Take Action On This Issue
Troy Davis has faced execution three times for a crime he may not have committed. In an unprecedented evidentiary hearing held in a federal district court in Savannah, Georgia in June, 2010, he was able to present evidence supporting his innocence claim. However, the standard for proving his innocence was "extraordinarily high", especially given the lack of physical and scientific evidence in his case. The federal judge ruled that he did not meet the high standard, despite the fact that doubts about his guilt remain unresolved. It is more important than ever that we continue to let Georgia authorities know that we oppose any effort to execute Troy Davis. Sign the petition today!
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=6oJCLQPAJiJUG&b=6645049&aid=12970&msource=WPSGIL2970
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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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Please Circulate Widely
Thurs. Sept. 8, 6:30pm
Organizing Meeting for Oct. 6-7 Protests on
10th Anniversary of Afghanistan War and Occupation
2969 Mission St. btwn 25th and 26th, San Francisco
near 24th St. BART; #14, 49 MUNI
A gruesome war grows ever more gruesome. October 7 will mark the 10th anniversary of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, and contrary to Washington's claims of "improved security" and "drawdown" the terrible toll just keeps rising.
In the first six months of the year, Afghan civilian casualties were up 15% from the same period in 2010. Tens of thousands of Afghan people have been killed, and hundreds of thousands wounded and displaced.
U.S. combat deaths in the war reached a record this month. An article in the March 4 Washington Post reported that U.S. military doctors now call double-leg amputations with accompanying genital injuries the "signature wound" of the Afghanistan war.
At a time when health, education and other vital government programs are being slashed or eliminated altogether, the war in Afghanistan devours $330 million per day--every day! And that is only about 10% of the real military budget. A recent study estimated that the total cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will total an unimaginable $4.4 trillion-$4,400,000,000,000.
If there is one thing that is clear it is this: Neither Democratic nor Republican politicians will stop the bloody carnage and immense waste of resources unless they are compelled to by the people. That's what makes the upcoming actions on October 6-7, marking the exact 10th anniversary of the Afghanistan war, so important. On those days, a wide range of marches, rallies, direct action and other forms of protest will take place from Washington DC to San Francisco, as well as in many other cities in the U.S. and around the world. Many organizations and individual activists will be marching to say: End the wars & occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and everywhere! Money for jobs, healthcare and schools, not the war machine!
Join us on Thursday, Sept. 8, 6:30pm for a meeting to plan for the October 6-7 actions here in San Francisco. The meeting will take place at the ANSWER Coalition office, 2969 Mission St., between 25th and 26th Sts., San Francisco.
The only way to end the bloody and rising carnage in Afghanistan is to immediately withdraw all U.S. and NATO troops and aircraft. Only the people can stop the war-join us!
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545
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Commemorate the 40th Anniversary of the Attica Prison Uprising
Friday, September 9th - 7pm Sharp
518 Valencia Street - San Francisco
Attica - The Restored 1974 Film
Discussion with:
Azadeh Zohrabi - Hastings Race & Poverty Law Journal
Dennis Cunningham - Original Attica Attorney
Manuel Fontaine - about connecting the dots to
Georgia, Ohio and California prison strikes
Prison unrest in the United States hit a boiling point on September 9, 1971, when inmates at Attica State Prison after months of protesting inhumane living conditions rebelled, seizing part of the prison and taking 35 hostages. The uprising was met with a military attack and the murder of 43 people after NY State troopers assaulted the prisoners. Attica - released 3 years later - is an investigation of the rebellion and its aftermath, piecing together documentary footage of the occupation and ensuing assault. Especially significant today as prisoners from Georgia, Ohio, California and other states fight for their human rights in the face of increased imprisonment and the brutality and torture of long-term solitary confinement.
$10 Donation - $5 youth - No one turned away
Sponsored by the Freedom Archives & the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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Palestine Is Coming to the U.N.!
Rally, Thursday, September 15, 5 pm: Gather at Times Square
6 pm: March to Grand Central and then over to the U.N. to demand:
Palestine: Sovereignty Now!
Palestine: Enforce the Right of Return!
Palestine: Full Equality for All!
5 pm: Gather at Times Square
6 pm: March to Grand Central and then over to the U.N., as we say:
End All U.S. Aid to Israel!
End the Occupation!
Support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions!
For more information, email palestineun@gmail.com
Sponsored by the Palestine U.N. Solidarity Coalition
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Protest, March & Die-In on 10th Anniversary of Afghanistan War
Friday, Oct. 7, 2011, 4:30-6:30pm
New Federal Building, 7th & Mission Sts, SF
End All the Wars & Occupations-Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Haiti . . .
Money for Jobs, Healthcare & Schools-Not for the Pentagon
Friday, October 7, 2011 will be the exact 10th anniversary of the U.S./NATO war on the people of Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of Afghani people have been killed, wounded and displaced, and thousands of U.S. and NATO forces killed and wounded. The war costs more than $126 billion per year at a time when social programs are being slashed.
The true and brutal character of the U.S. strategy to "win hearts and minds" of the Afghani population was described by a Marine officer, quoted in a recent ANSWER Coalition statement:
"You can't just convince them [Afghani people] through projects and goodwill," another Marine officer said. "You have to show up at their door with two companies of Marines and start killing people. That's how you start convincing them." (To read the entire ANSWER statement, click here)
Mark your calendar now and help organize for the October 7 march and die-in in downtown San Francisco. There are several things you can do:
1. Reply to this email to endorse the protest and die-in.
2. Spread the word and help organize in your community, union, workplace and campus.
3. Make a donation to help with organizing expenses.
Only the people can stop the war!
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
http://www.AnswerCoalition.org
http://www.AnswerSF.org
Answer@AnswerSF.org
2969 Mission St.
415-821-6545
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(Please forward widely)
Save the dates of October 6, 15 to protest wars; and May 15-22, 2012--Northern California UNAC will be discussing plans for solidarity actions around the Chicago G-8 here.
United National Antiwar Committee
UNACpeace@gmain.com or UNAC at P.O. Box 123, Delmar, NY 12054
518-227-6947
www.UNACpeace.org
UNITED NATIONAL ANTIWAR COMMITTEE (UNAC) CALLS FOR ACTIONS IN OCTOBER
TO MARK 10 YEARS OF WAR ON AFGHANISTAN
On June 22, the White House defied the majority of Americans who want an end to the war in Afghanistan. Instead of announcing the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops, contractors, bases, and war dollars, Obama committed to removing only one twentieth of the US forces on the ground in Afghanistan over the next eight months. Another 23,000 will supposedly be withdrawn just in time to influence the 2012 elections. Even if the President follows thru on this plan, nearly 170,000 US soldiers and contractors will remain in Afghanistan. All veterans and soldiers will be raising the question, "Who will be the last U.S. combatant to die in Afghanistan?"
In truth, the President's plan is not a plan to end the war in Afghanistan. It was, instead, an announcement that the U.S. was changing strategy. As the New York Times reported, the US will be replacing the "counterinsurgency strategy" adopted 18 months ago with the kind of campaign of drone attacks, assassinations, and covert actions that the US has employed in Pakistan.
At a meeting of the United National Antiwar Committee's National Coordinating Committee, held in NYC on June 18, representatives of 47 groups voted to endorse the nonviolent civil resistance activities beginning on October 6 in Washington, D.C. and to call for nationally coordinated local actions on October 15 to protest the tenth anniversary of the US war in Afghanistan. UNAC urges activists in as many cities as possible to hold marches, picket lines, teach-ins, and other events to say:
· Withdraw ALL US/NATO Military Forces, Contractors, and Bases out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya NOW!
· End drone attacks on defenseless populations in Pakistan and Yemen!
· End US Aid to Israel! Hands Off Iran!
· Bring Our War Dollars Home Now! Money for Jobs and Education, Not for War and Incarceration!
Note these dates of upcoming significant events:
· November 11-13 UNAC National Conference - a gathering of all movement activists to learn, share, plan future actions.
· May 15-22, 2012 International Protest Actions against war criminals attending NATO meeting and G-8 summit in Chicago.
Challenge the NATO War Makers in Chicago May 15-22, 2012
NATO and the G8 are coming to Chicago - so are we!
The White House has just announced that the U.S. will host a major international meeting of NATO, the US-commanded and financed 28-nation military alliance, in Chicago from May 15 to May 22, 2012. It was further announced that at the same time and place, there will be a summit of the G-8 world powers. The meetings are expected to draw heads of state, generals and countless others.
At a day-long meeting in New York City on Saturday, June 18, the United National Antiwar Committee's national coordinating committee of 69 participants, representing, 47 organizations, unanimously passed a resolution to call for action at the upcoming NATO meeting.
UNAC is determined to mount a massive united outpouring in Chicago during the NATO gathering to put forth demands opposing endless wars and calling for billions spent on war and destruction be spent instead on people's needs for jobs, health care, housing and education.
CHALLENGE THE NATO WAR MAKERS
Whereas, the U.S. is the major and pre-eminent military, economic and political power behind NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), and
Whereas, the U.S. will be hosting a major NATO gathering in the spring of 2012, and
Whereas, U.S. and NATO-allied forces are actively engaged in the monstrous wars, occupations and military attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, the Middle East and elsewhere,
Be it resolved that:
1) UNAC, in conjunction with a broad range of groups and organizations that share general agreement with the major demands adopted at our 2010 Albany, NY national conference, initiate a mass demonstration at the site of the NATO gathering, and
2) UNAC welcomes and encourages the participation of all groups interested in mobilizing against war and for social justice in planning a broad range of other NATO meeting protests including teach-ins, alternative conferences and activities organized on the basis of direct action/civil resistance, and
3) UNAC will seek to make the NATO conference the occasion for internationally coordinated protests, and
4) UNAC will convene a meeting of all of the above forces to discuss and prepare initial plans to begin work on this spring action.
Resolution passed unanimously by the National Coordinating Committee of UNAC on Saturday, June 18, 2011
click here to donate to UNAC:
https://nationalpeaceconference.org/Donate.html
Click here for the Facebook UNAC group.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_157059221012587&ap=1
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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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The Preacher and the Slave - Joe Hill
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca_MEJmuzMM
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Michael Allison Faces 75 Years In Illinois Prison for recording police WTWO!
Michael Allison faces 75 years in prison for recording public servants. Shame on Crawford County States Atty Tom Wiseman!
Here is the contact information for the State Attorney prosecuting this_ guy. I think we should all give him a call and tell him our opinion!
Crawford County States Attorney
Tom Wiseman
Crawford County Courthouse
105 Douglas St.
Robinson, IL 62454
618-546-1505
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Immigrant Rights Atlanta July 2, 2011
Native American speaker at July 2, 2011 demonstration in front of the state capitol in Atlanta, Georgia, protesting against the state's new anti-immigrant law, HB 87.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNR1KzGc-5U&feature=channel_video_title
The March:
La comunidad latina en Atlanta repudia la ley anti-inmigrante HB 87.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpm-l70M65o&t=0m52s
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Cracked Fukushima: Radioactive steam escapes danger zone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fimRJocH_90
Workers at Japan's Fukushima plant say the ground under the facility is cracking and radioactive steam is escaping through the cracks. The cooling system at the plant failed after the devastating tsunami hit Japan in March, sparking a nuclear crisis. But new evidence suggests that Fukushima reactors were doomed to cripple even before the massive wave reached them. RT's Anissa Naouai talks to Dr. Robert Jacobs, a Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute.
RT on Twitter: http://twitter.com/RT_com
RT on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RTnews
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London Riots. (The BBC will never replay this. Send it out)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biJgILxGK0o
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Protest which sparked Tottenham riot
Hours before the riot which swept the area demonstrators gather outside Tottenham Police Station in North London demanding "justice" for the killing of a 29-year-old man, Mark Duggan, who was shot dead by police.
By Alastair Good
August 7, 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/8687058/Protest-which-sparked-Tottenham-riot.html
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Visualizing a Trillion: Just How Big That Number Is?
"1 million seconds is about 11.5 days, 1 billion seconds is about 32 years while a trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years."
Digital Inspiration
http://www.labnol.org/internet/visualize-numbers-how-big-is-trillion-dollars/7814/
How Much Is $1 Trillion?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPfY0q-rEdY&feature=player_embedded
Courtesy the credit crisis and big bailout packages, the figure "trillion" has suddenly become part of our everyday conversations. One trillion dollars, or 1 followed by 12 zeros, is lots of money but have you ever tried visualizing how big that number actually is?
For people who can visualize one million dollars, the comparison made on CNN should give you an idea about a trillion - "if you start spending a million dollars every single day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spend a trillion dollars".
Another mathematician puts it like this: "1 million seconds is about 11.5 days, 1 billion seconds is about 32 years while a trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years".
Now if the above comparisons weren't really helpful, check another illustration that compares the built of an average human being against a stack of $100 currency notes bundles.
A bundle of $100 notes is equivalent to $10,000 and that can easily fit in your pocket. 1 million dollars will probably fit inside a standard shopping bag while a billion dollars would occupy a small room of your house.
With this background in mind, 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) is 1000 times bigger than 1 billion and would therefore take up an entire football field - the man is still standing in the bottom-left corner. (See visuals -- including a video -- at website:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/visualize-numbers-how-big-is-trillion-dollars/7814/
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One World One Revolution -- MUST SEE VIDEO -- Powerful and beautiful...bw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE3R1BQrYCw&feature=player_embedded
"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." Thomas Jefferson
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Very reminiscent of Obama...bw
Pat Paulsen 1968
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oiQhhdz8ys
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Japan: angry Fukushima citizens confront government (video)
Posted by Xeni Jardin on Monday, Jul 25th at 11:36am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVuGwc9dlhQ&feature=player_embedded
The video above documents what I am told is a meeting between Fukushima residents and government officials from Tokyo, said to have taken place on 19 July 2011. The citizens are demanding their government evacuate people from a broader area around the Fukushima nuclear plant, because of ever-increasing fears about the still-spreading radiation. They are demanding that their government provide financial and logistical support to get out. In the video above, you can see that some participants actually brought samples of their children's urine to the meeting, and they demanded that the government test it for radioactivity.
When asked by one person at the meeting about citizens' right to live a healthy and radioactive-free life, Local Nuclear Emergency Response Team Director Akira Satoh replies "I don't know if they have that right."
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Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class [Full Film]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6ZS91cqpa8
Narrated by Ed Asner
Based on the book by Pepi Leistyna, Class Dismissed navigates the steady stream of narrow working class representations from American television's beginnings to today's sitcoms, reality shows, police dramas, and daytime talk shows.
Featuring interviews with media analysts and cultural historians, this documentary examines the patterns inherent in TV's disturbing depictions of working class people as either clowns or social deviants -- stereotypical portrayals that reinforce the myth of meritocracy.
Class Dismissed breaks important new ground in exploring the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality intersect with class, offering a more complex reading of television's often one-dimensional representations. The video also links television portrayals to negative cultural attitudes and public policies that directly affect the lives of working class people.
Featuring interviews with Stanley Aronowitz, (City University of New York); Nickel and Dimed author, Barbara Ehrenreich; Herman Gray (University of California-Santa Cruz); Robin Kelley (Columbia University); Pepi Leistyna (University of Massachusetts-Boston) and Michael Zweig (State University of New York-Stony Brook). Also with Arlene Davila, Susan Douglas, Bambi Haggins, Lisa Henderson, and Andrea Press.
Sections: Class Matters | The American Dream Machine | From the Margins to the Middle | Women Have Class | Class Clowns | No Class | Class Action
http://www.mediaed.org
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Let's torture the truth out of suicide bombers says new CIA chief Petraeus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sm02UbKNCKQ
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Stop Police Brutality: Justice for Eric Radcliff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB8GpiXuSV4&NR=1
22 year old Eric Radcliff was shot and killed by police officers from the 35th district on the morning of Saturday May 21st, 2011. According to witnesses he was unarmed. The incident took place on the 5800 Block of Mascher Street in the 5th and Olney Section.
OUR COMMUNITY DEMANDS JUSTICE
WE THE FAMILIES AND FRIENDS OF ERIC RADCLIFF ARE CONCERNED THAT JUSTICE HAS NOT BEEN SERVED. WE BELIEVE THAT THE POLICE OFFICERS USED EXCESSIVE FORCE. ERIC DID NOT HAVE TO DIE.
OUR DEMANDS
1. Open An Investigation Into the May 21st Shooting Death of 22 year old Eric Radcliff by officers of the Philadelphia Police Department's 35th District.
2. End Police Brutality! Serve and Protect, Not Disrespect and Victimize!
3. LETS GET OUR HOUSE IN ORDER. Let's Unite for Real Security and To Build a Better Future for Ourselves
Please come Join in UNITY AND LOVE! God is Good, We ARE winning!
JusticeforEricRadcliff@gmail.com
215-954-2272 for more information
VIA Justice for Eric Radcliff
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Stop Police Brutality: Justice for Albert Pernell Jr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGyR9Y2LPss
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Autopsy Released in Police Shooting of Man Holding Nozzle
Douglas Zerby was shot 12 times, in the chest, arms and lower legs.
Watch Mary Beth McDade's report
http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-long-beach-belmont-shore-shooting,0,2471345.story
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Kim Ives & Dan Coughlin on WikiLeaks Cables that Reveal "Secret History" of U.S. Bullying in Haiti
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL0Dk21dC-M
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Operation Empire State Rebellion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJvBlQcaaaU&feature=player_embedded#at=10
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20 Facts About U.S. Inequality that Everyone Should Know
Click an image to learn more about a fact!
http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/facts.php
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Licensed to Kill Video
http://nirs.org/multimedia/video/l2k.htm
Gundersen Gives Testimony to NRC ACRS from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
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Guy on wheelchair taken down by officers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdkJxw1mPoM
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Paradise Gray Speaks At Jordan Miles Emergency Rally 05/06/2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJOLz1EYDYE&feature=player_embedded
Police Reassigned While CAPA Student's Beatdown Investigated
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK-6IsP3dUg&NR=1&feature=fvwp
Pittsburgh Student Claims Police Brutality; Shows Hospital Photos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_j_AVsTXZc&feature=relmfu
Justice For Jordan Miles
By jasiri x
http://justiceforjordanmiles.com/
Monday, May 9, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Even though Pittsburgh Police beat Jordan Miles until he looked like this: (Photo at website)
And even though Jordan Miles, an honor student who plays the viola, broke no laws and committed no crimes, the Federal Government decided not to prosecute the 3 undercover Pittsburgh Police officers who savagely beat him.
