or oblige investors to accept less than full repayment, a so-called haircut.
Speaking in Berlin, Mr. Bini Smaghi offered an unusually detailed and forceful rebuttal to German leaders who are pushing for investors to share the cost of a Greek bailout. Top officials of the E.C.B. usually avoid sparring with elected officials in public, and Mr. Bini Smaghi's comments illustrated the intensity of the debate on how to keep Greece afloat.
Restructuring of Greek debt would be costly for European taxpayers, reward speculators and discourage Greece from modernizing its economy, Mr. Bini Smaghi said.
"A debt restructuring of a sovereign may have severe implications, both for the debtor's and the creditor's economies," Mr. Bini Smaghi said, according to a text of the speech. "Restructuring should only be the last resort, i.e., when it is clear that the debtor country cannot repay its debts."
Many economists believe some kind of restructuring is inevitable, and European governments have begun warming to the idea as a way of showing their taxpayers that investors will also have to help pay for Greece.
But Mr. Bini Smaghi contested the idea that "there exists such a thing as an orderly debt restructuring."
"More often than not, restructurings have been disorderly, harmful and fraught with difficulties," he said.
Among other catastrophic effects, he said, Greek banks would be devastated and require bailouts that the Greek government would not have the money to finance. The problems would spread to other countries exposed to the Greek economy, and ultimately taxpayers in those countries would suffer, Mr. Bini Smaghi said. Greece would also not have the resources needed to make its economy competitive again.
"Imposing haircuts on private investors can seriously disrupt the financial and real economy of both the debtor and creditor countries," he said.
German and French banks are the biggest holders of Greek government debt, according to data released Monday by the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. German banks held $22.7 billion of Greek government debt at the end of December, while French banks held $15 billion.
Mr. Bini Smaghi said a default would reward speculators who have bet on Greece's failure, while punishing investors who have supported the country.
The E.C.B. would itself suffer if Greece defaulted, because since last year it has bought the country's debt to stabilize bond markets. The bank owns bonds valued at €75 billion from Greece, Ireland, Portugal and possibly other countries.
But the E.C.B.'s exposure is greater than that because it also accepts the bonds from banks in the euro area as collateral for loans carrying an interest rate of 1.25 percent.
On Monday, a British research organization, Open Europe, estimated that the E.C.B.'s total exposure to the Greek government and Greek banks at €190 billion.
Critics say that the E.C.B.'s credibility has suffered because its stake in Greek debt creates a conflict of interest.
"Huge risks have been transferred from struggling governments and banks onto the E.C.B.'s books, with taxpayers as the ultimate guarantor," said Mats Persson, director of Open Europe, a euro-skeptic organization backed by British business executives.
The E.C.B. declined to comment on Open Europe's estimate of its Greece exposure. The bank has never disclosed what kind of bonds it has purchased.
The Greek government has begun trying to raise money by selling stakes it owns in companies like OTE, but the privatization drive has encountered fierce resistance from citizens already weary of austerity measures.
Deutsche Telekom already owns a 30 percent stake in OTE, which it bought in 2008. A Telekom spokesman, Andreas Fuchs, said that the price for the 10 percent stake is still being calculated but will be around €400 million.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
16) Stranded Whales Now Far From Alone
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
June 5, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/us/06whale.html?ref=us
KEY LARGO, Fla. - With labored breath and diminished strength, three remaining pilot whales from a pod of 23 that stranded itself off the lower keys have fought to stay alive in a bayside pen here at the rustic Marine Mammal Conservancy center.
They have been pumped with antibiotics to treat their pneumonia, and given electro-stimulation to help straighten their tails and physical therapy to tone their damaged muscles.
Taking part in the effort have been hundreds of wetsuit-clad volunteers - teachers, students, restaurant workers, tourists, even the Olympic gold medalist swimmer Steve Lundquist and the film producer Jon Landau, of "Titanic" and "Avatar" renown - who have shown up night and day over the past month to cradle the 1,000-pound whales in the water. Without them, the whales would sink, literally, and die.
"You can hear the sickness in their breath," said Linda Roberman, a Key West paralegal who has twice made the 90-minute drive to the pen where the three remaining females are being cared for.
Like so many others, Ms. Roberman came to offer hands-on help for the ailing whales, something few animal lovers get the chance to do. "I want to give something back to help these animals who have been on the end of so many man-made terrors and disasters in the water," she said.
The first sighting of a stranded whale was reported to the conservancy on May 5. The pod was foundering along 10 miles of ocean near Cudjoe Key. Researchers believe that a few sick pilot whales probably headed for shallower waters and that the rest of the tight-knit pod followed, becoming stranded, said Erin Fougères, a marine mammal biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service.
All but 8 of the 23 whales died, most within the first 24 hours. Two of the survivors rebounded quickly and were released back into the ocean within days. Three failed to recover and were euthanized.
Now only whales numbered 300, 301 and 302 remain (they were not given names to discourage humans from bonding with them). Two of the whales are juveniles- a 1 1/2-year-old, the baby of the group, and a 2 1/2-year-old, the sickest. The third is a teenager.
If the youngest recovers, she is almost certainly headed for SeaWorld or the Miami Seaquarium because she probably lacks the skills to survive in the ocean, said Robert Lingenfelser, director of stranding operations for the all-volunteer Marine Mammal Conservancy. After a mass stranding, most pilot whales typically do not survive.
As the volunteers stream in day in and day out, Mr. Lingenfelser and his unpaid staff stay in touch with veterinarians, including some from SeaWorld, and with researchers and biologists at the NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service. Just getting the whales to Key Largo was a multiday process that involved waiting for them to stabilize and then transporting them on a boat equipped with a three-sided berth.
"It's been a Herculean effort," Ms. Fougères said.
Not everyone is keen on the mass volunteering effort. Russ Rector, a longtime activist and former dolphin trainer who opposes animal captivity, said volunteers did not always know the risks that working with marine mammals can pose.
