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Saturday, March 19, 2011: Resist the War Machine!
8th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq
In San Francisco, people will gather at 12 noon for a rally at UN Plaza (7th & Market Sts.) followed by a march to Lo. 2 boycotted hotels. The theme of the March 19 march and rally will be "No to War & Colonial Occupation - Fund Jobs, Healthcare & Education - Solidarity with SF Hotel Workers!" 12,000 SF hotel workers, members of UNITE-HERE Local 2, have been fighting for a new contract that protects their healthcare, wages and working conditions.
http://www.answercoalition.org/sf/index.html
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RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.
THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.
WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.
WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!
WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.
WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
Next organizing meeting Sunday, February 20, 1:00 P.M., Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street (between 15th and 16th Streets, San Francisco)
Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace
TRADUCCION:
Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior
Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.
Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.
Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.
Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.
Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.
VICTORY IN EGYPT!
U.S. Hands off the Ongoing Egyptian Revolution!
End US Military Aid to Egypt and Israel!
A Statement by the United National Antiwar Committee
On Friday, February 11th, the heroic Egyptian people won a historic victory with the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. Now they are proceeding to secure this victory by moving on to eliminate the rest of this hated regime, and to win the freedom, jobs, equality and dignity which has motivated their revolution from the start.
The announcement of Mubarak's resignation was coupled with news that the officers of the Armed Forces are now running the country. This comes as more and more rank and file soldiers and lower-level officers were joining the protests, and as others stood by as protesters blockaded the state TV, parliament and other government facilities.
We can be sure that the military hierarchy in alliance with what's left of the old regime will do everything in their power to stop the blossoming revolution in its tracks, to tell the protesters they must go home now and wait for gifts from on high.
AND THE DANGER IS REAL THAT WHEN THE MASSES SAY NO THAT THE MILITARY WILL DO WHAT IT DOES BEST.
We can be equally sure that Washington will give its full blessing and backing to these efforts of the remnants of the old regime and the military. Obama has made clear that he is solidly committed to the new face of the Egyptian regime, Omar Suleiman, who has proven over the years that he will collaborate with Washington in its torture and rendition policies. Meanwhile Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted in the New York Times saying that Washington would help organize political parties for future elections in Egypt - a typical maneuver used to subvert revolutions.
The United National Antiwar Committee has repeatedly urged supporters to mobilize for demonstrations called by Egyptian organizations in the US in solidarity with the revolution in Egypt and against US military and diplomatic intervention. UNAC hails the call for today's march in Washington, DC by Egyptian groups, and takes this opportunity to point out the special obligations of antiwar activists in the US given Washington's multifaceted efforts to obstruct the wishes of the majority of the Egyptian people.
The $1.3 billion a year in military aid which the US gives to Egypt must be cut off immediately. All US soldiers serving in Egypt, such as those in the Multinational Force in the Sinai, must be immediately withdrawn. And the US warships headed for Egypt must be immediately turned around.
UNAC has from its founding opposed all US aid to Israel. That position takes on particular importance given the real danger that as the Egyptian revolution advances, Israel will intervene to derail it - or launch new attacks against Lebanon, Gaza, or elsewhere, as a diversionary tactic.
Amidst the euphoria in Cairo, Al Jazeera interviewed a young woman in the crowd, who said:
"Its not just about Mubarak stepping down. It is about the process of bringing the people to power... The issue of women, the issue of Palestine, now everything seems possible."
WE MUST ENSURE THOSE POSSIBILITIES STAY ALIVE! UNAC ENCOURAGES ALL ANTIWAR ACTIVISTS AND ORGANIZATIONS TO STEP UP SUPPORT FOR RALLIES PLANNED BY THE EGYPTIAN COMMUNITY, AND TO INITIATE THEM WHERE NONE ARE PLANNED.
Finally, we urge all supporters of the Egyptian people to redouble efforts to build the national antiwar marches called by UNAC for April 9th in New York and April 10th in San Francisco. These marches, called to demand an end to US wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, an end to support for Israeli occupation, and in favor of social justice and jobs, take on ever more importance with the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere throughout the Arab world and Washington's attempts to crush or derail them.
SUPPORT THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY AND AGAINST EXPLOITATION AND OPPRESSION THROUGHOUT THE ARAB WORLD!
BUILD THE NATIONAL ANTIWAR MARCHES ON APRIL 9TH AND 10TH!
For more information: In SF: UNACNorthernCalifornia@gmail.com; (415) 49 NO War; www.unacpeace.org, unacpeace@gmail.com. For NYC information: unac-nyc@juno.com
San Franciscans/Northern California: Next UNAC Organizing Meeting: Sunday February 20 at 1 PM, Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street, (between 15th and 16th Streets in the rear) SF
SAVE THE DATE: Sunday, APRIL 10, Mass antiwar/social justice march and rally, Assemble: 11 AM Dolores Park, 19th and Dolores; Rally Noon; March at 1:30 pm.
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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. ARTICLES IN FULL
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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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CODEPINK MONTHLY GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE PEACE WALK IN SOLIDARITY WITH EGYPT, TUNISIA & PALESTINE!
WHEN: Noon, Sunday, February 13
WEAR: We're suggesting you wear Black and Red in Solidarity with Egypt (Red on top, black on bottom) so we can create a strong visual on the bridge. Pink is also welcome!
WHAT: Our monthly peace walk on the Golden Gate Bridge will be in solidarity with the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings for freedom, and all people-powered movements for justice in the Middle East! Have a heart and join us on Valentine's Day weekend.
Bring Your Whistles, Signs and Friends:
11:45: Gather at the northeast or southeast end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Parking available on all 4 "corners", just remember to take the last exit on hwy 101 as you approach the bridge, or the first exit after you leave the bridge.
Noon-1:30: March on bridge with rally on SF side following the march in solidarity with the people of Egypt, Tunisia and Palestine.
1:30 - 2 pm: Caravan to Senator Feinstein's house to continue the action!
Together we will call for an end to US military aid to Israel and Egypt. Military aid, like the Pennsylvanian made tear-gas that killed Jawaher, is not bringing peace to the Middle East!
We will also be marching in mourning memory of Jawaher Abu Rahmah, a Palestinian woman who was killed by tear gas inhalation at a weekly anti-wall demonstration in the village of Bil'in in the West Bank last month. Stop the Wall Coalition and General Union of Palestinian Women have called for the week of February 10 to be an international day of action in her memory.
Bring friends and your love!
BE GREEN AND CARPOOL
Call 415-355-0300 for more info on upcoming CODEPINK actions in the Bay this week!
Power to the peaceful and freedom for all!
Toby, Rae, Nancy, Leslie, Martha, Ali, Chelsea, Cynthia, and Bay Area CODEPINK
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Bay Area Supporters of International Friends of the Leon Trotsky Museum invite you to:
"Honoring Revolutionary Continuity: An Afternoon Public Forum & Fundraiser for the Leon Trotsky Museum in Mexico City"
Sunday, February 13 @ 2:30 p.m.
Alameda Public Library
1550 Oak Street (@ Lincoln Ave.)
Alameda, Calif.
Featuring:
Presentation by ESTEBAN VOLKOV, Leon Trotsky's grandson and president of the Leon Trotsky Museum Foundation, and
Preview of "A Planet Without A Visa: The Movie" -- a film by DAVID WEISS, with presentations by LINDY LAUB, director of the documentary film, and SUZI WEISSMAN, historian of the revolutionary and socialist movements
Also: Honoring founding members of the American Trotskyist movement ESTAR BAUR, ERWIN BAUR & RUTH HARER
Sliding Scale $10 to $20
For more information, call Frank Fried at 510-459-0328
[If you are not able to make the event but would like to make a tax-deductible donation to International Friends of the Leon Trotsky Museum, please send your check, payable to Global Exchange (our fiscal sponsor), to International Friends, PO Box 40009, San Francisco, CA 94140.]
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"Never Again for Anyone," with Auschwitz Survivor Hajo Meyer & Islamic Scholar Hatem Bazian
February 17, 2011
First Presbyterian Church
2619 Broadway (12 blocks from MacArthur BART)
Oakland, California
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/events/never-again-anyone-auschwitz-survivor-hajo-meyer-islamic-scholar-hatem-bazian
Tickets: $15 general, $10 for low-income/students
Buy ticketsthrough Brown Paper Tickets online or by calling 1-800-838-3006
Wheelchair accessible, ASL interpreted
Benefit for MECA's Maia Project: Clean Water for the Children of Gaza
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US President Barack Obama may soon announce plans to expand Afghan security forces by roughly 70,000 over current targets by year's end. The plan is expensive: It would cost the United States another $6 billion next year -- nearly twice as much as previously planned.
The United States needs JOBS and a full-employment economy. NOT MORE WARS OR MILITARY SPENDING!
Please join us in demonstrating for Peace on February 18 at 2 PM., corner of University at Acton. Wheelchair accessible.
Sponsors:
Strawberry Creek Tenants Association
Fran Rachael
841-4143
Berkeley GRAY PANTHERS
Phone: (510)548-9696 FAX: (510)548-9697
Email: GrayPanthersBerk@aol.com
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Next Meeting of United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) Steering Committee Meeting to Build April 10!
All BAy Area antiwar and peace and justice activists invited.
Sunday, February 20, 1:00 P.M.
Centro del Pueblo
474 Valencia Street (Between 15th and 16th Streets -- second floor, in the rear.)
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MEDIA RELEASE from Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists (BFUU)
A Benefit Evening to Support Bradley Manning
Thursday, Feb 24, 2011 7 - 9 pm
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists
Fellowship Hall address: 1924 Cedar Street , Berkeley CA 94709
Sponsored by: Courage To Resist, Social Justice Committee of the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists & Code Pink Golden Gate
Wheelchair Accessible. Suggested Donation is $5 - 10. No one turned away for lack of funds.
Dr. Caroline Knowles of the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists will give the welcoming remarks.
Daniel Ellsberg will speak. As the "Pentagon Papers" whistle-blower of the Vietnam War era, he is in a unique position to put the the current issues into historical context.
http://www.ellsberg.net
Senator Mike Gravel has been referencing the damage to a democratic society that excessive secrecy and media manipulation has had on the ability of citizens to exercise informed judgment. All the while the government has passed more repressive laws since the 9/11 attacks that intrude on citizen privacy and rights.
http://www.mikegravel.us
Jeff Patterson of "Courage To Resist" will provide an overview of the issues and the history of Bradley Manning's case.
http://www.couragetoresist.org
Cynthia Papermaster of Code Pink Golden Gate chapter will MC. She will offer views on the treatment of Bradley Manning and will report on her recent experience at the demonstration on MLK DAY at Fort Quantico Prison where Bradley Manning is being held in solitary confinement.
http://www.codepinkgoldengate.org
Details of the event can be found at BFUU Upcoming Events Webpage.
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists
Fellowship Hall address: 1924 Cedar Street , Berkeley CA 94709
Phone: 510-841-4824
www.bfuu.org
office@bfuu.org
Submitted by
Shirley Adams
404-245-7977 (cell)
BFUU Membership Team
The only gift is a portion of thyself.- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Saturday, March 19, 2011: Resist the War Machine!
8th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq
In San Francisco, people will gather at 12 noon for a rally at UN Plaza (7th & Market Sts.) followed by a march to Lo. 2 boycotted hotels. The theme of the March 19 march and rally will be "No to War & Colonial Occupation - Fund Jobs, Healthcare & Education - Solidarity with SF Hotel Workers!" 12,000 SF hotel workers, members of UNITE-HERE Local 2, have been fighting for a new contract that protects their healthcare, wages and working conditions.
Come to Washington, D.C., on March 19 for veterans-led civil resistance at the White House
March 19 is the 8th anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Iraq today remains occupied by nearly 50,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of foreign mercenaries.
Saturday, March 19, 2011, the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, will be an international day of action against the war machine.
The war in Afghanistan is raging. The U.S. is invading and bombing Pakistan. The U.S. is financing endless atrocities against the people of Palestine, relentlessly threatening Iran and bringing Korea to the brink of a new war.
While the United States will spend $1 trillion for war, occupation and weapons in 2011, 30 million people in the United States remain unemployed or severely underemployed, and cuts in education, housing and healthcare are imposing a huge toll on the people.
Actions of civil resistance are spreading.
Last Dec. 16, a veterans-led civil resistance at the White House played an important role in bringing the anti-war movement from protest to resistance. Enduring hours of heavy snow, 131 veterans and other anti-war activists lined the White House fence and were arrested.
In Washington, D.C., on March 19 there will be an even larger veterans-led civil resistance at the White House initiated by Veterans for Peace. People from all over the country are joining together for a Noon Rally at Lafayette Park, followed by a march on the White House where the veterans-led civil resistance will take place.
Many people coming to Washington, D.C., will be also participating in the Sunday, March 20 demonstration at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia to support PFC Bradley Manning. Quantico is one hour from D.C. Manning is suspected of leaking Iraq and Afghan war logs to Wikileaks. For the last eight months, he has been held in solitary confinement, pre-trial punishment, rather than pre-trial detention.
The ANSWER Coalition is fully mobilizing its east coast and near mid-west chapters and activist networks to be at the White House.
In Los Angeles, the March 19 rally and march will gather at 12 noon at Hollywood and Vine.
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org/
info@AnswerCoalition.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-265-1948
Boston: 857-334-5084 | New York City: 212-694-8720 | Chicago: 773-463-0311
San Francisco: 415-821-6545| Los Angeles: 213-251-1025 | Albuquerque: 505-268-2488
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Are you joining us on April 8 at the Pentagon in a climate chaos protest codenamed "Operation Disarmageddon?" It has been decided that affinity groups will engage in nonviolent autonomous actions. Do you have an affinity group? Do you have an idea for an action?
So far these are some of the suggested actions:
Send a letter to Sec. of War Robert Gates demanding a meeting to disclose the Pentagon's role in destroying the planet. He will ignore the letter, so a delegation would then go to the Metro Entrance to demand a meeting.
Use crime tape around some area of the Pentagon. The idea of crime/danger taping off the building could be done just outside the main Pentagon reservation entrance (intersection of Army/Navy) making the Alexandria PD the arresting authority (if needed) and where there is no ban on photography. Hazmat suits, a 'converted' truck (or other vehicle) could be part of the street theater. The area where I am thinking is also almost directly below I-95 and there is a bridge over the intersection - making a banner drop possible. Perhaps with the hazmat/street closure at ground level with a banner from above. If possible a coordinated action could be done at other Pentagon entrances and / or other war making institutions.
A procession onto the Pentagon reservation, without reservations, and set up a camp on one of the lawns surrounding The Pentagon. This contingent would reclaim the space in the name of peace and Mother Earth. This contingent would plan to stay there until The Pentagon is turned into a 100% green building using sustainable energy employing people who work for peace and the abolishment of war and life-affirming endeavors.
Bring a potted tree to be placed on the Pentagon's property to symbolize the need to radically reduce its environmental destructiveness.
Since the Pentagon is failing to return to the taxpayers the money it has misappropriated, "Foreclose on the Pentagon."
Banner hanging from a bridge.
Hand out copies of David Swanson's book WAR IS A LIE. Try to deliver a copy to Secretary of War Robert Gates.
Have short speeches in park between Pentagon and river; nice photo with Pentagon in background.
Die-in and chalk or paint outlines of victim's bodies everywhere that remain after the arrest to point to where real crimes are really being committed.
Establish command center, Peacecom? Paxcom? Put several people in white shirts and ties plus a few generals directing their armies for "Operation Disarmageddon."
Make the linkage between the tax dollars going to the Pentagon and war tax resistance. Use the WRL pie chart and carry banners "foreclose on war" and "money for green jobs not war jobs."
Hold a rally with representative speakers before going to the Pentagon Reservation. This would be an opportunity to speak out against warmongering and the Pentagon's role in destroying the environment.
As part of "Operation Disarmageddon," we will take a tree and plant it on the reservation. Our sign reads, "Plant trees not landmines."
Use crime tape on Army/Navy Drive to declare the Pentagon a crime scene. Do street theater there as well. Other affinity groups could go to selected entrances.
Establish a Peace Command Center at the Pentagon. Hold solidarity actions at federal buildings and corporate offices.
What groups have you contacted to suggest joining us at the Pentagon? See below for those who plan to be at the Pentagon on April 8 and for what groups have been contacted.
Kagiso,
Max
April 8, 2011 participants
Beth Adams
Ellen Barfield
Tim Chadwick
Joy First
Jeffrey Halperin
Malachy Kilbride
Max Obuszewski
David Swanson
April 8 Outreach
Beth Adams -- Earth First, Puppet Underground, Emma's Revolution, Joe Gerson-AFSC Cambridge, Code Pink(national via Lisa Savage in Maine), Vets for Peace, FOR, UCC Justice & Witness Ministries, Traprock, Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist Order, (National-INt'l) Vets for Peace and WILPF, Pace e Bene, Christian Peace Witness & UCC Justice & Witness (Cleveland).
Tim Chadwick -- Brandywine, Lepoco, Witness against Torture, Vets for Peace (Thomas Paine Chapter Lehigh Valley PA), and Witness for Peace DC.
Jeffrey Halperin -- peace groups in Saratoga Spring, NY
Jack Lombardo - UNAC will add April 8 2011 to the Future Actions page on our blog, and make note in upcoming E-bulletins, but would appreciate a bit of descriptive text from the organizers and contact point to include when we do - so please advise ASAP! Also, we'll want to have such an announcement for our next print newsletter, which will be coming out in mid-December.
Max Obuszewski - Jonah House & Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore
Bonnie Urfer notified 351 individuals and groups on the Nukewatch list
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RALLY AGAINST THE WARS AGAINST WORKING PEOPLE AT HOME AND ABROAD! BACK TO THE STREETS! BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 2011
ASSEMBLE AT DOLORES PARK AT 11:00 A.M.
NOON RALLY
MARCH AT 1:30 P.M.
THEY are the government, corporate, and financial powers that wage war, ravage the environment and the economy and trample on our democratic rights and liberties.
WE are the vast majority of humanity who want peace, a healty planet and a society that prioritizes human needs, democracy and civil liberties for all.
WE DEMAND Bring U.S. Troops, Mercenaries and War Contractors Home Now: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan! End the sanctions and stop the threats of war against the people of Iran, North Korea and Yemen. No to war and plunder of the people of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa! End U.S. Aid to Israel! End U.S. Support to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the Siege of Gaza! End support of dictators in North Africa!
WE DEMAND an end to FBI raids on antiwar, social justice, and international solidarity activists, an end to the racist persecution and prosecutions that ravage Muslim communities, an end to police terror in Black and Latino communities, full rights and legality for immigrants and an end to all efforts to repress and punish Wikileaks and its contributors and founders.
WE DEMAND the immediate end to torture, rendition, secret trials, drone bombings and death squads.
WE DEMAND trillions for jobs, education, social services, an end to all foreclosures, quality single-payer healthcare for ail, a massive conversion to sustainable and planet-saving energy systems and public transportation and reparations to the victims of U.S. terror at home and abroad.
Next organizing meeting Sunday, February 20, 1:00 P.M., Centro del Pueblo, 474 Valencia Street (between 15th and 16th Streets, San Francisco)
Sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC)
www.unacpeace.org
unacnortherncalifornia@gmail.com
415-49-NO-WAR
Facebook.com/EndTheWars
Twitter.com/UNACPeace
TRADUCCION:
Marcha en contra de las guerras: en casa y en el exterior
Ellos son el gobierno y las corporaciones que financian las guerras, destruyen el medio ambiente, la economía y pisotean nuestras libertades y derechos democráticos.
Nosotros, somos la gran mayoría de la humanidad y queremos paz. Un planeta saludable y una sociedad que priorice en las necesidades humanas, la democracia y las libertades civiles para todos.
Nosotros, demandamos que las tropas militares, los mercenarios y los contratistas de guerra que enviaron a Irak, Afganistán, y Paquistán sean traídas de regreso a los Estados Unidos ¡Ahora! Que paren con las sanciones y las amenazas de guerra en contra de los pueblos de Irán, Corea del Norte y Yemen; y que los Estados Unidos deje de colaborar con Israel en la invasión y acoso a Palestina y Gaza. No al saqueo de los pueblos de América Latina, el Caribe y África; que paren la persecución racista que amenaza las comunidades musulmanas y que paren el terror policiaco en contra de las comunidades negras y latinas; derechos totales y legalización para los emigrantes.
Nosotros, demandamos que el FBI pare de inmediato la persecución a los luchadores por la justicia social y la solidaridad internacional; como también pongan un alto a todos los esfuerzos que reprimen y castigan a los contribuidores y fundadores de Wikileaks.
Nosotros, demandamos trillones de dólares para trabajos, educación y servicios sociales; que cesen todos los embargos de viviendas y desalojos; un programa de salud gratuito y de calidad para todos; un programa energético de conversión masiva que salve al planeta y buen el sistema de transporte público. Y reparaciones para las víctimas del terror de estados unidos aquí en casa y en el exterior.
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B. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:
[Some of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:
http://bauaw.blogspot.com/ or bauaw.org ...bw]
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WikiLeaks Mirrors
Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.
In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.
Go to
http://wikileaks.ch/Mirrors.html
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Streaming TV from Egypt
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/spotlight/anger-in-egypt/
Mr. ElBaradei, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for his work as the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on Friday: "The Egyptian people will take care of themselves. The Egyptian people will be the ones who will make the change. We are not waiting for help or assistance from the outside world, but what I expect from the outside world is to practice what you preach, is to defend the rights of the Egyptian to their universal values."
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Labor Beat: Labor Stands with Subpoenaed Activists Against FBI Raids and Grand Jury Investigation of antiwar and social justice activists.
"If trouble is not at your door. It's on it's way, or it just left."
"Investigate the Billionaires...Full investigation into Wall Street..." Jesse Sharkey, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNUSIGZCMQ
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Oil Spill Commission Final Report: Catfish Responds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3ZRdsccMsM
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New antiwar song that's bound to be a classic:
box
http://www.youtube.com/user/avimecca
by tommi avicolli mecca
(c) 2009
Credits are:
Tommi Avicolli Mecca, guitar/vocals
John Radogno, lead guitar
Diana Hartman, vocals, kazoo
Chris Weir, upright bass
Produced and recorded by Khalil Sullivan
I'm the recruiter and if truth be told/ I can lure the young and old
what I do you won't see/ til your kid's in JROTC
CHO ooh, put them in a box drape it with a flag and send them off to mom and dad
send them with a card from good ol' uncle sam, gee it's really just so sad
I'm the general and what I do/ is to teach them to be true
to god and country flag and oil/ by shedding their blood on foreign soil
CHO
I'm the corporate boss and well I know/ war is lots of dough dough dough
you won't find me over there/ they just ship the money right back here
CHO
last of all it's me the holy priest/ my part is not the least
I assure them it's god's will/ to go on out and kill kill kill
CHO
it's really just so sad
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You might enjoy a bit of history:
William Buckley Show with Socialist Workers Party Presidential Candidates
http://vimeo.com/18611069
William Buckley Show with Socialist Workers Party Presidential Candidates from asi somburu on Vimeo.