To add insult to injury, Pittsburgh's Mayor and Police Chief immediately reinstated the 3 officers without so much as a apology. An outraged Pittsburgh community called for an emergency protest to pressure the local District Attorney to prosecute these officers to the fullest extent of the law.
Below is my good friend, and fellow One Hood founding member Paradise Gray (also a founding member of the Blackwatch Movement and the legendary rap group X-Clan) passionately demanding Justice for Jordan Miles and speaking on the futility of a war of terror overseas while black men are terrorized in their own neighborhoods.
For more information on how you can help get Justice For Jordan Miles go to http://justiceforjordanmiles.com/
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Tier Systems Cripple Middle Class Dreams for Young Workers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09pQW6TW8m4&feature=youtu.be
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Union Town by Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ZT71DxLuM&feature=player_embedded
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BRADLEY MANNING "BROKE THE LAW" SAYS OBAMA!
"He broke the law!" says Obama about Bradley Manning who has yet to even be charged, let alone, gone to trial and found guilty. How horrendous is it for the President to declare someone guilty before going to trial or being charged with a crime! Justice in the U.S.A.!
Obama on FREE BRADLEY MANNING protest... San Francisco, CA. April 21, 2011-Presidential remarks on interrupt/interaction/performance art happening at fundraiser. Logan Price queries Barack after org. FRESH JUICE PARTY political action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfmtUpd4id0&feature=youtu.be
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Max Romeo - Socialism Is Love
http://youtu.be/eTvUs4rY4to
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Cuba: The Accidental Eden
http://video.pbs.org/video/1598230084/
[This is a stunningly beautiful portrait of the Cuban natural environment as it is today. However, several times throughout, the narrator tends to imply that if it werent for the U.S. embargo against Cuba, Cuba's natural environment would be destroyed by the influx of tourism, ergo, the embargo is saving nature. But the Cuban scientists and naturalists tell a slightly different story. But I don't want to spoil the delightfully surprising ending. It's a beautiful film of a beautiful country full of beautiful, articulate and well-educated people....bw]
Watch the full episode. See more Nature.
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The Kill Team
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses - and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon
Rolling Stone
March 27, 3011
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327
Afghans respond to "Kill Team"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3guxWIorhdA
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WikiLeaks Mirrors
Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.
In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.
Go to
http://wikileaks.ch/Mirrors.html
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Labor Beat: Labor Stands with Subpoenaed Activists Against FBI Raids and Grand Jury Investigation of antiwar and social justice activists.
"If trouble is not at your door. It's on it's way, or it just left."
"Investigate the Billionaires...Full investigation into Wall Street..." Jesse Sharkey, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNUSIGZCMQ
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Domestic Espionage Alert - Houston PD to use surveillance drone in America!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpstrc15Ogg
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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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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
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Flashmob: Cape Town Opera say NO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wElyrFOnKPk
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"Don't F*** With Our Activists" - Mobilizing Against FBI Raid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyG3dIUGQvQ
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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Your help is needed to defend free speech rights
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
We are writing to urge you to send an email letter today that can make a big difference in the outcome of a free speech fight that is vital to all grassroots movements that support social justice and peace.
It will just take a moment of your time but it will make a big difference.
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=326
All across the country people and organizations engaged in producing and disseminating leaflets and posters - the classic method of grassroots outreach used by those without institutional power and corporate money - are being faced with bankrupting fines.
This has been happening with ferocity in the nation's capital ever since the ANSWER Coalition was fined over $50,000 in the span of a few weeks for posters advertising the Sept. 15, 2007, protest against the Iraq war.
Attorneys for the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) filed a major lawsuit in August 2007 against the unconstitutional postering regulations in Washington, D.C.
"The District has employed an illegal system that creates a hierarchy of speech, favoring the speech of politicians and punishing grassroots outreach," Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF, stated in explaining a basic tenet of the lawsuit. "It's time for that system to end, and it will."
The hard-fought four-year-long lawsuit filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund against Washington, D.C.'s unconstitutional postering regulations has succeeded in achieving a number of important victories, including the issuance of new regulations after the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia warned just last month of an impending declaration of unconstitutionality against the District.
In July 2011 the federal District Court issued a preliminary opinion regarding one aspect of our lawsuit and suggested that the D.C. government "revise the regulations to include a single, across-the-board durational restriction that applies equally to all viewpoints and subject matters."
But this battle is not finished. The new regulations still contain dissent-crushing "strict liability" provisions (explained below) and remain unconstitutionally vague and ambiguous. Plus the District has never withdrawn the tens of thousands of dollars of fines against ANSWER.
The District of Columbia is required by law to open the new rules to public comment, which it has done with an extremely short comment period that is now open. We need people to send a comment today to the government of Washington, D.C. It just takes a minute using our online Submit a Comment tool, which will send your comment by email.
Send a letter today in support of the right to produce and disseminate leaflets and posters in Washington, D.C. We have included a sample comment but we encourage people to use or add your own language.
An Opportunity for You to Make a Difference
In response to our lawsuit, the District of Columbia has now issued "Emergency Regulations" replacing the current system which the city now admits are a "threat to the public welfare," after the court issued a preliminary opinion that agreed with a basic argument of the lawsuit.
This is an important moment and we need you and others who believe in Free Speech to weigh in during the short 15-day public comment period in response to the proposed Emergency Regulations for postering. Submit an online Comment now that makes one or more of three vital points:
Drop the $70,000 fines that have been applied to the ANSWER Coalition for anti-war posters during the past four years.
End "Strict Liability" fines and penalities. Strict Liability constitutes something of a death penalty for Free Speech activities such as producing leaflets and posters. It means that an organization referenced on posted signs can be held "strictly liable" for any materials alleged to be improperly posted, even if the group never even posted a single sign or poster. The D.C. government is even going further than that - it just levied fines against a disabled Vietnam veteran who didn't put up a single poster but was fined $450 because three posted signs were seen referencing a Veterans for Peace demonstration last December, and the District's enforcement agents researched that his name was on the permit application for the peace demonstration at the White House. Any group or person that leaves literature at a bookstore, or distributes literature, or posts .pdf fliers on the Internet, can be fined tens of thousands of dollars simply for having done nothing more than making political literature available.
Insist that any new regulations be clear, unambiguous and fair. The District's new "Emergency" Regulations are still inadequate because they are vague and ambiguous. Vaguely worded regulations in the hands of vindictive authority can and will be used to punish, penalize and fine grassroots organizations that seek to redress grievances while allowing the powerful and moneyed interests to do as they please. The District's postering regulations must be clear and unambiguous if they are to be fair, uniform and constitutional.
Take two minutes right now, click through to our online comment submission tool.
Thank you for your continued support. After you send your comment today to the District of Columbia please send this email to your friends and encourage them to take action as well. Click here to send your comment to the District.
Sincerely,
ANSWER Coalition
www.AnswerCoalition.org
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STOP BART CENSORSHIP!
This is San Francisco, not Egypt.
Sign the Petition:
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/bart_censorship/?r=231035&id=25860-3083065-U6EApmx
The petition reads:
"A government agency cannot shut down an entire cell phone communications network just because it is being used to express dissent. BART Police must be held accountable for their actions. Stop the heavy handed tactics that violate free speech rights in an attempt to quell dissent."
You don't lose your First Amendment rights when you decide to take public transit. But that's what happened last week when BART Police turned off for three hours the underground network that allows passengers to communicate by cell phone on trains and on underground station platforms.
The BART Police suspended cell phone service in order to silence dissent. It was the first time ever in the United States that a government agency shut down cell phone service in order to suppress a public protest.
"All over the world, people are using mobile devices to protest oppressive regimes, and governments are shutting down cell phone towers and the Internet to stop them," said Michael Risher of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. "It's outrageous that in San Francisco, BART is doing the same thing."1
Tell the BART Board of Directors: Stop the BART Police from suspending cell phone service and violating free speech rights.
A government agency cannot shut down an entire cell phone communications network just because it's being used to express dissent.
It's shocking that a transit agency would go rogue and shut down a cell phone network in a major U.S. city. The incident, not surprisingly has sparked outrage from local elected officials and civil liberties groups and garnered national and international attention.
In the light of pressure from elected officials and national and international news coverage, the elected board that governs the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority cannot ignore this blatant and mass violation of civil rights. We must take advantage of this moment to pressure the BART Board of Directors to step in and take action to hold the BART Police accountable and stop them from suspending our First Amendment rights.
Tell the BART Board of Directors: The BART Police must be held accountable for their actions -- stop the heavy handed tactics that violate free speech rights in an attempt to quell dissent.
BART Police have been the center of controversy in recent years and have a history of cover ups in response to public outrage over its use of deadly force. Last week's cell phone disruption was aimed at disrupting protests of a fatal July 3 shooting of a knife-wielding homeless man.
Despite local, national and international outrage, BART officials haven't gotten the message yet. BART spokesman Linton Johnson said that the agency may cut cell phone service again in the future, explaining that riders "don't have the right to free speech inside the fare gates."2 It's up to the elected BART Board of Directors, who are accountable directly to the voters, to hold BART officials accountable.
Sign our petition and we will deliver your signatures to the elected members of the BART Board of Directors. And please share this petition with your Bay Area friends and family so they can take action, too.
1 BART admits halting cell service to stop protests, San Francisco Chronicle, August 13, 2011
2 Cell service stays on during BART protest in SF, San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 2011
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Statement by Angela Davis regarding Troy Davis
I urgently appeal to Georgia Governor Nathan Deal and to the members of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole - L. Gale Buckner , Robert E. Keller, James E. Donald, Albert Murray, and Terry Barnard - to spare the life of Troy Davis, a young African American citizen of your state.
I hope everyone within sight or sound of my words or my voice will likewise urgently call and fax Gov. Neal and the members of the Board. Under Georgia law, only they can stop the execution of Troy Davis.
First of all, there is very compelling evidence that Troy Davis may be innocent of the murder of Police Officer Mark MacPhail in 1989 in Savannah. The case against Davis has all but collapsed: seven of nine witnesses against him have recanted their testimony and said that they were pressured by police to lie; and nine other witnesses have implicated one of the remaining two as the actual killer. No weapon or physical evidence linking Davis to the murder was ever found. No jury has ever heard this new information, and four of the jurors who originally found him guilty have signed statements in support of Mr. Davis.
More importantly, the planned execution of a likely innocent young Black man in the state of Georgia has become a terrible blot on the status of the United States in the international community of nations. All modern industrial and democratic nations and 16 states within the United States have abolished capital punishment. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the men and women on death rows across the country are Black and other people of color, and are universally poor, severely undermines our country's standing in the eyes of the people of the world.
Most importantly, the execution of Troy Davis will contribute to an atmosphere of violence and racism and a devaluation of life itself within our country. If we can execute anyone, especially a man who may be innocent of any crime, it fosters disrespect for the law and life itself. This exacerbates every social problem at a time when the people of our country face some of the most difficult challenges regarding our economic security and future.
I urge everyone to join with me in urging Governor Neal and the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole to stay the execution of Troy Davis and commute his death sentence. Give this young man a life, and an opportunity to prove his innocence.
Please, call or fax today. Stop the execution of Troy Davis!
Gov. Nathan Deal
Tel: (404)651-1776
Fax: (404)657-7332
Email: georgia.governor@gov.state.ga.us
Web contact form: web: http://gov.state.ga.us/contact.shtml
Georgia Board of Parsons and Parole
L. Gale Buckner
Robert E. Keller
James E. Donald
Albert Murray
Terry Barnard
Tel: (404) 656-5651
Fax: (404) 651-8502
Angela Y. Davis
July 14, 2011
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Say No to Police Repression of NATO/G8 Protests
http://www.stopfbi.net/get-involved/nato-g8-police-repression
The CSFR Signs Letter to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel
The CSFR is working with the United National Antiwar Committee and many other anti-war groups to organize mass rallies and protests on May 15 and May 19, 2012. We will protest the powerful and wealthy war-makers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Group of 8. Mobilize your groups, unions, and houses of worship. Bring your children, friends, and community. Demand jobs, healthcare, housing and education, not war!
Office of the Mayor
City of Chicago
To: Mayor Rahm Emanuel
We, the undersigned, demand that your administration grant us permits for protests on May 15 and 19, 2012, including appropriate rally gathering locations and march routes to the venue for the NATO/G8 summit taking place that week. We come to you because your administration has already spoken to us through Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy. He has threatened mass arrests and violence against protestors.
[Read the full text of the letter here: http://www.stopfbi.net/get-involved/nato-g8-police-repression/full-text]
For the 10s of thousands of people from Chicago, around the country and across the world who will gather here to protest against NATO and the G8, we demand that the City of Chicago:
1. Grant us permits to rally and march to the NATO/G8 summit
2. Guarantee our civil liberties
3. Guarantee us there will be no spying, infiltration of organizations or other attacks by the FBI or partner law enforcement agencies.
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LEONARD PELTIER NEEDS OUR HELP!
Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee
PO Box 7488, Fargo, ND 58106
http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info
contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
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Supporter of Leak Suspect Is Called Before Grand Jury
By SCOTT SHANE
June 15, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/us/politics/16brfs-Washington.html?ref=world
A supporter of Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, who is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks, was called before a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., on Wednesday, but he said he declined to answer any questions. The supporter, David M. House, a freelance computer scientist, said he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, because he believes the Justice Department is "creating a climate of fear around WikiLeaks and the Bradley Manning support network." The grand jury inquiry is separate from the military prosecution of Private Manning and is believed to be exploring whether the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, or others in the group violated the law by acquiring and publishing military and State Department documents.
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Justice for Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace: Decades of isolation in Louisiana state prisons must end
Take Action -- Sign Petition Here:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/justice-for-albert-woodfox-and-herman-wallace
For nearly four decades, 64-year-old Albert Woodfox and 69-year-old Herman Wallace have been held in solitary confinement, mostly in the Louisiana State Penitentiary (known as Angola prison). Throughout their prolonged incarceration in Closed Cell Restriction (CCR) Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have endured very restrictive conditions including 23 hour cellular confinement. They have limited access to books, newspapers and TV and throughout the years of imprisonment they have been deprived of opportunities for mental stimulation and access to work and education. Social interaction has been restricted to occasional visits from friends and family and limited telephone calls.
Louisiana prison authorities have over the course of 39 years failed to provide a meaningful review of the men's continued isolation as they continue to rubberstamp the original decision to confine the men in CCR. Decades of solitary confinement have had a clear psychological effect on the men. Lawyers report that they are both suffering from serious health problems caused or exacerbated by their years of close confinement.
After being held together in the same prison for nearly 40 years, the men are now held in seperate institutions where they continue to be subjected to conditions that can only be described as cruel, inhuman and degrading.
Take action now to demand that Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace be immediately removed from solitary confinement
Sign our petition which will be sent to the Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, calling on him to:
* take immediate steps to remove Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace from close confinement
* ensure that their treatment complies with the USA's obligations under international standards and the US Constitution.
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WITNESS GAZA
http://www.witnessgaza.com/
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Stop Coal Companies From Erasing Labor Union History
http://www.change.org/petitions/stop-coal-companies-from-erasing-labor-union-history
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One year after Bradley's detainment, we need your support more than ever.
Dear Friends,
One year ago, on May 26, 2010, the U.S. government quietly arrested a humble young American intelligence analyst in Iraq and imprisoned him in a military camp in Kuwait. Over the coming weeks, the facts of the arrest and charges against this shy soldier would come to light. And across the world, people like you and I would step forward to help defend him.
Bradley Manning, now 23 years old, has never been to court but has already served a year in prison- including 10 months in conditions of confinement that were clear violation of the international conventions against torture. Bradley has been informally charged with releasing to the world documents that have revealed corruption by world leaders, widespread civilian deaths at the hands of U.S. forces, the true face of Guantanamo, an unvarnished view of the U.S.'s imperialistic foreign negotiations, and the murder of two employees of Reuters News Agency by American soldiers. These documents released by WikiLeaks have spurred democratic revolutions across the Arab world and have changed the face of journalism forever.
For his act of courage, Bradley Manning now faces life in prison-or even death.
But you can help save him-and we've already seen our collective power. Working together with concerned citizens around the world, the Bradley Manning Support Network has helped raise worldwide awareness about Manning's torturous confinement conditions. Through the collective actions of well over a half million people and scores of organizations, we successfully pressured the U.S. government to end the tortuous conditions of pre-trial confinement that Bradley was subjected to at the Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia. Today, Bradley is being treated humanely at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. T hanks to your support, Bradley is given leeway to interact with other pre-trial prisoners, read books, write letters, and even has a window in his cell.
Of course we didn't mount this campaign to just improve Bradley's conditions in jail. Our goal is to ensure that he can receive a fair and open trial. Our goal is to win Bradley's freedom so that he can be reunited with his family and fulfill his dream of going to college. Today, to commemorate Bradley's one year anniversary in prison, will you join me in making a donation to help support Bradley's defense?
http://bradleymanning.org/donate
We'll be facing incredible challenges in the coming months, and your tax-deductible donation today will help pay for Bradley's civilian legal counsel and the growing international grassroots campaign on his behalf. The U.S. government has already spent a year building its case against Bradley, and is now calling its witnesses to Virginia to testify before a grand jury.