Studies have found that marine mammals can transmit disease infection to humans and vice versa. Volunteers are briefed on how to remain still and calm, but Mr. Rector says they are not told enough about the risk of infection and how to protect themselves, a violation of fisheries protocol. The whales have bitten two volunteers and three staff members, some wounds requiring stitches.
Ms. Fougères said that while disease transmission did occur, it was rare.
"Mostly you need to make people aware of the possibility," she said.
Mr. Lingenfelser said he fully covered the territory in his briefing and barred people who had open wounds or who were ill from going into the water. No volunteers, he said, have reported any illnesses after going home.
A week ago, Mr. Lingenfelser said, displaying scrapes up his arm, he, too, was bitten or "raked." The baby was trying to be playful, he said.
"It's nothing life threatening or anything like that," he said. "But it tends to wake everybody up."
Inside the pen, Mr. Lingenfelser whispered to 302, who was sunburned and suffering from a severe curvature of the tail. He stood at the whale's head, his gaze watchful.
"Ready to go for a swim, girl?" he asked.
Behind him, four volunteers stood with their knees bent, allowing them to cradle the whale's body in their laps. The other two whales floated nearby.
Volunteers have responded sometimes by the busload, although the overnight shifts are difficult to fill.
Timothy Petraitis, 42, and his wife, Adela Faxas, 47, drove down from Fort Lauderdale over Memorial Day weekend to pitch in. Do-gooders by nature - they are both teachers - the couple could not resist the chance to serve as a human raft for the whales.
The favor, Ms. Faxas said, is repaid: "It's very calming, very soothing, very Zenning."
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
17) Fla. Couple Threatens Bank With Foreclosure
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/06/06/business/AP-US-Foreclosure-Mistake.html?src=busln
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - Months after Bank of America wrongly foreclosed on a house Warren and Maureen Nyerges had already paid for, they were still fighting to get reimbursed for the court battle.
So on Friday, their attorney showed up at a branch office in Naples with a moving truck and sheriff's deputies who had a judge's permission to seize the furniture if necessary. An hour later, the bank had written a check for $5,772.88.
"The branch manager was visibly shaken," attorney Todd Allen said Monday, recalling the visit to the bank last week. "At that point I was willing to take the desk and the chair he was sitting in."
After the moving company and sheriff's deputies get their share, the Nyerges should receive the rest of the money this week, ending a bizarre saga that started when they paid Bank of America $165,000 cash for a 2,700-square-foot foreclosed home in Naples in 2009.
About four months later, a process server knocked on their door and handed Warren Nyerges a notice of foreclosure.
"This is a big mistake," he recalled saying. "You must have the wrong house. We bought a foreclosure and don't have a mortgage."
That started 18 months of frustrating phone calls, paperwork and court hearings. Whenever Nyerges called the bank, representatives told him to "come up to date" with his payments. When he called 25 different law firms, no attorney would take the case. When he went to court, the lawyers for the bank filed incorrect motions and were woefully unprepared for the hearings.
"It was mind boggling," said Nyerges, a 46-year-old retired police officer. "To try to unscrew the screw up, it's not as easy as it sounds."
Eventually the Nyerges found Allen. They fought the foreclosure and won, proving that they owned the home outright.
During his research, Nyerges heard that his name got transposed from purchase agreements onto the prior foreclosure.
"I don't know if that is a fact, because no one really had the facts," he said.
In September 2010, a Collier county judge ordered Bank of America to pay the couple's $2,534 attorney fees. But by last week, the bank hadn't paid up, so Allen got a judge's permission to seize assets.
In an email to the Associated Press on Monday, Bank of America spokeswoman Jumana Bauwens apologized to the couple about the "delay in receiving the funds."
"The original request went to an outside attorney who is no longer in business," she wrote.
The law office of David J. Stern, which handled the Nyerges' case for Bank of America, told judges across Florida in March that it will end its involvement in 100,000 foreclosure cases.
The Florida attorney general's economic crimes division is investigating three law firms, including Stern's, over allegations that they created fraudulent legal documents, gouged homeowners with inflated fees, steered business to companies they owned and filed foreclosures without proving the bank actually had legal interest in the loans.
According to employee testimony filed with Florida authorities, Stern's employees churned out bogus mortgage assignments, faked signatures, falsified notarizations and foreclosed on people without verifying their identities, the amounts they owed or who owned their loans.
The attorney general is also looking at whether Stern paid kickbacks to big banks.
This isn't the first time that Bank of America has tried to foreclose on a property that was owned by a person without a mortgage. In 2009, a Fort Lauderdale man named Jason Grodensky bought a home in cash from Bank of America in a short sale. But in court, the foreclosure case continued and a judge ordered the property to be sold. Bank of America acknowledged the error and rescinded the foreclosure.
Allen sees the Nyerges case as symbolic of the foreclosure crisis. Courts are backlogged, and banks and their attorneys aren't scrutinizing foreclosure paperwork.
And Nyerges said he's still upset with Bank of America.
"They couldn't even spell our name right in the apology," he said.
___
Tamara Lush can be followed at: www.twitter.com/tamaralush
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
18) U.S. Plans Private Guard Force for Iraq
State Department Prepares to Hire 5,100-Strong Security Detail and Take Over Military Hardware for After Army Leaves
By NATHAN HODGE
JUNE 7, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304906004576369801913947130.html?mod=djemITP_h#printMode
WASHINGTON-The State Department is preparing to spend close to $3 billion to hire a security force to protect diplomats in Iraq after the U.S. pulls its last troops out of the country by year's end.
In testimony Monday before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of state for management, said the department plans to hire a 5,100-strong force to protect diplomatic personnel, guard embassy buildings and operate a fleet of aircraft and armored vehicles.
Underscoring the security risks in Iraq, five American troops were killed Monday in an attack in Baghdad, the largest single loss of life for the U.S. military there since April 2009.