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Wall Street Fat-Cats Flip Public Service Workers the Bird
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTcSOygSBBM
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Free Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4eNzokgRIw&feature=player_embedded
Song for Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_eood7DUwI
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Supermax Prison Cell Extraction - Maine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jUfK5i_lQs&feature=player_embedded
Warning, this is an extremely brutal video. What do you think? Is this torture?
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Did You Know?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY
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These videos refer to what happened at the G-20 Summit in Toronto June 26-27 of this year. The importance of this is that police were caught on tape and later confirmed that they sent police into the demonstration dressed as "rioting" protesters. One cop was caught with a large rock in his hand. Clearly, this is proof of police acting as agent provocatours. And we should expect this to continue and escalate. That's why everyone should be aware of these facts...bw
police accused of attempting to incite violence at G20 summ
Protestors at Montebello are accusing police of trying to incite violence. Video on YouTube shows union officials confronting three men that were police officers dressing up as demonstrators. The union is demanding to know if the Prime Minister's Office was involved in trying to discredit the demonstrators.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWbgnyUCC7M
quebec police admit going undercover at montebello protests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfzUOx53Rg&feature=related
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Published on Thursday, December 16, 2010 by Countdown With Keith Olbermann
Quantico, the New Gitmo
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2010/12/16-0
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Domestic Espionage Alert - Houston PD to use surveillance drone in America!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpstrc15Ogg
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15 year old Tells Establishment to Stick-it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U_gHUiL4P8&feature=player_embedded#
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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded
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LOWKEY - TERRORIST? (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmBnvajSfWU
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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
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Flashmob: Cape Town Opera say NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElyrFOnKPk
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Video of massive French protest -- inspiring!
http://www.dailymotion.com/Talenceagauchevraiment
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"Don't F*** With Our Activists" - Mobilizing Against FBI Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyG3dIUGQvQ
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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MECA Middle East Children's Alliance
Howard & Roslyn Zinn Presente! Honor Their Legacy By Providing Clean Water for Children in Gaza
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=13
Howard Zinn supported the work of the Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA) from the beginning. Over the years, he lent his name and his time countless times to support our work. Howard and Roz were both personal friends of mine and Howard helped MECA raise funds for our projects for children in Palestine by coming to the Bay Area and doing events for us.
On the first anniversary of Howard's passing, I hope you will join MECA in celebrating these two extraordinary individuals.
- Barbara Lubin, Executive Director
YES! I want to help MECA build a water purification and desalination unit at the Khan Younis Co-ed Elementary School for 1,400 students in Gaza in honor of Howard & Roslyn Zinn.
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=13
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Call for EMERGENCY RESPONSE Action if Assange Indicted,
Dear Friends:
We write in haste, trying to reach as many of you as possible although the holiday break has begun.......This plan for an urgent "The Day After" demonstration is one we hope you and many, many more organizations will take up as your own, and mobilize for. World Can't Wait asks you to do all you can to spread it through list serves, Facebook, twitter, holiday gatherings.
Our proposal is very very simple, and you can use the following announcement to mobilize - or write your own....
ANY DAY NOW . . . IN THE EVENT THAT THE U.S. INDICTS JULIAN ASSANGE
An emergency public demonstration THE DAY AFTER any U.S. criminal indictment is announced against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Spread the word and call people to come out, across the whole range of movements and groups: anti-war, human rights, freedom of information/freedom of the press, peace, anti-torture, environmental, students and youth, radicals and revolutionaries, religious, civil liberties, teachers and educators, journalists, anti-imperialists, anti-censorship, anti-police state......
At the Federal Building in San Francisco, we'll form ourselves into a human chain "surrounding" the government that meets the Wikileaked truth with repression and wants to imprison and silence leakers, whistleblowers and truthtellers - when, in fact, these people are heroes. We'll say:
HANDS OFF WIKILEAKS! FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING!
Join the HUMAN CHAIN AROUND THE FEDERAL BUILDING!
New Federal Building, 7th and Mission, San Francisco (nearest BART: Civic Center)
4:00-6:00 PM on The Day FOLLOWING U.S. indictment of Assange
Bring all your friends - signs and banners - bullhorns.
Those who dare at great risk to themselves to put the truth in the hands of the people - and others who might at this moment be thinking about doing more of this themselves -- need to see how much they are supported, and that despite harsh repression from the government and total spin by the mainstream media, the people do want the truth told.
Brad Manning's Christmas Eve statement was just released by his lawyer: "Pvt. Bradley Manning, the lone soldier who stands accused of stealing millions of pages secret US government documents and handing them over to secrets outlet WikiLeaks, wants his supporters to know that they've meant a lot to him. 'I greatly appreciate everyone's support and well wishes during this time,' he said in a Christmas Eve statement released by his lawyer...." Read more here:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/mannings-message-christmas-eve-i-gr/
Demonstrations defending Wikileaks and Assange, and Brad Manning, have already been flowering around the world. Make it happen here too.
Especially here . . .
To join into this action plan, or with questions, contact World Can't Wait or whichever organization or listserve you received this message from.
World Can't Wait, SF Bay
415-864-5153
sf@worldcantwait.org
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Email received from Lynne Stewart:
12/19/10; 12:03pm
Dear Folks:
Some nuts and bolts and trivia,
1. New Address
Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054
Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127
2. Visiting is very liberal but first I have to get people on my visiting list Wait til I or the lawyers let you know. The visits are FRI, SAT, SUN AND MON for 4 hours and on weekends 8 to 3. Bring clear plastic change purse with lots of change to buy from the machines. Brief Kiss upon arrival and departure, no touching or holding during visit (!!) On visiting forms it may be required that you knew me before I came to prison. Not a problem for most of you.
3. One hour time difference
4. Commissary Money is always welcome It is how I pay for the phone and for email. Also need it for a lot that prison doesn't supply in terms of food and "sundries" (pens!) A very big list that includes Raisins, Salad Dressing , ankle sox, mozzarella (definitely not from Antonys--more like a white cheddar, Sanitas Corn Chips but no Salsa etc. To add money, you do this by using Western Union and a credit card by phone or you can send a USPO money order or Business or Govt Check. The negotiable instruments (PAPER!) need to be sent to Federal Bureau of Prisons , 53504-054, Lynne Stewart, PO Box 474701, Des Moines Iowa 50947-001 (Payable to Lynne Stewart, 53504-054) They hold the mo or checks for 15 days. Western Union costs $10 but is within 2 hours. If you mail, your return address must be on the envelope. Unnecessarily complicated ? Of course, it's the BOP !)
5. Food is vastly improved. Just had Sunday Brunch real scrambled eggs, PORK sausage, Baked or home fried potatoes, Butter(sweet whipped M'God !!) Grapefruit juice Toast , orange. I will probably regain the weight I lost at MCC! Weighing against that is the fact that to eat we need to walk to another building (about at far as from my house to the F Train) Also included is 3 flights of stairs up and down. May try to get an elevator pass and try NOT to use it.
6. In a room with 4 bunks(small) about two tiers of rooms with same with "atrium" in middle with tv sets and tables and chairs. Estimate about 500 on Unit 2N and there are 4 units. Population Black, Mexicano and other spanish speaking (all of whom iron their underwear, Marta), White, Native Americans (few), no orientals or foreign speaking caucasians--lots are doing long bits, victims of drugs (meth etc) and boyfriends. We wear army style (khaki) pants with pockets tee shirts and dress shirts long sleeved and short sleeved. When one of the women heard that I hadn't ironed in 40 years, they offered to do the shirts for me. (This is typical of the help I get--escorted to meals and every other protection, explanations, supplies, etc. Mostly from white women.) One drawback is not having a bathroom in the room---have to go about 75 yards at all hours of the day and night --clean though.
7. Final Note--the sunsets and sunrises are gorgeous, the place is very open and outdoors there are pecan trees and birds galore (I need books for trees and birds (west) The full moon last night gladdened my heart as I realized it was shining on all of you I hold dear.
Love Struggle
Lynne
The address of her Defense Committee is:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information:
718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
Please make a generous contribution to her defense.
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Help end the inhumane treatment of Bradley Manning!
Bradley Manning Support Network. December 22, 2010
The Marine Brig at Quantico, Virginia is using "injury prevention" as a vehicle to inflict extreme pre-trial punishment on accused Wikileaks whistleblower Army PFC Bradley Manning (photo right). These "maximum conditions" are not unheard-of during an inmate's first week at a military confinement facility, but when applied continuously for months and with no end in sight they amount to a form of torture. Bradley, who just turned 23-years-old last week, has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest in late May. We're now turning to Bradley's supporters worldwide to directly protest, and help bring a halt to, the extremely punitive conditions of Bradley's pre-trial detention.
We need your help in pressing the following demands:
End the inhumane, degrading conditions of pre-trial confinement and respect Bradley's human rights. Specifically, lift the "Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order". This would allow Bradley meaningful physical exercise, uninterrupted sleep during the night, and a release from isolation. We are not asking for "special treatment". In fact, we are demanding an immediate end to the special treatment.
Quantico Base Commander
Colonel Daniel Choike
3250 Catlin Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-2707 (phone)
Quantico Brig Commanding Officer
CWO4 James Averhart
3247 Elrod Ave, Quantico VA 22134
+1-703-784-4242 (fax)
Background
In the wake of an investigative report last week by Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com giving evidence that Bradley Manning was subject to "detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries", Bradley's attorney, David Coombs, published an article at his website on Saturday entitled "A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning". Mr. Coombs details the maximum custody conditions that Bradley is subject to at the Quantico Confinement Facility and highlights an additional set of restrictions imposed upon him under a Prevention of Injury (POI) watch order.
Usually enforced only through a detainee's first week at a confinement facility, or in cases of violent and/or suicidal inmates, the standing POI order has severely limited Manning's access to exercise, daylight and human contact for the past five months. The military's own psychologists assigned to Quantico have recommended that the POI order and the extra restrictions imposed on Bradley be lifted.
Despite not having been convicted of any crime or even yet formally indicted, the confinement regime Bradley lives under includes pronounced social isolation and a complete lack of opportunities for meaningful exercise. Additionally, Bradley's sleep is regularly interrupted. Coombs writes: "The guards are required to check on Manning every five minutes [...] At night, if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure he is okay."
Denver Nicks writes in The Daily Beast that "[Bradley Manning's] attorney [...] says the extended isolation - now more than seven months of solitary confinement - is weighing on his client's psyche. [...] Both Coombs and Manning's psychologist, Coombs says, are sure Manning is mentally healthy, that there is no evidence he's a threat to himself, and shouldn't be held in such severe conditions under the artifice of his own protection."
In an article to be published at Firedoglake.com later today, David House, a friend of Bradley's who visits him regularly at Quantico, says that Bradley "has not been outside or into the brig yard for either recreation or exercise in four full weeks. He related that visits to the outdoors have been infrequent and sporadic for the past several months."
In an average military court martial situation, a defense attorney would be able to bring these issues of pre-trial punishment to the military judge assigned to the case (known as an Article 13 hearing). However, the military is unlikely to assign a judge to Bradley's case until the pre-trial Article 32 hearing is held (similar to an arraignment in civilian court), and that is not expected until February, March, or later-followed by the actual court martial trial months after that. In short, you are Bradley's best and most immediate hope.
What can you do?
Contact the Marine Corps officers above and respectfully, but firmly, ask that they lift the extreme pre-trial confinement conditions against Army PFC Bradley Manning.
Forward this urgent appeal for action widely.
Sign the "Stand with Brad" public petition and letter campaign at www.standwithbrad.org - Sign online, and we'll mail out two letters on your behalf to Army officials.
Donate to Bradley's defense fund at www.couragetoresist.org/bradley
References:
"The inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention", by Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com, 15 December 2010
"A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning", by attorney David E. Coombs, 18 December 2010
"Bradley Manning's Life Behind Bars", by Denver Nicks for the Daily Beast, 17 December 2010
Bradley Manning Support Network
Courage To Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
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KOREA: Emergency Response Actions Needed
The United National Antiwar Committee urges the antiwar movement to begin to plan now for Emergency 5pm Day-of or Day-after demonstrations, should fighting break out on the Korean Peninsula or its surrounding waters.
As in past war crisis and U.S. attacks we propose:
NYC -- Times Square, Washington, D.C. -- the White House
In Many Cities - Federal Buildings
Many tens of thousands of U.S., Japanese and South Korean troops are mobilized on land and on hundreds of warships and aircraft carriers. The danger of a general war in Asia is acute.
China and Russia have made it clear that the scheduled military maneuvers and live-fire war "exercises" from an island right off the coast of north Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) by South Korea are very dangerous. The DPRK has made it clear that they consider these live-fire war exercises to be an act of war and they will again respond if they are again fired on.
The U.S. deployment of thousands of troops, ships, and aircraft in the area while South Korea is firing thousands of rounds of live ammunition and missiles is an enormously dangerous provocation, not only to the DPRK but to China. The Yellow Sea also borders China. The island and the waters where the war maneuvers are taking place are north of the Korean Demilitarized Zone and only eight miles from the coast of the DPRK.
On Sunday, December 19 in a day-long emergency session, the U.S. blocked in the UN Security Council any actions to resolve the crisis.
UNAC action program passed in Albany at the United National Antiwar Conference, July 2010 of over 800 antiwar, social justice and community organizations included the following Resolution on Korea:
15. In solidarity with the antiwar movements of Japan and Korea, each calling for U.S. Troops to Get Out Now, and given the great increase in U.S. military preparations against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, National Peace Conference participants will organize immediate protests following any attack by the U.S. on Korea. U.S. war preparations include stockpiling hundreds of bunker-busters and conducting major war games near the territorial waters of China and Korea. In keeping with our stand for the right of self-determination and our demand of Out Now, the National Peace Conference calls for Bringing All U.S. Troops Home Now!
UNAC urges the whole antiwar movement to begin to circulate messages alerts now in preparation. Together let's join together and demand: Bring all U.S. Troops Home Now! Stop the Wars and the Threats of War.
The United National Antiwar Committee, www.UNACpeace.org
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In earnest support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
http://readersupportednews.org/julian-assange-petition
rsn:Petition
We here undersigned express our support for the work and integrity of Julian Assange. We express concern that the charges against the WikiLeaks founder appear too convenient both in terms of timing and the novelty of their nature.
We call for this modern media innovator, and fighter for human rights extraordinaire, to be afforded the same rights to defend himself before Swedish justice that all others similarly charged might expect, and that his liberty not be compromised as a courtesy to those governments whose truths he has revealed have embarrassed.
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GAP Inc: End Your Relationship with Supplier that Allows Workers to be Burned Alive
http://humanrights.change.org/blog/view/workers_burned_alive_making_clothes_for_the_gap
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT! FREE KEVIN COOPER!
Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper
Chronicle Editorial
Monday, December 13, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL
Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's death row!
http://www.savekevincooper.org/
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255
URGENT ACTION APPEAL
- From Amnesty International USA
17 December 2010
Click here to take action online:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084
To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to
http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success
For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):
http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf
Kevin Cooper, who has been on death row in California for 25 years, is asking the outgoing state governor to commute his death sentence before leaving office on 2 January 2011. Kevin Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence of the four murders for which he was sentenced to death. Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.
On the night of 4 June 1983, Douglas and Peggy Ryen were hacked and stabbed to death in their home in Chino Hills, California, along with their 10-year-old daughter Jessica and 11-year-old houseguest Christopher Hughes. The couple's eight-year-old son, Joshua Ryen, was seriously wounded, but survived. He told investigators that the attackers were three or four white men. In hospital, he saw a picture of Kevin Cooper on television and said that Cooper, who is black, was not the attacker. However, the boy's later testimony - that he only saw one attacker - was introduced at the 1985 trial. The case has many other troubling aspects which call into question the reliability of the state's case and its conduct in obtaining this conviction (see http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/013/2004/en).
Kevin Cooper was less than eight hours from execution in 2004 when the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted a stay and sent the case back to the District Court for testing on blood and hair evidence, including to establish if the police had planted evidence. The District Court ruled in 2005 that the testing had not proved Kevin Cooper's innocence - his lawyers (and five Ninth Circuit judges) maintain that it did not do the testing as ordered. Nevertheless, in 2007, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit upheld the District Court's ruling. One of the judges described the result as "wholly discomforting" because of evidence tampering and destruction, but noted that she was constrained by US law, which places substantial obstacles in the way of successful appeals.
In 2009, the Ninth Circuit refused to have the whole court rehear the case. Eleven of its judges dissented. One of the dissenting opinions, running to more than 80 pages and signed by five judges, warned that "the State of California may be about to execute an innocent man". On the question of the evidence testing, they said: "There is no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing and...imposed unreasonable conditions on the testing" ordered by the Ninth Circuit. They pointed to a test result that, if valid, indicated that evidence had been planted, and they asserted that the district court had blocked further scrutiny of this issue.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had already denied clemency in 2004 when the Ninth Circuit issued its stay. At the time, he had said that the "courts have reviewed this case for more than eighteen years. Evidence establishing his guilt is overwhelming". Clearly, a notable number of federal judges disagree. The five judges in the Ninth Circuit's lengthy dissent in 2009 stated that the evidence of Kevin Cooper's guilt at his trial was "quite weak" and concluded that he "is probably innocent of the crimes for which the State of California is about to execute him".
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
On 2 June 1983, two days before the Chino Hills murders, Kevin Cooper had escaped from a minimum security prison, where he was serving a four-year term for burglary, and had hidden in an empty house near the Ryen home for two nights. After his arrest, he became the focus of public hatred. Outside the venue of his preliminary hearing, for example, people hung an effigy of a monkey in a noose with a sign reading "Hang the Nigger!!" At the time of the trial, jurors were confronted by graffiti declaring "Die Kevin Cooper" and "Kevin Cooper Must Be Hanged". Kevin Cooper pleaded not guilty - the jury deliberated for seven days before convicting him - and he has maintained his innocence since then. Since Governor Schwarzenegger denied clemency in 2004, more evidence supporting Kevin Cooper's claim of innocence has emerged, including for example, testimony from three witnesses who say they saw three white men near the crime scene on the night of the murders with blood on them.
In 2007, Judge Margaret McKeown was the member of the Ninth Circuit's three-judge panel who indicated that she was upholding the District Court's 2005 ruling despite her serious concerns. She wrote: "Significant evidence bearing on Cooper's guilt has been lost, destroyed or left unpursued, including, for example, blood-covered coveralls belonging to a potential suspect who was a convicted murderer, and a bloody t-shirt, discovered alongside the road near the crime scene. The managing criminologist in charge of the evidence used to establish Cooper's guilt at trial was, as it turns out, a heroin addict, and was fired for stealing drugs seized by the police. Countless other alleged problems with the handling and disclosure of evidence and the integrity of the forensic testing and investigation undermine confidence in the evidence". She continued that "despite the presence of serious questions as to the integrity of the investigation and evidence supporting the conviction, we are constrained by the requirements of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA)". Judge McKeown wrote that "the habeas process does not account for lingering doubt or new evidence that cannot leap the clear and convincing hurdle of AEDPA. Instead, we are left with a situation in which confidence in the blood sample is murky at best, and lost, destroyed or tampered evidence cannot be factored into the final analysis of doubt. The result is wholly discomforting, but one that the law demands".
Even if it is correct that the AEDPA demands this result, the power of executive clemency is not so confined. Last September, for example, the governor of Ohio commuted Kevin Keith's death sentence because of doubts about his guilt even though his death sentence had been upheld on appeal (see http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/079/2010/en). Governor Ted Strickland said that despite circumstantial evidence linking the condemned man to the crime, "many legitimate questions have been raised regarding the evidence in support of the conviction and the investigation which led to it. In particular, Mr Keith's conviction relied upon the linking of certain eyewitness testimony with certain forensic evidence about which important questions have been raised. I also find the absence of a full investigation of other credible suspects troubling." The same could be said in the case of Kevin Cooper, whose lawyer is asking Governor Schwarzenegger to commute the death sentence before he leaves office on 2 January 2011. While Kevin Cooper does not yet have an execution date, it is likely that one will be set, perhaps early in 2011.
More than 130 people have been released from death rows on grounds of innocence in the USA since 1976. At the original trial in each case, the defendant had been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It is clear beyond any dispute that the USA's criminal justice system is capable of making mistakes. International safeguards require that the death penalty not be imposed if guilt is not "based upon clear and convincing evidence leaving no room for an alternative explanation of the facts". Amnesty International opposes all executions regardless of the seriousness of the crime or the guilt or innocence of the condemned.
California has the largest death row in the USA, with more than 700 prisoners under sentence of death out of a national total of some 3,200. California accounts for 13 of the 1,234 executions in the USA since judicial killing resumed there in 1977. There have been 46 executions in the USA this year. The last execution in California was in January 2006.
RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:
- Acknowledging the seriousness of the crime for which Kevin Cooper was sentenced to death;
- Urging Governor Schwarzenegger to take account of the continuing doubts about Kevin Cooper's guilt, including as expressed by more than 10 federal judges since 2004, when executive clemency was last requested;
- Urging the Governor to commute Kevin Cooper's death sentence.
APPEALS TO:
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol Building, Sacramento, CA 95814, USA
Fax: 1 916-558-3160
Email: governor@governor.ca.gov or via http://gov.ca.gov/interact#contact
Salutation : Dear Governor
PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY.
Check with the AIUSA Urgent Action office if sending appeals after 2 January 2011.
Tip of the Month:
Write as soon as you can. Try to write as close as possible to the date a case is issued.
** POSTAGE RATES **
Within the United States:
$0.28 - Postcards
$0.44 - Letters and Cards (up to 1 oz.)
To Canada:
$0.75 - Postcards
$0.75 - Airmail Letters and Cards (up to 1 oz.)
To Mexico:
$0.79 - Postcards
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To all other destination countries:
$0.98 - Postcards
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Amnesty International is a worldwide grassroots movement that promotes and defends human rights.
This Urgent Action may be reposted if kept intact, including contact information and stop action date (if applicable). Thank you for your help with this appeal.
Urgent Action Network
Amnesty International USA
600 Pennsylvania Ave SE 5th fl
Washington DC 20003
Email: uan@aiusa.org
http://www.amnestyusa.org/urgent/
Phone: 202.509.8193
Fax: 202.675.8566
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Free the Children of Palestine!
Sign Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
Published by Al-Awda, Palestine Right to Return Coalition on Dec 16, 2010
Category: Children's Rights
Region: GLOBAL
Target: President Obama
Web site: http://www.al-awda.org
Background (Preamble):
According to Israeli police, 1200 Palestinian children have been arrested, interrogated and imprisoned in the occupied city of Jerusalem alone this year. The youngest of these children was seven-years old.
Children and teen-agers were often dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, taken in handcuffs for questioning, threatened, humiliated and many were subjected to physical violence while under arrest as part of an ongoing campaign against the children of Palestine. Since the year 2000, more than 8000 have been arrested by Israel, and reports of mistreatment are commonplace.
Further, based on sworn affidavits collected in 2009 from 100 of these children, lawyers working in the occupied West Bank with Defense Children International, a Geneva-based non governmental organization, found that 69% were beaten and kicked, 49% were threatened, 14% were held in solitary confinement, 12% were threatened with sexual assault, including rape, and 32% were forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not understand.
Minors were often asked to give names and incriminate friends and relatives as a condition of their release. Such institutionalized and systematic mistreatment of Palestinian children by the state of Israel is a violation international law and specifically contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Israel is supposedly a signatory.