What happens to Bradley may ripple through history - he is already considered by many to be the single most important person of his generation. Please show your commitment to Bradley and your support for whistle-blowers and the truth by making a donation today.
With your help, I hope we will come to remember May 26th as a day to commemorate all those who risk their lives and freedom to promote informed democracy - and as the birth of a movement that successfully defended one courageous whistle-blower against the full fury of the U.S. government.
Donate now: bradleymanning.org/donate
In solidarity,
Jeff Paterson and Loraine Reitman,
On behalf of the Bradley Manning Support Network Steering Committee
www.bradleymanning.org
P.S. After you have donated, please help us by forwarding this email to your closest friends. Ask them to stand with you to support Bradley Manning, and the rights of all whistleblowers.
View the new 90 second "I am Bradley Manning" video:
I am Bradley Manning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-P3OXML00s
Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org
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Drop the Charges Against Carlos Montes, Stop the FBI Attack on the Chicano and Immigrant Rights Movement, and Stop FBI Repression of Anti-War Activists NOW!Call Off the Expanding Grand Jury Witchhunt and FBI Repression of Anti-War Activists NOW!
Cancel the Subpoenas! Cancel the Grand Juries!
Condemn the FBI Raids and Harassment of Chicano, Immigrant Rights, Anti-War and International Solidarity Activists!
STOP THE FBI CAMPAIGN OF REPRESSION AGAINST CHICANO, IMMIGRANT RIGHTS, ANTI-WAR AND INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY ACTIVISTS NOW!
Initiated by the Committee to Stop FBI Repression stopfbi.net stopfbi@gmail.com
http://iacenter.org/stopfbi/
Contact the Committee to Stop FBI Repression
at stopfbi.net
stopfbi@gmail.com
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Mumia Wins Decision Against Re-Imposition Of Death Sentence, But...
The Battle Is Still On To
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL!
The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222 • Oakland CA 94610
www.laboractionmumia.org
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Abolish the Death Penalty Blog
http://www.ncadp.org/blog.cfm?postID=165
Abolish the Death Penalty is a blog dedicated to...well, you know. The purpose of Abolish is to tell the personal stories of crime victims and their loved ones, people on death row and their loved ones and those activists who are working toward abolition. You may, from time to time, see news articles or press releases here, but that is not the primary mission of Abolish the Death Penalty. Our mission is to put a human face on the debate over capital punishment.
You can also follow death penalty news by reading our News page and by following us on Facebook and Twitter.
1 Million Tweets for Troy!
Take Action! Tweet for Troy!
When in doubt, don't execute!! Sign the petition for #TroyDavis! www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
Too much doubt! Stop the execution! #TroyDavis needs us! www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
No room for doubt! Stop the execution of #TroyDavis . Retweet, sign petition www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
Case not "ironclad", yet Georgiacould execute #TroyDavis ! Not on our watch! Petition: www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
No murder weapon. No physical evidence. Stop the execution! #TroyDavis petition: www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition
7 out of 9 eyewitnesses recanted. No physical evidence. Stop the execution of Troy Davis www.tinyurl.com/troyepetition #TroyDavis
Thanks!
Exonerated Death Row Survivors Urge Georgia to:
Stop the Execution of Troy Davis
Chairman James E. Donald
Georgia State Board of Pardons & Paroles
2 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, SE
Suite 458, Balcony Level, East Tower
Atlanta, GA 30334
May 1, 2011
Dear Chairperson Donald and Members of the Board:
We, the undersigned, are alive today because some individual or small group of individuals decided that our insistent and persistent proclamations of innocence warranted one more look before we were sent to our death by execution. We are among the 138 individuals who have been legally exonerated and released from death rows in the United States since 1973. We are alive because a few thoughtful persons-attorneys, journalists, judges, jurists, etc.-had lingering doubts about our cases that caused them to say "stop" at a critical moment and halt the march to the execution chamber. When our innocence was ultimately revealed, when our lives were saved, and when our freedom was won, we thanked God and those individuals of conscience who took actions that allowed the truth to eventually come to light.
We are America's exonerated death row survivors. We are living proof that a system operated by human beings is capable of making an irreversible mistake. And while we have had our wrongful convictions overturned and have been freed from death row, we know that we are extremely fortunate to have been able to establish our innocence. We also know that many innocent people who have been executed or who face execution have not been so fortunate. Not all those with innocence claims have had access to the kinds of physical evidence, like DNA, that our courts accept as most reliable. However, we strongly believe that the examples of our cases are reason enough for those with power over life and death to choose life. We also believe that those in authority have a unique moral consideration when encountering individuals with cases where doubt still lingers about innocence or guilt.
One such case is the case of Troy Anthony Davis, whose 1991 conviction for killing Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail rested almost solely on witness testimony. We know that today, 20 years later, witness evidence is considered much less reliable than it was then. This has meant that, even though most of the witnesses who testified against him have now recanted, Troy Davis has been unable to convince the courts to overturn his conviction, or even his death sentence.
Troy Davis has been able to raise serious doubts about his guilt, however. Several witnesses testified at the evidentiary hearing last summer that they had been coerced by police into making false statements against Troy Davis. This courtroom testimony reinforced previous statements in sworn affidavits. Also at this hearing, one witness testified for the first time that he saw an alternative suspect, and not Troy Davis, commit the crime. We don't know if Troy Davis is in fact innocent, but, as people who were wrongfully sentenced to death (and in some cases scheduled for execution), we believe it is vitally important that no execution go forward when there are doubts about guilt. It is absolutely essential to ensuring that the innocent are not executed.
When you issued a temporary stay for Troy Davis in 2007, you stated that the Board "will not allow an execution to proceed in this State unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused." This standard is a welcome development, and we urge you to apply it again now. Doubts persist in the case of Troy Davis, and commuting his sentence will reassure the people of Georgia that you will never permit an innocent person to be put to death in their name.
Freddie Lee Pitts, an exonerated death row survivor who faced execution by the state of Florida for a crime he didn't commit, once said, "You can release an innocent man from prison, but you can't release him from the grave."
Thank you for considering our request.
Respectfully,
Kirk Bloodsworth, Exonerated and freed from death row Maryland; Clarence Brandley, Exonerated and freed from death row in Texas; Dan Bright, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Albert Burrell, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Perry Cobb, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Gary Drinkard, Exonerated and freed from death row in Alabama; Nathson Fields, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Gary Gauger, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Michael Graham, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Shujaa Graham, Exonerated and freed from death row in California; Paul House, Exonerated and freed from death row in Tennessee; Derrick Jamison, Exonerated and freed from death row in Ohio; Dale Johnston, Exonerated and freed from death row in Ohio; Ron Keine, Exonerated and freed from death row in New Mexico; Ron Kitchen, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; Ray Krone, Exonerated and freed from death row in Arizona; Herman Lindsey, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Juan Melendez, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Randal Padgett, Exonerated and freed from death row in Alabama; Freddie Lee Pitts, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Randy Steidl, Exonerated and freed from death row in Illinois; John Thompson, Exonerated and freed from death row in Louisiana; Delbert Tibbs, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; David Keaton, Exonerated and freed from death row in Florida; Greg Wilhoit, Exonerated and freed from death row in Oklahoma; Harold Wilson, Exonerated and freed from death row in Pennsylvania.
-Witness to Innocence, May 11, 2011
http://www.witnesstoinnocence.com/view_news.php?Exonerated-Death-Row-Survivors-Urge-George-to-Stop-the-Execution-of-Troy-Davis-181
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"A Fort Leavenworth mailing address has been released for Bradley Manning:
Bradley Manning 89289
830 Sabalu Road
Fort Leavenworth, KS 66027
The receptionist at the military barracks confirmed that if someone sends Bradley Manning a letter to that address, it will be delivered to him."
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/update-42811
This is also a Facebook event
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=207100509321891#!/event.php?eid=207100509321891
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Committee to Stop FBI Repression
NATIONAL CALL-IN DAY -- ANY DAY
to Fitzgerald, Holder and Obama
The Grand Jury is still on its witch hunt and the FBI is still
harassing activists. This must stop.
Please make these calls:
1. Call U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald at 312-353-5300 . Then dial 0
(zero) for operator and ask to leave a message with the Duty Clerk.
2. Call U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder 202-353-1555
3. Call President Obama at 202-456-1111
Suggested text: "My name is __________, I am from _______(city), in
______(state). I am calling _____ to demand he call off the Grand Jury
and stop FBI repression against the anti-war and Palestine solidarity
movements. I oppose U.S. government political repression and support
the right to free speech and the right to assembly of the 23 activists
subpoenaed. We will not be criminalized. Tell him to stop this
McCarthy-type witch hunt against international solidarity activists!"
If your call doesn't go through, try again later.
Update: 800 anti-war and international solidarity activists
participated in four regional conferences, in Chicago, IL; Oakland,
CA; Chapel Hill, NC and New York City to stop U.S. Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald's Grand Jury repression.
Still, in the last few weeks, the FBI has continued to call and harass
anti-war organizers, repressing free speech and the right to organize.
However, all of their intimidation tactics are bringing a movement
closer together to stop war and demand peace.
We demand:
-- Call Off the Grand Jury Witch-hunt Against International Solidarity
Activists!
-- Support Free Speech!
-- Support the Right to Organize!
-- Stop FBI Repression!
-- International Solidarity Is Not a Crime!
-- Stop the Criminalization of Arab and Muslim Communities!
Background: Fitzgerald ordered FBI raids on anti-war and solidarity
activists' homes and subpoenaed fourteen activists in Chicago,
Minneapolis, and Michigan on September 24, 2010. All 14 refused to
speak before the Grand Jury in October. Then, 9 more Palestine
solidarity activists, most Arab-Americans, were subpoenaed to appear
at the Grand Jury on January 25, 2011, launching renewed protests.
There are now 23 who assert their right to not participate in
Fitzgerald's witch-hunt.
The Grand Jury is a secret and closed inquisition, with no judge, and
no press. The U.S. Attorney controls the entire proceedings and hand
picks the jurors, and the solidarity activists are not allowed a
lawyer. Even the date when the Grand Jury ends is a secret.
So please make these calls to those in charge of the repression aimed
against anti-war leaders and the growing Palestine solidarity
movement.
Email us to let us know your results. Send to info@StopFBI.net
**Please sign and circulate our 2011 petition at http://www.stopfbi.net/petition
In Struggle,
Tom Burke,
for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression
FFI: Visit www.StopFBI.net or email info@StopFBI.net or call
612-379-3585 .
Copyright (c) 2011 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights
reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55415
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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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DEFEND LYNNE STEWART!
http://lynnestewart.org/
Write to Lynne Stewart at:
Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054
Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127
Visiting Lynne:
Visiting is very liberal but first she has to get people on her visiting list; wait til she or the lawyers let you know. The visits are FRI, SAT, SUN AND MON for 4 hours and on weekends 8 to 3. Bring clear plastic change purse with lots of change to buy from the machines. Brief Kiss upon arrival and departure, no touching or holding during visit (!!) On visiting forms it may be required that you knew me before I came to prison. Not a problem for most of you.
Commissary Money:
Commissary Money is always welcome It is how Lynne pay for the phone and for email. Also for a lot that prison doesn't supply in terms of food and "sundries" (pens!) (A very big list that includes Raisins, Salad Dressing, ankle sox, mozzarella (definitely not from Antonys--more like a white cheddar, Sanitas Corn Chips but no Salsa, etc. To add money, you do this by using Western Union and a credit card by phone or you can send a USPO money order or Business or Govt Check. The negotiable instruments (PAPER!) need to be sent to Federal Bureau of Prisons, 53504-054, Lynne Stewart, PO Box 474701, Des Moines Iowa 50947-001 (Payable to Lynne Stewart, 53504-054) They hold the mo or checks for 15 days. Western Union costs $10 but is within 2 hours. If you mail, your return address must be on the envelope. Unnecessarily complicated? Of course, it's the BOP !)
The address of her Defense Committee is:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information:
718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
Please make a generous contribution to her defense.
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In earnest support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
http://readersupportednews.org/julian-assange-petition
rsn:Petition
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KEVIN COOPER IS INNOCENT! FREE KEVIN COOPER!
Reasonable doubts about executing Kevin Cooper
Chronicle Editorial
Monday, December 13, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/13/EDG81GP0I7.DTL
Death penalty -- Kevin Cooper is Innocent! Help save his life from San Quentin's death row!
http://www.savekevincooper.org/
http://www.savekevincooper.org/pages/essays_content.html?ID=255
URGENT ACTION APPEAL
- From Amnesty International USA
17 December 2010
Click here to take action online:
http://takeaction.amnestyusa.org/siteapps/advocacy/index.aspx?c=jhKPIXPCIoE&b=2590179&template=x.ascx&action=15084
To learn about recent Urgent Action successes and updates, go to
http://www.amnestyusa.org/iar/success
For a print-friendly version of this Urgent Action (PDF):
http://www.amnestyusa.org/actioncenter/actions/uaa25910.pdf
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"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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Courage to Resist needs your support
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
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
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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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) Your help is needed to defend free speech rights
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
2) Monsanto Corn Plant Losing Bug Resistance
by Scott Kilman
Published on Monday, August 29, 2011 by The Wall Street Journal
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/49-49/7238-monsanto-corn-spawning-superbug
3) Greenpeace: Fukushima schools unsafe after clean-up
By Natalia Konstantinovskaya
TOKYO | Mon Aug 29, 2011 6:14am EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/29/us-japan-schools-greenpeace-idUSTRE77S1GX20110829
4) The New Resentment of the Poor
New York Times Editorial
August 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/opinion/the-new-resentment-of-the-poor.html?_r=1&hp
5) Panel Hears Grim Details of Venereal Disease Tests
[How low can U.S. capitalism get? This low!...bw]
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
August 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/world/americas/31syphilis.html?ref=world
6) The Military and the Death Penalty
New York Times Editorial
August 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/opinion/the-military-and-the-death-penalty.html?_r=1&hp
7) Case Reveals Details of C.I.A. Flights
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
September 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/09/01/us/politics/AP-US-Sept-11-Rendition-Flights.html?hp
8) Judge Declines to Dismiss Case Alleging Racial Profiling by City Police in Street Stops
By AL BAKER
August 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/nyregion/racial-profiling-case-against-new-york-police-is-allowed-to-proceed.html?ref=nyregion
9) Second giant ice island set to break off Greenland glacier
Astonished scientist says he was 'completely unprepared for the gob-smacking scale of the breakup, which rendered me speechless'
By Ian Johnston
msnbc.com
updated 9/1/2011 10:43:21 AM ET
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44353322/ns/us_news-environment%23.TmAYDXObgTw
10) Job Growth at Halt in U.S.; Worst Showing in 11 Months
By SHAILA DEWAN
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/business/economy/united-states-showed-no-job-growth-in-august.html?hp
11) Hope, Fear and Insomnia: Journey of a Jobless Man
By JENNIFER GONNERMAN
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/nyregion/hope-fear-and-insomnia-journey-of-a-jobless-man.html?hp
12) Scanning 2.4 Billion Eyes, India Tries to Connect Poor to Growth
By LYDIA POLGREEN
September 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/world/asia/02india.html?hp
13) A Challenge for Unions in Public Opinion
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
September 2, 2011, 11:07 am
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/a-challenge-for-unions-in-public-opinion/?hp
14) Cable Implicates Americans in Deaths of Iraqi Civilians
"the autopsies on the victims were carried out in a hospital in Tikrit, Iraq, and 'revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.'"
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
September 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html?ref=world
15) Clinic Rejects Immigrants After Impasse With Hospital
By KEVIN SACK
September 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/health/02grady.html?ref=us
16) Ohio: State Prison Sold to Private Company
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
September 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/us/02brfs-Ohio.html?ref=us
17) The Truth Behind Stop-and-Frisk
New York Times Editorial
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/opinion/the-truth-behind-stop-and-frisk.html?hp
18) On Race, the Silence Is Bipartisan
"In July, the unemployment rate was 8.2 percent for whites, but 16.8 percent for blacks and 11.3 percent for Latinos. The Pew Research Center estimates that in 2009, the median household net worth was $5,677 for blacks, $6,325 for Hispanics and $113,149 for whites - down from $12,124, $18,539 and $134,992, respectively, in 2005."
By DESMOND S. KING and ROGERS M. SMITH
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/opinion/on-race-the-silence-is-bipartisan.html?hp
19) Files Note Close C.I.A. Ties to Qaddafi Spy Unit
By ROD NORDLAND
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/world/africa/03libya.html?hp
20) London Protesters Disrupt Israeli Orchestra's Concert
By JOHN F. BURNS
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/world/europe/03london.html?ref=world
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1) Your help is needed to defend free speech rights
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
We are writing to urge you to send an email letter today that can make a big difference in the outcome of a free speech fight that is vital to all grassroots movements that support social justice and peace.
It will just take a moment of your time but it will make a big difference.
https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=326
All across the country people and organizations engaged in producing and disseminating leaflets and posters - the classic method of grassroots outreach used by those without institutional power and corporate money - are being faced with bankrupting fines.
This has been happening with ferocity in the nation's capital ever since the ANSWER Coalition was fined over $50,000 in the span of a few weeks for posters advertising the Sept. 15, 2007, protest against the Iraq war.
Attorneys for the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) filed a major lawsuit in August 2007 against the unconstitutional postering regulations in Washington, D.C.
"The District has employed an illegal system that creates a hierarchy of speech, favoring the speech of politicians and punishing grassroots outreach," Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF, stated in explaining a basic tenet of the lawsuit. "It's time for that system to end, and it will."
The hard-fought four-year-long lawsuit filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund against Washington, D.C.'s unconstitutional postering regulations has succeeded in achieving a number of important victories, including the issuance of new regulations after the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia warned just last month of an impending declaration of unconstitutionality against the District.