Fewer than 50,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq. Under a 2008 U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, all U.S. troops are supposed to leave the country by the end of the year, leaving behind only a small military office to oversee arms sales.
While U.S. officials have expressed a willingness to station a small residual force in the country, it is unclear if the Iraqi government will make the request, which faces strong opposition in Iraq.
A large U.S. diplomatic presence will remain, however, and the departments of state and defense are wrestling with how to provide security for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad-which is a target of rocket attacks-and diplomatic outposts in the provinces.
As the military withdraws, Mr. Kennedy said, the State Department will rely on contractors to carry out a range of military-style missions that he said were "not inherently governmental," including providing emergency medical evacuation, operating systems to detect and warn against incoming rocket or artillery fire, or rescue diplomatic personnel under attack.
The contract security force slated for Iraq would far outstrip the State Department's in-house diplomatic security force. Mr. Kennedy said the State Department currently employs around 1,800 diplomatic security personnel around the world.
According to Mr. Kennedy, the military is handing over nearly 4,000 pieces of military hardware to the State Department, equipment valued at approximately $209 million. The hardware includes biometric equipment for screening personnel, and 60 armored vehicles designed to withstand roadside bomb attacks. The military is handing over systems that provide warning of attacks.
The State Department has awarded a series of multiyear contracts to private security companies for guard forces, including a $974 million award to SOC Inc. to guard the embassy in Baghdad, $1.5 billion to Triple Canopy Inc. for mobile security, and $401 million to Global Strategies Group Inc. for guarding a consulate in Basra. The State Department has also awarded a contract for medical services.
The department hasn't released a breakdown of how much, exactly, it will spend on security in 2012, the first year after U.S. troops withdraw. When the department's budget request was submitted in February, a senior State Department official said security costs would make up a "significant" portion of the department's operating budget for Iraq. The State Department awards security contracts, but overall funding levels must be approved by Congress.
Oversight of private security contractors has been a concern in both Washington and Baghdad, with some critics arguing that the U.S. has effectively outsourced military force. The Iraqi Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the plans to hire a private security force.
The bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting panel was created in 2008 to help oversee U.S. government spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the hearing Monday, members expressed concern that contractors were performing missions that should more appropriately be done by government personnel.
Former Congressman Christopher Shays, a co-chairman of the commission, raised the possibility that contractors might have to use force to rescue diplomatic personnel caught in a roadside improvised explosive device attack, potentially leading to an overt combat role.
"If you have an IED and you need to get a medic to deal with the injuries that are outside the embassy and-and/or you are under fire and you have to shoot your way out to get back to safety-in either case, you have to get someone there to attend to the wounded and you have to aggressively use force or you have to aggressively use force to get out, why do you think that's not an inherently governmental function?" he asked Mr. Kennedy.
Mr. Kennedy said he was comfortable with the distinction between the way the military used force, and the more defensive role of contract security.
"We fully understand that we still have challenges ahead as we carry out our diplomatic missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations where we rely on contingency contracting, but we believe we have instituted a sound foundation to carry us forward," Mr. Kennedy said.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
19) Police war on videographers filming police brutality
To Protect and To Serve
by digby
Hullabaloo
June 05, 2011
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/
The government's war on videographers is getting worse.
In Miami a bystander filmed police firing a hail of
bullets into a car and the cops went after him, smashed
his phone, threw him to the ground and took him to a
command center and photographed him.
Unfortunately for them:
But what they didn't know was that Narces Benoit had
removed the SIM card and hid it in his mouth, which
means the video survived.
Benoit showed the video to Miami Herald reporters on
Thursday, who described it in their article.
The three-minute video captured on Narces Benoit's
HTC EVO phone begins as officers crowd around the
east side of Herisse's car with guns drawn. Roughly
15 seconds into the video, officers open fire.
Benoit filmed the incident from the sidewalk on the
northeast corner of 13th Street and Collins Avenue,
close enough to see some officers' faces and
individual muzzle flashes.
Shortly after the gunfire ends, an officer points at
Benoit and police can be heard yelling for him to
turn off the camera. The voices are muffled at
times. The 35-year-old car stereo technician drops
his hand with the camera and hurries back to his
Ford Expedition parked further east on 13th Street.
The video shows Benoit get into the car, where his
girlfriend, Ericka Davis, sat in the driver's seat.
He raises his camera and an officer is seen
appearing on the driver's side with his gun drawn,
pointed at them.
The video ends as more officers are heard yelling
expletives, telling the couple to turn the video off
and get out of the car.
"They put guns to our heads and threw us on the
ground," Davis said.
Apparently it was quite a melee with bullets flying
everywhere and four bystanders wounded in the crossfire.
I have no idea if the police did anything wrong in the
incident, but their immediate action to destroy video
doesn't exactly reassure one that everything is on the
up and up. Why would that be their first instinct?
I've written before about the laws being proposed
throughout the country that make it illegal to film the
police in the line of duty (to protect their privacy,
don't you know) but they haven't made much headway. I
guess some police officers have just decided to destroy
the evidence on the spot.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
20) Nurses Open Letter to Wisconsinites - Carry on!
Peaceful Protests are Important Tools to Protect our patients and our community
By Jean Ross, RN and Co-President for National Nurses United
June 7, 2011
http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/blog/entry/nurses-open-letter-to-wisconsinites-carry-on/
The fight in Wisconsin continues to be an on-going an inspiration to the entire nation. As a registered nurse for 37 years, I have been part of a proud tradition of protest as well. My number one priority, as it is for all nurses, is to advocate for my patients. This is a daily struggle we must wage against corporate insurance and hospitals that care more about the bottom line than patient care. As nurses we fight every day for our patients -- by marching on our administrators, disrupting our halls of government, and protesting in the streets.