Petition:
http://www.gopetition.com/petition/41467.html
We, the undersigned call on US President Obama to direct Israel to
1. Stop all the night raids and arrests of Palestinian Children forthwith.
2. Immediately release all Palestinian children detained in its prisons and detention centers.
3. End all forms of systematic and institutionalized abuse against all Palestinian children.
4. Implement the full restoration of Palestinian children's rights in accordance with international law including, but not limited to, their right to return to their homes of origin, to education, to medical and psychological care, and to freedom of movement and expression.
The US government, which supports Israel to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars a year while most ordinary Americans are suffering in a very bad economy, is bound by its laws and international conventions to cut off all aid to Israel until it ends all of its violations of human rights and basic freedoms in a verifiable manner.
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"Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority, which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests."..."Publishing State Secrets" By Leon Trotsky
Documents on Soviet Policy, Trotsky, iii, 2 p. 64
November 22, 1917
http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/foreign-relations/1917/November/22.htm
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE! FREE BRADLEY MANNING! STOP THE FBI RAIDS NOW!
MONEY FOR HUMAN NEEDS NOT WAR!
To understand how much a trillion dollars is, consider looking at it in terms of time:
A million seconds would be about eleven-and-one-half days; a billion seconds would be 31 years; and a trillion seconds would be 31,000 years!
From the novel "A Dark Tide," by Andrew Gross
Now think of it in terms of U.S. war dollars and bankster bailouts!
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MIDDLE EAST CHILDREN'S ALLIANCE
Your Year-End Gift for the Children
Double your impact with this matching gift opportunity!
Dear Friend of the Children,
You may have recently received a letter from me via regular mail with a review of the important things you helped MECA accomplish for the children in 2010, along with a special Maia Project decal.
My letter to you also included an announcement of MECA's first ever matching gift offer. One of our most generous supporters will match all gifts received by December 31. 2010 to a total of $35,000.
So, whether you are a long time supporter, or giving for the first-time... Whether you can give $10 or $1,000... This is a unique opportunity to double the impact of your year-end gift!
Your contribution will be matched dollar for dollar, making it go twice as far so that MECA can:
* Install twenty more permanent drinking water units in Gaza schools though our Maia Project
* Continue our work with Playgrounds for Palestine to complete a community park in the besieged East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, where violent Israeli settlers attack children and adults, Israeli police arrest the victims, and the city conducts "administrative demolitions" of Palestinian homes.
* Send a large medical aid shipment to Gaza.
* Renew support for "Let the Children Play and Heal," a program in Gaza to help children cope with trauma and grief through arts programs, referrals to therapists, educational materials for families and training for mothers.
Your support for the Middle East Children's Alliance's delivers real, often life-saving, help. And it does more than that. It sends a message of hope and solidarity to Palestine-showing the people that we are standing beside them as they struggle to bring about a better life for their children.
With warm regards,
Barbara Lubin
Founder and Director
P.S. Please give as much as you possible can, and please make your contribution now, so it will be doubled. Thank you so much.
P.S.S. If you didn't receive a MAIA Project decal in the mail or if you would like another one, please send an email message to meca@mecaforpeace.org with "MAIA Project decal" in the subject line when you make your contribution.
To make a gift by mail send to:
MECA, 1101 8th Street, Berkley, CA 94710
To make a gift by phone, please call MECA's off at: 510-548-0542
To "GO PAPERLESS" and receive all your MECA communications by email, send a message to meca@mecaforpeace.org with "Paperless" in the subject line.
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For Immediate Release
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
12/2/2010
For more information: Joe Lombardo, 518-281-1968,
UNACpeace@gmail.org, NationalPeaceConference.org
Antiwar movement supports Wikileaks and calls for and independent, international investigation of the crimes that have been exposed. We call for the release of Bradley Manning and the end to the harassment of Julian Assange.
The United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC) calls for the release of Bradley Manning who is awaiting trial accused of leaking the material to Wikileaks that has been released over the past several months. We also call for an end to the harassment of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and we call for an independent, international investigation of the illegal activity exposed through the material released by Wikileaks.
Before sending the material to Wikileaks, Bradley Manning tried to get his superiors in the military to do something about what he understood to be clear violations of international law. His superiors told him to keep quiet so Manning did the right thing; he exposed the illegal activity to the world.
The Afghan material leaked earlier shows military higher-ups telling soldiers to kill enemy combatants who were trying to surrender. The Iraq Wikileaks video from 2007 shows the US military killing civilians and news reporters from a helicopter while laughing about it. The widespread corruption among U.S. allies has been exposed by the most recent leaks of diplomatic cables. Yet, instead of calling for change in these policies, we hear only a call to suppress further leaks.
At the national antiwar conference held in Albany in July, 2010, at which UNAC was founded, we heard from Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers on the ground during the helicopter attack on the civilians in Iraq exposed by Wikileaks (see: http://www.mediasanctuary.org/movie/1810 ). He talked about removing wounded children from a civilian vehicle that the US military had shot up. It affected him so powerfully that he and another soldier who witnessed the massacre wrote a letter of apology to the families of the civilians who were killed.
We ask why this material was classified in the first place. There were no state secrets in the material, only evidence of illegal and immoral activity by the US military, the US government and its allies. To try to cover this up by classifying the material is a violation of our right to know the truth about these wars. In this respect, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be held up as heroes, not hounded for exposing the truth.
UNAC calls for an end to the illegal and immoral policies exposed by Wikileaks and an immediate end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an end to threats against Iran and North Korea.
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Courage to Resist needs your support
By Jeff Paterson, Courage to Resist.
It's been quite a ride the last four months since we took up the defense of accused WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning. Since then, we helped form the Bradley Manning Support Network, established a defense fund, and have already paid over half of Bradley's total $100,000 in estimated legal expenses.
Now, I'm asking for your support of Courage to Resist so that we can continue to support not only Bradley, but the scores of other troops who are coming into conflict with military authorities due to reasons of conscience.
Please donate today:
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
"Soldiers sworn oath is to defend and support the Constitution. Bradley Manning has been defending and supporting our Constitution."
-Dan Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistle-blower
Iraq War over? Afghanistan occupation winding down? Not from what we see. Please take a look at, "Soldier Jeff Hanks refuses deployment, seeks PTSD help" in our December newsletter. Jeff's situation is not isolated. Actually, his story is only unique in that he has chosen to share it with us in the hopes that it may result in some change. Jeff's case also illustrates the importance of Iraq Veterans Against the War's new "Operation Recovery" campaign which calls for an end to the deployment of traumatized troops.
Most of the folks who call us for help continue to be effected by Stoploss, a program that involuntarily extends enlistments (despite Army promises of its demise), or the Individual Ready Reserve which recalls thousands of former Soldiers and Marines quarterly from civilian life.
Another example of our efforts is Kyle Wesolowski. After returning from Iraq, Kyle submitted an application for a conscientious objector discharge based on his Buddhist faith. Kyle explains, "My experience of physical threats, religious persecution, and general abuse seems to speak of a system that appears to be broken.... It appears that I have no other recourse but to now refuse all duties that prepare myself for war or aid in any way shape or form to other soldiers in conditioning them to go to war." We believe he shouldn't have to walk this path alone.
Sincerely,
Jeff Paterson
Project Director, Courage to Resist
First US military service member to refuse to fight in Iraq
Please donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38590
P.S. I'm asking that you consider a contribution of $50 or more, or possibly becoming a sustainer at $15 a month. Of course, now is also a perfect time to make a end of year tax-deductible donation. Thanks again for your support!
Please click here to forward this to a friend who might
also be interested in supporting GI resisters.
http://ymlp.com/forward.php?id=lS3tR&e=bonnieweinstein@yahoo.com
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Add your name! We stand with Bradley Manning.
"We stand for truth, for government transparency, and for an end to our tax-dollars funding endless occupation abroad... We stand with accused whistle-blower US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning."
Dear All,
The Bradley Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist are launching a new campaign, and we wanted to give you a chance to be among the first to add your name to this international effort. If you sign the letter online, we'll print out and mail two letters to Army officials on your behalf. With your permission, we may also use your name on the online petition and in upcoming media ads.
Read the complete public letter and add your name at:
http://standwithbrad.org/
Courage to Resist (http://couragetoresist.org)
on behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network (http://bradleymanning.org)
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
Dear Friend,
On Friday, September 24th, the FBI raided homes in Chicago and Minneapolis, and turned the Anti-War Committee office upside down. We were shocked. Our response was strong however and we jumped into action holding emergency protests. When the FBI seized activists' personal computers, cell phones, and papers claiming they were investigating "material support for terrorism", they had no idea there would be such an outpouring of support from the anti-war movement across this country! Over 61 cities protested, with crowds of 500 in Minneapolis and Chicago. Activists distributed 12,000 leaflets at the One Nation Rally in Washington D.C. Supporters made thousands of calls to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. Solidarity statements from community organizations, unions, and other groups come in every day. By organizing against the attacks, the movement grows stronger.
At the same time, trusted lawyers stepped up to form a legal team and mount a defense. All fourteen activists signed letters refusing to testify. So Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Fox withdrew the subpoenas, but this is far from over. In fact, the repression is just starting. The FBI continues to question activists at their homes and work places. The U.S. government is trying to put people in jail for anti-war and international solidarity activism and there is no indication they are backing off. The U.S. Attorney has many options and a lot of power-he may re-issue subpoenas, attempt to force people to testify under threat of imprisonment, or make arrests.
To be successful in pushing back this attack, we need your donation. We need you to make substantial contributions like $1000, $500, and $200. We understand many of you are like us, and can only afford $50, $20, or $10, but we ask you to dig deep. The legal bills can easily run into the hundreds of thousands. We are all united to defend a movement for peace and justice that seeks friendship with people in other countries. These fourteen anti-war activists have done nothing wrong, yet their freedom is at stake.
It is essential that we defend our sisters and brothers who are facing FBI repression and the Grand Jury process. With each of your contributions, the movement grows stronger.
Please make a donation today at stopfbi.net (PayPal) on the right side of your screen. Also you can write to:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
P.O. Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414
This is a critical time for us to stand together, defend free speech, and defend those who help to organize for peace and justice, both at home and abroad!
Thank you for your generosity! Tom Burke
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Please sign the petition to stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal and
and forward it to all your lists.
"Mumia Abu-Jamal and The Global Abolition of the Death Penalty"
http://www.petitiononline.com/Mumialaw/petition.html
(A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int'l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)
[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco (E-mail: MumiaLegalDefense@gmail.com; Website: www.MumiaLegalDefense.org).]
Committee To Save Mumia Abu-Jamal
P.O. Box 2012
New York, NY 10159-2012
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Short Video About Al-Awda's Work
The following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's work since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown on Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l Al-Awda Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected over the past nine years.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial support to carry out its work.
To submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to
http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html and follow the simple instructions.
Thank you for your generosity!
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COURAGE TO RESIST!
Support the troops who refuse to fight!
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/
Donate:
http://www.couragetoresist.org/x/content/view/21/57/
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D. ARTICLES IN FULL (Unless otherwise noted)
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1) Protest in Egypt Takes a Turn as Workers Go on Strike
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10egypt.html?hp
2) Assange Probe Hits Snag
Inquiry Suggests WikiLeaks Founder Didn't Induce Soldier to Leak Documents
By JULIAN E. BARNES And EVAN PEREZ
FEBRUARY 9, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703313304576132543747598766.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsThird
3) Egypt, the Commune and Coriolanus; Marx and Shakespeare in Historic Times
The Rustbelt Radical
February 9, 2011
http://rustbeltradical.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/egypt-the-commune-and-coriolanus-marx-and-shakespeare-in-historic-times/
4) Egypt's Army Signals Transfer of Power
"On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch reported that since Jan. 28, when troops took up positions in Egyptian cities, army officers and the military police had arbitrarily detained at least 119 people. In at least five cases, the group said, detainees said they had been tortured. ...On Wednesday, some cellphone customers in Egypt received the equivalent of marketing messages from the new minister, Mahmoud Wagdy. One read, 'From the Ministry of Interior: The police will do nothing but serve and protect the people.' Another said, 'Starting today, we will only deal through truthfulness, honesty and rule of law.'"
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, ANTHONY SHADID AND ALAN COWELL
February 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/world/middleeast/11egypt.html?hp
5) Obama and Egypt's Future
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/opinion/10kristof.html?hp
6) Wired and Shrewd, Young Egyptians Guide Revolt
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10youth.html?ref=world
7) Labor Actions in Egypt Boost Protests
By KAREEM FAHIM and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10egypt.html?ref=world
8) Wave of Unrest Wipes Billions Off Stock Values
By SARA HAMDAN
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10iht-m10bflight.html?ref=world
9) Israel: Unions Threaten to Strike Over Rising Prices
By ISABEL KERSHNER
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10briefs-Israel.html?ref=world
10) After a False Dawn, Anxiety for Illegal Immigrant Students
By JULIA PRESTON
February 8, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/us/09immigration.html?ref=education
11) Public-Worker Unions Skip Albany Ad Blitz for New Tactics
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/nyregion/10unions.html?ref=nyregion
12) Netherlands could be safe haven for war criminals: leaked memo
By Adri Nieuwhof
The Electronic Intifada
February 8, 2011
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11787.shtml
13) Mubarak Steps Down, Ceding Power to Military
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, ANTHONY SHADID and ALAN COWELL
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/world/middleeast/12egypt.html?_r=1&hp
14) Avoiding a New Pharaoh
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
February 11, 2011, 11:34 am
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/avoiding-a-new-pharaoh/
15) Behind a Push for Parole in Chicago, a Prisoner's Old Neighborhood
By EMMA GRAVES FITZSIMMONS
February 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us/11chicago.html?ref=us
16) Privately, Public Employees See Cuts as Inevitable
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
February 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/nyregion/11publicworkers.html?ref=nyregion
17) As India Thrives, Its People Remain Hungry
By VIKAS BAJAJ
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/business/global/12food.html?ref=business
18) Military Offers Assurances to Egypt and Neighbors
By KAREEM FAHIM and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
February 12, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/world/middleeast/13egypt.html?_r=1&hp
19) When Democracy Weakens
By BOB HERBERT
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12herbert.html?hp
20) Uncharted Ground After End of Egypt's Regime
"'The sun will rise on a more beautiful Egypt,' one protester said. Or, as a joke traded by cellphone on Friday put it: 'From Tahrir Square to our brothers in fellow countries ... is there anyone who has a president bothering them?'"
By ANTHONY SHADID
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/world/middleeast/12revolution.html?hp
21) Obama to Propose Cuts as Opening Bid in Budget Showdown
By JACKIE CALMES
February 12, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/us/politics/13budget.html?hp
22) It Ain't Just Mubarak -- 7 of the Worst Dictators the U.S. Is Backing to the Hilt
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on February 5, 2011, Printed on February 12, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149805/
23) Soldier May Testify Against Comrades in Afghan Killings, Lawyer Says
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/12soldiers.html?ref=world
24) Wisconsin May Take an Ax to State Workers' Benefits and Their Unions
By MONICA DAVEY and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/12unions.html?ref=us
25) U.S. Approves Corn Modified for Ethanol
By ANDREW POLLACK
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/business/12corn.html?ref=us
26) Oregon: Man Dies Yards From Emergency Room Door
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/12brfs-MANDIESYARDS_BRF.html?ref=us
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1) Protest in Egypt Takes a Turn as Workers Go on Strike
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10egypt.html?hp
CAIRO - Protesters demanding the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak appeared on Wednesday to have recaptured the initiative in their battle with his government, demonstrating a new ability to mobilize thousands to take over Cairo's streets beyond Tahrir Square and to spark labor unrest.
As reports filtered in of strikes and unrest spreading to other parts of the city and the country, the government seemed to dig in deeper. Mr. Mubarak's handpicked successor, Vice President Omar Suleiman, warned Tuesday that the only alternative to constitutional talks was a "coup" and added: "We don't want to deal with Egyptian society with police tools."
But the pressure on Mr. Mubarak's government was intensifying, a day after the largest crowd of protesters in two weeks flooded Cairo's streets and the United States delivered its most specific demands yet, urging swift steps toward democracy. Some of the protesters drew new inspiration from the emotional interview on Egypt's most popular talk show with Wael Ghonim, the online political organizer who was detained for two weeks.
At dawn on Wednesday, the 16th day of the uprising, hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators remained camped out at Parliament, where they had marched for the first time on Tuesday. There were reports of thousands demonstrating in several other cities around the country while protesters began to gather again in Tahrir Square, a few blocks from Parliament.
By midday, hundreds of workers from the Health Ministry, adjacent to Parliament and a few hundred yards from Tahrir Square, also took to the streets in a protest whose exact focus was not immediately clear, Interior Ministry officials said.
Violent clashes between opponents and supporters of Mr. Mubarak led to more than 70 injuries in recent days, according to a report by Al Ahram - the flagship government newspaper and a cornerstone of the Egyptian establishment - while government officials said the protests had spread to the previously quiet southern region of Upper Egypt.
In Port Said, a city of 600,000 at the mouth of the Suez Canal, protesters set fire to a government building and occupied the city's central square. There were unconfirmed reports that police fired live rounds on protesters on Tuesday in El Kharga, 375 miles south of Cairo, resulting in several deaths. Protesters responded by burning police stations and other government buildings on Wednesday, according to wire reports.
On Tuesday, the officials said, thousands protested in the province of Wadi El Jedid. One person died and 61 were injured, including seven from gunfire by the authorities, the officials said. Television images also showed crowds gathering in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city.
Before the reports of those clashes, Human Rights Watch reported that more than 300 people have been killed since Jan. 25.
Increasingly, the political clamor for Mr. Mubarak's ouster seemed to be complemented by strikes in Cairo and elsewhere.
In the most potentially significant action, about 6,000 workers at five service companies owned by the Suez Canal Authority - a major component of the Egyptian economy - began a sit-in on Tuesday night. There was no immediate suggestion of disruptions to shipping in the canal, a vital international waterway leading from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. But Egyptian officials said that total traffic declined by 1.6 percent in January, though it was up significantly from last year.
More than 2,000 textile workers and others in Suez demonstrated as well, Al Ahram reported, while in Luxor thousands hurt by the collapse of the tourist industry marched to demand government benefits. There was no immediate independent corroboration of the reports.
At one factory in the textile town of Mahalla, more than striking 1,500 workers blocked roads, continuing a long-running dispute with the owner. And more than 2,000 workers from the Sigma pharmaceutical company in the city of Quesna went on strike while some 5,000 unemployed youth stormed a government building in Aswan, demanding the dismissal of the governor.
For many foreign visitors to Egypt, Aswan is known as a starting point or destination for luxury cruises to and from Luxor on the Nile River. The government's Ministry of Civil Aviation reported on Wednesday that flights to Egypt had dropped by 70 percent since the protests began.
In Cairo, sanitation workers demonstrated around their headquarters in Dokki.
While state television has focused its coverage on episodes of violence that could spread fear among the wider Egyptian public and prompt calls for the restoration, Al Ahram's coverage was a departure from its usual practice of avoiding reporting that might embarrass the government.
In the lobby of the newspaper, journalists on Wednesday were in open revolt against the newspaper's management and editorial policies.
Some called their protest a microcosm of the Egyptian uprising, with young journalists leading demands for better working conditions and less biased coverage. "We want a voice," said Sara Ramadan, 23, a sports reporter.
The turmoil at the newspaper has already changed editorial content, with the English-language online edition openly criticizing what it called "the warped and falsified coverage by state media" of the protests in Tahrir Square and elsewhere.
The paper described how "more than 500 media figures" issued a statement declaring "their rejection of official media coverage of the January 25 uprising and demanded that Minister of Information Anas El-Fikki step down."
Members of the Journalists Syndicate moved toward a no-confidence vote against their leader, Makram Mohamed Ahmed, a former Mubarak speech writer, the daily Al Masry Al Youm reported on its English-language Web site.
Several of the dozens of protesters occupying the lobby on Wednesday said the editor of the English-language division heads to the square to join the protests every night, joined by many of the staff.
The scattered protests and labor unrest seemed symptomatic of an emerging trend for some Egyptians to air an array of grievances, some related to the protests and some of an older origin.
The government's bid to project its willingness to make concessions has had limited success. On Tuesday, Vice President Suleiman announced the creation of a committee of judges and legal scholars to propose constitutional amendments.
But all the members are considered Mubarak loyalists.
The Obama administration was continuing its efforts to influence a transition. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called Mr. Suleiman on Tuesday to ask him to lift the 30-year emergency law that the government has used to suppress and imprison opposition leaders, to stop imprisoning protesters and journalists, and to invite demonstrators to help develop a specific timetable for opening up the political process. He also asked Mr. Suleiman to open talks on Egypt's political future to a wider range of opposition members.
Mr. Suleiman has said only that Egypt will remove the emergency law when the situation justifies its repeal, and the harassment and arrest of journalists and human rights activists has continued even in the last few days.
And while he raised the prospect of a coup, he also said, "we want to avoid that - meaning uncalculated and hasty steps that produce more irrationality."
"There will be no ending of the regime, nor a coup, because that means chaos," Mr. Suleiman said. And he warned the protesters not to attempt more civil disobedience, calling it "extremely dangerous." He added, "We absolutely do not tolerate it."
On Tuesday , young organizers guiding the movement from a tent city inside Tahrir Square, or Liberation Square, showed the discipline and stamina that they say will help them outlast Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Suleiman, even if their revolt devolves into a war of attrition.
Many in the crowd, for example, said they had turned out because organizers had spread the word over loudspeakers and online media for demonstrators to concentrate their efforts on just Tuesdays and Fridays, enabling their supporters to rest in between. And while Mr. Mubarak remains in office, they say, there is no turning back.
Many in the crowd said discussed the inspiration they drew from the interview with the freed organizer, Mr. Ghonim. A Google executive, he had been the anonymous administrator of a Facebook group that enlisted tens of thousands to oppose the Mubarak government by publicizing a young Egyptian's beating death at the hands of its reviled police force.
In the tearful conversation on Egypt's Dream TV, Mr. Ghonim told the story of his "kidnapping," secret imprisonment in blindfolded isolation for 12 days and determination to overturn Egypt's authoritarian government. Both Mr. Ghonim and his interviewer, Mona el-Shazly, appeared in Tahrir Square Tuesday to cheer on the revolt.
Some protesters said they saw the broadcast as a potential turning point in a propaganda war that has so far gone badly against them, with the state-run television network and newspapers portraying the crowds in Tahrir Square as a dwindling band of obstructionists doing the bidding of foreign interests.
Organizers had hinted in recent days that they intended to expand out of the square to keep the pressure on the government. Then, around 3 p.m., a bearded man with a bullhorn led a procession around the tanks guarding the square and down several blocks to the Parliament. Many of the protesters still wore bandages on their heads from a 12-hour war of rocks and stones against Mubarak loyalists a few days before.
"Parliament is a great pressure point," said Ahmed el-Droubi, a biologist. "What we need to do is unite this protest and Tahrir, and that is just the first step. Then we will expand further until Mr. Mubarak gets the point."
Back in Tahrir Square, more members of the Egyptian elite continued to turn up in support of the protestors, including the pop star Shireen Abdel Wahab and the soccer goalkeeper Nader al-Sayed. Brigades of university employees and telephone company employees joined the protests, as did a column of legal scholars in formal black robes.