In July 2011 the federal District Court issued a preliminary opinion regarding one aspect of our lawsuit and suggested that the D.C. government "revise the regulations to include a single, across-the-board durational restriction that applies equally to all viewpoints and subject matters."
But this battle is not finished. The new regulations still contain dissent-crushing "strict liability" provisions (explained below) and remain unconstitutionally vague and ambiguous. Plus the District has never withdrawn the tens of thousands of dollars of fines against ANSWER.
The District of Columbia is required by law to open the new rules to public comment, which it has done with an extremely short comment period that is now open. We need people to send a comment today to the government of Washington, D.C. It just takes a minute using our online Submit a Comment tool, which will send your comment by email.
Send a letter today in support of the right to produce and disseminate leaflets and posters in Washington, D.C. We have included a sample comment but we encourage people to use or add your own language.
An Opportunity for You to Make a Difference
In response to our lawsuit, the District of Columbia has now issued "Emergency Regulations" replacing the current system which the city now admits are a "threat to the public welfare," after the court issued a preliminary opinion that agreed with a basic argument of the lawsuit.
This is an important moment and we need you and others who believe in Free Speech to weigh in during the short 15-day public comment period in response to the proposed Emergency Regulations for postering. Submit an online Comment now that makes one or more of three vital points:
Drop the $70,000 fines that have been applied to the ANSWER Coalition for anti-war posters during the past four years.
End "Strict Liability" fines and penalities. Strict Liability constitutes something of a death penalty for Free Speech activities such as producing leaflets and posters. It means that an organization referenced on posted signs can be held "strictly liable" for any materials alleged to be improperly posted, even if the group never even posted a single sign or poster. The D.C. government is even going further than that - it just levied fines against a disabled Vietnam veteran who didn't put up a single poster but was fined $450 because three posted signs were seen referencing a Veterans for Peace demonstration last December, and the District's enforcement agents researched that his name was on the permit application for the peace demonstration at the White House. Any group or person that leaves literature at a bookstore, or distributes literature, or posts .pdf fliers on the Internet, can be fined tens of thousands of dollars simply for having done nothing more than making political literature available.
Insist that any new regulations be clear, unambiguous and fair. The District's new "Emergency" Regulations are still inadequate because they are vague and ambiguous. Vaguely worded regulations in the hands of vindictive authority can and will be used to punish, penalize and fine grassroots organizations that seek to redress grievances while allowing the powerful and moneyed interests to do as they please. The District's postering regulations must be clear and unambiguous if they are to be fair, uniform and constitutional.
Take two minutes right now, click through to our online comment submission tool.
Thank you for your continued support. After you send your comment today to the District of Columbia please send this email to your friends and encourage them to take action as well. Click here to send your comment to the District.
Sincerely,
ANSWER Coalition
www.AnswerCoalition.org
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2) Monsanto Corn Plant Losing Bug Resistance
by Scott Kilman
Published on Monday, August 29, 2011 by The Wall Street Journal
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-news-section/49-49/7238-monsanto-corn-spawning-superbug
Widely grown corn plants that Monsanto Co. genetically modified to thwart a voracious bug are falling prey to that very pest in a few Iowa fields, the first time a major Midwest scourge has developed resistance to a genetically modified crop.
The discovery raises concerns that the way some farmers are using biotech crops could spawn superbugs.
Iowa State University entomologist Aaron Gassmann's discovery that western corn rootworms in four northeast Iowa fields have evolved to resist the natural pesticide made by Monsanto's corn plant could encourage some farmers to switch to insect-proof seeds sold by competitors of the St. Louis crop biotechnology giant, and to return to spraying harsher synthetic insecticides on their fields.
"These are isolated cases, and it isn't clear how widespread the problem will become," said Dr. Gassmann in an interview. "But it is an early warning that management practices need to change."
The finding adds fuel to the race among crop biotechnology rivals to locate the next generation of genes that can protect plants from insects. Scientists at Monsanto and Syngenta AG of Basel, Switzerland, are already researching how to use a medical breakthrough called RNA interference to, among other things, make crops deadly for insects to eat. If this works, a bug munching on such a plant could ingest genetic code that turns off one of its essential genes.
Monsanto said its rootworm-resistant corn seed lines are working as it expected "on more than 99% of the acres planted with this technology" and that it is too early to know what the Iowa State University study means for farmers.
The discovery comes amid a debate about whether the genetically modified crops that now saturate the Farm Belt are changing how some farmers operate in undesirable ways.
These insect-proof and herbicide-resistant crops make farming so much easier that many growers rely heavily on the technology, violating a basic tenet of pest management, which warns that using one method year after year gives more opportunity for pests to adapt.
Monsanto is already at the center of this issue because of its success since the 1990s marketing seeds that grow into crops that can survive exposure to its Roundup herbicide, a glyphosate-based chemical known for its ability to kill almost anything green.
These seeds made it so convenient for farmers to spray Roundup that many farmers stopped using other weedkillers. As a result, say many scientists, superweeds immune to Roundup have spread to millions of acres in more than 20 states in the South and Midwest.
Monsanto became the first company to sell rootworm-resistant biotech corn to farmers in 2003. The seed contains a gene from a common soil microorganism called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, from which crop biotechnology has been used to mine several genes for making insecticidal proteins.
One of the genes Monsanto developed makes a crystalline protein called Cry3Bb1. It rips apart the gut of the rootworm but is harmless to mammals, birds and most beneficial insects. Competitors, which use other Bt genes to attack the rootworm, estimate that roughly one-third of the corn grown in the U.S. carries Monsanto's Cry3Bb1 gene.
Monsanto said it generated world-wide sales of $4.26 billion from corn seed and biotechnology traits, about 40% of its overall sales, in its last full year.
Until insecticide-producing corn plants arrived, Midwest farmers typically tried to keep pests like the corn borer and the rootworm in check by changing what they grew in a field each year, often rotating between corn and soybeans. That way, the offspring of corn-loving insects would starve the next year.
Some farmers began to plant corn in the same field year after year. The financial incentive to grow corn has increased in recent years in part because the ethanol-fuel industry's exploding appetite for corn has helped to lift prices to very profitable levels for growers.
According to Dr. Gassmann, the Iowa fields in which he found rootworms resistant to the Cry3Bb1 toxin had been producing Monsanto's Bt-expressing corn continuously for at least three years. Dr. Gassmann collected rootworm beetles from four Iowa cornfields with plant damage in 2009. Their larvae were then fed corn containing Monsanto's Cry3Bb1 toxin. They had a survival rate three times that of control larvae that ate the same corn.
Dr. Gassmann found that Monsanto's Bt toxin still had some lethal impact on the larvae from the problem Iowa fields, and that the bugs were still highly susceptible to a rootworm-resistant corn plant from a competitor that uses a different Bt toxin, called Cry34/35Ab1.
Scientists in other Farm Belt states are also looking for signs that Monsanto's Bt corn might be losing its effectiveness. Mike Gray, a University of Illinois entomologist, said he is studying rootworm beetles he collected in northwest Illinois earlier this month from fields where Monsanto's Bt-expressing corn had suffered extensive rootworm damage.
The government requires that farmers who plant the genetically modified corn take certain steps aimed at preventing insects from developing resistance. Farmers are told to create a refuge for the bugs by planting non-modified corn in part of their fields. The refuge, which can be as much as 20% of a farmer's field, is supposed to reduce the chances that two toxin-resistant bugs mate and pass along that trait to their offspring.
Dr. Gray said the confirmation of toxin-resistant rootworms in Iowa could force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to revisit its policy of allowing the size of these insect refuges to shrink to as little as 5% of a cornfield as crop biotechnology companies begin to sell seed for corn plants that can make two different rootworm-killing toxins.
Part of what has attracted some farmers to Monsanto's new SmartStax corn line is that it allows them to plant a smaller refuge. But one of the two anti-rootworm toxins in that variety is the Cry3Bb1 protein at the center of Dr. Gassmann's study.
The EPA said it is too early to comment on any implications arising from Dr. Gassmann's paper.
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3) Greenpeace: Fukushima schools unsafe after clean-up
By Natalia Konstantinovskaya
TOKYO | Mon Aug 29, 2011 6:14am EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/29/us-japan-schools-greenpeace-idUSTRE77S1GX20110829
(Reuters) - Greenpeace said on Monday that schools and surrounding areas located 60 km (38 miles) from Japan's tsunami-hit nuclear power plant were unsafe for children, showing radiation readings as much as 70 times internationally accepted levels.
The environmental group took samples at and near three schools in Fukushima city, well outside the 20 km exclusion zone from Tokyo Electric Power's stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in Japan's northeast.
"No parent should have to choose between radiation exposure and education for their child," said Kazue Suzuki, Greenpeace Japan's anti-nuclear project head.
The government had already taken steps to decontaminate schools in Fukushima prefecture, where the crippled plant has been leaking radiation since it was hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Calling the measures "deplorably late and inadequate," Greenpeace said it had found average dose rates above the maximum allowed under international standards, of 1 millisievert per year, or 0.11 microsievert per hour.
Japan's education ministry on Friday set a looser standard, allowing up to 1 microsievert per hour of radiation in schools.
Greenpeace said that inside a high school it tested, the reading was 0.5 microsievert per hour, breaching international standards even after the government's clean-up.
At a staircase connecting a school playground to the street, it found radiation amounting to 7.9 microsieverts per hour, or about 70 times the maximum allowed, exceeding even Japan's own standard.
Greenpeace urged the government to delay reopening the schools as planned on September 1 after the summer break and relocate children in the most affected cities until decontamination was complete.
Fukushima city dismissed Greenpeace's calls, saying the schools were safe under the government's norms.
"We're finished decontaminating the schools, and they no longer have high radiation levels," city official Yoshimasa Kanno said. He added that postponing the opening of more than 100 schools in the city based on Greenpeace's findings of "only three" would be unreasonable.
RADIATION TO PERSIST FOR YEARS
Despite the government's reassurances, parents have removed thousands of children from schools in Fukushima since the disasters, fearing damage to their health.
Underscoring such concerns, the government said this month that 45 percent of children living outside the evacuation zone in Fukushima were exposed to low levels of radiation though it was within safety levels.
Greenpeace, which took its samples August 17-19, did not say how long it might take to rid the areas of harmful levels of radiation.
But Jan van de Putte, its radiation expert, noted that cleaning up in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, about 100 km from Chernobyl, required hundreds of thousands of workers toiling over several months.
A vast area is still uninhabitable around the Chernobyl plant 25 years after the world's worst nuclear disaster, and experts have estimated Japan's decontamination efforts could cost as much as 10 trillion yen ($130 billion).
"We expect that the radiation levels would persist for a long period of time," van de Putte said. ($1 = 76.855 Japanese Yen)
(Editing by Chang-Ran Kim and Chris Gallagher)
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4) The New Resentment of the Poor
New York Times Editorial
August 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/opinion/the-new-resentment-of-the-poor.html?_r=1&hp
In a decade of frenzied tax-cutting for the rich, the Republican Party just happened to lower tax rates for the poor, as well. Now several of the party's most prominent presidential candidates and lawmakers want to correct that oversight and raise taxes on the poor and the working class, while protecting the rich, of course.
These Republican leaders, who think nothing of widening tax loopholes for corporations and multimillion-dollar estates, are offended by the idea that people making less than $40,000 might benefit from the progressive tax code. They are infuriated by the earned income tax credit (the pride of Ronald Reagan), which has become the biggest and most effective antipoverty program by giving working families thousands of dollars a year in tax refunds. They scoff at continuing President Obama's payroll tax cut, which is tilted toward low- and middle-income workers and expires in December.
Until fairly recently, Republicans, at least, have been fairly consistent in their position that tax cuts should benefit everyone. Though the Bush tax cuts were primarily for the rich, they did lower rates for almost all taxpayers, providing a veneer of egalitarianism. Then the recession pushed down incomes severely, many below the minimum income tax level, and the stimulus act lowered that level further with new tax cuts. The number of families not paying income tax has risen from about 30 percent before the recession to about half, and, suddenly, Republicans have a new tool to stoke class resentment.
Representative Michele Bachmann noted recently that 47 percent of Americans do not pay federal income tax; all of them, she said, should pay something because they benefit from parks, roads and national security. (Interesting that she acknowledged government has a purpose.) Gov. Rick Perry, in the announcement of his candidacy, said he was dismayed at the "injustice" that nearly half of Americans do not pay income tax. Jon Huntsman Jr., up to now the most reasonable in the Republican presidential field, said not enough Americans pay tax.
Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, and several senators have made similar arguments, variations of the idea expressed earlier by Senator Dan Coats of Indiana that "everyone needs to have some skin in the game."
This is factually wrong, economically wrong and morally wrong. First, the facts: a vast majority of Americans have skin in the tax game. Even if they earn too little to qualify for the income tax, they pay payroll taxes (which Republicans want to raise), gasoline excise taxes and state and local taxes. Only 14 percent of households pay neither income nor payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution. The poorest fifth paid an average of 16.3 percent of income in taxes in 2010.
Economically, reducing the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit - which would be required if everyone paid income taxes - makes no sense at a time of high unemployment. The credits, which only go to working people, have always been a strong incentive to work, as even some conservative economists say, and have increased the labor force while reducing the welfare rolls.
The moral argument would have been obvious before this polarized year. Nearly 90 percent of the families that paid no income tax make less than $40,000, most much less. The real problem is that so many Americans are struggling on such a small income, not whether they pay taxes. The two tax credits lifted 7.2 million people out of poverty in 2009, including four million children. At a time when high-income households are paying their lowest share of federal taxes in decades, when corporations frequently avoid paying any tax, it is clear who should bear a larger burden and who should not.
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5) Panel Hears Grim Details of Venereal Disease Tests
[How low can U.S. capitalism get? This low!...bw]
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
August 30, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/31/world/americas/31syphilis.html?ref=world
Gruesome details of American-run venereal disease experiments on Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers and mental patients in the years after World War II were revealed this week during hearings before a White House bioethics panel investigating the study's sordid history.
From 1946 to 1948, American taxpayers, through the Public Health Service, paid for syphilis-infected Guatemalan prostitutes to have sex with prisoners. When some of the men failed to become infected through sex, the bacteria were poured into scrapes made on the penises or faces, or even injected by spinal puncture.
About 5,500 Guatemalans were enrolled, about 1,300 of whom were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid. At least 83 died, but it was not clear if the experiments killed them. About 700 were treated with antibiotics, records showed; it was not clear if some were never treated.
The stated aim of the study was to see if penicillin could prevent infection after exposure. But the study's leaders changed explanations several times.
"This was a very dark chapter in the history of medical research sponsored by the U.S. government," Amy Gutmann, the chairwoman of the bioethics panel and the president of the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview.
President Obama apologized to President Álvaro Colom of Guatemala for the experiments last year, after they were discovered.
Since then, the panel, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, has studied 125,000 pages of documents and has sent investigators to Guatemala. While the panel will not make its final report until next month, details emerged in hearings on Monday and Tuesday.
The most offensive case, said John Arras, a bioethicist at the University of Virginia and a panelist, was that of a mental patient named Berta.
She was first deliberately infected with syphilis and, months later, given penicillin. After that, Dr. John C. Cutler of the Public Health Service, who led the experiments, described her as so unwell that she "appeared she was going to die." Nonetheless, he inserted pus from a male gonorrhea victim into her eyes, urethra and rectum. Four days later, infected in both eyes and bleeding from the urethra, she died.
"I really do believe that a very rigorous judgment of moral blame can be lodged against some of these people," Dr. Arras said.
Also, several epileptic women at a Guatemalan home for the insane were injected with syphilis below the base of their skull. One was left paralyzed for two months by meningitis.
Dr. Cutler said he was testing a theory that the injections could cure epilepsy.
Poor, handicapped or imprisoned Guatemalans were chosen because they were "available and powerless," said Anita L. Allen, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania's law school and a panelist.
The panel's hearings also brought to light that a local doctor had invited the American researchers, and that Guatemalan military and health officials had initially approved the work. In 1947, an international conference on venereal diseases - based on the experiments - was held in Guatemala City, according to Dr. Rafael Espada, the vice president of Guatemala, in remarks quoted by the Guatemalan news media.
Dr. Espada, a physician, is leading his country's inquiry into the matter and is expected to deliver his report in October. On Monday, he told Guatemalan reporters that five survivors, all in their 80s, had been found and would receive medical tests.
Dr. Cutler's team took pains to keep its activities hidden from what one of the researchers described as "goody organizations that might raise a lot of smoke."
Members of the bioethics commission recalled Nazi experiments on Jews and said that Dr. Cutler, who died in 2003, must have known from the Nuremberg doctors' trials under way by 1946 that his work was unethical.
Also, according to Dr. Gutmann, Dr. Cutler had read a brief article in The New York Times on April 27, 1947, about other syphilis researchers - one of them from his own agency - doing tests like his on rabbits. The article stated that it was "ethically impossible" for scientists to "shoot living syphilis germs into human bodies." His response, Dr. Gutmann said, was to order stricter secrecy about his work.
Also, one commission member added, "Regardless what you think of the ethical issues, it was just bad science."
The results were never published in medical journals, note-keeping was "haphazard at best" and routine protocols were not done.
The Guatemala experiments came to light only last year when a medical historian found descriptive notes in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh. The historian, Susan M. Reverby of Wellesley College, was researching the infamous Tuskegee study, in which Alabama sharecroppers infected with syphilis were left untreated from 1932 to 1972. Dr. Cutler oversaw the Tuskegee study after his Guatemala work finished; he was also an acting dean at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1960s.
Dr. Cutler sent his Guatemala reports to only one supervisor, but Dr. Gutmann said they went up the chain to Surgeon General Thomas Parran Jr., a favorite of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. According to a government biography, Dr. Parran was famous for his long campaign against syphilis, which was then a major public health problem but could not even be mentioned on the radio.