Our victories benefit our patients and our communities. In just the last week NNU nurses around the country have waged fights and won improved standards for patients and gains for nurses at two large public university hospital systems in Chicago and California. These victories came after long fights by nurses to defend their patients and themselves, in the public sector where many workers have been wrongly forced to accept concessions. Nurses won when we waged a long fight in California for the first safe staffing legislation in the country. And when then Governor Schwarzenegger tried to stop it in the courts, we fought back by shaming him at every public event he went to around the country. We won, protecting patient safe staffing levels and setting a standard for the nation.
Democracy goes far beyond voting and recalls. In order to protect and preserve our rights under a democracy we have an obligation to stand against injustice, to hold those we elect accountable to protect the public good.
In Wisconsin, Scott Walker and other corporate-backed Republicans tricked the public by saying nothing about their "Reverse Robbin' Hood" agenda during their campaign -- unleashing their attacks only after Walker was safely in office. This budget is not for the public good, and it's not about the deficit. It's about taking from the most vulnerable; seniors, students, disabled, farmers, and the poor, and giving to corporations and the rich, and increasing spending to make that happen.
This all out assault on Wisconsin's values goes so far as to consolidate this governor intent to sell off our public utilities for corporate gain, with no protections on future rate increases for consumers. Why not instead raise $2 billion dollars by closing corporate tax loopholes and ensuring banks that caused the crisis pay their bills. When we see policies that are morally bankrupt, we must speak out and take action.
Protest to stop this budget is happening right now, in the hearing rooms and outside the capitol, following in the footsteps of the Wisconsin farmer's 1933 statewide milk strike for fair prices, the Madison Teachers' 1976 strike forcing the state to adopt binding arbitration, and the 1999 five-day sit-in by students at UW-Madison to adopt anti-sweatshop policies. Our rich history shows we win through organized resistance and it is a roadmap for us today. We continued to build that history and a movement for social justice when we refused to leave the capitol and continue to protest the budget.
While the corporate interests that oppose us have deep pockets, we are the people and there's more of us than them. If we stand for our community and the public good, we will build this movement to win today and for years to come. Join us to stop this morally bankrupt budget and fight for a contract for Main Street NOT Wall Street.
* * * * *
Jean Ross, RN, is a Co-President for National Nurses United. With 170,000 RNs in every state, (including more than 2,000 in WI,) NNU is the largest union and professional association for RNs in U.S. history.
With the erosion of living standards for many, and new attacks almost daily from Wall Street-funded politicians, all Americans need a new contract, a binding relationship for their security, for their families, and for future generations. To achieve these goals, NNU has launched a Main Street Campaign for the American People. For more information:
http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/mainstreet
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
21) NATO Warplanes Pound Tripoli in Daylight Attack
By JOHN F. BURNS
June 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/world/africa/08tripoli.html?hp
TRIPOLI, Libya - In a sudden, sharp escalation of NATO's air campaign over Libya, warplanes dropped more than 50 bombs on targets in Tripoli on Tuesday, obliterating large areas of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya command compound.
In response, Colonel Qaddafi posted an audio recording on Libyan state television vowing never to surrender or accept defeat. "We welcome death," he said. "Martyrdom is a million times better."
The unusual daylight raids, the most intense on the Libyan capital since the aerial campaign started more than 11 weeks ago, began in mid-morning and continued until dusk. What appeared to be bunker-busting bombs laid waste to an area of about two acres in one corner of the compound, destroying six or seven major buildings and leaving a twisted, smoking mass of steel and concrete.
Libyan officials said 10 to 15 people lay buried in the ruins of one building alone, though the only casualty seen by Western reporters who were bused to the scene was a man who was pulled from the rubble while they were there, identified by officials as a cleaner.
In the absence of any visible rescue operations, the man's body had been spotted by an American television crew, then laid out beneath a green sheet on a rubble-strewn roadway while an ambulance was summoned. Officials said the extent of the devastation made it impossible for the heavy machinery needed to search for bodies to reach the area.
In a city grown accustomed to the NATO raids, the attacks caused a heightened level of alarm, partly because they began so early in the day, when this capital of 2.5-million people was busy with its weekday routines. Most of the nearly 4,000 strike sorties flown by NATO since the air war began in March have been carried out deep into the night, partly, NATO officials have said, to minimize the risk of civilian casualties. But Tuesday's daylight raids emptied much of the city of traffic, with stores in large areas of the city shuttered and the few people out hurrying to complete their business and find shelter.
Colonel Qaddafi's government has become increasingly isolated as the conflict has dragged on, hindered by growing numbers of high-level defections and evidence that support for him even among residents of Tripoli, his stronghold, has become fractured. On Tuesday, Libya's labor minister, Al-Amin Manfur, added his name to the growing exodus, declaring at a meeting in Geneva of the International Labor Organization that he was now supporting the rebel government, the National Transitional Council, Agence France-Presse reported.
At a joint news conference with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, President Obama said the Qaddafi government was starting to collapse under the pressure of NATO airstrikes. "What you are seeing across the country is an inexorable trend of the regime forces being pushed back, being incapacitated," he said. "I think it is just a matter of time before Qaddafi goes."
Among the buildings ruined in Tuesday's attacks was a grand reception house and accompanying V.I.P. guesthouse where the South African president, Jacob Zuma, had been received in early April on a brief diplomatic mission on behalf of the African Union. But that attempt proved fruitless, as did a second effort a week ago, because Colonel Qaddafi rejected any deal under which he would leave the country. The NATO attacks have been increasing in frequency since the second peace plan foundered.
Up until Tuesday, most NATO aerial attacks on Tripoli have been carried out during the night hours. NATO officials had been saying they would be increasing the pace and intensity of the attacks on targets linked to Colonel Qaddafi and his military forces as part of an effort to oust him from power and stop his forces from attacking civilians who have joined the organized revolt against him.