Many at the protests buttonholed Americans to express deep disappointment with President Obama, shaking their heads at his ambiguous messages about an orderly transition. They warned that the country risked incurring a resentment from the Egyptian people that could last long after Mr. Mubarak is gone.
Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim, Anthony Shadid, Mona El-Naggar, Thanassis Cambanis and Liam Stack.
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2) Assange Probe Hits Snag
Inquiry Suggests WikiLeaks Founder Didn't Induce Soldier to Leak Documents
By JULIAN E. BARNES And EVAN PEREZ
FEBRUARY 9, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703313304576132543747598766.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsThird
U.S. investigators have been unable to uncover evidence that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange induced an Army private to leak government documents to his website, according to officials familiar with the matter.
New findings suggest Pfc. Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst accused of handing over the data to the WikiLeaks website, initiated the theft himself, officials said. That contrasts with the initial portrait provided by Defense Department officials of a young man taken advantage of by Mr. Assange.
Further denting the push by some government officials to prosecute Mr. Assange, the probes have found little to link the two men, though others affiliated with WikiLeaks have been tied to Pfc. Manning, officials said.
For the U.S. to bring its preferred case against Mr. Assange of inducing the leak, it would have to show that the WikiLeaks founder specifically encouraged Mr. Manning to hand over the documents, which included thousands of State Department cables, as well as low-level intelligence reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and Justice Department lawyers continue to gather evidence for a possible conspiracy charge against Mr. Assange, but that's a harder case to make, government officials said. Such a charge would be based on contacts, which are more evident, between Pfc. Manning and lower-level WikiLeaks activists, and on Mr. Assange's leadership of the group, these officials said.
Attorneys for Mr. Assange and Pfc. Manning, who is being held in a military brig in Virginia, didn't return calls seeking comment Tuesday. Mr. Assange has denied he had any contact with Pfc. Manning, whose lawyers have never commented on the accusations against him.
Failing to prosecute Mr. Assange, who has been portrayed as the chief instigator of the leaks, would be a setback to U.S. officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, who have been vocal in asserting that the publication of the documents was a crime that should be prosecuted. The State Department cables, in particular, embarrassed U.S. diplomats and could expose their contacts to reprisals.
Mr. Assange is currently facing extradition proceedings in the U.K. on a request from Sweden, which is investigating sexual-assault allegations against him. In a second day of testimony Tuesday, lawyers sparred over who was more uncooperative-Mr. Assange or the Swedish prosecutor pursuing him.
Lawyers for Mr. Assange argued he shouldn't be extradited because he tried multiple times to meet with Swedish prosecutors after they opened the investigation on Sept. 1, and before Mr. Assange left Sweden on Sept. 27.
A lawyer representing Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny said it was Ms. Ny who tried repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, to schedule an interrogation with Mr. Assange, who at one point went missing for about a week, unreachable even by his own lawyers.
Leonard Weinglass, a U.S. civil-rights lawyer who is working on Mr. Assange's defense, said his attorneys believed the U.S. government would attempt to have Mr. Assange extradited to the U.S.
In Washington, military officials have been examining how the data was stolen and how the theft could have been prevented. Army investigators now believe Pfc. Manning decided to steal the documents and give them to WikiLeaks on his own, out of his own malice toward the military or the government, according to a senior U.S. official.
The results of the Army inquiry were briefed for Army Secretary John McHugh last week, officials said. The findings of that probe contrast with the initial portrayal by some government officials of Pfc. Manning as a confused young person who was taken advantage of by Mr. Assange.
Pfc. Manning worked in intelligence operations in Baghdad and was assigned the task of examining intelligence relevant to Iraq. Defense officials said Pfc. Manning used his security clearance instead to tap into classified government documents around the world.
The military has charged Pfc. Manning in connection with two leaks-a State Department cable on the Icelandic banking crisis and a video showing a U.S. military helicopter firing on a group of people in Baghdad. He hasn't been charged in connection with the leaks of thousands of State Department and intelligence documents. Defense officials say they believe he was responsible for them.
After joining the Army, Pfc. Manning had a series of disciplinary problems, including fighting with other soldiers. Those conflicts fueled Pfc. Manning's anger toward the military, said the senior official, but investigators believe his antipathy to the government began earlier.
Early in the probe, Justice Department officials concluded they wouldn't treat WikiLeaks as a journalistic enterprise, which makes it easier for federal investigators to seek subpoenas of records related to WikiLeaks leaders and associates.
Federal authorities have used a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., to gather evidence, including gaining a judge's December order to Twitter Inc. for records related to Mr. Assange and Pfc. Manning, and several WikiLeaks volunteers.
-Jeanne Whalen contributed to this article.
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3) Egypt, the Commune and Coriolanus; Marx and Shakespeare in Historic Times
The Rustbelt Radical
February 9, 2011
http://rustbeltradical.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/egypt-the-commune-and-coriolanus-marx-and-shakespeare-in-historic-times/
When great events happen words wombed in dusty classics burst forth with new energy and resume the urgency with which they were written. It is impossible, in the face of history-making, not also to be drawn to history already made. In the Rustbelt's little world Shakespeare created the words and Marx assembled the script of our human drama. I've revisited both since the events in Egypt began forcefully intervening into history sixteen (only sixteen? it seems a year, at least!) days ago.
While it's impossible not to feel some comparisons with the Commune and Cairo's Tahrir, I'm not making any analogies (really, I'm not!), all I'm saying is that in times of revolution Marx's Civil War in France becomes an even more remarkable read, no more so than now. Here's something that passed my eyes on an early morning bus ride, where nearly every paragraph read before sparkled to life...
'In their reluctance to continue the civil war opened by Thiers' burglarious attempt at Montmartre, the Central Committee made themselves, this time, guilty of a decisive mistake in not at once marching upon Versailles, them completely helpless, and this putting an end to the conspiracies of Thiers and his Rurals. Instead of this, the Party of Order was again allowed to try its strength at the ballot box, on the 26th of March, the day of the election of the Commune. Then, in the mairies [city halls] of Paris, they exchanged bland words of conciliation with their too generous conquerors, muttering in their hearts solemn vows to exterminate them in due time.'
Among other overtly political themes, Shakespeare's Coriolanus holds a cold mirror up to the despot's visage only to reveal ourselves, or part of ourselves- those dark places where power becomes it's own justification, where power panders and we pander power. There is a whole lot in this work, one my father wouldn't let me watch as a kid because of its incredible, brutal violence, for leftists to ponder. Who could watch the play now and not see a little of Ben Ali or Hosni Mubarek in Caius Martius? Or in the Senators, the 'people's tribunes', who, in their own power desires, propel themselves on the people's hunger for justice in rebellion against a master they once served? Again, these are not analogies, just the reiteration that certain struggles of our specie's are...ongoing.
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4) Egypt's Army Signals Transfer of Power
"On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch reported that since Jan. 28, when troops took up positions in Egyptian cities, army officers and the military police had arbitrarily detained at least 119 people. In at least five cases, the group said, detainees said they had been tortured. ...On Wednesday, some cellphone customers in Egypt received the equivalent of marketing messages from the new minister, Mahmoud Wagdy. One read, 'From the Ministry of Interior: The police will do nothing but serve and protect the people.' Another said, 'Starting today, we will only deal through truthfulness, honesty and rule of law.'"
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, ANTHONY SHADID AND ALAN COWELL
February 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/world/middleeast/11egypt.html?hp
CAIRO - Egypt's armed forces on Thursday announced that they had begun to take "necessary measures to protect the nation and support the legitimate demands of the people," a step that suggested the military intends to take a commanding role in administering the strife-torn nation.
The announcement of an enhanced role for the military came as officials in President Hosni Mubarak's government suggested a momentous shift in power was underway, including a possible transfer of power from Mr. Mubarak to his Vice President Omar Suleiman.
Hossan Badrawi, secretary general of the National Democratic Party (NDP), told Egyptian state news outlets and the BBC that Mr. Mubarak would "most probably" speak to the nation soon, and that he would likely step down from his post.
In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, C.I.A. Director Leon E. Panetta said that there was a "strong likelihood" that Mr. Mubarak would step down by the end of the day.
Although the shape of a new Egyptian government remained unclear, television images on Al Jazeera showed the masses in Tahrir Square cheering the news of an impending shake-up, waving flags and chanting: "The Army and the people in one hand."
Vice President Omar Suleiman, named by Mr. Mubarak to undertake a dialogue with opposition groups, had warned Tuesday night that if the process he was supervising did not produce results, the military would step in to take administrative control in what he called a "coup." He did not say what role he would play in a military government.
The announcement came as Egypt's uprising entered its 17th day on Thursday, bolstered by strikes and protests among professional groups in Cairo and workers across the country. A senior official in Mr. Mubarak's embattled government was quoted as saying the army would "intervene to control the country" if it continued to devolve into chaos.
As tension built ahead of Friday's planned mass protests, thousands of chanting lawyers in black robes and physicians in white laboratory coats marched into Tahrir Square - the epicenter of the uprising - to join the clamor for Mr. Mubarak's ouster.
Engineers and journalists also headed for the square on Thursday as the numbers there began to swell once again into the thousands, with demonstrators mingling among the tents and graffiti-sprayed army tanks that have taken on an air of semipermanence.
Officials in Mr. Mubarak's government have been warning for several days that protesters faced a choice between negotiating in earnest with the government on Constitutional changes or having the military step in to guard against a descend into political chaos. Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit seemed to add a further ominous tone to those comments today, telling Al Arabiya television,
"If chaos occurs, the armed forces will intervene to control the country, a step which would lead to a very dangerous situation."
Mr. Aboul Gheit made the comments a day after he dismissed calls by Egyptian protesters and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scrap the country's emergency laws, which allow the authorities to detain people without charge.
Up until now, the military has pledged not to use force against the protesters who have occupied Cairo's central Tahrir Square and whose tactics have broadened to the establishment of a fresh encampment outside the Egyptian Parliament. But a report released Thursday by Human Rights Watch cast doubt on the military's impartiality.
"Since Jan. 31, Human Rights Watch has documented the arbitrary arrest by military police of at least 20 protesters who were leaving or heading to Tahrir Square," the group said in a statement. "Most of these arrests occurred in the vicinity of the square or in other parts of Cairo from where protesters were taking supplies to the square."
The group said it had also documented at least five cases of the torture of detainees at the hands of the military. A spokesman for the military denied the accusations.
The army has also deployed tanks and reinforcements across the city, setting up a narrow access point to the square that forces would-be protesters into single file after they stand in long lines to enter.
The apparently hardening official line - and the stubborn resistance of the protesters - coincided with a surge of strikes and worker protests affecting post offices, textile factories and even Al Ahram, the government's flagship newspaper.
While the government turned up pressure on the opposition, there were continued signs of turmoil within its own ranks. State TV reported that the state prosecutor had opened a formal investigation of Ahmed Ezz, a widely hated former senior member of the ruling National Democratic Party and a confidant of the president's son Gamal Mubarak, and two other former ministers.
Another N.D.P. official, Mamdouh Hosny, director of the Industry and Energy Committee in Parliament, announced he was resigning from the party, the Egyptian daily, Al Masry Al Youm, reported.
The presence of lawyers and other professionals joining the demonstrations seemed to broaden the participation in the uprising, reflecting the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has strong support among Egyptian lawyers and other professions..
Some of the protesters say they have been inspired by Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who has emerged as a prominent voice in a revolt galvanized in part by social networking sites. On Thursday, a Twitter feed in his name in English declared: "I promise every Egyptian that I will go back to my normal life & not be involved in any politics once Egyptians fulfill their dreams."
But, in an interview on CNN, he was also quoted as saying he was "ready to die" for the opposition's cause. "And I'm telling this to Omar Suleiman," he said. "He's going to watch this. You're not going to stop us. Kidnap me, kidnap all my colleagues. Put us in jail. Kill us. Do whatever you want to do. We are getting back our country. You guys have been ruining this country for 30 years."
The protests at Al Ahram by freelance reporters demanding better wages and more independence from the government snarled one of the state's most powerful propaganda tools and seemed to change its tone: On Wednesday, the front page, which had sought for days to play down the protests, called recent attacks by pro-Mubarak protesters on Tahrir Square an "offense to the whole nation."
And on Thursday, the newspaper's online edition in English broke news of hotel closures in Sharm El-Sheikh, the heart of Egypt's Red Sea tourism industry, which was badly hit when many visitors fled the country as the uprising broke out.
Outside Cairo's main post office, about 100 people gathered to demand higher wages and more jobs as a series of stoppages percolated through the capital. "Everyone has begun demanding their rights," said Ahmed Suleiman, 29, a part-time postal worker. "And it's time for the government to meet them." He spoke under a banner proclaiming: "Egyptian post office in solidarity with the youth of Tahrir Square."
As the city braced for bigger protests that organizers are trying to muster for Friday - the Muslim holy day and the beginning of the weekend - the authorities appeared to have strung more razor wire around the state radio and television building towering over the Nile. The move seemed to reflect concern that protesters may try to move to new locations, expanding their presence.
On the diplomatic front, Mr. Aboul Gheit's retort to Mr. Biden played into the complicated relationship between Mr. Mubarak's government and the Obama administration, which had urged swift steps toward a political transition, then endorsed Mr. Mubarak's remaining until the end of his term later this year. Since then, Mr. Biden has suggested that the United States still expects some immediate changes to be made.
On Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, responded to the Egyptian government's claims that such changes were premature, saying, "What you see happening on the streets of Cairo is not all that surprising when you see the lack of steps that their government has taken to meet their concerns."
That attempt to put some distance between the United States and Mr. Mubarak, though, was unlikely to impress the protesters, who say that the Obama administration, by continuing to back the president, also ignores their concerns.
By nightfall on Wednesday, more than 1,000 protesters prepared to sleep outside the Parliament building for a second night, a symbolic move that showed the opposition's growing confidence as the protesters expanded the scope of their activism beyond Tahrir Square.
Reports from around the country of vigorous and sometimes violent protests also suggested a movement regaining steam.
Security officials said that five people died and more than 100 were injured during protests on Tuesday in El Kharga, 375 miles south of Cairo. Protesters responded Wednesday by burning police stations and other government buildings. In Asyut, protesters blocked a railway line. Television images showed crowds gathering again in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city.
Even protests that were not directly against Mr. Mubarak centered on the types of government neglect that have driven the call for him to leave power.
Protesters in Port Said, a city of 600,000 at the mouth of the Suez Canal, set fire to a government building, saying local officials had ignored their requests for better housing. And in one of the most potentially significant labor actions, thousands of workers for the Suez Canal Authority continued a sit-in on Wednesday, though there were no immediate suggestions of disruptions of shipping in the canal, a vital international waterway.
On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch reported that since Jan. 28, when troops took up positions in Egyptian cities, army officers and the military police had arbitrarily detained at least 119 people. In at least five cases, the group said, detainees said they had been tortured.
There were signs that the police, under the jurisdiction of the hated Interior Ministry, were trying to remake their image. The authorities have announced in recent days that prosecutors are weighing charges against Habib el-Adly, recently removed as interior minister. The charges, including murder, are related to the killing of protesters by security officers during the unrest.
On Wednesday, some cellphone customers in Egypt received the equivalent of marketing messages from the new minister, Mahmoud Wagdy. One read, "From the Ministry of Interior: The police will do nothing but serve and protect the people." Another said, "Starting today, we will only deal through truthfulness, honesty and rule of law."
As Mr. Mubarak held on to power, influential groups and people seemed determined to distance themselves from his government's legacy. Members of a prominent journalists' association moved toward a no-confidence vote against their leader, Makram Mohamed Ahmed, a former Mubarak speechwriter, the daily Al Masry Al Youm reported on its English-language Web site.
And the recently appointed culture minister, Gaber Asfour, a literary critic, resigned Wednesday after pressure from his colleagues, according to Al Ahram.
Outside groups, meanwhile, continued to try to take advantage of the Egyptian uprising. In an online forum, a group in Iraq affiliated with Al Qaeda called on Egyptians to "wage violent jihad to topple the regime in Egypt," according to Khaled Hamza, the editor of the Web site of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest opposition movement.
He bristled at the comments, saying the revolt in Egypt was nonviolent and included "all sects, trends and religions."
"Egyptians are capable of solving their problem without intrusion, meddling and prying from foreign groups such as Al Qaeda and similar groups advocating the use of violence," he said.
Increasingly, the political clamor for Mr. Mubarak's ouster seemed to be complemented by strikes nationwide. While many strikes seemed to focus on specific grievances related to working conditions, labor leaders suggested they were energized by protests against Mr. Mubarak.
The protest against the Suez Canal Authority began Tuesday night and was staged by about 6,000 workers. In Helwan, 6,000 workers at the Misr Helwan Spinning and Weaving Company went on strike, Ms. Refaat said.
More than 2,000 workers from the Sigma pharmaceutical company in Quesna began a strike while about 5,000 unemployed youths stormed a government building in Aswan, demanding the dismissal of the governor.
In Cairo, sanitation workers demonstrated outside their headquarters.
David D. Kirkpatrick and Anthony Shadid reported from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Kareem Fahim, Liam Stack, Mona El-Naggar and Thanassis Cambanis contributed reporting from Cairo, and Helene Cooper from Washington.
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5) Obama and Egypt's Future
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/opinion/10kristof.html?hp
In Tahrir Square, I saw a young man holding a sign over his head. The sign urged President Hosni Mubarak to flee the country: "Hurry up! My arms are tired."
Lots of Egyptians seemed to feel the same way. They said they're sick of Mr. Mubarak and the entire regime - and are increasingly resentful that the Obama administration continues to seem more comfortable with the regime than with people power. My sense is that we're not only on the wrong side of history but that we're also inadvertently strengthening the anti-Western elements that terrify us and drive our policy.
President Obama and his aides were blindsided by the crisis from the beginning (as were we in the news media), and I fear that they've mishandled it since. When the protests began, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described Mr. Mubarak's government as "stable" and "looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people."
Then our special envoy, Frank Wisner, called for Mr. Mubarak to stay in power, saying: "President Mubarak's continued leadership is critical." The White House has tried to backtrack, but it has been backtracking from backtracks so much that on Egypt its symbol might as well be a weather vane.
When well-known journalists like Anderson Cooper of CNN were being beaten up in Tahrir Square, the White House found its voice. But now that foreign reporters are no longer being routinely harassed, it has lost its sense of urgency. "Now" is no longer in the White House lexicon.
America seems to favor reforms under Mr. Mubarak's vice president, Omar Suleiman, while perhaps throwing Mr. Mubarak himself overboard. But Mr. Suleiman is every bit as much an autocrat as Mr. Mubarak himself, and our emphasis on stability, order and gradualism suggests a profound allergy to popular will.
That raises a basic question: Why does our national policy seem to be that democracy is good for Americans and Israelis, yet dangerous for Egyptians?
One answer is simple. American officials worry that Mr. Mubarak has for decades stifled any secular democratic opposition, so the only organized dissent comes from the Muslim Brotherhood. The fear is that if elections come too soon, before secular groups can organize, the Brotherhood will do well.
That's a legitimate concern, but it's one that the Egyptian opposition is fully aware of and has a variety of mechanisms to address. And a new opinion survey shows that the Muslim Brotherhood has only 15 percent approval and its leaders get just 1 percent support in a presidential straw poll (the candidate to watch: Amr Moussa, the chief of the Arab League).
To many Egyptians, the U.S. is conspiring with the regime to push only cosmetic reforms while keeping the basic structure in power. That's creating profound ill will. In Tahrir Square, I watched as young people predisposed to admire America - the Facebook generation - expressed a growing sense of betrayal. In a country where half the population is under 24, we are burning our bridges.
Americans, perhaps, don't fully appreciate that the regime is mind-bogglingly corrupt and instinctively repressive. On my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground, I've linked to a video that appears to show Egyptian forces shooting an unarmed, unthreatening protester in cold blood and to another that apparently shows a government vehicle driving through a group of protesters, striking them and hurtling on. Those videos are heart-wrenching, and it is because of long experience with the regime's callousness that ordinary Egyptians don't trust people like Mr. Suleiman one bit. They think he's stalling in an effort to retain the system - and they're probably right.
Human Rights Watch has confirmed 302 deaths in the Egypt upheavals, based on visits to hospitals in three cities, and says the real toll may be significantly higher. To put that in perspective, that is several times the toll when Iran crushed its pro-democracy movement in 2009. And it's approaching the toll when the Chinese Army opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing in 1989. Yet when it's our ally that does the killing, we counsel stability, gradualism and order.
These are Egypt's problems to work out, not America's. But whatever message we're trying to send, the one that is coming through is that we continue to embrace the existing order, and that could taint our future relations with Egypt for many years to come.
Many years ago, when I studied Arabic intensively at the American University in Cairo, I was bewildered initially because for the first couple of months I learned only the past tense. That's the basic tense in Arabic, and so in any Arabic conversation I was locked into the past.
The Obama administration seems equally caught in the past, in ways that undermine the secular pro-Western forces that are Egypt's best hope. I hope the White House learns the future tense.
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
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6) Wired and Shrewd, Young Egyptians Guide Revolt
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10youth.html?ref=world
CAIRO - They were born roughly around the time that President Hosni Mubarak first came to power, most earned degrees from their country's top universities and all have spent their adult lives bridling at the restrictions of the Egyptian police state - some undergoing repeated arrests and torture for the cause.
They are the young professionals, mostly doctors and lawyers, who touched off and then guided the revolt shaking Egypt, members of the Facebook generation who have remained mostly faceless - very deliberately so, given the threat of arrest or abduction by the secret police.
Now, however, as the Egyptian government has sought to splinter their movement by claiming that officials were negotiating with some of its leaders, they have stepped forward publicly for the first time to describe their hidden role.
There were only about 15 of them, including Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who was detained for 12 days but emerged this week as the movement's most potent spokesman.
Yet they brought a sophistication and professionalism to their cause - exploiting the anonymity of the Internet to elude the secret police, planting false rumors to fool police spies, staging "field tests" in Cairo slums before laying out their battle plans, then planning a weekly protest schedule to save their firepower - that helps explain the surprising resilience of the uprising they began.
In the process many have formed some unusual bonds that reflect the singularly nonideological character of the Egyptian youth revolt, which encompasses liberals, socialists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
"I like the Brotherhood most, and they like me," said Sally Moore, a 32-year-old psychiatrist, a Coptic Christian and an avowed leftist and feminist of mixed Irish-Egyptian roots. "They always have a hidden agenda, we know, and you never know when power comes how they will behave. But they are very good with organizing, they are calling for a civil state just like everyone else, so let them have a political party just like everyone else - they will not win more than 10 percent, I think."
Many in the circle, in fact, met during their university days. Islam Lotfi, a lawyer who is a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood Youth, said his group used to enlist others from the tiny leftist parties to stand with them in calling for civil liberties, to make their cause seem more universal. Many are now allies in the revolt, including Zyad el-Elaimy, a 30-year-old lawyer who was then the leader of a communist group.
Mr. Elaimy, who was imprisoned four times and suffered multiple broken limbs from torture for his political work, now works as an assistant to Mohamed ElBaradei, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the International Atomic Energy Agency. In turn, his group built ties to other young organizers like Ms. Moore.