In 1943, Dr. Cutler's team had tried to infect 241 inmates of a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., with gonorrhea. But that time they adhered to ethical protocols, using only volunteers, explaining the risks and offering cash or help getting reduced sentences in return for participating.
Dr. Nelson L. Michael, an AIDS researcher at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and a panelist, speculated that the research was rushed and badly done because it had started under intense pressure to help the war effort. Curing troops' venereal diseases was a major goal of military medicine.
The panelists generally agreed that the ethical review boards now mandated by the American government, universities, foundations and medical journals would prevent similar abuses today by anyone spending taxpayer or foundation money.
Pharmaceutical and medical device companies also do research in poor countries and still need watching, panel members said. But large companies say publicly that they adhere to ethical principles.
"The problem in 1946," Dr. Gutmann said, "was that ethical rules were treated as obstacles to overcome, not as fundamental bedrock of human dignity. That can still apply today. That's why our panel is doing our report."
Panel members endorsed the idea of creating compensation funds for subjects who are harmed in the future, or requiring researchers to buy insurance for that purpose. Some countries require these steps; the United States does not.
Elisabeth Malkin contributed reporting.
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6) The Military and the Death Penalty
New York Times Editorial
August 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/opinion/the-military-and-the-death-penalty.html?_r=1&hp
Racism in the application of capital punishment has been well documented in the civilian justice system since the Supreme Court reinstated the penalty in 1976. Now comes evidence that racial disparity is even greater in death penalty cases in the military system.
Minority service members are more than twice as likely as whites - after accounting for the crimes' circumstances and the victims' race - to be sentenced to death, according to a forthcoming study co-written by David Baldus, an eminent death-penalty scholar, who died in June.
The analysis is so disturbing because the military has made sustained, often successful efforts to rid its ranks of discrimination. But even with this record, its failure to apply the death penalty fairly is more proof that capital punishment cannot be free of racism's taint. It is capricious, barbaric and discriminatory, and should be abolished.
The number of capital cases in the military system is small: of 105 cases in which the death penalty might have been applied between 1984 - when the military revamped its death penalty process - and 2005, 15 defendants were sentenced to death. (Another capital case in 2010 was not included in the study.) Eight have since been removed from death row because of various legal errors, and two were granted clemency.
In its analysis, the new report found a significant risk that minority service members would be given the death penalty in cases in which there was at least one white victim, while a similarly situated white defendant would more likely be spared.
This connection between race and the death penalty is notably different from the results found in state criminal courts. A landmark study of state cases by Mr. Baldus and others in the 1980s showed that a death sentence often hinged not on the race of the defendant, but on the race of the victim. People accused of killing white victims were four times as likely to be sentenced to death as those accused of killing black victims.
Clearly, the military has not succeeded in keeping racial bias out of its judicial process. The broad discretion of judges and jurors in military tribunals and the system's lack of transparency may make it harder to root out discrimination.
Still, the number of military capital cases has dropped to roughly one every two years since life without parole became a military option in 1997, far fewer than in the previous decade. Military courts now generally avoid seeking the death penalty when the crime is no different from crimes handled in civilian courts except that the defendant is in the military.
Almost all the capital cases involve victims who were American troops on duty or otherwise significant to the military. The reversal rate on these cases has been shockingly high: eight out of 10 death sentences have been overturned, compared with a reversal rate of 3 to 8 percent in military non-capital cases. An important reason is inadequate counsel: the military often assigns inexperienced military lawyers incapable of mounting a strong defense.
The last military execution was in 1961. The de facto moratorium has not made the country or the military less secure. The evidence of persistent racial bias is further evidence that it is time for the military system to abolish the death penalty.
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7) Case Reveals Details of C.I.A. Flights
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
September 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/09/01/us/politics/AP-US-Sept-11-Rendition-Flights.html?hp
WASHINGTON (AP) - The secret airlift of terrorism suspects and American intelligence officials to CIA-operated overseas prisons via luxury jets was mounted by a hidden network of U.S. companies and coordinated by a prominent defense contractor, newly disclosed documents show.
More than 1,700 pages of court files in a business dispute between two aviation companies reveal how integral private contractors were in the government's covert "extraordinary rendition" flights. They shuttled between Washington, foreign capitals, the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and, at times, landing points near once-secret, CIA-run overseas prisons.
The companies ranged from DynCorp, a leading government contractor that secretly oversaw the flights, to caterers that unwittingly stocked the planes with fruit platters and bottles of wine, the court files and testimony show.
A New York-based charter company, Richmor Aviation Inc., which supplied corporate jets and crews to the government, and a private aviation broker, SportsFlight Air, which organized flights for DynCorp, have been engaged in a four-year legal dispute. Both sides have cited the government's program of forced transport of detainees in testimony, evidence and legal arguments. The companies are fighting over $874,000 awarded to Richmor by a New York state appeals court to cover unpaid costs for the secret flights.
The court files, which include contracts, flight invoices, cell phone logs and correspondence, paint a sweeping portrait of collusion between the government and the private contractors that did its bidding - some eagerly, some hesitantly. Other companies turned a blind eye to what was going on.
Trial testimony studiously avoided references to the CIA. When lawyers pressed a witness about flying terrorists from Washington or Europe to Guantanamo Bay, Columbia County, N.Y., Supreme Court Judge Paul Czajka put on the brakes: "Does this have anything to do with the contract? I mean, it's all very interesting, and I would love to hear about it, but does it have anything to do with how much money is owed?"
At another point, the name of a high-level CIA official was mentioned, but the official's intelligence ties were not divulged.
Among the new disclosures:
-DynCorp, which was reorganized and split up between another major contractor and a separate firm now known as DynCorp International, functioned as the primary contractor over the airlift. The company had not been previously linked to the secret flights.
-Airport invoices and other commercial records provide a new paper trail for the movements of some high-value terrorism suspects who vanished into the CIA "black site" prisons, along with government operatives who rushed to the scenes of their capture. The records include flight itineraries closely coordinated with the arrest of accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the suspected transport of other captives.
-The private jets were furnished with State Department transit letters providing diplomatic cover for their flights. Former top State Department officials said similar arrangements aided other government-leased flights, but the documents in the court files may not be authentic since there are indications that the official who purportedly signed them was fictitious.
-The private business jets shuttled among as many as 10 landings over a single mission, costing the government as much as $300,000 per flight.
According to invoices between 2002 and 2005, many of the flights carried U.S. officials between Washington Dulles International Airport and the Guantanamo Bay detention compound, where the U.S. was housing a growing population of terror detainees. Other flights landed at a dizzying array of international airports.
Jets were dispatched to Islamabad; Rome; Djibouti; Frankfurt, Germany; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Shannon, Ireland; Glasgow, Scotland; Tenerife, Spain; Sharm el Sheik, Egypt; and even Tripoli.
Some flights landed at airports near where CIA black sites operated: Kabul, Bangkok and Bucharest. Others touched down at foreign outposts where obliging security services reportedly took in U.S. terror detainees for their own severe brand of persuasion: Cairo; Damascus, Syria; Amman, Jordan; and Rabat, Morocco. Billing records show scores of baggage handlers, ramp officials, van and car providers, satellite and flight phone firms, hotels and caterers routinely serviced the flights and crews and earned tens of thousands of dollars.
The court records do not specify who was aboard the planes beyond a count of crew and passengers. But in several cases, the flights dovetail with the arrests and transport of some of the most prominent accused terrorism suspects captured in the months immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: Mohammed, the purported mastermind, and Ramzi bin Alshib, his key logistics man; Abd al-Nashiri, who allegedly planned the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole; and Hambali, an Indonesia terror leader tied to the 2002 bombing of a Bali nightclub. The detainees all vanished into the CIA's now-shuttered "black site" prison network and all are now at Guantanamo awaiting military trials.
President George W. Bush acknowledged the existence of the prison network in 2006, and the CIA director in 2009, Leon Panetta, said the prisons were no longer in use. The intelligence agency has never acknowledged specific locations, but prisons overseen by U.S. officials reportedly operated in Poland, Romania, Thailand, Lithuania and Afghanistan. Detainees have claimed in legal actions that they were flown, often hooded and shackled, to the prisons, where some were exposed to simulated drowning known as waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.
The inner workings of the flight program have leaked previously. Aviation logs and other records were exposed by lawsuits and European parliamentary inquiries, and investigative accounts have traced patterns of some planes used in the flights. The Council of Europe estimated in 2007 that 1,245 CIA-operated flights passed over the continent, but an accurate count of actual rendition flights will probably never be known without a U.S. government accounting.
But few court and corporate records have emerged describing the backstage role of private companies that aided in the secret flights. The international human rights group, Reprieve, which discovered the court case in New York, said the material provides "an unprecedented insight into the government's outsourcing of torture."
In the court case, Richmor accused SportsFlight in 2007 of failing to pay more than $1.15 million for at least 55 missions flown by planes and crews chartered by DynCorp for government use. A state judge ruled for Richmor in January 2010, awarding the company $1.6 million. In May, an appeals court affirmed the decision, cutting the judgment to $874,000. Richmor contends it still has not been paid in full.
During the trial, Richmor's president, Mahlon Richards, carefully described flights as classified and said passengers were "government personnel and their invitees." But he also said he was aware of allegations his planes flew "terrorists" and "bad guys." In a phone interview this week, Richards said he had agreed to work with the government as a patriotic response to the Sept. 11 attacks, adding that his company was only one of several air charter concerns that provided jets.
"We thought we were doing a good thing," Richards said. He declined to specify which government agency he dealt with or describe how the flights operated, citing confidentiality agreements with the government. But he noted, "It was the government that called the shots."
SportsFlight's lawyers made the nature of the flights a central part of its legal appeal, insisting that SportsFlight's president, Don Moss, learned over time that "the flights would be going to and from Guantanamo Bay and would be used for assorted rendition missions."
In one deposition, he blurted out the name of a CIA official during a line of questioning quickly aborted by the lawyers. The official's intelligence background was not mentioned, but The Associated Press has independently confirmed the official's role in CIA operations. Contacted at his New York home, Moss would only verify that his trial testimony was accurate.
A CIA spokeswoman said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.
DynCorp is the largest company known to be involved in the secret flights. Previously, the most prominent company linked to the airlift had been Boeing subsidiary Jeppeson Dataplan, which was accused in a 2007 ACLU lawsuit of providing flight planning and navigation for rendition jets. Justice Department attorneys intervened in that case, urging judges to dismiss the case on national security grounds, and a federal appeals court agreed. There is no indication the government intervened in the New York state case.
DynCorp was purchased in 2003 by Computer Services Corp., another leading federal contractor, in a $940 million merger. Computer Services Corp. then took on a supervising role in the rendition flights through 2006, according to invoices and emails in the court files. CSC sold three DynCorp units in 2005 to Veritas Capital Fund, a private equity firm, for $850 million, but retained ownership of other parts of the old company. Veritas in turn sold the restructured DynCorp - now known as DynCorp International - for about $1 billion in 2010 to Cerebrus Capital Management, another private equity fund.
DynCorp International spokeswoman Ashley Burke said Wednesday that the company "has no involvement in or information about the litigation between Richmor and SportsFlight." She added that none of the DynCorp entities listed in the court files is owned by or has any affiliation with DynCorp International.
A Computer Sciences spokesman, Chris Grandis, said the company could not comment because of the ongoing lawsuit.
Under DynCorp's guidance, Richmor provided 10-passenger Gulfstream jets and flight crews for its government clients nearly once a month between May 2002 and January 2005, according to flight invoices. The maiden flight was a May 2002 trip from Washington to Guantanamo and back, but by year's end, the Gulfstreams were flying more complex routes that paralleled the suspected movements of high-value al-Qaida and other terrorist captives to black prison sites.
Every time the Gulfstream and other planes in Richmor's fleet took to the air, they carried one-page transit documents on State Department letterhead. The notices, known as "letters of public convenience," were addressed "to whom it may concern," stating that the jets should be treated as official flights and that "accompanying personnel are under contract with the U.S. government."
In trial testimony, Moss said the documents were provided from the government to DynCorp, which furnished them to Richmor. Richards said the letters were given to flight crews before they left on each flight, but declined to explain their use.
The notes, signed by a State Department administrative assistant, Terry A. Hogan, described the planes' travels as "global support for U.S. embassies worldwide."
The AP could not locate Hogan. No official with that name is currently listed in State's department-wide directory. A comprehensive 2004 State Department telephone directory contains no reference to Hogan, or variations of that name - despite records of four separate transit letters signed by Terry A. Hogan in January, March and April 2004. Several of the signatures on the diplomatic letters under Hogan's name were noticeably different.
A State Department spokesman said the department has a policy of not commenting on "alleged intelligence activities."
In some cases, the notes added that the jets were not restricted by standard federal flight rules governing aircraft for hire. Although such exemptions are vague in practice, said Gregory Winton, a former Federal Aviation Administration lawyer, they might allow pilots to avoid normal FAA restrictions on the amount of duty hours they could fly - helpful on the long international missions such as those flown by the Gulfstreams.
In some circumstances, Winton added, such diplomatic cover letters might also be used to allow pilots to deviate from their flight plans and to win cooperation from foreign authorities after an international landing. Human rights groups and foreign critics have contended that some rendition flights obscured their real destinations when they dropped off detainees at airfields near the black sites.
"When you go overseas and show up in somebody's backyard in your private plane working for the U.S. government, that's a diplomacy issue, not a flight issue," Winton said.
The court files break down costs incurred for on-flight computers and phones, landing fees and even money spent for meals. A $440 catering bill from Ohio-based Air Chef for an October 2003 flight from Washington to Guantanamo showed the Gulfstream was well stocked as it headed south. It carried fruit platters, assorted muffins and bagels, deli sandwiches, potato chips, cookies and two $39 bottles of wine.
Sav Momgelli, Air Chef's vice president for sales, said the company had no idea it had been providing meals for secret government flights.
"We don't ask questions," he said. "We're never told and we never ask. It could be a VIP, but to us it doesn't matter. It's just another customer."
Associated Press writers Adam Goldman and Barry Schweid in Washington and Michael Hill in Albany, N.Y., contributed to this report.
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8) Judge Declines to Dismiss Case Alleging Racial Profiling by City Police in Street Stops
By AL BAKER
August 31, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/nyregion/racial-profiling-case-against-new-york-police-is-allowed-to-proceed.html?ref=nyregion
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected an effort to dismiss a case claiming that New York City police officers use race as a factor in stopping people on the streets, sometimes to frisk them, saying there is enough evidence for a jury to decide.
Lawyers for the city had argued that no trial was necessary and moved to dismiss a lawsuit against the city and its police force. In the suit, the Center for Constitutional Rights alleges a widespread pattern of stops based not on reasonable suspicion of individuals but on racial profiling in the Police Department's "stop, question and frisk" policy.
As a practical matter, the stops display a measurable racial disparity: black and Hispanic people generally represent more than 85 percent of those stopped by the police, though their combined populations make up a small share of the city's racial composition.
The judge, Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court, ruled that the evidence submitted so far raised enough questions to allow a trial to go forward to determine whether the department's practices amounted to a pattern of race-based stops. She said the racial claims appeared "difficult to discern."
"This case presents an issue of great public concern," she wrote in her decision. "Writ large, that issue is the disproportionate number of African-Americans and Latinos who become entangled in our criminal justice system, as compared to Caucasians."
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has repeatedly rejected the accusation of racial profiling and has said the racial breakdown of the stops correlates to the racial breakdown of crime suspects. Police officials say the street-stop tactic has helped reduce crime, remove guns from streets and save lives.
But in raw numbers, the number of stops continues to rise, bringing the practice under increasing scrutiny from lawmakers, academics, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the New York Civil Liberties Union.
As the judge's order became public, Christopher T. Dunn, the associate legal director of the civil liberties organization, released statistics showing that the number of stops in the second quarter of 2011 totaled 178,824. The first quarter's total, 183,326, was the highest for any quarter since 2002, when the numbers began being reliably tracked; in 2010, city officers made more street stops - 601,055 - than in any previous 12-month period.
"We had 575,000 in 2009, just over 600,000 in 2010, and we're now on pace for over 700,000 this year," said Darius Charney, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the case in January 2008. "All this is in an era of either declining or flat crime rates, which begs the question: Is there really a need for this many stops?"
The city plans to contest the reliability and methodology of the plaintiff's statistical expert, upon whom the ruling relied heavily, said Heidi Grossman, deputy chief of the city Law Department's special federal litigation division.
"While the court has left it for the jury to determine whether the city has taken adequate action to ensure that stops of New Yorkers are handled appropriately, we are confident the jury will find in the city's favor," Ms. Grossman said. "Indeed, the court noted that the city does not have an express policy of stopping minorities based on race."
Ms. Grossman noted that the judge held that the lead plaintiff, David Floyd, was stopped in February 2008 under reasonable suspicion by the police, despite his challenge of the encounter. She said further procedural challenges could arise before trial, which the ruling also noted.
At one point in her ruling, Judge Scheindlin provocatively termed some of the underlying evidence presented by the plaintiffs as a "smoking gun." She was referring to audio recordings of station-house roll calls, in which officers received instructions on their arrest, summons and street-stops activity.
"In sum," she wrote, "I find that there is a triable issue of fact as to whether N.Y.P.D. supervisors have a custom or practice of imposing quotas on officer activity, and whether such quotas can be said to be the 'moving force,' behind widespread suspicionless stops."
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9) Second giant ice island set to break off Greenland glacier
Astonished scientist says he was 'completely unprepared for the gob-smacking scale of the breakup, which rendered me speechless'
By Ian Johnston
msnbc.com
updated 9/1/2011 10:43:21 AM ET
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44353322/ns/us_news-environment%23.TmAYDXObgTw
New photographs taken of a vast glacier in northern Greenland have revealed the astonishing rate of its breakup, with one scientist saying he was rendered "speechless."