The special envoy to Africa for the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, arrived in the rebel capital, Benghazi, on Tuesday with a similar mission, Reuters reported. The envoy, Mikhail Margelov, said he would try to establish a dialogue between Libya's warring factions, but it seemed likely that his effort would founder on the same diplomatic shoals as Mr. Zuma's.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
22) An Awakening That Keeps Them Up All Night
By SUZANNE DALEY
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/world/europe/07spain.html
MADRID - As daylight faded, a cluster of young protesters sat in a circle discussing whether to support a new tax on financial transactions.
They had gathered most evenings this week, hoping to turn two weeks of demonstrations that have filled city squares across this country and taken the political establishment by surprise, into something more lasting - a set of demands.
"We need change in this country," said Ruth Martínez, a member of the group who has been unemployed for nearly three years.
Until recently, young people in Spain were dismissed as an apathetic generation, uninterested in party politics. But the outpouring of young people who have taken to the streets since May 15 - at one point about 28,000 protesters spent the night in Madrid's Puerta del Sol square - has changed all that, forcing the country to take heed and reconsider.
The recession that has ravaged Spain, along with much of southern Europe, has had an especially hard impact on the young, with unemployment rates soaring to more than 40 percent for 20- to 24-year-olds, about twice the national average and the highest in the European Union. Many of them see limited hope of improvement unless they reshuffle the political deck and demand a new approach to creating jobs.
"Suddenly people are talking about politics everywhere," said María Luz Morán, a sociologist at the Complutense University of Madrid. "You go to have coffee or you are standing in the subway and you hear conversations about politics. It's been years since I heard anyone talking about politics."
Even young people who have jobs here are often caught in a system of poorly paid, temporary contracts. The contracts were once designed to help them break into the labor force, but they have served instead to put adulthood out of reach for many. Ms. Moran said that one survey showed that about 50 percent of 30-year-olds in Spain were still living with their parents.
"We call 32- and 35-year-olds young people in Spain, because they are forced to live like children," she said. "Thirty-year-olds should have their own homes."
Few experts are willing to say what the protesters might achieve. But already issues that were discussed only at the margins are being taken more seriously. One major conservative daily newspaper, ABC, polled constitutional experts this week about what it would take to change the election laws, one of the principal demands of the demonstrators, who say the current system heavily favors the country's two leading political parties.
"They have already had an impact," said Rafael Díaz-Salazar, another sociologist at Complutense, who believes that the protesters may represent about two million voters. "They are forcing people to take a look at this impoverished generation. There will have to talk about precarious work contracts and housing in the next election. They cannot avoid it anymore."
Experts say that there are two broad categories of unemployed and underemployed young people in Spain. At one end of the spectrum are relatively uneducated young people who left school in the past decade when the country's economy was booming and they could easily find work in the construction industry. Now those jobs have disappeared and are unlikely to come back.
At the other end are workers who have one or more university degrees, who cannot find work either, or who get hired on six-month contracts at low wages, often in menial jobs that have nothing to do with what they were trained for.
Lidia Posada García, 26, is one of them. She is active in ¡Democracia REAL Ya!, a group that helped rally protestors through the Internet. A lawyer, she is one of the few in her circle of friends who has a job. But she says she is paid as if she is doing administrative work.
"We all live at home," she said. "We are the most prepared, qualified generation. But there is not much for us."
One of the catchiest slogans to emerge from the protests is "no jobs, no houses, no pension, no fear."
Many of the protesters were so excited by the turnout on May 15 that they decided to pitch their tents and stay on. By May 21, the day before regional and local elections, there were thousands more protesters in squares across the country, ignoring official decrees that they should leave.
Since then, the numbers who camp out every night have dwindled, though nightly "general assemblies" in Madrid still draw thousands, including gawking tourists. The Puerta del Sol has taken on a circus feel. Some of the protesters sport dreadlocks, look ragged and lounge around on mattresses.
Still, between the tents and handmade plastic lean-tos there is all manner of activity, from massages to hardheaded efforts to organize, communicate and zero in on a list of demands. This week protesters have been trying to reach an agreement at the assemblies as to how and when to dismantle the tents and leave all but an information point in the square.
Historically, Spaniards have taken to the streets with some regularity, like most Europeans. But the events are usually organized by political parties and unions, organizations that the young have largely ignored. Many of the new protesters say they are disgusted with the unions that do little to represent their interests and with both of Spain's main parties, which they view as corrupt and unresponsive.
Early participants say the protests bloomed over Twitter and Facebook, triggered by several events that gnawed at the younger generation, including revelations from WikiLeaks documents that showed government officials to be less than forthright, and opposition to a recent antipiracy Internet law, which aims to shut down previously legal Web sites enabling the free downloading of music and films.
"WikiLeaks and the antipiracy law were not the reasons for the outpouring," said Enrique Dans, an economist and blogger at the IE Business School in Madrid, who became involved in protesting the antipiracy law and then helped to mobilize his followers. "But they were the spark. Just like the man who set himself on fire in Tunisia was not the reason, but the spark for what happened afterwards."
Mr. Dans arrived at the initial demonstration late and was stunned at the turnout. "I came around the corner and I thought, 'My God, there are people here,' " he said. "There has never really been a grass-roots movement in Spain."
Rachel Chaundler contributed reporting.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
23) Radiation Understated After Quake, Japan Says
By HIROKO TABUCHI
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/world/asia/07japan.html?ref=world
TOKYO - Japan said Monday that radioactive emissions from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the early days of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disaster might have been more than twice as large as a previous estimate, suggesting the accident was more grave than the government had publicly acknowledged.
It is unclear whether a more accurate reading of emissions levels would have promoted a swifter or wider evacuation from around the plant. Still, the lag in reporting the true extent of the emissions added to what some critics have called a litany of confusing and contradictory data and analysis from the Japanese authorities, putting officials on the defensive about whether they delayed, or even blocked, the release of information to the public.
Last month the government acknowledged that three of the plant's reactors had probably suffered fuel meltdowns, after having denied that possibility.
On Monday, Japan's nuclear regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said that the reactor pressure vessel at one of the plant's reactors appeared to have been compromised as early as five hours after the quake.