The seeds of the revolt were planted around the time of the uprising in Tunisia, when Walid Rachid, 27, a liaison from an online group called the April 6 Movement, sent a note to the anonymous administrator of an anti-torture Facebook page asking for "marketing help" with a day of protest on Jan. 25, Mr. Rachid recalled. He wondered why the administrator would communicate only by Google instant message. In fact, it was someone he already knew: Mr. Ghonim, the Google executive.
The day of the protest, the group tried a feint to throw off the police. The organizers let it be known that they intended to gather at a mosque in an upscale neighborhood in central Cairo, and the police gathered there in force. But the organizers set out instead for a poor neighborhood nearby, Mr. Elaimy recalled.
Starting in a poor neighborhood was itself an experiment. "We always start from the elite, with the same faces," Mr. Lotfi said. "So this time we thought, let's try."
They divided up into two teams - one coaxing people in cafes to join them, the other chanting to the tenements above. Instead of talking about democracy, Mr. Lotfi said, they focused on more immediate issues like the minimum wage. "They are eating pigeon and chicken and we are eating beans all the time," they chanted. "Oh my, 10 pounds can only buy us cucumbers now, what a shame what a shame."
Ms. Moore said: "Our group started when we were 50. When we left the neighborhood we were thousands." As the protests broke up that day, she said, she saw a man shot to death by the police. She carried her medical bag to the next demonstration and set up a first-aid center.
By the time they occupied Tahrir Square, she and her friends had enlisted the Arab Doctors Union - many of whose members are also members of the Muslim Brotherhood - which set up a network of seven clinics. The night before the "Friday of anger" demonstration planned for Jan. 28, the group met at the home of Mr. Elaimy while Mr. Lotfi conducted what he called a "field test." From 6 to 8 p.m., he and a small group of friends walked the narrow alleys of a working-class neighborhood calling out for residents to protest, mainly to gauge the level of participation and measure the pace of a march through the streets.
"And the funny thing is, when we finished up the people refused to leave," he said. "They were 7,000 and they burned two police cars."
When he called the information in to the group at Mr. Elaimy's house, they drew up a detailed plan for protesters to gather at specified mosques, then march toward main arteries that led to Tahrir Square. They even told Mr. ElBaradei which mosque to attend. Then they informed the press where he would be, and pictures of a Nobel laureate drenched by water cannons flashed around the world.
In signs of a generation gap echoed across Egypt, the young people acknowledged some frustration with their elders in the opposition parties. "Simply, they are part of the system, part of the regime," Mr. Lotfi said. "Mubarak was able to tame them."
Even so, he said, having members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the square proved to be a strategic asset because as participants in an illegal, secret society, "they are by nature organized."
That organization proved crucial a few days later when the protesters quickly formed a kind of assembly line to defend against an onslaught of rocks and firebombs from an army of Mubarak loyalists. One group used steel bars to break up pavement into stones, another relayed the rocks to the front and the third manned the barricades.
"When people have been killed, from time to time you feel guilty," Mr. Lotfi said. "But after the war that night, we felt more and more that our country deserves our sacrifice."
A few days later, seven members of the group were abducted by the police after leaving a meeting at Mr. ElBaradei's house and detained for three days.
The organizers disseminated a weekly schedule, with the biggest protests set for Tuesday and Friday, to conserve their energy. And before each protest they leaked a new false lead to throw off the police, letting out that they would march on the state television headquarters, for example, when their real goal was to surround Parliament.
They formed a coalition to represent the youth revolt, with Mr. Ghonim on their executive committee. When the government began inviting them to meetings, they held a vote in Tahrir Square to decide. About a half-dozen representatives of youth groups participated, one person said, and they voted against negotiating by about 70 percent.
Most of the group are liberals or leftists, and all, including the Brotherhood members among them, say they aspire to a Western-style constitutional democracy where civic institutions are stronger than individuals.
But they also acknowledge deep divides, especially over the role of Islam in public life. Mr. Lotfi points to pluralistic Turkey. On the question of alcohol - forbidden by Islam - he suggested that drinking was a private matter but that perhaps it should be forbidden in public.
Asked if he could imagine an Egyptian president who was a Christian woman, he paused. "If it is a government of institutions," he said, "I don't care if the president is a monkey."
Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting.
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7) Labor Actions in Egypt Boost Protests
By KAREEM FAHIM and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10egypt.html?ref=world
CAIRO - Labor strikes and worker protests that flared across Egypt on Wednesday affected post offices, textile factories and even the government's flagship newspaper, providing a burst of momentum to protesters demanding the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, even as his government pushed back with greater force against the opponents' demands.
The protests at the newspaper, Al Ahram, by freelance reporters demanding better wages and more independence from the government, snarled one of the state's most powerful propaganda tools and seemed to change its tone: On Wednesday, the front page, which had sought for days to play down the protests, called recent attacks by pro-Mubarak protesters on Tahrir Square an "offense to the whole nation."
In the face of the unrest, the country's foreign minister delivered stern warnings that seemed to reflect the government's growing impatience with the protests.
Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit dismissed calls by Egyptian protesters and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scrap the country's emergency laws, which allow the authorities to detain people without charge.
"We have 17,000 prisoners loose in the streets out of jails that have been destroyed," Mr. Aboul Gheit said during an interview with the NewsHour on PBS. "How can you ask me to sort of disband that emergency law while I'm in difficulty?"
The remarks about Mr. Biden reflected the complicated relationship between Mr. Mubarak's government and the Obama administration, which had urged swift steps toward a political transition, then endorsed Mr. Mubarak's remaining until the end of his term later this year. Since then, Mr. Biden has suggested that the United States still expects some immediate changes to be made.
On Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, responded to the Egyptian government's claims that such changes were premature, saying, "What you see happening on the streets of Cairo is not all that surprising when you see the lack of steps that their government has taken to meet their concerns."
That attempt to put some distance between the United States and Mr. Mubarak, though, was unlikely to impress the protesters, who say that the Obama administration, by continuing to back the president, also ignores their concerns.
By nightfall on Wednesday, more than 1,000 protesters prepared to sleep outside the Parliament building for a second night, a symbolic move that showed the opposition's growing confidence as the protesters expanded the scope of their activism beyond Tahrir Square.
Reports from around the country of vigorous and sometimes violent protests also suggested a movement regaining steam.
Security officials said that 5 people died and more than 100 were injured during protests on Tuesday in El Kharga, 375 miles south of Cairo. Protesters responded Wednesday by burning police stations and other government buildings. In Asyut, protesters blocked a railway line. Television images showed crowds gathering again in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city.
Even protests that were not directly against Mr. Mubarak centered on the types of government neglect that have driven the call for him to leave power.
Protesters in Port Said, a city of 600,000 at the mouth of the Suez Canal, set fire to a government building, saying local officials had ignored their requests for better housing. And in one of the most potentially significant labor actions, thousands of workers for the Suez Canal Authority continued a sit-in on Wednesday, though there were no immediate suggestions of disruptions of shipping in the canal, a vital international waterway.
The deaths of protesters in El Kharga were a reminder of Egypt's unsettled security picture.
On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch reported that since Jan. 28, when troops took up positions in Egyptian cities, army officers and the military police had arbitrarily detained at least 119 people. In at least five cases, the group said, detainees said they had been tortured.
There were signs that the police, under the jurisdiction of the hated Ministry of Interior, were trying to remake their image. The authorities have announced in recent days that prosecutors are weighing charges against Habib el-Adly, recently removed as interior minister. The charges, including murder, are related to the killing of protesters by security officers during the unrest.
On Wednesday, some cellphone customers in Egypt received the equivalent of marketing messages from the new minister, Mahmoud Wagdy. One read, "From the Ministry of Interior: The police will do nothing but serve and protect the people." Another said, "Starting today, we will only deal through truthfulness, honesty and rule of law."
As Mr. Mubarak held on to power, influential groups and people seemed determined to distance themselves from his government's legacy. Members of a prominent journalists' association moved toward a no-confidence vote against their leader, Makram Mohamed Ahmed, a former Mubarak speechwriter, the daily Al Masry Al Youm reported on its English-language Web site.
And the recently appointed culture minister, Gaber Asfour, a literary critic, resigned Wednesday after pressure from his colleagues, according to Al Ahram.
Outside groups, meanwhile, continued to try to take advantage of the Egyptian uprising. In an online forum, a group in Iraq affiliated with Al Qaeda called on Egyptians to "wage violent jihad to topple the regime in Egypt," according to Khaled Hamza, the editor of the Web site of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest opposition movement.
He bristled at the comments, saying the revolt in Egypt was nonviolent and included "all sects, trends and religions."
"Egyptians are capable of solving their problem without intrusion, meddling and prying from foreign groups such as Al Qaeda and similar groups advocating the use of violence," he said.
Increasingly, the political clamor for Mr. Mubarak's ouster seemed to be complemented by strikes nationwide. While many strikes seemed to focus on specific grievances related to working conditions, labor leaders suggested they were energized by protests against Mr. Mubarak.
Rahma Refaat, a lawyer at the Center for Trade Union and Worker Services, said, "Most of those on strike say that we have discovered that the resources of our country have been stolen by the regime."
The protest against the Suez Canal Authority began Tuesday night and was staged by about 6,000 workers. In Helwan, 6,000 workers at the Misr Helwan Spinning and Weaving Company went on strike, Ms. Refaat said.
More than 2,000 workers from the Sigma pharmaceutical company in Quesna began a strike while about 5,000 unemployed youths stormed a government building in Aswan, demanding the dismissal of the governor.
Postal workers protested in shifts, Ms. Refaat said. In Cairo, sanitation workers demonstrated outside their headquarters.
In Al Ahram's lobby, journalists called their protest a microcosm of the Egyptian uprising, with young journalists leading demands for better working conditions and less biased coverage.
"Egypt before the 25th is different from Egypt after the 25th," said Essam Saad, who does work for the newspaper, referring to Jan. 25, the first day of antigovernment protests. "What is happening now is going to clean up Al Ahram. This newspaper is supposed to be the newspaper of the people, not the newspaper of the regime and the government."
Liam Stack, Mona El-Naggar and Thanassis Cambanis contributed reporting from Cairo, and Helene Cooper from Washington.
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8) Wave of Unrest Wipes Billions Off Stock Values
By SARA HAMDAN
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10iht-m10bflight.html?ref=world
DUBAI - Arab stock exchanges lost nearly $50 billion in the last week of January alone as political unrest escalated in Tunisia and Egypt, and analysts attributed the flight of capital to investor concern over the possibility of further instability throughout the region.
"The whole world was affected by the events in Egypt, giving rise to fears over lines of transportation of oil," said Yazan Abdeen, a fund manager at ING Investment Management, based in Dubai. "The memory of the financial crisis is also not far from us. So it is expected that the flow of capital was quickly redirected toward security, toward what is perceived as a safer bet."
Since the uprisings began in Egypt, following events in Tunisia, financial markets in the Gulf and North African region began facing sharp declines. The 13 Arab stock exchanges collectively fell about 5 percent, equivalent to $49 billion, to $942 billion from $991 billion between Jan. 25 and Jan. 31, according to a report by Kamco, the asset management arm of the Kuwaiti investment firm Kipco.
The flight of domestic capital and foreign investment was largely due to panic selling, noted the report, as a "state of fear hit investors" that other countries were vulnerable to the same economic and political issues that triggered unrest in Tunisia and Egypt.
The Gulf markets were the hardest hit. As a whole, Gulf exchanges lost $32 billion in the last five days of January, according to Kamco's report. The Tadawul exchange in Saudi Arabia, the largest in the region by market capitalization, was responsible for an overwhelming 63 percent of the total loss in market value of Gulf shares in the last week of January, the report said. The Saudi bourse fell 6.5 percent, or $3.2 billion - the exchange's worst slump since May 2010.
The bourses in Kuwait, Dubai and Abu Dhabi fell a total of $4.7 billion, according to the report.
"The problems in Egypt added fuel to the fire," said Majdi Gharzeddeene, the head of investment research at Kamco. "Panic selling is part of the issue, but the reaction of the markets was due to a combination of regional and local factors specific to each country."
In Kuwait, he said, negative sentiment was already brewing from the beginning of the year, reflecting concerns over liquidity problems, huge amounts of debt, and solvency issues that a number of investment companies face.
In Qatar, where he said the stock exchange enjoyed a $27 billion rise in valuations in 2010, profit taking was a contributor to the January decline in market value.
In Dubai and Abu Dhabi the real estate slump has continued to weigh on the markets, despite continued government support, while recently announced corporate earnings have not been as strong as expected.
Mr. Gharzeddeene said the problems in Egypt were exacerbating existing concerns about the fragility of regional markets.
"Fundamentally, the Egyptian economy is not strong and on top of that, they are losing about $350 million per day since the unrest began," he said. "The flight of capital from the region could be going toward commodities like gold and oil, or to other emerging markets like China and India."
The Egyptian stock market, the fifth-largest in the region, lost $5.12 billion in just two days - its heaviest loss since October 2008 - and then closed as a pre-emptive measure to reduce losses.
Investors are also factoring in downgrades by credit rating agencies, which so far have affected Egyptian, Tunisian and, most recently, Jordanian long-term currency debt.
Following Tunisia's revolution, Standard & Poor's lowered its rating for the country's long-term local currency debt to BBB+ from A-, while Moody's Investor Services reduced the local and foreign currency of Tunisia's government bond ratings to Baa3 from Baa2.
S.&P. lowered Egypt's foreign currency long-term rating to BB from BB+, and local currency long-term and short-term ratings to BB+/B from BBB-/A-3. Moody's followed suit, downgrading Egypt's debt to Ba2 from Ba1 with a negative outlook.
On Tuesday, Standard and Poor's lowered Jordan's local currency ratings to BB+/B, with a negative outlook.
Spreads of credit-default swaps, which gauge the cost of insurance against sovereign debt default, have widened sharply in the region because of political unrest in Egypt, according to a research report by Moody's released this week.
Still, despite the ongoing uncertainty, there are signs that investors are recovering their nerve.
"Investors can see that what happened in Egypt did not take place in Saudi or Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, despite the pressure," Mr. Abdeen of ING said.
"We have already seen a lot of money returning back to the Arab markets, particularly when stocks fall below a certain level and become attractive to investors again."
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9) Israel: Unions Threaten to Strike Over Rising Prices
By ISABEL KERSHNER
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10briefs-Israel.html?ref=world
Israeli union officials threatened Wednesday to call a general strike to protest recent price increases that have sent the cost of gasoline, water and basic foods spiraling upward. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to announce measures to ease the burden on the public on Thursday. A news conference was originally planned for Wednesday but was postponed after Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz was hospitalized, suffering from flu and exhaustion. Mr. Netanyahu is facing growing public anger over the increases: the cost of gasoline has gone up by 13 percent, the price of water has increased by more than 100 percent and many basic food items have risen by up to 8 percent over the past year.
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10) After a False Dawn, Anxiety for Illegal Immigrant Students
By JULIA PRESTON
February 8, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/us/09immigration.html?ref=education
MILWAUKEE - It was exhilarating for Maricela Aguilar to stand on the steps of the federal courthouse here one day last summer and reveal for the first time in public that she is an illegal immigrant.
"It's all about losing that shame of who you are," Ms. Aguilar, a college student who was born in Mexico but has lived in the United States without legal documents since she was 3 years old, said of her "coming out" at a rally in June.
Those were heady times for thousands of immigrant students who declared their illegal status during a nationwide campaign for a bill in Congress that would have put them on a path to legal residence. In December that bill, known as the Dream Act, passed the House, then failed in the Senate.
President Obama insisted in his State of the Union address and in interviews that he wanted to try again on the bill this year. But with Republicans who vehemently oppose the legislation holding crucial committee positions in the new House, even optimists like Ms. Aguilar believe its chances are poor to none in the next two years.
That leaves students like her who might have benefited from the bill - an estimated 1.2 million nationwide - in a legal twilight.
The president says he supports their cause, and immigration officials say illegal immigrant students with no criminal record are not among their priorities for deportation. But federal immigration authorities removed a record number of immigrants from the country last year, nearly 393,000, while the local police are rapidly expanding their role in immigration enforcement. Students often get caught.
Illegal immigrants also face new restrictions many states are imposing on their access to public education, driver's licenses and jobs. And for those like Ms. Aguilar who came out last year to proclaim their illegal status, there is no going back to the shadows.
Republicans who will lead their party in the House on immigration issues say illegal immigrant students should not be spared from deportation. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, led the opposition to the Dream Act, calling it "an American nightmare" that would allow illegal immigrants to displace American students from public colleges.
Mr. Smith and other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have pledged to block any legislation giving legal status to illegal immigrants, which they reject as amnesty for lawbreakers. Still, as Politico first reported on Monday, Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York, a Democrat, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, have begun preliminary talks to see whether there is enough support in Congress to try to pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul in coming months.
In the weeks since the Senate vote, many young illegal immigrants are grappling with the letdown after a campaign that mobilized thousands of them for sit-in protests and text message blitzes of Congressional lawmakers.
"Many have become extremely frustrated, sad, confused and without a lot of answers as to how to move forward," said Roberto G. Gonzales, a sociologist at the University of Washington who has surveyed young illegal immigrants. "They had a lot of hope that their activities were going to change the minds of the country. Having the door slammed in their face hit many of them really hard."
A moment of truth, Mr. Gonzales said, comes when the students graduate from college. Many excel academically, but without work authorization, they cannot be legally employed. Some immigrants with bachelor's degrees end up busing restaurant dishes and cleaning offices, falling back on the jobs of their less educated parents, who often struggled to put them through college.
Hostility toward illegal immigrants has grown in many states. Lawmakers in Georgia and Virginia are considering measures to ban illegal immigrants from all public colleges. Bills to deny state resident tuition rates to illegal immigrants are under consideration here in Wisconsin, as well as in Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska and Indiana. Only a few states, like Colorado and Maryland, are going the opposite direction, debating measures to allow illegal immigrants to pay the lower in-state tuition rates.
In the absence of a student bill in Congress, Obama administration officials are doing little to assist illegal immigrants who might be eligible for legal status if it passed. Department of Homeland Security officials said they would continue to reject any broad moratorium on deportations for those students.
Immigration agents have been instructed to focus on arresting immigrants who are convicted criminals, implicitly steering away from students without criminal records. When students do get caught, officials are using executive powers to postpone or cancel their deportations, they said.
Brian P. Hale, the senior spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency "uses discretion on a case by case basis, as appropriate."
But senior administration officials said they did not want to make wider use of those powers for fear of deepening the conflict with Mr. Smith and other Republicans, who might try to limit the authority granted by immigration law and further stiffen their opposition to measures like the Dream Act. The officials spoke anonymously, saying they could discuss policy more freely that way.
The strategizing in Washington is doing little for Ms. Aguilar, 19, a junior at Marquette University here.
"If your name is out there immediately attached with 'undocumented,' then there is always this fear of being deported," she said.
But Ms. Aguilar said she was not as dispirited as many other students like her because she still felt the elation that came after she revealed her illegal status, then traveled to Washington to watch the December vote from the Senate gallery.
"I think losing the shame overshadows the fear," she said. "I'd much rather clarify to the public that being undocumented is just a circumstance I find myself in. I'd much rather have that out in the public than just living in fear."
Immigrant activists say that coming out may have given some protection to student leaders like Ms. Aguilar, since administration officials would prefer to avoid the furor that would follow if one of them was detained. Ms. Aguilar also admits she has not yet had to face some of the hardest consequences of her status. An honors student in her Milwaukee high school, she was accepted to Marquette, a private Jesuit university, on a full tuition scholarship.
After the Senate vote, she said, she is working with an immigrant organization here to build new support for the student bill.
"It failed and we were all like super bummed out," she said. "So we came out of there crying, but defiant. We were like, one day we're going to pass this, don't even worry about it."
That pluck is not shared by José Varible, 19, another illegal immigrant from Mexico, who was brought to the United States at age 9 by his parents. A student in business management at Gateway Technical College, a community college in Kenosha, Wis., Mr. Varible also held a formal coming out ceremony last summer.
Since he is not eligible for any financial aid, Mr. Varible struggles to pay his tuition. He cannot drive, since Wisconsin does not issue licenses without proof of legal United States residence. With a knack for technology hardware, he taught himself to repair computers. But without a Social Security number, he can take only odd jobs doing that work.
Combined with his new exposure as an illegal immigrant, he said, those limitations sometimes sink him into depression. He has even considered moving to Australia.
"You know, the thing is, I just don't feel welcome here," he said. "You cannot live as an undocumented immigrant."
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11) Public-Worker Unions Skip Albany Ad Blitz for New Tactics
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
February 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/nyregion/10unions.html?ref=nyregion
ALBANY - The airwaves are virtually silent. The fiery criticism of years past has given way to conciliatory press releases. And the halls of the Capitol ring not with angry protests but with the quiet hum of lawmakers and lobbyists making their daily rounds.
Faced with devastating budget cuts from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and a deeply hostile electorate, New York's most influential public-employee unions have unexpectedly shifted their strategy for defending cherished government programs and worker benefits. Put off for now are the angry denunciations and millions of dollars of advertisements, chiefly from hospitals and a health care union, that have traditionally begun haunting governors in early February.
Instead, two coalitions of labor unions and their allies are mounting campaigns aimed chiefly at persuading Mr. Cuomo to extend the so-called millionaire's tax, a state surcharge on high-income New Yorkers that is scheduled to expire in December. The tax, which Mr. Cuomo wants to eliminate, could bring in billions of dollars in revenue in the next few years, cushioning cuts to schools and Medicaid.
The labor groups want to reframe a debate that they believe has overemphasized service cuts and cast public workers as selfish and overpaid.
One such group, the Strong Economy for All Coalition, will formally open next week with a $5 million budget, backed by S.E.I.U. 1199, the powerful health care workers' union, and the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City teachers union.
Most of the money will go not to television and radio advertisements, but for canvassing, social media and other organizing efforts intended to bring pressure on lawmakers from their own constituents, drawing in part on lessons the teachers learned from defeating candidates backed by well-financed charter school advocates in the Democratic primary last fall.
"We think the ad wars make people feel disenfranchised from the process," said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers. "We want to do the grass-roots work - training people on speaking to community groups, going to civic associations, block associations, lawmakers. We want the lawmakers to hear from their real constituents, as opposed to the people that usually lobby them."
Indeed, an early radio ad script from the group does not mention Mr. Cuomo at all. Instead, it assails "bankers, brokers and money managers" on Wall Street for collecting record pay and bonuses in the midst of a state fiscal crisis.
Such a message contrasts starkly with past budget-battle advertisements. One memorable advertisement run by 1199 two years ago to protest Medicaid cuts featured a blind Bronx resident asking of former Gov. David A. Paterson, who is himself legally blind, "Why are you doing this to me?"
A second coalition, called Growing Together New York, and joining dozens of labor, environmental and community groups, will focus more directly on opposing Mr. Cuomo's cuts, while also agitating for the extension of the income-tax surcharge. The coalition will be spearheaded by New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness, a liberal advocacy organization whose backers include CSEA, formerly the Civil Service Employees Association, the largest union of state workers, and New York State United Teachers, the statewide teachers' union.
A press release announcing the coalition's formation last week emphasized that it was "not looking for a confrontation with the governor" but instead "a healthy exchange of ideas."