In August 2010, part of the Petermann Glacier about four times the size of Manhattan island broke off , prompting a hearing in Congress.
Researcher Alun Hubbard, of the Centre for Glaciology at Aberystwyth University, U.K., told msnbc.com by phone that another section, about twice the size of Manhattan, appeared close to breaking off.
In 2009, scientists installed GPS masts on the glacier to track its movement.
But when they returned in July this year, they found the ice had been melting so quickly - at an unexpected 16-and-a-half feet in two years - that some of the masts stuck into the glacier were no longer in position.
Hubbard, who has been working with Jason Box, of Ohio State University, and others, said in a statement issued by the Byrd Polar Research Center that scientists were still trying to work out how fast the glacier was moving and the effect on the ice sheet feeding the glacier.
'Really weird'
But he said he was taken aback by the difference between 2009 and 2011 when he visited the glacier in late July.
"Although I knew what to expect in terms of ice loss from satellite imagery, I was still completely unprepared for the gob-smacking scale of the break-up, which rendered me speechless," he said in the statement.
"I'm very familiar with the glacier. It's very hard to sort of envisage something so big not being there ... to come back and basically see an ice shelf has disappeared, which is 20 kilometers across (about 12 miles) ... I was speechless and started laughing because I couldn't sort of believe it," Hubbard added, speaking to msnbc.com.
"It was really weird when the helicopter first came over," he added.
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10) Job Growth at Halt in U.S.; Worst Showing in 11 Months
By SHAILA DEWAN
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/business/economy/united-states-showed-no-job-growth-in-august.html?hp
The nation's employers failed to add new jobs in August, a strong signal that the economy has stalled and that policymakers can no longer afford inaction.
The dismal showing, the first time in 11 months that total payrolls did not rise, was the latest indication that the jobs recovery that began in 2010 lacked momentum. The unemployment rate for August did not budge, remaining at 9.1 percent.
As President Obama prepared to deliver a major proposal to bolster job creation next week, the new report added to the pressure on the administration, on Republicans who have resisted any new stimulus spending, and on the Federal Reserve, which has been divided over the wisdom of using its limited arsenal of tools to get the economy moving again.
The White House immediately seized on the report as evidence that bold action was needed, calling the unemployment rate "unacceptably high." Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said in an interview that she hoped the president's proposals would be embraced by Congress. "If they're not supported, then he's going to take it out to the public," she said.
Republicans, in turn, argued that the numbers were further proof that the policies of Mr. Obama, whom they quickly dubbed "President Zero," were not working. The lack of growth in nonfarm payrolls placed the job market well below the consensus forecast by economists of a 60,000 increase, which itself was none too optimistic. It was a sharp decline from July, which the Labor Department on Friday revised to show a gain of 85,000 jobs.
August's stall came after a prolonged increase in economic anxiety this summer that began with the brinksmanship in Washington's debt-ceiling debate, followed by the country's loss of its triple-A credit rating, stock market whiplash and renewed concerns about Europe's sovereign debt.
On Friday, Wall Street stocks promptly lost more than 2 percent of their value at the opening of trading, with the Dow Jones industrial average down about 200 points by midday, and some economists upgraded their odds for a double-dip recession.
The jobs figure, a monthly statistical snapshot by the Department of Labor, appears slightly more negative than it is because it does not include 45,000 Verizon workers who were on strike when the survey was taken but who will reappear in next month's report. But even factoring in the Verizon jobs, private sector growth was the slowest it has been since May of last year. In addition, the report showed that job growth in June and July was softer than previously thought.
"As long as payrolls are weak, you will continue to hear cries of not just recession risk, but cries that the United States is in a recession and we just don't know it," said Ellen Zentner, the senior United States economist for Nomura Securities.
Economists blamed both sluggish demand for goods and services and the heightened uncertainty over the economy's direction for the slow pace of job creation, saying political deadlock was creating economic paralysis.
"There is really a darkening cloud that seems to hover over the U.S. economy because of the lack of progress being made on economic issues," said Bernard Baumohl, the chief economist at the Economic Outlook Group. "There is extreme frustration with Congress and the administration not working together to address the fiscal issues."
Government continued to shed jobs overall, though small gains were posted at the state level, the Labor Department reported. Local governments, on the other hand, lost 20,000 jobs.
Two of the bright spots in the economy over the last year, manufacturing and retail, lost steam, falling by 3,000 and 8,000 jobs, respectively. The health care sector added 29,700 jobs in August.
The number of long-term unemployed - people out of work for 27 weeks or more - remained about the same as in July, at 6 million, as did the median duration of unemployment, at 19.6 weeks compared with 19.7 weeks in July.
The general unemployment rate, which counts only people who looked for work in the previous four weeks, held steady at 9.1 percent. But a broader measure that includes people who have looked for work in the last year and people who were involuntarily working part-time instead of full-time, fell slightly to 16.1 percent. The percent of working-age adults who were employed, already at its lowest rate since 1983, ticked down from 58.6 percent to 58.5 percent.
Though unexpectedly low, the jobs report may not change the mainstream view among economists that the economy will stay in growth mode, albeit at a level that is barely perceptible, much less comforting, to Americans without jobs.
"We've got at least another 12 months of difficulty to go through," said Steven Ricchiuto, United States economist for Mizuho Securities USA. "I know that doesn't help politicians who are worried about the elections."
It is unclear whether the report increases the chances that Congress will act on any of the recommendations President Obama may make next week, such as a tax incentive for companies to hire new workers. But several economists said that given the fragility of the recovery, the payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits, both set to expire at the end of the year, should be renewed.
"It's probably not the time for adding to fiscal drag," said Jim O'Sullivan, the chief economist for MF Global. He said that together the tax cut and unemployment benefits account for 1 percent of the gross domestic product.
Some analysts had already downgraded their forecast for the jobs numbers on Thursday based on new economic indicators including weaker online job advertising, a rise in announced layoffs and a growing pessimism about the job market by consumers. A major report on manufacturing showed slowing employment growth and shrinking production and new orders.
But other indicators suggested that fears of recession have outstripped reality. Consumer confidence dropped sharply and pending home sales dipped, but in July retail sales increased and orders for durable goods - expensive items often purchased on credit - were up 4 percent. A report on chain-store sales indicated modest back-to-school shopping, somewhat slowed by Hurricane Irene.
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11) Hope, Fear and Insomnia: Journey of a Jobless Man
By JENNIFER GONNERMAN
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/nyregion/hope-fear-and-insomnia-journey-of-a-jobless-man.html?hp
ON June 25, 2010, Frederick Deare punched out for the last time from his job driving a forklift at the Old London factory in the Bronx. That summer, everyone at the plant was being laid off: the oven operators, the assembly-line packers, the forklift drivers, the sanitation workers. Total jobs lost: 228. Old London, the snack manufacturer that invented the Cheez Doodle, was moving its operations to North Carolina. At 53, Mr. Deare, known as Freddy or Teddy Bear to his co-workers, would have to find a new job.
There was a time, not all that long ago, when the sound of factory whistles could be heard throughout the five boroughs. In the Bronx, there were Farberware, the pot manufacturer, which employed 700 people before shutting down its plant in 1996; Everlast, the boxing glove maker, which closed its operation in 2003; and Stella D'oro, the cookie-and-breadstick bakery that moved to Ohio in 2009. A. L. Bazzini Company, the peanut factory that supplies snacks to Yankee Stadium, will soon be leaving the city, too.
A century ago, about 40 percent of New York City workers held manufacturing jobs, according to "Working-Class New York," by Joshua B. Freeman. As Labor Day rolls around again, that portion has shrunk to less than 4 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. And when Mr. Deare received his pink slip, he joined a growing army of the unemployed in a borough that has been hit hard by the nation's financial turmoil. The Bronx has an unemployment rate of 12 percent, the highest in the state. For African-American men like Mr. Deare, the city's unemployment rate is even more disturbing: nearly 20 percent.
If getting a job is hard enough for a white-collar worker armed with a college degree, then the challenge was even steeper for Mr. Deare, who has only a G.E.D., lost 15 years to drug addiction and did a brief stint in prison. He had reinvented himself at Old London, reporting to work day after day for a decade; by the end, he was earning $16.61 an hour with health insurance. How does someone with his background find a job in the new economy? Mr. Deare was about to find out.
In those first weeks after he was laid off, Mr. Deare found that he liked staying home - hanging out with his fiancée, Annette Amaro; eating her cooking; zoning out in front of the television. With low rent and his three children all grown, Mr. Deare was in better financial shape than many of his former co-workers. And it helped that he had received a severance check of nearly $5,000.
As the end of summer neared, he threw himself into job-hunting. He put in applications everywhere he could think of, including Target and FedEx. He contacted his former union to see if it could help. He asked everyone he knew with a job to look out for him. The effort turned out to be an exercise in rejection. Nobody offered to hire him; they didn't even bother calling back.
To keep up his spirits, he called each morning into a 6 o'clock prayer line run by his daughter, a minister in Massachusetts. Callers shared their worries, then prayed together; some mornings, Mr. Deare revealed his job woes.
"The hardest part for him is not working, not being in the game," Ms. Amaro said. "He's not a sit-around kind of guy."
That fall, her mother came through with the best lead: somebody had told her there might be an opening at one of the meat markets at Hunts Point in the Bronx. Unsure which market needed help, Mr. Deare visited five or six. Most wouldn't even let him fill out an application - "Sorry, we're not hiring" - but he managed to leave his résumé at one place. When he returned the following week, he talked his way into a job.
He started in October, working the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift. The job required spending all night in frigid temperatures, moving in and out of freezers and refrigerators, lifting 70-pound boxes. "I'm 53 years old, and this is some strenuous work," he said. "Everybody else is 23."
When he got home in the morning, he would slide into a warm bath. The position paid $15 an hour, but if he could hold on to it for a few months, he would move up to $18 an hour, with benefits and a spot in the union.
Reese Grosett and Iraida Rivera had been two of Mr. Deare's closest friends at Old London. As of November, neither had a job, and one morning the two met up at a McDonald's near the Bronx Zoo. Ms. Rivera confessed that while she had enjoyed her first five days out of work, Day 6 was different.
"I woke up in the morning, and when I looked at what time it was and I had nothing to do, I literally cried," she recalled. "I said, 'What am I going to do now?' "
Of all the people Mr. Grosett and Ms. Rivera knew from Old London, Mr. Deare was one of the very few who had found work. He had become a source of hope to everyone else, his good fortune reminding them that even in these bleak times, it was still possible to find a decent job. But now, a month after he started work at Hunts Point, Mr. Deare's fortunes had changed.
"Did he tell you?" Mr. Grosett asked, between sips of orange juice. "They laid him off."
Mr. Deare had recounted to friends what the boss told him: "Business is very slow right now. If it picks up, I have your number." This conversation took place at 5 a.m., and the boss asked if Mr. Deare could stay and finish his shift. He was tempted to storm off, but considering the state of the economy, it seemed a bad idea to anger any potential employer, even one who had just let him go. So he completed the shift.
In many ways, this second layoff stung even more than the first. "I thought I was on that track again to be a worker, and then - boom! - this happens," he said. "It was a low blow." He was back where he had started: phoning friends for job leads, filling out applications, waiting for calls. But by now his severance was gone. He would have to survive on his unemployment benefits: $353 a week.
Some nights, he couldn't sleep. Other times, he woke at 4 a.m., reached for his cellphone and played video games for an hour or two, until he grew so tired that the phone fell from his hand and he was dozing once again. It was hard to say exactly what caused the insomnia - anxiety about unpaid bills, fear of never finding another job, an internal time clock accustomed to working the night shift - but it was a problem he shared with many of his former co-workers.
Once, he woke at 3 a.m. and groped in the dark for his phone. "Should be sleeping," he wrote on his Facebook page. "I guess there's a lot on the mind."
Dhyalma Diaz, a friend from Old London, responded, "Don't worry teddy we all have a lot in our minds."
That winter, Mr. Deare jumped on every lead that came his way. A friend told him about a laundry company looking for a truck driver. The job paid $10 an hour with no benefits, but Mr. Deare reasoned that he was in no position to be picky. So he pulled on his parka, headed over to the employment agency and spent an hour in the waiting room, only to learn that the company wanted someone with experience driving a truck, not a forklift.
Mr. Deare tried for months to get hired at a school for troubled children where his cousin works, in Westchester County. Finally, he managed to land an interview for a teacher's aide position. It sounded as if the job was his, as long as he didn't fail a drug test. He urinated into a cup, passed the test, then waited for the call. One week went by. Then two weeks. Then three weeks. He left messages, but nobody phoned back.
He was not one to complain, but the strain of not having a job was starting to show. His moods swung from frustration to depression to rage. To lift his spirits, his fiancée would tell him: "You know the kind of worker you are - and you know you're out there putting in the applications; you're doing the footwork. It's not you. This is what the country is going through." She made this point often, but it was hard not to take each rejection personally.
As week after week went by with no good news, his efforts became more scattershot. In March, he applied for a job at a shoe store. He also filled out forms for positions in health care and child care. At this point, he figured, he would take just about anything. It was the attitude of a desperate man: there was a certain logic to it, but, of course, finding a job in a field where you have no experience or personal contacts can be next to impossible.
Mr. Deare had kept in touch with about 25 co-workers from Old London, and by spring none had found new jobs. Still, he was determined to beat the odds. "Somebody is hiring somewhere, and I'm going to find that person," he told himself.
He had stayed in touch with his former union, Local 1102 of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. During one conversation with a contact there in late March, he heard about a job opening: forklift driver at a coffee warehouse in Yonkers.
He got an interview, and the supervisor he met with sounded optimistic about his chances of being hired. But there was no formal offer. Day after day went by. For three weeks the wait stretched on. This time, however, he got the job. And it was a union job, with benefits. He started on April 11 - 290 days after Old London laid him off.
"You're speaking to a happy man," he said after his first day. "I am in my glory. I mean, today was wonderful."
There was only one downside: The work paid $10 an hour, 40 percent less than he had made at Old London. After taxes, his paycheck was even less than the unemployment benefits he had been collecting. But he tried not to dwell on this. "I don't let it bother me that I'm getting less, because of the simple fact I have something, and a lot of people have nothing," he said. "You have to crawl before you can walk." Four and a half months later, he is still on the job.
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12) Scanning 2.4 Billion Eyes, India Tries to Connect Poor to Growth
By LYDIA POLGREEN
September 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/world/asia/02india.html?hp
KALDARI, India - Ankaji Bhai Gangar, a 49-year-old subsistence farmer, stood in line in this remote village until, for the first time in his life, he squinted into the soft glow of a computer screen.
His name, year of birth and address were recorded. A worker guided Mr. Gangar's rough fingers to the glowing green surface of a scanner to record his fingerprints. He peered into an iris scanner shaped like binoculars that captured the unique patterns of his eyes.
With that, Mr. Gangar would be assigned a 12-digit number, the first official proof that he exists. He can use the number, along with a thumbprint, to identify himself anywhere in the country. It will allow him to gain access to welfare benefits, open a bank account or get a cellphone far from his home village, something that is still impossible for many people in India.
"Maybe we will get some help," Mr. Gangar said.
Across this sprawling, chaotic nation, workers are creating what will be the world's largest biometric database, a mind-bogglingly complex collection of 1.2 billion identities. But even more radical than its size is the scale of its ambition: to reduce the inequality corroding India's economic rise by digitally linking every one of India's people to the country's growth juggernaut.
For decades, India's sprawling and inefficient bureaucracy has spent billions of dollars to try to drag the poor out of poverty. But much of the money is wasted or simply ends up trapping the poor in villages like Kaldari, in a remote corner of the western state of Maharashtra, dependent on local handouts that they can lose if they leave home.
So now it is trying something different. Using the same powerful technology that transformed the country's private economy, the Indian government has created a tiny start-up of skilled administrators and programmers to help transform - or circumvent - the crippling bureaucracy that is a legacy of its socialist past.
"What we are creating is as important as a road," said Nandan M. Nilekani, the billionaire software mogul whom the government has tapped to create India's identity database. "It is a road that in some sense connects every individual to the state."
For its proponents, the 12-digit ID is an ingenious solution to a particularly bedeviling problem. Most of India's poorest citizens are trapped in a system of village-based identity proof that has had the perverse effect of making migration, which is essential to any growing economy, much harder.
The ID project also has the potential to reduce the kind of corruption that has led millions of Indians to take to the streets in mass demonstrations in recent weeks, spurred on by the hunger strike of an anticorruption activist named Anna Hazare. By allowing electronic transmission and verification of many government services, the identity system would make it much harder for corrupt bureaucrats to steal citizens' benefits. India's prime minister has frequently cited the new system in response to Mr. Hazare's demands.
The new number-based system, known as Aadhaar, or foundation, would be used to verify the identity of any Indian anywhere in the country within eight seconds, using inexpensive hand-held devices linked to the mobile phone network.
It would also serve as a shortcut to building real citizenship in a society where identity is almost always mediated through a group - caste, kin and religion. Aadhaar would for the first time identify each Indian as an individual.
The identity project is, in a way, an acknowledgment that India has failed to bring its poor along the path to prosperity. India may be the world's second-fastest-growing economy, but more than 400 million Indians live in poverty, according to government figures. Nearly half of children younger than 5 are underweight.
India's expensive public welfare systems are so inefficient that warehouses overflow with rotting grain despite malnutrition rates that rival those of sub-Saharan Africa, and much of it is siphoned off to the private market long before it reaches hungry mouths. The government builds sturdy classrooms but fails to punish well-paid teachers who do not show up for work. These systems fail to connect citizens' most basic needs with help that is readily available, either through government handouts or the marketplace.