The agency also said it now estimated that the radioactive release from the plant totaled 770,000 terabecquerels in the first week after March 11. The agency had previously estimated 370,000 terabecquerels released in the first month.
A terabecquerel is a trillion becquerels, a commonly used measure of the radiation emitted by a radioactive material.
The agency suggested that the higher emissions estimate was equivalent to only about 10 percent of the radioactive materials released in 1986 by the explosion and fire at Chernobyl, still widely considered the world's worst nuclear plant disaster, in the former Soviet Union. But the 770,000 terabecquerels figure in fact comes to about 40 percent of the official Soviet estimate of emissions from Chernobyl.
Most experts say that the true emissions from Chernobyl were 1.5 to 2.5 times as high as the Soviet Union acknowledged. Assuming that true emissions from Chernobyl were twice the official figure, the Fukushima nuclear accident has released 20 percent as much as Chernobyl, according to Japan's new estimate.
Japanese officials have stressed other differences between Fukushima and Chernobyl. At Chernobyl, a burning graphite reactor pushed radioactive particles high into the atmosphere and downwind across Europe. At Fukushima, the leak mostly produced radioactive liquid runoff into the ocean and low-altitude radioactive particles that have dispersed into the ocean, which suggests that the crisis could pose fewer health risks.
Japan's assessment has been based largely on computer models showing heavy emissions of radioactive iodine and cesium from March 14 to 16. Officials have said that the emissions peaked during those days, and have dropped sharply since.
Even at the time of the first estimate in April, Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission, an independent government panel, had called the reading too low. Its own estimate was 630,000 terabecquerels in the first month, or about 34 percent of the official Soviet estimate and 17 percent of the unofficial higher estimate.
The commission relied on a computer model that uses radiation measurements taken at various distances from a nuclear accident. The model produces an estimate of the radioactive material escaping from the source.
But the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency based its number on estimates of the damage to the reactors' radioactive cores. Its latest reading more accurately reflects the radioactive material spewed after hydrogen explosions at Reactors 2 and 3, the agency said.
Officials cautioned that there was a wide margin of error involved in both calculations.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
24) Radiation's Unknowns Weigh on Japan
By MATTHEW L. WALD
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/business/energy-environment/07radiation.html?ref=business
As officials in Japan agonize over what constitutes a safe radiation dose for people who live near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, the state of the science has been a daunting problem. Studies on the effects of exposure are based mostly on large doses delivered quickly by atomic bombs, while radiation from the Fukushima disaster would more likely result in small doses delivered over many years.
So far the debate in Japan has centered on the risks to children. Government guidelines set after the disaster allowed schoolchildren in Fukushima Prefecture to be exposed to 20 times the radiation dose previously permitted. The new level is equal to the international standard for adult workers at nuclear power plants.
After a huge outcry from parents, the government promised that it would lower the permissible level and that it would pay to remove contaminated topsoil from school grounds.
But the debate is not limited to children; the authorities have to weigh the risks of allowing thousands of people, including the elderly, to be exposed to levels that remain far above natural background radiation.
The general assumption is that when people are exposed to small doses for decades, the incidence of cancer will rise over time. But that prediction is based on extrapolating from data on people who were exposed to acute brief doses when atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 - not on observing individuals exposed to small doses over decades.
Some researchers argue that all humans are regularly exposed to a low natural level of radiation, and that it is not harmful when below a certain threshold, although fetuses may be an exception. Another vocal minority argues that there is statistical evidence for higher cancer rates among people exposed to tiny incremental doses.
Still, the mainstream view is that extrapolating from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki data is more prudent.
"There's a point beneath which you just don't know, and a straight line is the simplest assumption," said Dr. Richard R. Monson, an epidemiologist and chairman of the committee that wrote an influential report released in 2006 by the National Academy of Sciences on low-level radiation exposures.
His committee based its recommendations on a hypothesis known as the "linear, no threshold model." Under this hypothesis, if a given dose will cause fatal cancers in a certain number of people in a population, then half that dose will cause fatal cancer in half as many people, and a millionth of that dose will cause fatal cancer in a millionth as many people.
Dr. Monson's committee largely extrapolated from the health records of thousands of Japanese civilians exposed to a sudden burst of high-energy gamma radiation by atomic bombs. Over the next 65 years, most of those people died from cancers that may or may not have been caused by radiation, and others from causes common to old age.
Their death rate from cancer exceeded the one recorded for populations of Japanese not exposed to the radiation. But applying this data to the risks faced at Fukushima Daiichi is problematic, experts say, and could lead to overstating or understating the risk to people who live near the plant.
The most obvious difference is that the bomb survivors' exposure in 1945 was nearly instantaneous. People in the Fukushima area are confronting regular levels of contamination in the range of 5 to 10 times what people are normally exposed to in natural background radiation.
What is more, some of the radiation to which people are being exposed around Fukushima is inside the body; it comes from radioactive materials that contaminated their food or water. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many of the victims experienced only a quick external irradiation.
Evan B. Douple, the associate chief of research for the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, a joint Japanese-American science institute that analyzes health data from the bomb survivors, said that a dose delivered slowly over time was less damaging than an equal dose delivered quickly.
"It is well known in radiation biology that radiation-induced damage from a given dose of radiation is less effective if it is protracted or fractionated," he said. The reason, he said, is that the body's repair mechanisms work during the extended period of exposure.
The 2006 report by the National Academy of Sciences estimated that the effect of a given amount of radiation is 1.5 times worse when the dose is given all at once than when it is extended. But there are no authoritative details on varying doses over time.
As if this were not complex enough, another school of thought suggests that the radiation effect on people exposed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was worse than the official statistics show.
This theory holds that weaker individuals were killed off by the bombs and by the hardships suffered in those cities at the end of World War II. The people who survived past that period, on whom the estimates are based, are not representative because they were stronger than average.