"We're mobilizing, and we have a ground strategy," said Ron Deutsch, executive director of New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness. "We're taking the show out on the road, much as the governor has with his budget."
Mr. Deutsch added, "We want to engage the governor in a dialogue here, and I don't know if an ad war is the way to do that."
Both coalitions argue that the debate over New York's budget crisis has unfairly scapegoated public workers while virtually ignoring the role that Wall Street risk-taking, and the accompanying financial collapse, played. They also say that what Mr. Cuomo has described as an epidemic of overspending is as much a revenue crisis driven by tax cuts for the wealthy from the Pataki era.
The shift in tactics reflects, to some extent, Mr. Cuomo's efforts to both woo and fracture his opponents, hoping to avoid the kind of joint assault from teachers, health workers and state employees' unions that ultimately wore down Mr. Paterson and past governors.
Last week, Mr. Cuomo proposed major cuts to Medicaid, school aid and the state work force, while inviting unions to come to him with their own proposals to save money. At the same time, he has amassed a $5 million war chest of his own, money Mr. Cuomo has said he will spend on advertisements only if he is attacked first. He has helped organize a coalition of business groups, called the Committee to Save New York, with plans to spend at least $10 million this year defending his proposals to cap property taxes and rein in spending.
Mr. Cuomo also struck a deal last summer with the Working Families Party, long a potent attack force for unions on fiscal issues, to appear on their ballot line in exchange for their pledge to support his agenda, including his promise not to raise or impose new taxes. The deal did not prevent them, union officials said, from advocating for an extension of the surcharge, an existing tax.
"We are working right now with the governor's folks on the Medicaid redesign team, and we're hoping to come up with some creative ways to save money," said Kevin Finnegan, the political director for 1199.
Some union officials and their allies say the change in strategy also reflects a recognition that the traditional winter ad wars are not without cost to themselves, both in dollars - 1199 alone has spent as much as $10 million a year out of a joint fund with the Greater New York Hospital Association - and in public relations backlash.
"We have had enormous experience with the old way," said Kenneth E. Raske, president of the hospital association. "The old way leaves a sour taste in our mouth, too. We've seen what happens in the past. We didn't like the process and we didn't like the outcome. You get some restorations, but you still end up with some difficult cuts."
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12) Netherlands could be safe haven for war criminals: leaked memo
By Adri Nieuwhof
The Electronic Intifada
February 8, 2011
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11787.shtml
A leaked secret memorandum from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggests the government is seeking to ensure Israeli and other foreign officials who may be pursued for war crimes can visit the Netherlands without fear of arrest or legal accountability.
The memo, which was leaked to the Dutch television station KRO reveals that Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal sought advice on possibilities for the state to prevent prosecution of foreign government officials who visit the Netherlands ("Minister Rosenthal wil vervolging buitenlandse politici in Nederland tegen gaan," 26 January 2011).
Rosenthal sought advice from the ministry's legal department after Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono canceled his state visit to the Netherlands last October following imminent legal action linked to his alleged role in crimes against humanity. However, it was clear that Yudhoyono could not be prosecuted because of his diplomatic immunity as president.
Rosenthal's request for advice on the matter may have been triggered by concerns about future visits by Israel officials. Several high-ranking Israeli officials have within the past year canceled planned visits to European countries fearing arrest in connection with allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, documented in the UN-commissioned Goldstone report.
In its memo, the Department of Legal Affairs writes that diplomatic immunity is the only guarantee against criminal prosecution. In order to get around this limitation, the memo proposes the option of a new "generic" law to protect foreign politicians from prosecution in the Netherlands.
Another option would be a short-term agreement with a state to grant immunity to a specific person for a limited period. This would carry the publicity risk that "the Netherlands protects a war criminal," the officials who authored the memo wrote.
Yet another possibility the Dutch officials consider is that the state could take over an invitation to a foreign official issued by a private party, thus providing the foreign official with a form of state protection and indicating that such a visit is important to the foreign relations of the Netherlands. Previous court cases have shown, the memo notes, that "judges are sensitive to the argument that the judiciary should exercise restraint in cases that affect foreign relations."
This was "astonishing advice," Menno Kamminga, Professor of international law and director of the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights, told KRO television. "The Netherlands is bound by various treaties to prosecute violators of human rights; you cannot try to evade this unilaterally with a new law," Kamminga said.
A key case that shows the relevance of the potential effect of the foreign ministry memo if its recommendations are implemented, involved legal action by a Palestinian who alleged he was tortured by Danny Ayalon, a former head of the Israeli secret service, and now deputy Israeli foreign minister.
Liesbeth Zegveld, attorney and professor in international humanitarian law, lodged a complaint to the public prosecutor when Ayalon visited the Netherlands at the invitation of the Dutch Zionist group Centre for Documentation and Information on Israel (CIDI) in May 2008.
Zegveld told Radio 1 in the Netherlands: "It was clear that Ayalon had no diplomatic immunity. The public prosecutor was interested in the case but needed to formally ask advice of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the immunity of Ayalon. Although we reminded the ministry that the time was limited, they sent their advice one day after he left the country. Indeed, the advice was that Ayalon had no immunity. That is exactly the atmosphere that breathes from the memo. It all happens behind the scenes." The tactic of using such delays to buy time is described in the memo ("Rosenthal wil vervolging buitenlandse politici in Nederland tegengaan", 27 January 2011).
Zegveld pointed out that under the leaked memo's recommendations, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could have given official cover to CIDI's invitation of Ayalon by inviting him for "a cup of tea at the ministry." Ayalon's visit would thus have become an official visit to the Netherlands, and judges would presumably have deferred to the government in the case of any legal proceeding against him. As Zegveld explained, "This has nothing to do with immunity. It is about influencing the judiciary with means that are not available to the other party. It is contrary to the interest of preventing impunity."
The foreign ministry memo was leaked about three months after a right-wing minority coalition government was installed with the support of the PVV (Party for Freedom) led by Islamophobic demagogue Geert Wilders. Wilders, a staunch supporter of Israel, visited the country in December and voiced support for the views of settler leaders who say Israel should should annex the occupied West Bank and that Jordan should be the Palestinian state.
The coalition negotiated an agreement with Wilders which commits the government to "invest in the relationship with the State of Israel." In this way, Israel received exclusive treatment: it is the only country that is mentioned.
The special relationship with Israel came under the spotlight after the Israeli organization NGO Monitor began a defamation campaign against The Electronic Intifada last November. Dutch Foreign Minister Rosenthal responded immediately with a fierce attack on the Dutch donor organization ICCO for its support to the publication and has since threatened to cut government funding to ICCO and other civil society organizations that deviate from his policies toward Israel.
Articles calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions have been a particular thorn in Rosenthal's side. He told the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant on 11 December 2010 that "We [the government] want to resist Israel bashing, we want to invest in the relationship with Israel."
Moreover, Rosenthal's attack on ICCO is striking because the support of the Dutch government to donor organizations is outside his area of authority. Ben Knapen, Minister of Development Cooperation and a former chief editor of the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, is responsible for funding to organizations like ICCO and has remained silent on the matter.
The leaked foreign ministry legal memo also repeatedly points out the publicity risks of offering protection to suspects of international crimes by stretching possible immunity beyond presidents of states, prime ministers and ministers of foreign affairs.
This means that despite the attacks on their independence from the Dutch government, Dutch civil society and politicians can still send a clear signal to Rosenthal: the Netherlands has to comply with its international obligations to hold alleged suspects of war crimes to account, no matter their origin or the identity of their victims.
Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate.
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13) Mubarak Steps Down, Ceding Power to Military
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, ANTHONY SHADID and ALAN COWELL
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/world/middleeast/12egypt.html?_r=1&hp
CAIRO - President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt resigned his post and turned over all power to the military on Friday, ending his nearly 30 years of autocratic rule and bowing to a historic popular uprising that has transformed politics in Egypt and around the Arab world.
The streets of Cairo exploded in shouts of "God is Great" moments after Mr. Mubarak's vice president and longtime intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, announced during evening prayers that Mr. Mubarak had passed all authority to a council of military leaders.
"Taking into consideration the difficult circumstances the country is going through, President Mohammed Hosni Mubarak has decided to leave the post of president of the republic and has tasked the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to manage the state's affairs," Mr. Suleiman, grave and ashen, said in a brief televised statement.
Even before he had finished speaking, protesters began hugging and cheering, shouting "Egypt is free!" and "You're an Egyptian, lift your head"
"He's finally off our throats," said one protester, Muhammad Insheemy. "Soon, we will bring someone good."
The departure of the 82-year-old Mr. Mubarak, at least initially to his coastal resort home in Sharm el-Sheik, was a pivotal turn in a three-week revolt that has upended one of the Arab's world's most enduring dictatorships. The popular protest, peaceful and resilient despite numerous effort by Mr. Mubarak's legendary security apparatus to suppress it, ultimately deposed an ally of the United States who has been instrumental in implementing American policy in the region for decades.
His departure leaves the military in charge of this nation of 80 million, facing insistent calls for fundamental democratic change and open elections. The military, which has repeatedly promised to respond to the demands of protesters, has little recent experience in directly governing the country. It will have to defuse demonstrations and strikes that have paralyzed the economy and left many of the country's institutions, including state news media and the security forces, in shambles.
Shortly before the announcement of Mr. Mubarak's departure, the military issued a communiqué pledging to carry out a variety of constitutional reforms in a statement remarkable for its commanding tone. The military's statement alluded to the delegation of power to Mr. Suleiman and it suggested that the military would supervise implementation of the reforms.
The military did not indicate whether it intended to take the kinds of fundamental steps toward democracy that protesters have been demanding. This was the second direct statement from the military in two days, and it largely stuck to the main constitutional and electoral reforms that Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Suleiman had promised to implement. It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Suleiman would retain a role, under the military council, in running the country.
State radio reported that Naguib Sawiris, a wealthy and widely respected businessman, has agreed to act as a mediator between the opposition and the authorities in carrying through the political reforms, a development that was cheered by protesters.
In Tahrir Square, the focal point of the uprising, many protesters were overcome with the emotion of achieving their unlikely but determined quest to overthrow Mr. Mubarak. More than an hour after Mr. Suleiman spoke, the din was undiminished, as the celebrants, some in tears, shouted, sang, embraced and chanted. The slogan of the revolution, "The people want to bring down the regime," adopted from Tunisia, became, "The people, at last, have brought down the regime."
Parents were seen putting their children on the tanks to have their photos snapped with the soldiers, while the soldiers reached down to shake hands with the protesters and people chanted, "The people and the army are one hand." In a show of solidarity in at least lower levels of the army, three Egyptian officers shed their weapons and uniforms and joined the protesters.
"Now, we can breathe fresh air, we can feel our freedom," said Dr. Gamal Heshamt, a former member of Parliament and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. "Now we can start to build our country. After 30 years of absence from the world, Egypt is back."
Some people waved Tunisian flags, while young women danced on the hulking remains of burned-out armored personnel carriers.
The Qasr al-Nil bridge, the sight of ugly fighting between the protesters and Mubarak supporters, was crammed from one end to the next with people cheering and chanting, "Egypt! Egypt! Egypt!"
"The Egyptian people are heroes," said Samia Mahmoud, 41, who said he works in the tourist industry in Sharm el-Sheik. "I'm hoping for a new Egypt."
Amr Sayed, 20, who had been in the square for the last 15 days, said simply, "The people wanted to take back their rights, and now they have."
David D. Kirkpatrick and Anthony Shadid reported from Cairo, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Kareem Fahim, Liam Stack, Mona El-Naggar and Thanassis Cambanis from Cairo, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Marquette, Mich.
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14) Avoiding a New Pharaoh
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
February 11, 2011, 11:34 am
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/avoiding-a-new-pharaoh/
So Hosni Mubarak is out. Vice President Omar Suleiman says that Mubarak has stepped down and handed over power to the military. This is a huge triumph for people power, and it will resonate across the Middle East and far beyond (you have to wonder what President Hu Jintao of China is thinking right now). The narrative about how Arab countries are inhospitable for democracy, how the Arab world is incompatible with modernity - that has been shattered by the courage and vision of so many Tunisians and Egyptians.
It's also striking that Egyptians triumphed over their police state without Western help or even moral support. During rigged parliamentary elections, the West barely raised an eyebrow. And when the protests began at Tahrir Square, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the Mubarak government was "stable" and "looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people." Oops. So much for our $80 billion intelligence agency. On my Facebook fan page, I asked my fans (before the Tahrir protests began) what the next Tunisia would be. A surprising number said Egypt - if you were among them, you apparently did better than our intelligence community. Indeed, Egyptians in Tahrir told me that they were broadly inspired by America's example of freedom, but that their greatest inspiration came from Tunisia and Al Jazeera. On Tahrir Square, there were signs saying "Thank you, Tunisia." So, all of you Tunisians and Egyptians, "mabrouk" or "congratulations"! You've made history. The score in Egypt is: People Power, 1; Police State, 0.
But the game isn't over, and now a word of caution. I worry that senior generals may want to keep (with some changes) a Mubarak-style government without Mubarak. In essence the regime may have decided that Mubarak had become a liability and thrown him overboard - without any intention of instituting the kind of broad, meaningful democracy that the public wants. Senior generals have enriched themselves and have a stake in a political and economic structure that is profoundly unfair and oppressive. And remember that the military running things directly really isn't that different from what has been happening: Mubarak's government was a largely military regime (in civilian clothes) even before this. Mubarak, Vice President Suleiman and so many others - including nearly all the governors - are career military men. So if the military now takes over, how different is it?
The military ostensibly played a neutral role in recent weeks, and protesters certainly feel much more sympathetic to the military than to the police. But some elements of the army have been involved in repression of pro-democracy protesters, including arrest and torture. The Guardian noted:
One of those detained by the army was a 23-year-old man who would only give his first name, Ashraf, for fear of again being arrested. He was detained last Friday on the edge of Tahrir Square carrying a box of medical supplies intended for one of the makeshift clinics treating protesters attacked by pro-Mubarak forces....
Ashraf was hauled off to a makeshift army post where his hands were bound behind his back and he was beaten some more before being moved to an area under military control at the back of the museum.
"They put me in a room. An officer came and asked me who was paying me to be against the government. When I said I wanted a better government he hit me across the head and I fell to the floor. Then soldiers started kicking me. One of them kept kicking me between my legs," he said. "They got a bayonet and threatened to rape me with it. Then they waved it between my legs. They said I could die there or I could disappear into prison and no one would ever know. The torture was painful but the idea of disappearing in a military prison was really frightening."
That kind of thing happened to a lot of people, and those millions of brave Egyptians who went to the streets were protesting not just against Mubarak but against the police state as a whole. May Mubarak's resignation mark a milestone toward their goal - and I think it is, but it's not the end of the journey. And let's hope that the United States makes absolutely clear that it stands for full democracy, not just for some kind of false stability that derives from authoritarianism. The Obama administration missed the boat in the last few weeks, but I thought yesterday's speech and statement by President Obama marked an improvement. Let's hope it continues. May Mubarak's resignation mark a new beginning - in Egypt, and also in wiser American policy toward Egypt and the Arab world.
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15) Behind a Push for Parole in Chicago, a Prisoner's Old Neighborhood
By EMMA GRAVES FITZSIMMONS
February 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/us/11chicago.html?ref=us
CHICAGO - At a cafe in the heart of this city's exuberant Puerto Rican community, in the neighborhood of Humboldt Park, a waitress serves up favorites from the island: café con leche, rice and beans and guava pastries. On the counter, a framed photograph of a white-haired man sits next to a stack of petitions calling for his release from prison.
The petitions are posted at more than a dozen businesses in the neighborhood, where the campaign to free 68-year-old Oscar Lopez Rivera has deep and stubborn roots: he is the last remaining member of the radical group known as the F.A.L.N. (Spanish initials for Armed Forces of National Liberation) still in prison among more than a dozen convicted in the 1980s.
Volunteers in the neighborhood, on the city's northwest side, have increased efforts in recent weeks to collect signatures outside train stops, grocery stores and churches.
Mr. Lopez Rivera, who has been in prison for almost 30 years, is viewed by some as a political prisoner and others as an unrepentant terrorist. Since he applied for parole last year, both sides have been lobbying the four-member United States Parole Commission, which is expected to make a decision soon.
The commission has received three large boxes of letters in support of his parole and many calls against it, said Johanna Markind, assistant general counsel for the commission. The response has included passionate requests from prominent leaders, a letter supporting parole from four Puerto Rican members of Congress, and a letter against parole from Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago.
Mr. Lopez Rivera was convicted here in 1981 of numerous charges, including seditious conspiracy, a charge used for those plotting to overthrow the United States government. He was sentenced to 70 years in prison.
President Bill Clinton offered Mr. Lopez Rivera and other members of the F.A.L.N. clemency in 1999, a decision that stirred an emotional debate. Mr. Clinton said their sentences were out of proportion with their offenses.
While 12 prisoners accepted the offer and were freed, Mr. Lopez Rivera rejected the chance to reduce his sentence because it did not include all the group's members, his lawyer, Jan Susler, said. If he had accepted the agreement, she said, he would have been eligible for release in 2009.
In January, a hearing examiner for the Parole Commission recommended that Mr. Lopez Rivera should not be paroled, according to several people who were at the closed hearing.
The F.A.L.N. was involved in more than 100 bombings in New York, Chicago and other cities, according to federal officials. A bombing at Fraunces Tavern in New York in 1975 killed four people, including Frank Connor, a 33-year-old banker.
His son Joseph has been a consistent voice against parole for any members of the F.A.L.N. When Mr. Connor testified at the parole hearing, he said he had hoped that Mr. Lopez Rivera would apologize or show some sense of contrition.
"He wouldn't take responsibility for anything," Mr. Connor said in an interview.
Although Mr. Lopez Rivera was not charged specifically with the Fraunces Tavern bombing, Mr. Connor said that he blames Mr. Lopez Rivera for his father's death because he was a leader of the group that took responsibility for the bombing. Mr. Connor has written about the case for various Web sites and has encouraged friends and family to call the commission.
Ms. Susler said Mr. Lopez Rivera had no involvement in the Fraunces Tavern bombing. "It was very impactful, moving testimony from people who had terrible losses," Ms. Susler said, "but it had nothing to do with Mr. Lopez."
Since the hearing, the National Boricua Human Rights Network, which is active in Puerto Rican issues, said it had gathered more than 4,000 signatures supporting parole in Chicago. The city has the second-largest Puerto Rican community in the country, after New York.
The group has argued that Mr. Lopez Rivera poses no threat to the public and that others who were released have lived productive lives without getting in trouble again. It is an opinion shared by many in Humboldt Park.
On a recent afternoon, the owner of a barbershop in the neighborhood, Reinaldo Oquendo, sat at a table with a group of men playing dominoes.
"I think it is about time they let him out," Mr. Oquendo said without looking up from his game. "Thirty years is a lifetime. Nobody deserves to be in prison for that long."
The parole case still resonates here because his family continues to work in the neighborhood and many here have an interest in Puerto Rican history, "which is very much a part of their lives," said Ana Ramos-Zayas, an associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University who has studied the community.
Many people here knew Mr. Lopez Rivera, who worked as a community organizer in the neighborhood after serving in the Vietnam War. His younger brother Jose Lopez is the longtime executive director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, which runs a day care, an AIDS clinic and a youth center in the neighborhood.
There has been a concerted effort to establish Humboldt Park as a cultural and economic hub for the Puerto Rican community in Chicago, which numbers about 113,000 people, compared with more than 750,000 in New York, according to Census Bureau figures.
Crowds flock to several annual parades and festivals along a portion of Division Street known as Paseo Boricua, where two huge, red and blue steel flags extend over the road at both ends of the business district. The neighborhood is filled with Puerto Rican murals, restaurants, record shops, and bookstores.
Recently, Jose Lopez walked down the street greeting people and checking on the cultural center's many projects. He was particularly excited about the opening this spring of a new Institute of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture in the neighborhood.
Mr. Lopez said that his brother's absence had taken a great toll on his family. Their parents and a sister have died while he was in prison.
"It is a continual punishment for our family not to have Oscar here for these moments," he said.
Mr. Lopez Rivera still believes in Puerto Rican independence but he does not talk about the F.A.L.N., his lawyer said. At the federal prison holding him, in Terre Haute, Ind., he spends his days reading about current events, working as an orderly, and painting scenes of Puerto Rican life and leftist leaders like Fidel Castro. He sells them online to benefit the National Boricua Human Rights Network.
He could remain in prison for 15 more years if the commission denies his request for parole. But if Mr. Lopez Rivera is released, there is likely to be another celebratory rally in Humboldt Park as there has been for prisoners in the past.
Epifanio Velez, who opened a restaurant on Paseo Boricua four years ago, is looking forward to his return.
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16) Privately, Public Employees See Cuts as Inevitable
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
February 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/nyregion/11publicworkers.html?ref=nyregion
UNION, N.J. - The meeting of the public-workers' union had ended, the rallying cries about hostile lawmakers and ominous contract deadlines had given way to a buffet dinner.
Sitting down to eat, Andrea Douglas, a claims representative for the State of New Jersey for the past 10 years, quietly conceded what few union leaders say aloud: Government workers have to give up some of their benefits. "I'm a realist," Ms. Douglas said. "The private sector is looking at us, and we do look good. I know we'll have to give. Everybody else is asking, 'How am I going to pay rent?' "
Around the table, fellow workers stared, taken aback by her talk of concessions.
"You don't see it coming?" she said to them. "We're going to have to give. I'm more than willing to pay more to support my benefits. But you can't ask me to give so much that I can't afford to live. At least negotiate with me on that."
Public-sector workers these days are under assault, their hard-won salaries and benefits depicted as drains on the body politic. Labor unions have responded angrily to that sort of talk, pledging to fight to keep what is theirs.
But in interviews and discussions among themselves, public employees express more complicated feelings. The police officers, teachers and workers are struggling with anger and fear. But many also acknowledge that the world they have known and the assumptions they have built their lives on are crumbling before their eyes.
Nowhere has the environment for public workers been more stinging than in New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Christie has earned folk-hero status for his aggressive antiunion posture. And the public has responded: a Quinnipiac University poll released on Thursday showed voters here favored by wide margins wage freezes, furloughs and pension cuts for those on the state payroll.
To be sure, unions have won many victories over the years: current state workers contribute only 1.5 percent of their pay for health care, for example. Mr. Christie wants them to pay 30 percent of the cost of their insurance.
Straining the conversations among neighbors and in bars, breakfast joints and bowling alleys is the growing rift between government workers and their brethren in the building trades: under-employed laborers, carpenters, ironworkers and others who no longer see the powerful public-sector unions as allies.
"It goes back to the idea of divide and conquer," said Calvin McCullars, a disability-claims processor for 22 years. "A few years ago, nobody really cared about state workers. And now, since the economy went bad, other people are getting laid off, and everybody's attacking us like we're doing something wrong. We're getting picked on, like a scapegoat."
William Elliott, a state revenue agent, said people seemed to have forgotten that Wall Street greed and deregulation caused the financial meltdown, not working people. "I feel like the public is being played," he said. "I remember hearing someone say, 'Why waste a perfect crisis to advance your cause?' "
As others filtered out into the icy night, Naomi Monroe, a principal clerk for the Board of Nursing, lingered. She said she was eligible to retire but recently learned that she needed to work another five years to be able to live on her pension.