Technology, its supporters believe, could solve these problems because it would provide people with a way to interact with the state without depending on local officials who are now the main gatekeepers of government services.
"One cannot improve human beings," said Ram Sevak Sharma, the director general of the identity program. "But one can certainly improve systems. And the same flawed human beings with a better system will be able to produce better results."
To build the database, the Indian government has created a highly unusual hybrid institution: a small team of elite bureaucrats who are working with veterans of Silicon Valley start-ups and Bangalore's most-respected technology companies. Despite the scale of its task, the organization has deliberately been kept small. At its peak, no more than a few hundred people will work on the project, and private contractors will do much of the work of enrolling citizens. It costs the program about $3 to issue each Aadhaar number, Mr. Nilekani said, and more than 30 million have been issued so far. The process is free and voluntary.
The operation's tiny footprint and seemingly technical mission have kept the project from drawing much scrutiny so far. Just as the information technology industry grew stealthily beneath the nose of the bureaucracy that had traditionally smothered private enterprise, the identity database is quietly embedding itself in India's bureaucratic fabric even as other efforts to reform India's government and economy seem to have stalled.
Century-old labor and land laws stifle industry and mobility, making it hard to build factories and create jobs. Restrictions on foreign investment protect small shopkeepers and domestic industries but also hamper investment that could modernize agriculture. Yet efforts to change these rules often fail to overcome entrenched interests.
The identity database has so far met only muffled opposition. Privacy watchdogs worry that the identity numbers will be abused by a snooping state that cares little for civil liberties. Leftists fret that the database will lead to an erosion of the state's role in helping the poor. But powerful and corrupt bureaucrats, politicians and businessmen who thrive on the current system's opacity have yet to object publicly, though they almost certainly will once the challenge to the way they do business becomes evident.
India's identity database will be an order of magnitude larger than the world's largest existing biometric database, the US-Visit program for visas, which has data on about 100 million people. To register all 1.2 billion Indians, the system will need to collect 12 billion fingerprints and scan 2.4 billion irises. It is a project of epic proportions - not unlike the challenge of governing the world's largest democracy.
A Start-Up in Spirit
With its grid of chest-high cubicles in cheerful colors, the suite of offices could belong to a high-tech start-up like so many others in the booming city of Bangalore. On the second floor of the Touchstone Building, part of a nondescript technology office park off a traffic-choked ring road, the government's own start-up is at work.
In one glass-walled conference room, bankers on leave from their jobs in finance were planning how to use the Aadhaar and hand-held mobile technology to bring banking to India's 600,000 villages without laying a single brick.
In another, programmers worked out how Aadhaar's open software architecture could be used to build an ecosystem like the ones Google and Apple created, embedding the number in every aspect of life. That could eliminate trillions of pages of bureaucratic paperwork, remnants of the License Raj, the old system that governed India's closed economy. Indians face obstacles almost every time they ask anything of their government - a driver's license, subsidized grain, a birth certificate. Digitizing these systems would eliminate countless opportunities for graft.
A typical government office this is not. There are no peons in white Nehru caps shuffling between offices with bundles of dusty paper files tied with string. The standard uniform of the tech company employee - khaki trousers and polo shirt - is de rigueur.
The project resembles a start-up because the man in charge is Mr. Nilekani, a co-founder of India's most famous start-up. In 1981 he pooled 10,000 rupees in capital, or $1,100 to $1,200, with six colleagues to start Infosys, the outsourcing giant. Infosys has grown into a $30 billion company with more than 130,000 employees around the globe. Mr. Nilekani's path from son of a socialist textile mill manager to world-renowned billionaire inspires countless Indians.
Two years ago, when the government decided to create the identity database, Mr. Nilekani stepped down as chairman of Infosys to oversee the effort, forging an unusual path in Indian public life from business to government.
"I am an entrepreneur within the system," he explained in an interview in his office in New Delhi.
The very notion of a businessman in government was once unthinkable. Mr. Nilekani, 56, came of age in an era when almost all private industry in India was smothered under the License Raj's heavy blanket of government regulation. This meant entrepreneurship was almost impossible. For a young man in the 1970s with elite credentials, going abroad to work for a private company or getting a posting in the elite Indian Administrative Service were the two most attractive options.
Mr. Nilekani was a founding member of a second elite, the one created when a handful of brainy graduates of India's top technical schools set up companies in Bangalore in the 1980s.
Over time, India's technology elite has transformed not just India but the world, sending its brightest engineers to Silicon Valley and beyond. India has become the back office to the world, not only handling customer service calls and insurance claims, but also composing legal briefs and performing complex quantitative analysis for investment banks.
But even as it made global business more efficient and profitable, this technological class was cut out of India's political system.
In 2008 Mr. Nilekani published "Imagining India," a wonkish book that elucidated a set of ideas he thought could transform India. A best seller here, it was the type of policy book an American businessman might write if he aspired to high public office. But India's hurly-burly political system has no place for men like Mr. Nilekani.
"This was not the United States, where a Michael Bloomberg could be the C.E.O. of a large company one day and get elected as New York's mayor the next," Mr. Nilekani wrote. "Being an entrepreneur automatically made me a very long shot in Indian politics, and an easy target for populist rhetoric."
A deep suspicion toward private enterprise, a result of decades of socialist politics, permeates public life. Political parties are intensely hierarchical and formed along family, religious and caste lines, making it all but impossible for an outsider like Mr. Nilekani to win an election.
Still, he pined to serve somehow, and his chance came when the Congress Party was re-elected and formed a strong coalition government in 2009. Rahul Gandhi, the tech-savvy scion of India's leading political family and the presumed prime minister in waiting, wanted Mr. Nilekani to join the government.
At first Mr. Gandhi asked Mr. Nilekani to transform the dysfunctional education bureaucracy, according to a senior government official familiar with Mr. Gandhi's thinking. But Sonia Gandhi, Mr. Gandhi's mother and the leader of the Congress Party, along with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, concluded that such a move would cause too much of an uproar.
When the government decided to create the unique-identity system, Mr. Nilekani leapt at the chance to run it. Though he would hold cabinet rank, he would be in charge of a small and seemingly arcane government authority. No one would notice that he was working on a revolutionary project, the Gandhis and Mr. Singh concluded.
"People don't fully realize what can be done with this," said a senior government official working on the identity system, who requested anonymity because the scope of the project is a delicate subject. "People who are not familiar with technology don't understand how big this is."
The Resistance
Unsurprisingly, some people see the idea of a centralized identity database as a dystopian nightmare. Privacy advocates contend that the government will use it to track citizens, a serious concern in a country where the government carries out extensive wiretapping and surveillance to track potential terrorists.
India lacks robust laws to protect privacy, though Mr. Nilekani and others have urged the passage of strict legislation to govern the use of information the government collects. The database has been designed to contain as little information as possible - only a name, date of birth, sex and address. When anyone tries to confirm a person's identity using the number, the database will supply only a yes-or-no answer.
Many influential critics of the identity system argue that it is costly - $326 million is budgeted for the next financial year, and the project will take a decade to complete - and unnecessary because there are easier ways to check corruption in antipoverty programs. Chhattisgarh State, in central India, has drastically reduced waste and fraud in its delivery of subsidized grain using a system of smart cards.
"This is a solution in search of a problem," said Usha Ramanathan, a lawyer who works on civil liberties.
Because Aadhaar will be linked instantly with a bank account, some social activists suspect that the government is seeking to replace its current system of in-kind benefits - like distributing grain and creating state-supported jobs - with direct cash transfers. Many on the left oppose such a shift because they think handing out cash from the public till would create a backlash and undercut support for poverty programs.
But the project has enjoyed an unusual degree of support from the highest officials in India. When the program was inaugurated, Prime Minister Singh and Mrs. Gandhi, the Congress Party's left-leaning leader, attended the ceremony. Several influential members of the National Advisory Council, a kind of kitchen cabinet that advises Mrs. Gandhi on social policy, were deeply wary of the project, but she overruled them.
"Mrs. Gandhi normally consents to discussions on a number of issues we raise," said Harsh Mander, an activist and member of the council. "But on this she said, 'No, we are going ahead with the idea.' "
The Invisible Man
Under an overpass near the fetid bank of the Yamuna River, in the shadow of New Delhi, the homeless lined up to be counted.
Mohammed Jalil, a rickshaw puller dressed in his best shirt, hair freshly washed and neatly parted, sat uneasily behind a computer screen, waiting to be registered for an Aadhaar number.
Though he has lived in Delhi more than half his life, Mr. Jalil may as well not exist. He is homeless. For two decades he has worked as a rickshaw driver, delivering heavy loads of wooden furniture from a market to homes across the city, earning about $100 a month. Labor is so cheap in India that it makes more sense to use a man as a pack horse than to expend fossil fuel.
He left his village in the impoverished state of Uttar Pradesh, hoping to find a better way to make a living than farming a scrap of land. But the lack of identity documents has been a fundamental hurdle. "When I first came to Delhi I thought I would earn big money, build a house in my village and educate my children," he said.
But he has no bank account, making it hard to save money. When one of his children got sick, he took a loan from a moneylender at an onerous interest rate. Poor people like him are entitled to subsidies for food, housing and health care, but he has no access to them.
Mr. Jalil hopes Aadhaar will allow him to open a bank account. He could get a driver's license and a cellphone.
"That will give me an identity," he said, gesturing at the computer station where he had just completed his enrollment. "It will show that I am a human being, that I am alive, that I live on this planet. It will prove I am an Indian."
Mr. Jalil's number has yet to arrive, but he is waiting.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
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13) A Challenge for Unions in Public Opinion
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
September 2, 2011, 11:07 am
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/a-challenge-for-unions-in-public-opinion/?hp
A new Gallup poll has found that a slim majority of Americans, 52 percent, approve of labor unions and that the difference in views between how Democrats and Republicans feel toward unions has reached record levels.
The Gallup poll, released on Thursday, found that the approval rate for unions was unchanged from 2010 and was up from 2009, when unions had the lowest approval rating, 48 percent, since Gallup began this survey in 1936.
Showing a huge partisan difference in views, the poll of 1,008 adults found that 78 percent of Democrats approve of unions, while just 26 percent of Republicans do, the lowest percentage ever for Republicans.
Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup's managing editor, wrote, "This could reflect a greater politicization of union issues given the fact that many state-level efforts to curb union influence were promoted by Republican governors often backed by a Republican-controlled legislature."
After Republicans swept to power in many states last November, the Republican governors of several states, most notably Wisconsin and Ohio, moved to curb collective bargaining by public-employee unions, an effort that generated huge resistance from labor unions and Democrats.
Mr. Jones wrote that the huge debate over union rights this year "seems to have resulted in a draw in the court of public opinion, with labor unions neither gaining nor losing Americans' support overall compared with last year."
The Gallup poll found a strong rebound of Democrats' and independents' views toward unions over the last two years. Approval among Democrats rose to 78 percent from 66 percent in 2009, and to 52 percent from 44 percent among independents. For Republicans, the approval rating was 26 percent this year, down from 34 percent last year (and 29 percent in 2009).
This year's poll found that 52 percent of Americans approved of unions and 42 percent disapproved. (The survey was conducted Aug. 11 to 14 with 95 percent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.)
When the overall approval rating for unions fell to its lowest level ever in 2009, many labor relations said that was because many Americans believed that labor unions could be too stubborn and demanding and were a major cause of the General Motors and Chrysler bankruptcies that year. Union leaders maintain that a major reason for the overall decline in approval ratings in recent years - the approval rate was 65 percent less than a decade ago - is that conservative politicians and think tanks have been putting out a flood of negative information about organized labor.
Business groups say labor's approval ratings have slid from decades past because many Americans feel they have good wages and benefits and no longer see a need for unions.
Labor leaders acknowledge that one of their biggest challenges is to figure out how to make Americans more enthusiastic about unions and unionizing at a time when many workers face stagnating wages, rising insecurity on the job and employers' cutting back on pensions and other benefits - all while corporate profits have been quite strong.
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14) Cable Implicates Americans in Deaths of Iraqi Civilians
"the autopsies on the victims were carried out in a hospital in Tikrit, Iraq, and 'revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.'"
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
September 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html?ref=world
A recently disclosed diplomatic cable shows that a top United Nations human rights official warned the United States government five years ago that he had received information indicating that Iraqi reports of American troops executing a family were true.
Five of the victims, the official said, were children 5 years old or younger, and four were women.
The March 15, 2006, attack in Ishaqi, Iraq, was one of the most disputed episodes of the war. Iraqi police officials maintained from the beginning that the family had been lined up and executed. A video later surfaced that showed graphic images of five dead children and three dead adults; most of the victims appeared to have been killed by bullets or other flying projectiles that punctured their head, abdomen or chest.
Three months after the killings, and after the United Nations official's warning, the American military announced that its own investigation had determined the allegations of an execution were "absolutely false." The military admitted, however, that the raid and subsequent air strike resulted in as many as nine "collateral deaths," a euphemism for civilian fatalities.
The Americans said the troops, who captured an insurgent leader on the mission, took gunfire from the house before the commander on the ground ordered them to return fire from machine guns and then from helicopters and jets, following proper rules of engagement. A senior Pentagon official said that both regular infantry and special operations forces took part in the operation.
The human rights official, Philip Alston, wrote a letter to the United States Embassy in Geneva 12 days after the killings, outlining information he had received that was starkly different from the American account. Mr. Alston's letter was included in an unclassified diplomatic cable made public late last month by WikiLeaks and reported by McClatchy Newspapers on Wednesday on its Web site.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory of the Army, said on Thursday that the information revealed in the cable did not change the conclusions of military investigators that no crime or cover-up had taken place.
"There has been nothing new we haven't already looked into here," Colonel Gregory said.
On Friday, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said that based on the new information revealed in the cable, the Iraqi government would reopen its investigation of the incident. "We will not give up on enforcing the rights of the Iraqi people," said the spokesman, Ali al-Musawi.
When he wrote the letter, Mr. Alston was the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and according to the New York University Web site he is now a law professor there. He did not return a phone call and an e-mail message seeking comment.
It was not clear from his letter to the embassy how he conducted his investigation into the killings or who provided him information. But in the letter he said the autopsies on the victims were carried out in a hospital in Tikrit, Iraq, and "revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed."
Mr. Alston reported that information he had received indicated the episode unfolded this way: Someone in the home fired on the Americans, then a 25-minute gunfight ensued, and then troops "entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them." After that, an American air raid destroyed the house, which Iraqis had viewed as an attempt to cover up the killings.
He also said that United States forces attacked the house in part because they suspected that members of the family who lived there were involved in the killing of two American troops earlier that month.
The killings and subsequent controversy over the nature of the deaths occurred as Iraq was spiraling into a sectarian civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, and American forces were coming under increasing criticism for raids that killed civilians.
Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting from Baghdad.
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15) Clinic Rejects Immigrants After Impasse With Hospital
By KEVIN SACK
September 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/health/02grady.html?ref=us
ATLANTA - After the collapse of negotiations between Atlanta's public hospital and the world's largest dialysis provider, a dozen immigrants suffering from renal failure were refused treatment at an Atlanta clinic on Thursday and advised to wait until their conditions deteriorated enough to justify life-saving care in an emergency room.
Unless the deadlock is broken, 22 patients, most of them illegal immigrants, face a debilitating cycle. Rather than receiving dialysis three times a week, as is standard protocol for cleansing their blood of toxins, they must wait until they are in sufficiently serious jeopardy to trigger the federal law that requires hospital care.
Dialysis patients said that typically means placing themselves at risk of serious impairment or death. "Trust me, it is just like dying," said Bineet Kaur, 28, an illegal immigrant from India who was turned away on Thursday morning from the clinic, operated by Fresenius Medical Care. "You are almost unconscious, you know. Even if you are talking, your brain is not working. Sometimes you have to be hospitalized for days or weeks."
The patients' odyssey, which dramatizes the moral and fiscal quandaries of providing health care to illegal immigrants, began two years ago, when new management at the hospital here, Grady Memorial, shut its budget-draining outpatient dialysis clinic. The closing displaced about 60 uninsured immigrants, many of whom had relied on free treatment there for years.
Illegal immigrants are not eligible for Medicare, which covers most dialysis costs for citizens with renal disease. And few have access to insurance.
Grady volunteered to transport patients to other states or their home countries and to pay for three months of treatment. Some accepted. But in response to a patient lawsuit and media scrutiny, the hospital eventually contracted with Fresenius to treat the others for one transitional year.
When that contract expired in August 2010, Grady grudgingly negotiated a one-year extension. Thirteen patients were taken by various dialysis providers as charity cases, and Grady agreed to pay for treatment of the remaining 25 at Fresenius clinics. The hospital, which is partly financed through county appropriations, has spent more than $2 million on the patients since closing its dialysis unit, said Matt Gove, a senior vice president.
As the Aug. 31 expiration of the new contract approached, Grady and Fresenius again tried to negotiate an extension. But after a temporary improvement in its bottom line, Grady now faces a $20 million shortfall, Mr. Gove said. "This isn't a traditional business negotiation where we're trying to low-ball," he said. "We're broke."
Jane A. Kramer, a spokeswoman for Fresenius Medical Care North America, said her company negotiated with Grady until Wednesday. Last week, the company notified patients that they would have to seek emergency treatment at Grady, where Fresenius also operates the inpatient dialysis service.
Regardless, 12 patients showed up at a Fresenius clinic on Thursday for their usual dialysis and a manager told them they would not be treated, patients said.
The hospital and the provider disagreed about which was responsible for keeping the patients alive.
"They are Grady patients," Ms. Kramer said. "While we are very concerned by the situation this places the patients in, the patients must seek treatment from Grady." Fresenius anticipates worldwide net income of more than $1 billion this year.
Mr. Gove responded indignantly. "There cannot be a debate about one thing," he said. "This group of patients has been under the care of Fresenius and their doctors for two years. If Fresenius decided to discharge a patient because they are unable to pay, that is Fresenius's decision, having nothing to do with Grady."