So the deaths counted in the following decades occurred among a hardier-than-average population, critics say.
In the United States, most of the policies involving radiation exposure involve people who are exposed to low levels on the job, like nuclear plant workers. If the United States faced decisions like those now confronting Japanese officials, "there really isn't any coherent policy," said Robert Alvarez, a former senior staff member at the Energy Department who works as a consultant for groups worried about nuclear risks.
Kuniko Tanioka, a member of the Japanese Parliament who traveled to Washington to research how the United States government conducts independent inquiries after major technological disasters, said that advising the public after a nuclear accident poses grave challenges in both countries.
Ms. Tanioka suggested that the best course that Japan could take would be to distribute all the raw data it has on radiation exposure to the international community and allow outside interpretations.
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
25) Oil Sands Project in Canada Will Go On if Pipeline Is Blocked
By IAN AUSTEN
"Environmentalists are using the project as a proxy for their general antagonism toward oil sands production, which consumes large amounts of water and energy and can be destructive to the boreal forest that sits on top of the tarry rock from which the oil is extracted. 'This is really a campaign against tar sands expansion rather than a single pipeline,' said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, the director of the international program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that is a leading American critic of the process."
June 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/business/energy-environment/07pipeline.html?ref=business
OTTAWA - One way or another - by rail or ship or a network of pipelines - Canada will export oil from its vast northern oil sands projects to the United States and other markets.
So the regulatory battle over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would link the oil sands to the Gulf Coast of the United States, may be little more than a symbolic clash of ideology, industry experts say. Even if the Obama administration rejects the Keystone plan, the pace of oil sands development in northern Alberta is unlikely to slow.
Oil producers in Canada have several alternatives for reaching the United States market. And recent investments by Chinese companies in the oil sands suggest that a growing alternative market lies across the Pacific.
"The Canadian oil sands will continue to be developed irrespective of whether the pipeline goes ahead," said Russell K. Girling, the president and chief executive of TransCanada, the company behind the $7 billion project.
That determination to proceed has become almost beside the point in the battle over Keystone XL's fate, which has dragged on since November 2008.
Environmentalists are using the project as a proxy for their general antagonism toward oil sands production, which consumes large amounts of water and energy and can be destructive to the boreal forest that sits on top of the tarry rock from which the oil is extracted.
"This is really a campaign against tar sands expansion rather than a single pipeline," said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, the director of the international program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that is a leading American critic of the process.
Advocates, meanwhile, say that oil sands extraction is getting cleaner and represents a potentially major source of oil from a politically stable ally that will help ensure America's energy security.
The stakes are enormous. The oils sands have reserves of 171.3 billion barrels, according to estimates by the provincial government of Alberta - enough to change the balance of world oil markets, some energy experts say; by comparison, Saudi Arabia has reserves of 264.2 billion barrels.
Because of that, the debate over the pipeline has been unusually protracted and fractious, and, according to some analysts, characterized by hyperbole on both sides.
"This situation has reached such talismanic significance that whatever the U.S. government does will be read far more deeply than the substance merits," said Michael A. Levi, the senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The State Department, which must approve the project because it crosses international borders, is nearing the end of its environmental review and then will examine national interest questions. It has said it expects to make a ruling by the end of the year.
As the world's largest importer of oil and a next-door neighbor of Canada, the United States is the most attractive and logical market for oil sands crude and already buys virtually all that Canada exports. But producers are eager to move their product all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, where there are more refineries capable of handling the unusually thick crude.
It is now shipped through an existing pipeline - an earlier part of the Keystone project - to Cushing, Okla., where large storage facilities are fed by a variety of pipelines. There, it is priced against lighter oil and generally commands a lower price.
Because demand for oil in the United States is unlikely to fall significantly in the foreseeable future, Canadian producers are sure to look for other ways to ship their oil south if the Keystone XL project is rejected. While backup plans are not fully developed, other options do exist.
Shipping by rail is one. Last October, in a joint venture with the Canadian National Railway of Montreal, Altex Energy, an oil shipping company, began shipping relatively small amounts of tar sands crude along Canadian National's tracks directly to the Gulf of Mexico.
Not only does rail avoid billions of dollars in infrastructure investment, it also escapes any regulatory reviews in the United States.
"It's no different than shipping grain," said Glen Perry, the president of Altex, which is based in Calgary, Alberta.
Mr. Perry acknowledged that rail was considerably more expensive than pipeline shipping. Pipelines, however, require the oil sands crude to be diluted with chemicals that thin it and make it flow more easily. Rail cars do not.
In addition to rail, there are other pipelines available. The Trans Mountain pipeline owned by Kinder Morgan already moves Alberta oil, including tar sands production, to ports on Canada's Pacific Coast. Some of that travels by sea to refineries in the United States.
While that pipeline is operating at near capacity, Kinder Morgan is considering increasing its capacity to the coast and has already upgraded the line inland.
Enbridge, another large Canadian pipeline company, is proposing its own line, from just north of Edmonton, Alberta, to the northern British Columbia port of Kitimat.
While both of those projects have encountered opposition from environmentalists and some aboriginal groups, the political climate favors the energy industry. Last month Canadians re-elected a Conservative government that has its traditional power base in Alberta, which has staunchly promoted the oil sands.
Other pipeline projects could develop if Keystone XL does not. It is technically feasible to convert one of two natural gas pipelines to eastern Canada to carry oil. Once there, shipments could enter the United States through existing trans-border crossings in Ontario and Quebec.
Ronald Liepert, the energy minister in Alberta, said that while Canada would prefer to sell its oil to the United States, "this commodity will go someplace."
In particular, he said, China is already a major consumer of other Canadian natural resources and a small investor in the oil sands. "I can predict confidently that at some point China will take every drop of oil Canada can produce."
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
26) Government to Sell £10 Billion of Public Land to Developers
By REUTERS
June 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/06/07/business/business-us-public-land-housing.html?src=busln
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain plans to sell public land worth an estimated 10 billion pounds to address a chronic housing shortage and help erode its record budget deficit.