"The way things are going now, I'll probably have to look for another job," Ms. Monroe said. "I keep praying they'll lay me off, because I'll make more on unemployment than working, and then at least I can go to school to learn something new."
Thanks to earlier cuts, people calling her office sometimes have to be put on hold, she said, and at least two or three erupt each day over the delay. "They're yelling and screaming about how lazy public workers are," she said. "When I came here, I had hypertension. I've been carried out by ambulance before. It's so stressful."
A few miles from the State House at JoJo's Tavern in Hamilton, N.J., an always-crowded gathering place, the pizza is thin-crusted but the atmosphere is thick with griping and dread.
Robert Haupt, a retired electrician, was a member of a union, but he has issues with state workers. "I object to them squawking about getting the day off after Thanksgiving with pay," he said, referring to a perk the governor tried but failed to revoke. "They can bank sick days to the point where they can leave work two years ahead of time. I never had that privilege. If I didn't get work, I didn't get paid."
But across the bar, Tim Connery, 59, a middle-school music teacher, shared his own fears for the future with Wayne Lonabaugh, a retired colleague. Mr. Lonabaugh remembered the calculations he made starting out.
"I only made $4,200 a year, but older people said, the pension is the big thing," Mr. Lonabaugh said. "So I had two jobs. I worked in a cement plant. But I got my pension."
"I got 38 years in," Mr. Connery said softly over his drink. "But everything's up in the air. They're taking 10 percent out of the principal every year to pay existing retirees. I'm worried that it won't be there for me."
The two said that they had always accepted earning less than they might have made in another job, partly because the benefits were so good. Mr. Lonabaugh, who taught math and science for 35 years, now enjoys free health insurance. "Twenty-five years ago, a Democrat told me, 'You'll never get free health for retirees, because it would bankrupt the state,' " Mr. Lonabaugh, a Republican, said with a slightly rueful smile. "And we got it. And he was right."
George Dzurkoc, a detective who leads the police officers' union in Trenton, was at the next bar stool with his fiancée, talking about his struggles to calm his fellow officers' anxieties. "It's horrible," he said. "You have people's lives hanging in the balance, and you can't give them answers. They ask me every day: 'Are they laying us off?' "
Mr. Dzurkoc did not take issue with the governor's measure that caps property taxes, but said there were better ways to cut costs. "Do we need two-day-a-week garbage pickup in the wintertime?" he said. "Do we need 500-plus school districts and superintendents? The problem is no one wants to give up their own fiefdoms."
Down the block, where retirees gather at Fred & Pete's delicatessen, the easy banter now gives way to serious concerns.
"Teachers are being downgraded," said Joan Schutts, who gave up her kindergarten class eight years ago. "My daughter's a middle-school teacher now, and she's hearing things from people. Even from children: 'You're making too much money.' "
Mrs. Schutts's husband, Richard, a retired utility worker, said that politicians who took fiscal shortcuts like skipping payments into New Jersey's pension system created the crisis.
"And nobody wants the solution to come out of their pocket," he said. "It's that simple."
"I don't feel that way," said their friend Bettie Herzstein, who retired from teaching elementary school in 2004. "Do it to me, but do it evenly to everybody."
Ms. Herzstein said she was willing to pay for part of her health care. "I think that's only fair. But somebody has to do something to the medical profession, too," she said. "My husband and I were just recently in the hospital. One test, just for the doctor to read the test, was $2,400. And my bill for two weeks in the hospital was $100,000." Her share of that? "Not a penny," she said. "Thank God for the teachers' union."
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17) As India Thrives, Its People Remain Hungry
By VIKAS BAJAJ
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/business/global/12food.html?ref=business
BAMNOD, INDIA - The 50-year-old farmer knew from experience that his onion crop was doomed when torrential rains pounded his fields throughout September, a month when the Indian monsoon normally peters out.
For lack of modern agricultural systems in this part of rural India, his land does not have adequate drainage trenches, and he has no safe, dry place to store onions. The farmer, Arun Namder Talele, said he had lost 70 percent of the onion crop on his two-hectare, or five-acre, farm here, about 150 kilometers, or 95 miles, north of the western city of Aurangabad.
"There are no limits to my losses," Mr. Talele said.
Mr. Talele's misfortune, like that of many other farmers, is a grim reminder of a persistent fact: India, despite its ambitions as an emerging economic giant, still struggles to feed its 1.1 billion people.
Four decades after the Green Revolution had seemed to be solving the country's food problems, nearly half of Indian children 5 years old or younger are malnourished. And soaring food prices, a problem around the world, are especially troubling in India.
Globally, floods in Australia and drought in China have helped send food prices soaring everywhere, on fears that the world will see a repeat of the shortages of 2007 and 2008 that caused food riots in some poor countries, including Egypt.
While India's agricultural problems are part of this bigger global picture, in many ways its food challenges are more entrenched and systemic than those faced elsewhere.
Western investors may take eager note of India's economic growth rate of nearly 9 percent a year. But that statistic rings hollow in its vast rural areas. Agriculture employs more than half the population, but it accounts for only 15 percent of the economy - and it has grown an average of only about 3 percent annually in recent years.
Critics say Indian policy makers have failed to follow up on the country's investments in agricultural technology of the 1960s and '70s; they have focused on more glamorous, urban industries like information technology, financial services and construction.
There is no agribusiness of the type known in the United States, with highly mechanized farms growing thousands of hectares of food crops, because Indian laws and customs bar corporations from farming land directly for food crops, and they make it difficult to assemble large land holdings.
Yet, even with India's farming still dependent on manual labor and the age-old vicissitudes of nature, demand for food has continued to rise, driven by a growing population and rising incomes, especially in the middle and upper classes. As a result, India is importing ever greater amounts of staples like beans and lentils (up 157 percent from 2004 to 2009) and cooking oil (up 68 percent in the same period).
Food prices are rising faster in India than in almost any other major economy, faster than they did during the 2007-8 surge.
In December 2010, food prices in India had jumped 13.7 percent from the level of a year earlier, while the inflation rate for all commodities - heavily weighted by the food number - stood at 8.4 percent.
A snapshot number released in mid-January showed Indian food prices rising even faster - more than 17 percent over the same period in 2010 - as the cost of onions, fruit, eggs, milk and other commodities rose.
Food inflation hits especially hard in India because Indians, most of whom live on less than $2 a day, spend a bigger portion of their disposable incomes on food than people in other big developing economies like China and Brazil.
"This is the worst form of taxation on the poorest of the poor," said Ashok Gulati, Asia director for the International Food Policy Research Institute, based in Washington.
Indian government officials have scrambled to make up the shortage of vegetables like onions by importing them. These short-term efforts have helped: Onions are now available at 20 rupees a kilogram, or about 20 cents a pound, in Mumbai, down more than 70 percent from their recent highs.
But experts say the widening gap between agriculture's anemic supply and the demand for food calls for fundamental changes in farming policies.
During the Green Revolution, the government invested heavily in rural agriculture, with an emphasis on hybrid seeds, fertilizers and irrigation canals.
More recent policy makers have not built on that early success. Most Indian farmers still do not have irrigation systems, and waste and inefficiency have severely depleted precious groundwater.
Although many farmers have access to free or subsidized electricity that can be used to pump water, few receive power for more than a few hours a day. Mr. Talele, the farmer in Bamnod, gets electricity for only four hours during the day and four hours at night. During those periods, he pumps well water with which he floods into his fields, because he cannot afford the sprinklers or drip irrigation that would more efficiently and effectively water his crops.
And rural India has far too few temperature-controlled warehouses that could help farmers and the nation build up reserves as a hedge against poor growing seasons.
When Mr. Talele's vegetables are ready for harvest, he immediately takes them to wholesale markets, which are controlled by committees of local traders. "Whatever the market decides, that's the price we get," he said.
Indian officials acknowledge that the country needs to increase investment in irrigation, encourage competition in wholesale and retail markets and provide specific food subsidies for the poor. And they also have to provide more education and jobs for villagers, so fewer people must live off the land.
Experts say India needs to make changes like some of those China made beginning in the late 1970s, when it started investing heavily in agriculture and eased regulations on farming.
As recently as 1977, Chinese and Indian farmers harvested about the same amount of wheat for each hectare they planted. But by 2009, U.N. data show, wheat yields in China were 1.7 times as high as those in India.
Kaushik Basu, a professor at Cornell University in upstate New York who is also the chief economic adviser to India's finance minister, says he now sees more willingness on the part of Indian officials to overhaul agriculture policies.
But outside experts like Mr. Gulati are skeptical that real change will come from the government. The governing coalition has been hobbled by corruption scandals, and an energized opposition effectively blocked proceedings in Parliament last year.
Some Indian farmers are investing on their own, finding ways to circumvent the government when necessary and using subsidies when they are available.
About 50 kilometers from Mr. Talele's farm in the village of Pahur, Sandeep Ram Karshanbakr has seen his yearly income from farming jump to 200,000 rupees, or about $4,400, from 80,000 rupees three years ago. He credits his fortune to a drip-irrigation system he bought from an Indian company, Jain Irrigation.
The government paid half the 128,000-rupee cost of the system. That has cut the amount of water and electricity Mr. Karshanbakr uses by about half on his 1.2 hectares, while improving yields twofold to fivefold for his crops of chilis, cauliflower, eggplant, tomatoes and cotton.
Mr. Karshanbakr says he is considering buying or leasing more land. But many farmers, like Mr. Talele, say they simply cannot afford such irrigation equipment, even with government subsidies that are as high as 50 percent of the sticker price. "It's still too expensive," he said.
Anil Jain, managing director at Jain Irrigation, said India needed to help farmers like Mr. Talele invest. "Agriculture can grow at 6 to 8 percent," he said. "But we have to create opportunity and income in rural areas."
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18) Military Offers Assurances to Egypt and Neighbors
By KAREEM FAHIM and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
February 12, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/world/middleeast/13egypt.html?_r=1&hp
CAIRO - As a new era dawned in Egypt on Saturday, the army leadership sought to reassure Egyptians and the world that it would shepherd a transition to civilian rule and honor international commitments like its peace treaty with Israel.
Exultant and exhausted opposition leaders claimed their role in the country's future, pressing the army to lift the country's emergency law and saying no negotiations with the military had yet begun. They vowed to return to Tahrir Square next week to honor those who died in the 18-day uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak after nearly 30 years of authoritarian rule.
In an announcement broadcast on state television, an army spokesman said that Egypt would continue to abide by all its international and regional treaties and that the current civilian leadership would manage the country's affairs until the formation of a new government.
The army spokesman said a "peaceful transition of power" would "allow an elected civilian power to rule the country." But the he did not discuss a timetable for any transfer of power.
A wary opposition stood its ground, even as disagreements surfaced over whether to leave Tahrir Square, the center of the revolution. And the impact of Egypt's uprising rippled across the Arab world, as protesters turned out in Algeria, where the police arrested leading organizers, and in Yemen, where pro-government forces beat demonstrators with clubs. In Tunisia, which inspired Egypt's uprising, hundreds demonstrated to cheer Mr. Mubarak's ouster.
In Tahrir Square, some members of the movement that toppled Mr. Mubarak vowed to continue their protests, saying that all their demands had not yet been met, including an end to the emergency law that allows detention without charges, and the release of political prisoners. About 50 of them stood in the square on Saturday morning, as the military removed barricades on the periphery.
But the uprising's leading organizers, speaking at a news conference in central Cairo, asked protesters to leave the square.
The group, the Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution, which includes members of the April 6 Youth Movement, the Muslim Brotherhood Youth and young supporters of Mohamed ElBaradei, a prominent opposition figure, said it had not yet talked with the military and that on Sunday it would lay out a road map for a transitional government.
The coalition said that Ahmed Zewail, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and other respected figures would work as intermediaries between the youth group and the military.
"The power of the people changed the regime," said Gehan Shaaban, a spokeswoman. "But we shouldn't trust the army. We should trust ourselves, the people of Egypt." .
There were signs that not all the protesters were willing to give up. During the news conference, a protester said: "We should all head to Tahrir and stay there, until we ourselves are sure that everything is going as planned. The government of Ahmed Shafiq has to go!" Mr. Shafiq is the prime minister. The news conference ended soon afterward.
The army spokesman called on citizens to cooperate with the police, after weeks of civil strife, and urged a force stained by accusations of abuse and torture to be mindful of the department's new slogan: "The police in the service of the people."
Earlier, the defense minister, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, tried to drive to Tahrir Square, according to a paratrooper stationed in the square. But he did not leave his car.
In the rest of Cairo citizens measured their new reality with humor, mild arguments and celebrations. The official state press gave a measure of how much things had changed.
"The People Toppled the Government" read the headline in Al Ahram, the flagship state-owned national newspaper and former government mouthpiece, borrowing a line from the protest movement. Another article noted that Switzerland had frozen the assets of Mr. Mubarak his aides.
On state television, which for weeks depicted the protesters as a violent mob of foreigners, an anchor spoke of the "youth revolution."
In Tahrir Square thousand of volunteers who brought their own brooms or cleaning supplies, swept streets and scrubbed graffiti from nearby buildings. On the streets surrounding the square, the celebrations from the night before continued, spurred on by honking drivers.
Traffic jams around the city, caused by the protests, persisted. A driver stuck in a traffic yelled: "The revolution has to do something about this."
The president's departure, for Sharm el Sheik, seemed for some to have stripped the country's pressing political problems of some of their urgency. Mr. ElBaradei's brother, Ali ElBaradei, said Mohamed ElBaradei was taking the day off and had not been contacted by the military. "They will call when they call," he said.
Amr Hamzawy, who has acted as a mediator between the protesters and the government, said that "everyone is taking a break," though he expressed concern with the vague nature of the army's most recent statements.
"What is the timeline we are looking at?" he said. "Is it September?" He also said it was unclear whether the army council ruling the country favored amending the Constitution or starting from scratch, which is the preferred solution for many of the protesters.
There was also no clear sign from the military about whether it intended to abolish Parliament, Mr. Hamzawy said, adding that so far the military's tone had been "very, very positive."
Much of the confusion was caused by the way Mr. Mubarak left, he said. "He was trying very hard to stay in office, and he played his last card" by delegating authority to Vice President Omar Suleiman, he said. "It badly failed, and they pushed him out."
Reporting was contributed by Anthony Shadid, Mona El-Naggar and Liam Stack from Cairo, and Thomas Fuller from Tunis.
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19) When Democracy Weakens
By BOB HERBERT
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12herbert.html?hp
As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn't help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it's on the ropes. We're in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.
While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn't really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.
So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can't afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.
The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president's re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won't be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They'll be genuflecting before the very rich.
In an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John Kerry said that the Egyptian people "have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities." Americans are being asked to swallow exactly the opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.
The corporate and financial elites threw astounding sums of money into campaign contributions and high-priced lobbyists and think tanks and media buys and anything else they could think of. They wined and dined powerful leaders of both parties. They flew them on private jets and wooed them with golf outings and lavish vacations and gave them high-paying jobs as lobbyists the moment they left the government. All that money was well spent. The investments paid off big time.
As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their book, "Winner-Take-All Politics": "Step by step and debate by debate, America's public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many."
As if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight enough, the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens United decision, which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming power of corporate money in politics. Ordinary Americans have no real access to the corridors of power, but you can bet your last Lotto ticket that your elected officials are listening when the corporate money speaks.
When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.
As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, "The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry - especially environmental regulation." (A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)
It's a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little. What the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?
The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that's a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.
I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. "If there is going to be change," he said, "real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves."
I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.
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20) Uncharted Ground After End of Egypt's Regime
"'The sun will rise on a more beautiful Egypt,' one protester said. Or, as a joke traded by cellphone on Friday put it: 'From Tahrir Square to our brothers in fellow countries ... is there anyone who has a president bothering them?'"
By ANTHONY SHADID
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/world/middleeast/12revolution.html?hp
CAIRO - One revolution ended Friday. Another may soon begin.
In a moment that may prove as decisive to the Middle East as the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, 18 days of protest hurtled Egypt once again to the forefront of politics in the Middle East. In the uprising's ambition, young protesters, savvy with technology and more organized than their rulers, began to rewrite the formula that has underpinned an American-backed order: the nation in the service of a strongman.
The ecstatic moments of triumph in Tahrir Square seemed to wash away a lifetime of defeats and humiliations, invasions and occupations that, in the weeks before the revolution, had seemed to mark the bitterest time for both Egypt and the Arab world.
"The sun will rise on a more beautiful Egypt," one protester said. Or, as a joke traded by cellphone on Friday put it: "From Tahrir Square to our brothers in fellow countries ... is there anyone who has a president bothering them?"
But in the gray light of dawn, Egypt will face the meaning of its revolution, as will an Arab world that shares its demographic of a younger generation taking the stage, posing challenges as myriad as Mr. Mubarak's departure was singular.
The months and years ahead will determine whether the fervor and community of Tahrir Square can translate into a new notion of citizenship, a truce between the state and Islamists and the curbing of the entrenched power of militaries, the police and suffocating bureaucracies that have failed to deliver young people a better life in an Arab world that is becoming ever younger. "It's not the end," said Nadia Magdy, a protester in the square. "It's the beginning."
The beginning was as stunning a moment as the Arab world has witnessed, written in the smallest acts of citizenship and the grandest gestures of defiance. From the first day, Tahrir Square represented a model of people seizing the initiative from a hapless government, be it cleaning the streets or running their own security. The very acts seemed an antidote to decades of autocracy, stagnation and festering resentment over their own powerlessness. "We've discovered ourselves," said one of the organizers, Wael Khalil.
As revelatory was a new form of politics, the protests of the long-derided Arab street, where dutiful crowds were trotted out at the whim of dictators in Syria and Iraq or deployed by the sheer organizational skills of Islamist movements like Lebanon's Hezbollah. Egypt's revolt was by no means spontaneous - propelled by new media like Facebook and the potency of Al Jazeera's broadcasts - but the spark of Tunisia's uprising became the flame of Egypt's revolt.
Even the slogan - "The people want the fall of the regime" - was borrowed from the Tunisian protests. So was the idea. "Islam is the solution," goes the hackneyed slogan of Islamic activists. Protesters in Cairo offered an alternative: "Tunisia is the solution," and it articulated an indigenous vocabulary, free of the baggage of an American invasion, that put forth resonant calls for an end to corruption, a better standard of living, the respect of rulers and a notion of dignity.
"This is a historic moment in the Arab world: An Arab leader stepping down under the pressure of his people," said Khaled Dakheel, a writer and columnist in Saudi Arabia. "What is happening is telling the people that there is something they can do."
Protesters in Cairo were blunter. One leader had fallen, but some worried about a military that sought to claim the mantle of the revolution even as it remained a bulwark of the old order. Asked what they would do if it imposed its own brand of rule, Ahmed Sleem, an organizer with an opposition group led by Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate, said simply, "We know the way to Tahrir Square."
Egypt's revolution earned many names in 18 days: Revolution of the Youth, of the People, of Anger, of Freedom, of the Hungry, and most poetically, the Revolution of Light. In the end, it was called the January 25 Revolution, the date of the first protest. In that, it was a departure from another revolution, that of July 26, when Gamal Abdel Nasser and fellow officers seized power from a decadent king and mobilized Egypt for wars with Israel. It evolved into something far less ambitious: a mantra of security and stability, in which Egyptians and many Arabs were forced to give up their rights.
Even in his very last days, Mr. Mubarak understood the conflict in those terms; in his last speech to the nation, he spoke of security and stability 10 times. The protesters in Cairo wrecked the regional formula, though their ambitions have yet to offer a paradigm to replace it. "Leaders in the Arab world are weaker now," said Sadiq al-Azm, a prominent Syrian thinker and writer.
Whatever order emerges will almost certainly be less favorable to Israel and the United States, both symbols to many protesters of Egyptian subservience. It was no coincidence that the most outspoken proponents of Mr. Mubarak's rule were Israel and Saudi Arabia who, with Egypt, formed the spine of American dominance in the region. Nor will economic reforms of the kind mandated by the International Monetary Fund make headway in a country that blames them for creating a class of crony capitalists.
But a defining trait of Egypt's revolution was the way it looked inward at a country whose stagnation rankled even more than the petty humiliations of the police and the prisons that held thousands without charge. Democracy was the cry on Friday in Tahrir Square, a way to rejuvenation, even as some acknowledged that the unity that created one of the most remarkable tableaus in Egyptian history could splinter as it faces a transition that remained opaque.
"I'm dead scared," said Yasmine Gharabli, a protester in the square, punctuated by cries for civilian, not military government. "I can't believe the power of the people but we have to work so hard now and make sure it goes the way we want it to go."
Egypt's military struck the right note in its communiqués. A spokesman even raised his hand in salute as he praised the youths killed in the revolution. But like the bureaucracy, utterly incapable of meeting the demands of a city of 18 million, the military remains an entrenched institution, itself a symbol of the array of interests - from tribes in Jordan, a ruling minority in Syria and ruling families in the gulf - that may offer up some reform, as Bahrain and Yemen's leaders have, to defuse radical change.
"Those who are wise among the Arab regimes would introduce serious and quick reforms right away before uprisings and revolutions sweep them away," said Najeeb Rajab, a prominent human rights activist in Bahrain.
Few believe that the revolution will represent the kind of moment that Eastern Europe experienced in 1989. The Arab world, ruled by monarchies, republics and something in between, has too many different ideologies and disparate histories. Of all Arab countries, Tunisia and Egypt have the strongest sense of national identity, a cohesiveness that helped their revolutions coalesce so quickly. Neither had a military that would brutally crush dissent (as in Syria), or the ability to play off populations against each other (as in Jordan) or even the money to pay people to stay quiet (as in the gulf).
It does have the Muslim Brotherhood, though, and the way Egypt's transition brings the Islamic group formally into politics for the first time in nearly 60 years may chart a way forward for states that have long used the threat of Islamists to forestall democratic reform. Its role remains a pressing question so far unanswered in the Middle East: How to reconcile individual rights with religious identity in devout countries.
There are few examples of success in the Arab world. Nominally democratic places like Iraq and Lebanon are beholden to sectarian allegiances so visceral they promote toxic divisions. These past weeks, Egypt defied those narrower identities, bringing Islamic activists into the arena with the most secular. Many said their work together helped dispel clichés about each other. But protests rallying around one demand pale before the task of building a state. Some have looked to Turkey, a Muslim country that many Islamic activists consider a success in bringing religiously inspired parties into the political mainstream.
"I think the most important challenge for Egypt the next few years is how to build a new civil culture," said Hanna Grace, an opposition leader. "Not military, not religious, but a civil culture. How do you build a secular modern state for religious people?"
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Egypt's revolution, though, will prove its most intangible: a sense of pride. After the 1967 war, Nizar Qabbani, a renowned Arab poet, wrote, "Our shouting is louder than our actions, our swords are taller than us. This is our tragedy." On Friday night in Tahrir Square, the song of a contemporary, the Egyptian icon Abdel-Halim Hafez, blared from the speakers. Everyone nearby shouted the chorus.
"You rose up, oh Egypt. And after patience and the night came victory," it went. "Egypt, you rose up, and your son succeeded and he waved your flag high."