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16) Ohio: State Prison Sold to Private Company
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
September 1, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/us/02brfs-Ohio.html?ref=us
Lake Erie Correctional Institution, in Ashtabula County, has been sold to a private company. The prison is the only one of five prisons the state put up for sale that will be sold, state officials said Thursday. Corrections Corporation of America will buy it for $72.7 million, more than the $50 million needed from the privatization effort to balance the state's prison budget. The four other prisons for sale did not generate high enough offers, state officials said. Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest prison operator, takes control of the facility, in Conneaut, on Dec. 31, pending the outcome of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the move. The company, based in Nashville, will operate the prison, which cost $41 million to build, at 8 percent less than it cost the state. The facility plans to add 304 beds. Chris Mabe, president of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, said the union expects deterioration in salary, benefits and working conditions for those prison staff members who move to the private sector from the public sector. He said staffing was the main way they cut costs.
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17) The Truth Behind Stop-and-Frisk
New York Times Editorial
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/opinion/the-truth-behind-stop-and-frisk.html?hp
Judge Shira Scheindlin of Federal District Court in New York made the right call when she refused to dismiss a lawsuit against the New York City Police Department, which alleged that officers use race as a basis for stopping and frisking citizens, rather than reasonable suspicion. The trial will provide an important opportunity to evaluate this increasingly troubling program, which resulted in 600,000 people being stopped on the streets last year alone.
The stop-and-frisk tactic is as old as policing itself. But it has been a central law enforcement tool in New York since the 1990's, when the police adopted the "broken windows" approach, clamping down on minor crime and emphasizing preventive measures against lawbreaking.
New York has experienced a dramatic reduction in crime. But as Judge Scheindlin pointed out, there is no conclusive proof that widespread use of stop-and-frisk itself drove down crime. Crime fell in many cities, including those that did not adopt the approach.
There is no dispute that minorities are disproportionately singled out. Blacks and Hispanics make up a little more than half of the city's population but about 85 percent of the people stopped. Supporters of the program argue that minority men are disproportionately represented among offenders as well. But analyses dating back more than a decade have shown that it is not so simple.
As Judge Scheindlin notes in her opinion, a report by the legal scholar Jeffrey Fagan found that blacks and Latinos were more likely to be stopped at police discretion, not just in high-crime, high-minority areas, but in districts where crime is minimal and populations are mixed.
Police officials say that officers stop people when they have reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. An analysis last year by The Times of street stops in one mainly black Brooklyn neighborhood found that officers listed vague reasons in half the stops, including "furtive movement," a category that can be used to mask harassment.
The Fagan report found that arrests are made in less than 6 percent of all street stops - a lower rate than if the police simply set up random checkpoints. Less than 1 percent of stops turned up weapons. This suggests that hundreds of thousands of people, mostly minorities, have been stopped for no legitimate reason - or worse, because of the color of their skin.
The Police Department says it has a training program that explains proper arrest procedure and warns officers against racial profiling. But Judge Scheindlin was sharply critical of those efforts, noting that numerous officers did not recall ever receiving such training.
In rejecting the city's request for dismissal, Judge Scheindlin rightly pointed out that the suit, brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights, raises issues of great public concern. New Yorkers need to know whether the Police Department has failed to properly train and monitor its officers to prevent race-based stops.
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18) On Race, the Silence Is Bipartisan
"In July, the unemployment rate was 8.2 percent for whites, but 16.8 percent for blacks and 11.3 percent for Latinos. The Pew Research Center estimates that in 2009, the median household net worth was $5,677 for blacks, $6,325 for Hispanics and $113,149 for whites - down from $12,124, $18,539 and $134,992, respectively, in 2005."
By DESMOND S. KING and ROGERS M. SMITH
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/opinion/on-race-the-silence-is-bipartisan.html?hp
THE economic crisis in the United States is also a racial crisis. White Americans are hurting, but nonwhite Americans are hurting even more. Yet leaders in both political parties - for different reasons - continue to act as though race were anachronistic and irrelevant in a country where an African-American is the president.
In July, the unemployment rate was 8.2 percent for whites, but 16.8 percent for blacks and 11.3 percent for Latinos. The Pew Research Center estimates that in 2009, the median household net worth was $5,677 for blacks, $6,325 for Hispanics and $113,149 for whites - down from $12,124, $18,539 and $134,992, respectively, in 2005.
All groups have suffered from high unemployment, the mortgage meltdown and soaring health care costs, but African-Americans and Hispanics started far behind and continue to fall behind. In 2009, 35 percent of black households and 31 percent of Latino households had zero or negative wealth, compared with 15 percent of white households.
Since the end of legal segregation in the 1960s, there have been two approaches to ameliorating racial inequality. Conservatives and most Republican politicians insist that laws be colorblind and that race-conscious measures like affirmative action should be ended. Liberals and most Democratic politicians favor such measures, mindful of the burdens of past and present discrimination.
For most of the nation's history, the two major parties were internally divided over racial issues. But today, racial policy positions align almost perfectly with the party system. The two parties, which openly clashed over race from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, have for the last decade pretty much agreed not to talk about race - a silence that impedes progress toward racial equality.
Democrats mention race as little as possible, even though minority voters are crucial constituents, because colorblind positions are far more politically popular. Affirmative action has been supported in every Democratic presidential platform since 1972, but since the Reagan era, Democrats speak of it less and less.
President Obama, for example, does not openly renounce affirmative action, but he pragmatically stresses universal social programs like health care. He manages to avoid appearing especially concerned about African-Americans.
This tack leaves modern Republicans with little to criticize, lest they appear to be race-baiting, so they too keep quiet.
Advocates of both colorblind and race-conscious approaches to public policy now claim the mantle of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights agenda and his call for people to be judged by their character, not their skin. Though Republicans claim that free-market policies will lift all boats and Democrats hope that "universal" measures to combat economic inequality will benefit all groups, racial inequality has endured.
As studies of employment and real estate practices begun during the Reagan era have consistently shown, racial discrimination persists. And "race neutral" economic measures backed by Democrats, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, have proved too limited to aid many poorer blacks and Hispanics.
Political leaders must openly recognize that we cannot progress either by ignoring race or focusing exclusively on it. It is not only legitimate, but also essential, to evaluate policy options partly on the basis of whether they are likely to reduce or increase racial inequalities.
Compromise policies - measures that are not explicitly race-targeted but are chosen partly because they will benefit nonwhites especially - should become the basis for policy debates.
For example, without using explicit racial classifications, we can devise districts and situate homes in ways that are more likely to produce integrated schools and neighborhoods.
We can adopt employment tests that are fair and inclusive and do a better job at predicting job performance than many Civil Service exams now do.
And we can do more to ensure that our criminal laws do not target crimes more typical of urban Hispanics and blacks, like crack cocaine use, more strongly than crimes typical of suburban whites, like powder cocaine use.
Both parties should accept that the question of whether policies help narrow the racial divide must be part of the discussion. After all, it was the Republican-led search for racial progress in the 1860s and the Democratic-led fight for civil rights in the 1960s - buttressed, of course, by African-Americans' own freedom struggle - that allowed the election of a black president in 2008.
Desmond S. King, a professor of American government at Oxford University, and Rogers M. Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, are the authors of "Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama's America."
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19) Files Note Close C.I.A. Ties to Qaddafi Spy Unit
By ROD NORDLAND
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/world/africa/03libya.html?hp
TRIPOLI, Libya - Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya's former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service - most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country's reputation for torture.
Although it has been known that Western intelligence services began cooperating with Libya after it abandoned its program to build unconventional weapons in 2004, the files left behind as Tripoli fell to rebels show that the cooperation was much more extensive than generally known with both the C.I.A. and its British equivalent, MI-6.
Some documents indicate that the British agency was even willing to trace phone numbers for the Libyans, and another appears to be a proposed speech written by the Americans for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi about renouncing unconventional weapons.
The documents were discovered Friday by journalists and Human Rights Watch. There were at least three binders of English-language documents, one marked C.I.A. and the other two marked MI-6, among a larger stash of documents in Arabic.
It was impossible to verify their authenticity, and none of them were written on letterhead. But the binders included some documents that made specific reference to the C.I.A., and their details seem consistent with what is known about the transfer of terrorism suspects abroad for interrogation and with other agency practices.
And although the scope of prisoner transfers to Libya has not been made public, news media reports have sometimes mentioned it as one country that the United States used as part of its much criticized rendition program for terrorism suspects.
A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Youngblood, declined to comment on Friday on the documents. But she added: "It can't come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats."
The British Foreign Office said, "It is the longstanding policy of the government not to comment on intelligence matters."
While most of the renditions referred to in the documents appear to have been C.I.A. operations, at least one was claimed to have been carried out by MI-6.
"The rendition program was all about handing over these significant figures related to Al Qaeda so they could torture them and get the information they wanted," said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, who studied the documents in the intelligence headquarters in downtown Tripoli.
The documents cover 2002 to 2007, with many of them concentrated in late 2003 and 2004, when Moussa Koussa was head of the External Security Organization. (Mr. Koussa was most recently Libya's foreign minister.)
The speech that appears to have been drafted for Colonel Qaddafi was found in the C.I.A. folder and appears to have been sent just before Christmas in 2003. The one-page speech seems intended to depict the Libyan dictator in a positive light. It concluded, using the revolutionary name for the Libyan government: "At a time when the world is celebrating the birth of Jesus, and as a token of our contributions towards a world full of peace, security, stability and compassion, the Great Jamhariya presents its honest call for a W.M.D.-free zone in the Middle East," referring to weapons of mass destruction.
The flurry of communications about renditions are dated after Libya's renouncement of its weapons program. In several of the cases, the documents explicitly talked about having a friendly country arrest a suspect, and then suggested aircraft would be sent to pick the suspect up and deliver him to the Libyans for questioning. One document included a list of 89 questions for the Libyans to ask a suspect.
While some of the documents warned Libyan authorities to respect such detainees' human rights, the C.I.A. nonetheless turned them over for interrogation to a Libyan service with a well-known history of brutality.
One document in the C.I.A. binder said operatives were "in a position to deliver Shaykh Musa to your physical custody, similar to what we have done with other senior L.I.F.G. members in the recent past." The reference was to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was dedicated to the overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi, and which American officials believed had ties to Al Qaeda.
When Libyans asked to be sent Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq, another member of the group, a case officer wrote back on March 4, 2004, that "we are committed to developing this relationship for the benefit of both our services," and promised to do their best to locate him, according to a document in the C.I.A. binder.
Two days later, an officer faxed the Libyans to say that Mr. Sadiq and his pregnant wife were planning to fly into Malaysia, and the authorities there agreed to put them on a British Airways flight to London that would stop in Bangkok. "We are planning to take control of the pair in Bangkok and place them on our aircraft for a flight to your country," the case officer wrote.
Mr. Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch said he had learned from the documents that Sadiq was a nom de guerre for Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who is now a military leader for the rebels.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Belhaj gave a detailed description of his incarceration that matched many of those in the documents. He also said that when he was held in Bangkok he was tortured by two people from the C.I.A.
On one occasion, the Libyans tried to send their own plane to extradite a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Abu Munthir, and his wife and children, who were being held in Hong Kong because of passport irregularities.
The Libyan aircraft, however, was turned back, apparently because Hong Kong authorities were reluctant to let Libyan planes land. In a document labeled "Secret/ U.S. Only/ Except Libya," the Libyans were advised to charter an aircraft from a third country. "If payment of a charter aircraft is an issue, our service would be willing to assist financially," the document said.
While questioning alleged terror group members plainly had value to Western intelligence, the cooperation went beyond that. In one case, for example, the Libyans asked operatives to trace a phone number for them, and a document that was in the MI-6 binder replied that it belonged to the Arab News Network in London. It is unclear why the Libyans sought who the phone number belonged to.
The document also suggested signs of agency rivalries over Libya. In the MI-6 binder, a document boasted of having turned over someone named Abu Abd Alla to the Libyans. "This was the least we could do for you to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years," an unsigned fax in 2004 said. "Amusingly, we got a request from the Americans to channel requests for information from Abu Abd through the Americans. I have no intention of doing any such thing."
Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington.
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20) London Protesters Disrupt Israeli Orchestra's Concert
By JOHN F. BURNS
September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/world/europe/03london.html?ref=world
LONDON - For the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, marking its 75th anniversary, it was a jarring first, and in a city that has been one of the orchestra's most welcoming hosts: the repeated disruption of its concert at Royal Albert Hall in London on Thursday night by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, to the point that the BBC cut off its live broadcast and played recordings of the evening's program instead.
The protest was a first, too, for the BBC's Promenade Concerts, a popular rite of summer in Britain since 1895 that aims, promoters say, to bring classical music to the widest possible audience, performed by orchestras and ensembles from across the world.
According to the BBC, no other performance since the live "Proms" broadcasts began in the 1930s has been disrupted by protests. As for halting a broadcast altogether, a BBC spokesman said the only precedent anybody could remember was during German bombing raids on London in World War II.
If any other marker were needed, the concert was billed as a celebration of the 75th birthday earlier this year of Zubin Mehta, who has been musical director of the Israeli orchestra, known as the I.P.O., and before that the orchestra's musical adviser, for a total of more than 40 years.
On Friday, Mr. Mehta flew with the orchestra to Switzerland, on the next leg of a European tour, declining to comment on the protest. One music lover among the sellout audience of more than 5,000 in London described Mr. Mehta's demeanor as conductor, during the disruptions and the loud booing and shouts of "Out! Out! Out!" that others directed at the protesters, as one of stoic calm, with Mr. Mehta never once looking at the protesters and waiting with his baton at the ready until the uproar calmed down.
The Proms concerts are frequently joyous affairs, with an accent on informality. This year, they have featured an evening of musical comedy and a concert by an Australian group, the Spaghetti Western Orchestra, playing Ennio Morricone's scores for films like "A Fistful of Dollars" with instruments including asthma inhalers and cereal packets.
But the Israel Philharmonic performance was jolted by a group of about 30 protesters, whose interruptions appeared to have been carefully planned, said Rebecca Driver, a spokeswoman for BBC's Proms. The program, featuring works by Anton Webern, Max Bruch, Isaac Albeniz and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, was disrupted four times in two hours, each time by a group seated apart from the last, forcing security officers to expel the protesters one group at a time.
The protesters included a core group of professional musicians, who gave what amounted to a counterconcert, breaking into vocal choruses in a bid to drown out the orchestra. A statement by the protesters said that they were members of "a new vocal ensemble" called Beethovians for Boycotting Israel, and described their behavior during the concert as a "debut performance."
The statement quoted one of the singer-protesters, Deborah Fink, whom it identified as a soprano, describing the group's first disruption as "intricately interwoven" with the Israel Philharmonic's first piece, Webern's Passacaglia.
"We thought we'd liven up the Webern a bit," Ms. Fink was quoted as saying. "The performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the previous night's Prom was so exciting that we decided to treat the audience to our own version of the 'Ode to Joy.' " She then cited lines from the protesters' bitterly satirical version of the 18th-century poem by Friedrich Schiller that is sung to Beethoven's score:
Israel, end your occupation:
There's no peace on stolen land.
We'll sing out for liberation
Till you hear and understand.
Several concertgoers said that the audience appeared to be overwhelmingly hostile to the protesters, with boos, shouts and cries of "Shut up!" countering the protesters' choruses.
"It was just quite upsetting," said Tom Dixon, one of the concertgoers. "The Israelis had come just to play music, and they were being targeted for something I don't think they were involved in at all."
Another man in the hall, Jonathan Hoffman, said he had carried an Israeli flag to the concert and waved it during the protests. "I'm proud of the fact that I'm Jewish," he said. "I'm proud of this wonderful orchestra that consists of people who face terror every day."
Ms. Driver, the Proms spokeswoman, said the police officers who had been posted at the entrances to keep peace between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters did not enter the hall, and made no arrests.
She said that concerns about possible disruption inside the hall had prompted the organizers to mount an unusually thorough search of all the concertgoers, but that the checks had not discovered the patches of hand-lettered cloth that protesters inside the hall had used to spell out the words "Free Palestine" as they staged their demonstrations.
BBC Radio Three, the highbrow station that broadcasts the Proms, cut away quickly after the first of the protests broke out, apologizing to listeners for the interruption. It returned twice to the concert, resuming the broadcast, before finally abandoning it.
During the breaks, and after the final interruption, the station played recorded versions of the works on the orchestra's program. In the concert hall, Mr. Mehta led the orchestra through the full program, concluding to a huge ovation and an encore.
The possibility of disruption had already been well flagged. Earlier in the week, a letter signed by 23 professional musicians, including Ms. Fink, a music teacher who has been active in Jewish groups opposing the Israeli occupation of pre-1967 Palestinian territory, was published in a newspaper, The Independent, castigating the BBC for inviting the Israeli orchestra.
"Israel deliberately uses the arts to promote a misleading image of Israel," the signers said. "Through this campaign, officially called 'Brand Israel,' denials of human rights and violations of international law are hidden behind a cultural smokescreen." The conductor, Mr. Mehta, kept his thoughts to himself after the concert, declining all requests for interviews. But perhaps anticipating trouble, he had given his views on the orchestra's political and social significance in an interview with the BBC before the performance.
"The I.P.O. is a cultural ambassador for Israel, and it is not 'whitewashing Israel's crimes,' " he said, quoting a pro-Palestine boycott campaign. "People who make music have to be politically aware; we have to know what's going on. We have to bring people together. In Israel, for Arab and Jewish audiences, and on quite a few occasions every year, at least for two-and-a-half hours, there is some sort of peace in the hall."
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 3, 2011
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described material from which Zubin Mehta quoted in a statement. It was from a pro-Palestine campaign, not a pro-Israel campaign.
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