All government departments with significant landbanks will be asked to identify, by the autumn, land suitable for sale for homes, Housing Minister Grant Shapps will say on Wednesday.
This will be used to build 100,000 homes over the next three to four years, in a scheme that is expected to support as many as 25,000 jobs.
The 10 billion pounds estimate of surplus land is based on government figures for land values in England from HM Treasury in 2005, supplied by the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA).
"As one of the country's biggest landlords, the government has a critical role to play in making sites available for developers so we can get the homes this country needs built," Shapps will say in a statement.
"Over the coming months, property specialists will work to make sure no stone is left unturned and no site is left unused, and every department's plans will come under the close scrutiny of a cabinet committee."
Some of the land will be sold under a "Build Now, Buy Later" deal, and the names of the first three sites -- to be made available immediately to developers -- will be announced on Wednesday.
"It will be a boost in the arm for house builders," said a spokesman at the Home Builders Federation, a 300-member trade association which represents builders such as Persimmon, Barratt Developments and Taylor Wimpey
"We only built 100,000 homes last year and, if implemented practically, this could mean an extra 30,000 homes a year, which is clearly a significant increase."
The HBF estimates a shortage approaching 1 million homes in England, and forecasts 232,000 homes need to be built per year to close the gap.
CHRONIC SHORTAGE
Britain's housing market has been slowing since the middle of last year and recent data show mortgage approvals fell in April to just half their long-run average, before the financial crisis, of 90,000 per month.
Last week it emerged house builders are in talks with British banks to find ways of helping buyers overcome tight lending conditions, which have caused market gridlock.
Housing organisations are concerned the land may not be sold at subsidised levels, leaving few incentives for developers to build affordable housing, of which there is a chronic shortage.
"With the Treasury under pressure to generate high sales receipts, decisions as to what kind of development takes place and where could be driven simply by the highest bidder," said Hugh Ellis, Chief Planner at the TCPA.
"The private sector could be left having to squeeze every penny out of development."
(Editing by David Hulmes)
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
26 comments:
buy zolpidem street price of ambien - ambien side effects joint pain
alprazolam buy taking 7 xanax bars - side effects xanax during pregnancy
valium generic valium pill code - valium dosage panic attacks
buy ambien ambien side effects pregnancy - ambien cr side effects itching
diazepam cheap legal buy diazepam usa - diazepam high yahoo
lorazepam 1mg ativan withdrawal and heart palpitations - overdose of ativan side effects
ativan pharmacy ativan overdose antidote - ativan vs xanax anxiety
generic ativan online ativan withdrawal how to - ativan withdrawal klonopin
ativan online ativan dosage xanax - ativan addiction withdrawal
generic alprazolam xanax drug detection time - xanax side effects liver
alprazolam no prescription generic xanax wiki - xanax and high blood pressure
ativan sale ativan side effects restless legs - ativan used drug withdrawal
xanax 0.5mg pass swab drug test xanax - how get high xanax
ativan without prescription cheap ativan - ativan dosage teenager
cheap ambien online ambien side effects nih - generic ambien 10mg 30 pills reviews
order soma soma drug 2410 - carisoprodol 350 mg en espanol
buy ambien online without prescription ambien overdose how much is too much - ambien cr 12.5 mg side effects
diazepam 5mg buy roche valium no prescription - valium for depression and anxiety
soma without prescription soma drug huxley - carisoprodol half-life urine
buy valium online valium drug interactions - drug valium drug test
valium diazepam cheap valium online no prescription - valium vs xanax
buy valium online 5mg valium back pain - valium alternatives anxiety
buy valium online legally where to buy valium uk - valium online consultation
[url=http://www.burberrypascherlondon.com][b]http://www.burberrypascherlondon.com[/url] ouhcxkcvukil echarpe burberry
[url=http://www.basketisabelmarantspascher.com][b]isabel marant sneakers[/url] didwjuvxacxz isaben marant
[url=http://www.officielburberrypascher.com][b]echarpe burberry[/url] emgshseodkjm sac burberry
[url=http://www.officiellouisvuitton.com][b]sac louis vuitton pas cher[/url] ewnshyzqqeso sac louis vuitton pas cher
[url=http://www.saclongchamppaschersoldesfr.com][b]sac longchamp pas cher[/url] kydyehnpmlpq sac longchamp
[url=http://www.louisvuitton2013outlet.com][b]louis vuitton handbags[/url] ldncurgbpnxq http://www.officiellouisvuitton.com
[url=http://www.burberryscarfoutleter.com][b]burberry outlet[/url] tyodicxogbxc burberry scarf
[url=http://www.saclongchamppascherrparis.com][b]sac longchamp pas cher[/url] ffuatljviyze sac longchamp pas cher
ugg xmjxpwka botas ugg pzfcumma ugg españa
APPLY FOR BUSINESS LOAN, PERSONAL LOAN NOW.
Urgent Loan Needed Contact us today I am a private lender who give out loan to private and corporate individuals Have you been turned down by so many banks? Do you need finance to establish your business? Do you need finance for the expansion of you business? Or do you need a personal loan? My loan ranges from personal to business loan. My interest rate is very affordable and our loan process is very fast as well. I am very willing to make all your financial troubles a thing of the past. If you are really ready to get. your financial problems solved,Then search no further and apply for a loan today. If you are interested fill the DATA FORM so that i can give you my terms and conditions. am.finacial@blumail.org
* Full name:……………………….
* Sex …………………………….
* Country…………………………..
* State:…………………………….
* Occupation:……………………..
* phone number:………………….
* Age:……………………………….
* Amount needed as loan:………
* Loan Duration:…………………..
* Propose of Loan:………………..
* Annual revenue:…………………
* Monthly Income:………………..
We await your urgent reponse asap.
email am.finacial@blumail.org
Thanks
Mis Alex Maria
Post a Comment