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21) Obama to Propose Cuts as Opening Bid in Budget Showdown
By JACKIE CALMES
February 12, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/us/politics/13budget.html?hp
WASHINGTON - President Obama said on Saturday that the budget he will propose on Monday would help the government, now running annual deficits averaging $1 trillion, start to "live within its means." Its proposed spending cuts will be his opening bid in the year's fiscal showdown with newly empowered Congressional Republicans.
"After a decade of rising deficits, this budget asks Washington to live within its means, while at the same time investing in our future," Mr. Obama said in his weekly national address. "It cuts what we can't afford to pay for what we cannot do without. That's what families do in hard times."
The budget for the 2012 fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1, will call for greater deficit reduction over the coming decade than Mr. Obama proposed last year and certainly than in his first budget, when the economy was in the depths of the worst recession in eight decades. As such, the budget will reflect his midterm shift from a focus on stimulus spending and tax cuts in his first two years to budget-cutting as the economy picks up steam.
Mr. Obama's third annual budget also reflects the political pressure he confronts from a new House Republican majority that is dedicated to slashing domestic spending far more. But the administration readily concedes, even boasts, that the president will not win any race to outcut House Republicans.
The Republicans are trying to strip up to $100 billion from domestic spending in the current fiscal year - nearly a quarter of the limited budget segment they have singled out - before they begin drafting their own budget for the 2012 fiscal year.
To frame the year's budget debate, Mr. Obama has been arguing for weeks that such deep cuts could threaten the recovery and that the economy's growth and competitiveness demand some spending increases, as he is proposing, in programs for education, infrastructure, innovation and research.
The administration also contends that its 10-year plan would leave the country in better overall fiscal health than the path envisioned by Congressional Republicans. They would maintain the Bush-era tax cuts after 2012, repeal the cost-saving provisions of the health care law and exempt the military from spending cuts even as they rip domestic spending.
While Mr. Obama will also reduce military spending and some health program costs, neither he nor the Republicans are tackling the unsustainable long-term growth of entitlement programs like Medicare or proposing to raise significant revenues - as most budget analysts and bipartisan debt-reduction panels, including the one Mr. Obama created last year, have said are essential.
The president's budget will reflect the five-year domestic spending freeze, through the 2015 fiscal year, that he proposed last month in his State of the Union address to save an estimated $400 billion over the coming decade.
In the Republican response to Mr. Obama's national address on Saturday, Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah disparaged that approach. "The president's proposal for a freeze in government spending might give the White House a nice talking point," he said. "But it is a totally inadequate solution to our nation's spending problems."
But Mr. Obama would propose deeper cuts in some programs, including many that he supported in the past - like energy aid for low-income families, community services and development grants and assistance to restore the Great Lakes - to make room for the spending increases he wants in education, research and infrastructure.
While the Pentagon is not subject to the freeze, Mr. Obama's budget reduces the department's previous spending plans by $78 billion over five years. It would cut several weaponry programs guarded by the individual armed services and their patrons in Congress, including a Joint Strike Fighter engine and a Marine expeditionary vehicle. Separately, projected war costs are declining because of the reduction of troop levels in Iraq.
Together, Mr. Obama's budget and House Republicans' early moves suggest that at least for the coming fiscal year, overall nonsecurity spending is likely to be cut somewhat below the president's proposal to freeze it at last year's levels.
Even if House Republicans bridged their evident differences over their larger spending cuts package, it would not survive opposition from Mr. Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate. Over time, the budget history of past decades suggests that neither side could sustain the cuts each is proposing in so-called nonsecurity discretionary spending, which is just over a tenth of the federal budget but covers most government programs from air traffic control to national parks and cancer research.
Typically, nonsecurity discretionary spending has grown faster than inflation, but not nearly as fast as the much bigger programs whose costs are driving projections of federal debt to dangerous levels in coming decades: the military; the entitlement programs Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; and interest on the debt.
In his Saturday address, Mr. Obama said his freeze would reduce nonsecurity domestic spending, measured against the size of the economy, to the lowest level since President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961. Separately, he has said Republicans should work with him on a compromise to rein in future entitlement spending and to overhaul the tax code.
Mr. Obama's budget will incorporate some ideas from the bipartisan debt-reduction commission he created last year, but he will stop far short of embracing the commission majority's overall recommendation for a comprehensive overhaul of all spending and taxes to save $4 trillion over 10 years.
That caution reflects a scaling back of the fiscal-reformist ambitions Mr. Obama brought to office, because of resistance in both parties. For example, Mr. Obama considered proposing changes in Social Security to make it solvent over 75 years, but Congressional Democrats objected.
Yet even some deficit hawks are sympathetic to the president's caution, given the likelihood that at least for now House Republicans would reject any such compromise.
"In this highly partisan environment, if the president proposes something, there is automatically some group that is opposed," said Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. "It may be better for him to play the role of referee."
"To get a result," Mr. Conrad added, "the president has got to be part of a larger process that involves Republicans and Democrats, House and Senate. How one gets to the table is not just one move, it's a series of moves. And it's very, very difficult."
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22) It Ain't Just Mubarak -- 7 of the Worst Dictators the U.S. Is Backing to the Hilt
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on February 5, 2011, Printed on February 12, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149805/
Embattled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, whose regime has received billions in U.S. aid, has been in the global media spotlight of late. He's long been "our bastard," but he's not alone.
Let's take a look at the other dictators from around the planet who are fortunate enough to be on Uncle Sam's good side.
1. Paul Biya, Cameroon
Biya has ruled Cameroon since winning an "election" in 1983. He was the only candidate, and did pretty well, getting 99 percent of the vote.
According to the country's Wikipedia entry, "The United States and Cameroon work together in the United Nations and a number of other multilateral organizations. While in the UN Security Council in 2002, Cameroon worked closely with the United States on a number of initiatives. The U.S. government continues to provide substantial funding for international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, and African Development Bank, that provide financial and other assistance to Cameroon."
Amnesty International details unlawful executions, journalists being thrown in jail and a host of other nasty business.
As part of a strategy to stifle opposition, the authorities perpetrated or condoned human rights violations including arbitrary arrests, unlawful detentions and restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. Human rights defenders and journalists were harassed and threatened. Men and women were detained because of their sexual orientation.
2. Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov (or Berdymukhamedov), Turkmenistan
Berdymuhammedov came to power in 2006 when his predecessor died and the constitutionally mandated successor was thrown in jail.
According to the State Department, "For several years in the 1990s, Turkmenistan was a key player in the U.S. Caspian Basin Energy Initiative, which sought to facilitate negotiations between commercial partners and the Governments of Turkmenistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey to build a pipeline under the Caspian Sea and export Turkmen gas to the Turkish domestic energy market and beyond--the so-called Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline (TCGP)." Parade Magazine's list of the world's worst dictators notes that "the U.S. continues to import oil from Turkmenistan ($100 million worth in 2008), while Boeing provides airplanes to the Turkmen government. Chevron ... opened an office in Turkmenistan's capital, Ashgabat."
Human Rights Watch says that while Berdymuhammedov has taken some steps "to reverse some of the most ruinous social policies" of his predecessor's rule, "the government remains one of the most repressive and authoritarian in the world."
3. Teodoro Obiang Nguema, Equatorial Guinea
Thirty-two years ago, Obiang Nguema deposed - and then executed -- his uncle, Francisco Macías, in a bloody coup. Peter Maas called him not only "Africa's worst dictator," but a man whose life "seems a parody of the dictator genre."
Obiang ... had promised to be kinder and gentler than his predecessor, but in the 1990s, even the U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea received a death threat from a regime insider, the ambassador has said, and had to be evacuated. Not long after that, offshore oil was discovered, but the first wave of revenues-about $700 million-was transferred into secret accounts under Obiang's personal control.
According to Parade, "The U.S. imported more than $3 billion in petroleum products from Equatorial Guinea" in 2008.
4. Idriss Deby, Chad
We also imported $3 billion worth of oil from Chad that year. According to the State Department, "The United States enjoys cordial relations with the Deby government. Chad has proved a valuable partner in the global war on terror, and in providing shelter to approximately 200,000 refugees of Sudan's Darfur crisis along its eastern border."
Amnesty International's 2010 report on Chad paints quite a picture:
Civilians and humanitarian workers were killed and abducted; women and girls were victims of rape and other violence; and children were used as soldiers. The authorities failed to take adequate action to protect civilians from attacks by bandits and armed groups. Suspected political opponents were unlawfully arrested, arbitrarily detained and tortured or otherwise ill-treated. Harassment and intimidation of journalists and human rights defenders continued. Demolition of houses and other structures continued throughout 2009, leaving thousands of people homeless.
Despite the fact that Chad's military has been accused of using child soldiers, Parade notes that "the U.S. continues to train Chadian commandos."
5. Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan
The thing that makes Karimov so special is his (alleged) penchant for boiling his political opponents to death.
Karimov has been president of Uzbekistan since 1990, when he won the first of a number of rigged elections by a huge margin. Torture, arbitrary detentions and massive roundups of religious minorities are commonplace in Uzbekistan, according to Human Rights Watch. But the country has been a key partner of the U.S. in its "war on terror," hosting U.S. troops at the Karshi-Khanabad airbase until 2005. Relations cooled somewhat after Karimov encouraged the U.S. to abandon the base, but as Parade notes, "U.S. trade with Uzbekistan doubled in 2008, as Americans continue to import huge amounts of Uzbek uranium, which is used for nuclear power plants and weapons." The following year "Uzbekistan Airways ordered Boeing jetliners worth about $600 million."
6. Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia
Zenawi has ruled Ethiopia for 20 years. Just last year, after what Human Rights Watch called "months of intimidation of opposition party supporters," Zenawi's party, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, won 99.6 percent of the vote. Legitimacy!
Ethiopia is a key strategic partner in the "war on terror," and contributes significantly to African peace-keeping operations. According to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United States is the largest donor to Ethiopia. Congress passed a law, over the objections of the Bush administration, that restricts military aid to the country until it has a free press and the Zenawi regime improves its human rights record, but - and this is a big but - it exempts aid for "counter-terrorism." So despite the fact that, according to Amnesty International, Ethiopian opposition groups are illegal, NGOs have been banned and Ethiopians often disappear without trial, the U.S. continues to train Ethiopian troops.
7. King Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz, Saudi Arabia
Apparently, when a theocratic Islamic state does horrible things to its citizens, it's only a big deal if that state is named Iran. Saudi Arabia, of course, is among the United States' most important allies - the U.S. government has provided security for the Saudi royal family for decades, in exchange for which ... oil.
Abdullah has instituted some reforms since taking power in 2005, but Human Rights Watch says the "initiatives have been largely symbolic, with only modest concrete gains or institutional protection for rights." Amnesty International's 2010 report charges that the Saudi authorities continue to use "a wide range of repressive measures to suppress freedom of expression and other legitimate activities."
Hundreds of people were arrested as suspected terrorists. Thousands of others arrested in the name of security in previous years remained in jail; they included prisoners of conscience. Some 330 security suspects received unfair trials before a newly constituted but closed specialized court; one was sentenced to death and 323 were sentenced to terms of imprisonment.
There you have it -- a grand collection of bastards, yes. But remember: they're our bastards!
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America).
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23) Soldier May Testify Against Comrades in Afghan Killings, Lawyer Says
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/12soldiers.html?ref=world
SEATTLE - The cases against four of the Army soldiers accused of killing three unarmed Afghan civilians for sport last year could hinge on a fifth soldier whose lawyer said he was prepared to plead guilty to the crimes and testify against the others.
The fifth soldier, Specialist Jeremy N. Morlock, 22, who is accused in all three deaths, has signed a detailed confession as part of his effort to avoid a life sentence. Specialist Morlock, who is scheduled to face a court-martial on March 3, is seeking a sentence of 24 years.
The lawyer, Geoffrey Nathan, said prosecutors had agreed to the deal, though Army officials said Friday that they would not comment on the matter. A military judge would have to approve any plea deal and could alter any sentence in it.
A copy of the so-called stipulation of fact accompanying the plea offer and obtained by The New York Times is signed by Specialist Morlock and an Army defense lawyer but not by an Army prosecutor. The Washington Post has previously reported that a plea agreement is in place.
Specialist Morlock and Staff Sgt. Calvin R. Gibbs are the only two soldiers who have been accused in all three killings, which took place in January, February and May of last year. In the stipulation of fact, Specialist Morlock repeated his assertions that Sergeant Gibbs was the ringleader. All five soldiers, members of a Stryker Brigade from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State who were based near Kandahar, Afghanistan, are accused of faking combat situations to justify killing Afghans with grenades and guns.
"During the entire incident, the Accused knew that the Afghan was unarmed and no threat to himself or any of his fellow Soldiers," the stipulation says, referring to the killing in May. "There was no lawful justification or excuse for the killing or any of the actions taken by the Accused during the shooting of the Afghan male."
Specialist Morlock, who is from Wasilla, Alaska, has previously implicated himself and other soldiers in the killings, including in video statements that were broadcast on television last fall. His lawyers had sought to discredit those statements, saying that Specialist Morlock was under the influence of prescription medications and not mentally competent at the time.
"He knows what he's up against," Mr. Nathan, a civilian lawyer, said in explaining why his client is now pursuing the plea deal. "We have fully educated him as to his risk factors."
All five of the soldiers have been referred for court-martial. Two of them, Specialist Michael Wagnon and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, were referred only recently, around the time that Specialist Morlock's stipulation was drafted on Jan. 28.
Last year, Specialist Morlock initially did not implicate Specialist Wagnon in the killings, but later said he had been involved in the February shooting.
According to Specialist Morlock's signed stipulation, when Sergeant Gibbs asked him to participate, Specialist Wagnon responded, "This isn't my first rodeo; I'm in."
Colby Vokey, a civilian lawyer for Specialist Wagnon, said his client is innocent. "In order to get a deal," he said. "Morlock is compelled to offer testimony against others, including Wagnon."
"We are definitely going to trial," he added. "Michael Wagnon has not had anything to do with any kind of planned killing of any person whatsoever."
Lawyers for the other defendants also said they expected their cases to go to trial. A lawyer for Specialist Adam C. Winfield, who is accused in the May killing, said that his client had pursued a plea deal but had been unable to come to terms with Army prosecutors.
Lawyers in the case say two photographs show Specialist Morlock and Specialist Holmes holding up the heads of dead Afghans as their bodies lie on the ground. But they dispute how effective the photographs would be as evidence. Physical evidence in the case is limited, with investigators admitting they did not do detailed crime scene investigations out of concern that Afghan villagers would become angry if they learned the killings were suspicious.
"Their own mouths convicted them, their own statements," Mr. Nathan said. "Other than that, there's no evidence. There are no bodies."
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24) Wisconsin May Take an Ax to State Workers' Benefits and Their Unions
By MONICA DAVEY and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/12unions.html?ref=us
Citing Wisconsin's gaping budget shortfall for this year and even larger ones expected in the years ahead, Gov. Scott Walker proposed a sweeping plan on Friday to cut benefits for public employees in the state and to take away most of their unions' ability to bargain.
The proposal by Mr. Walker, a Republican who was elected in November after pledging that he would get public workers' compensation "into line" with everyone else's, is expected to receive support next week in the State Legislature, where Republicans also won control of both chambers in the fall.
The prospect left union leaders, state and local employees and some Democrats stunned over the plan's scope and what it might signal for public-sector unions in the state. Union leaders began planning rallies in Madison and contacting lawmakers, pressing them to reject the idea.
Mr. Walker said Wisconsin was prepared for any fallout, noting in an interview that the National Guard was ready to step in to handle state duties, if need be.
"I'm just trying to balance my budget," Mr. Walker said. "To those who say why didn't I negotiate on this? I don't have anything to negotiate with. We don't have anything to give. Like practically every other state in the country, we're broke. And it's time to pay up."
State leaders across the country have talked about solving budget woes with actions that in other climates might have been politically impossible: cutting the salaries and pensions of government workers and limiting the power of labor unions.
But the plan in Wisconsin, which faces a $137 million shortfall in the current budget and a gap in the billions for the coming cycle, is among the most far-reaching of such proposals to be delivered to lawmakers. Mr. Walker expects swift approval.
Among key provisions of Mr. Walker's plan: limiting collective bargaining for most state and local government employees to the issue of wages (instead of an array of issues, like health coverage or vacations); requiring government workers to contribute 5.8 percent of their pay to their pensions, much more than now; and requiring state employees to pay at least 12.6 percent of health care premiums (most pay about 6 percent now).
Mike Imbrogno, a cook at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who belongs to a union and said he earns $28,000 a year, described the move as an "attack" on working people.
"He's basically trying to smash the last remaining organized upward pressure on wages and benefits in Wisconsin," Mr. Imbrogno said. Governor Walker's proposal would specifically remove the right of the university's faculty and staff to bargain collectively.
Mr. Walker made several proposals that will weaken not just unions' ability to bargain contracts, but also their finances and political clout.
His proposal would make it harder for unions to collect dues because the state would stop collecting the money from employee paychecks.
He would further weaken union treasuries by giving members of public-sector unions the right not to pay dues. In an unusual move, he would require secret-ballot votes each year at every public-sector union to determine whether a majority of workers still want to be unionized.
He would require public-employee unions to negotiate new contracts every year, an often lengthy process. And he would limit the raises of state employees and teachers to the consumer price index, unless the public approves higher raises through a referendum. Exempted from those changes would be firefighters and law enforcement personnel.
"We think that the proposal that's put forward, it just goes too far," said Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin A.F.L.-C.I.O. "The right to negotiate wages and benefits for a union is a fundamental underpinning of the American middle class."
But Mr. Walker and Republican leaders said disassembling unions was not the point at all. The intent, Mr. Walker said, was to avoid balancing the budget some other way: by laying off some 6,000 state workers, and taking away Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands of children.
Wisconsin officials say Mr. Walker's plan would save the state $30 million in the current budget, and $300 million in the next budget. "In these tough times, I think people are going to feel that this is not that much to ask," said Jeff Fitzgerald, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly. "Everyone is going to have to pitch in."
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25) U.S. Approves Corn Modified for Ethanol
By ANDREW POLLACK
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/business/12corn.html?ref=us
A type of corn that is genetically engineered to make it easier to convert into ethanol was approved for commercial growing by the Department of Agriculture.
The decision, announced Friday, came in the face of objections from corn millers and others in the food industry, who warned that if the industrial corn cross-pollinated with or were mixed with corn used for food, it could lead to crumbly corn chips, soggy cereal, loaves of bread with soupy centers and corn dogs with inadequate coatings.
"If this corn is comingled with other corn, it will have significant adverse impacts on food product quality and performance," the North American Millers' Association said in a statement on Friday.
The corn, developed by Syngenta, contains a microbial gene that causes it to produce an enzyme that breaks down corn starch into sugar, the first step toward making ethanol. Ethanol manufacturers now buy this enzyme, called alpha amylase, in liquid form and add it to the corn at the start of their production process.
Syngenta says that having the crop make the enzyme for its own breakdown - self-processing corn, as it were - will increase ethanol output while reducing the use of water, energy and chemicals in the production process. The company, a seed and pesticide manufacturer based in Switzerland, said it would take various measures to prevent the corn from getting into the food supply.
The corn, which is called Enogen, is one of the first crops genetically engineered to contain a trait that influences use of the plant after harvest. Virtually all past biotech crops have had traits like insect resistance, aimed at helping farmers more than manufacturers or consumers.
Enogen is also one of the first to be engineered solely for industrial purposes.
The Agriculture Department said the corn met the statutory requirements for approval, in that it was not a pest that would harm plants. The Food and Drug Administration had previously found the corn safe to eat.
The Agriculture Department said the food processors should work with Syngenta to address their concerns. "We are pleased that these segments of industry continue to dialogue with Syngenta on research and testing efforts," the department said in a press release.
The corn approval is the third recent one in which the Agriculture Department has had to weigh the risks of the spread of a genetically engineered trait.
Two weeks ago, it approved the unrestricted cultivation of biotech alfalfa over the objections of some environmental groups and the organic food industry. Last week, it cleared biotech sugar beets for planting, with some restrictions. Both the alfalfa and beets have a gene making them tolerant of the herbicide Roundup.
With Syngenta's corn, however, the opponents are not only the usual anti-biotechnology groups but also a powerful industry that is normally receptive to biotechnology. The millers' association, which has led the opposition, represents 43 companies, including giants like General Mills, ConAgra Mills and ADM Milling.
The association said that Syngenta's own data indicated that as little as one amylase corn kernel mixed with 10,000 conventional kernels could be enough to weaken the corn starch and disrupt food processing operations.
Another concern of some in the food industry is that if the amylase corn is found in food supplies it could lead to recalls or disrupt exports.
Syngenta says the amylase enzyme is not active when the kernel is intact. It is most active, the company said, at certain levels of temperature, acidity and moisture found in ethanol factories but rarely in factories that make corn starch, corn syrup or corn chips.
Syngenta also said the corn would be grown only in the vicinity of ethanol plants. Farmers would be under contract and have financial incentives to sell their output only to that plant. Other steps would be taken to limit cross-pollination or inadvertent mixing in grain elevators.
But food processors and environmental groups said that some spread was inevitable.
"This is StarLink all over again," said Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists. She was referring to the situation in 2000 when a genetically modified corn approved only for animal use got into the human food supply, prompting huge recalls and disrupting American exports.
One difference, however, is that unlike StarLink, Syngenta's new corn is approved for food use. Other alpha amylase enzymes are already used in food processing.
The Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group, said it was preparing to sue. The group persuaded a court to temporarily revoke the approvals of the biotech alfalfa and sugar beets because the Agriculture Department had not done a full environmental impact statement. The department, which has been reviewing Syngenta's application since 2005, did not prepare such a statement for Syngenta's corn.
Syngenta said that this year it expected the corn to be grown on fewer than 25,000 acres, in the western parts of Kansas and Nebraska. However, use could expand greatly in the future. As much as 40 percent of the nation's corn crop last year is going into ethanol production.
The National Corn Growers Association applauded the corn's approval.
The corn contains a synthetic gene derived from micro-organisms that live near hot-water vents on the ocean's floor. The enzyme is stable at the high temperatures used in making ethanol. The liquid amylase now used by ethanol plants is made in other micro-organisms.
Syngenta said that use of its corn increased ethanol production by 8 percent and reduced natural gas consumption 8 percent in a test at an ethanol plant in Oakley, Kan.
"We don't ever want to go back to a liquid amylase product," Steve McNinch, the chief executive of Western Plains Energy, the owner of the plant, said in a statement issued by Syngenta.
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26) Oregon: Man Dies Yards From Emergency Room Door
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/12brfs-MANDIESYARDS_BRF.html?ref=us
A man died early Friday in a Portland hospital's parking garage, just 100 feet from the emergency room's entrance, and the police said no one from the staff of Portland Adventist Medical Center helped as officers tried to revive him. The man, Birgilio Marin-Fuentes, 61, suffered a heart attack in his car. Mr. Marin-Fuentes had driven to the hospital, then crashed into a pillar and wall of the parking garage. Sgt. Pete Simpson, a police spokesman, said that the only medical help the officers received was from an ambulance crew after hospital staff members told an officer to call 911. Hospital officials say they dispatched security officers trained in first aid and a paramedic.
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