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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter
Table of Contents:
A. ARTICLES IN FULL
B. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
D. VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.
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A. ARTICLES IN FULL
(Unless otherwise noted)
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1) CIA Paying AT&T to Provide Call Records-NY Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2013/11/07/technology/07reuters-usa-surveillance-att.html?src=busln
(Reuters) - The CIA is paying AT&T more than $10 million (£6,236,357.97) a year to provide phone records for overseas counter-terrorism investigations, the New York Times reported, quoting government officials.
The No. 2 U.S. mobile service provider is cooperating under a voluntary contract, not under subpoenas or court orders compelling the company to participate, the paper said. (http://r.reuters.com/juk54v)
The report comes amid widespread political uproar after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents describing how the U.S. government collects far more internet and telephone data than previously known.
Under the AT&T arrangement, the CIA supplies phone numbers of overseas terrorism suspects and AT&T searches its database to provide call records that may help identify foreign associates, the paper said.
Most of the call logs provided by AT&T involve foreign-to-foreign calls, the paper said.
AT&T does not disclose the identity of the Americans calling from the United States, and masks their phone numbers when it produces the records, the paper said, quoting the officials.
AT&T was not immediately available for comment. (Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bangalore and Alina Selyukh in Washington,)
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2) Executions Stall as States Seek Different Drugs
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
HOUSTON — Florida ran out of its primary lethal-injection drug last month and relied on a new drug that no state had ever used for an execution. At Ohio’s next scheduled execution, the state is planning to use a two-drug combination for the first time. Last month in Texas, Michael Yowell became that state’s first inmate executed using a drug made by a lightly regulated pharmacy that usually produces customized medications for individual patients.
The decision by manufacturers to cut off supplies of drugs, some of which had been widely used in executions for decades, has left many of the nation’s 32 death penalty states scrambling to come up with new drugs and protocols. Some states have already changed their laws to keep the names of lethal-drug suppliers private as a way to encourage them to provide drugs.
The uncertainty is leading to delays in executions because of legal challenges, raising concerns that condemned inmates are being inadequately anesthetized before being executed and leading the often-macabre process of state-sanctioned executions into a continually shifting legal, bureaucratic and procedural terrain.
In the Florida execution, which used the new drug midazolam as part of a three-drug mix, The Associated Press reported that the inmate, William Happ, appeared to remain conscious longer and made more body movements after losing consciousness than those executed with the old formula.
“We have seen more changes in lethal injection protocols in the last five years than we have seen in the last three decades,” said Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School and a death penalty expert. “These states are just scrambling for drugs, and they’re changing their protocols rapidly and carelessly.”
All 32 states with legalized executions use lethal injection as their primary option for executions. Of the more than 250 executions since 2008, all but five were done with lethal injections.
Facing increasing pressure and scrutiny from death penalty opponents, manufacturers of several drugs used in lethal injections — including sodium thiopental and pentobarbital — over the past few years have ceased production of the drugs or required that they not be used in executions. Looking for alternatives, state prison systems have been more eager to try new drugs, buy drugs from new sources, keep the identities of their drug suppliers secret and even swap drugs among states.
A week before the execution of a convicted murderer, Arturo Diaz, in September, Texas prison officials received two packages of pentobarbital from the Virginia Department of Corrections, at no charge; the state with the country’s second-busiest death chamber acting as ad-hoc pharmacy to the state with the busiest.
Several states have turned to compounding pharmacies, which are largely unregulated by the Food and Drug Administration and overseen primarily by the states. They have traditionally made specialized drugs, for instance, turning a medication into a cream or gel if a patient has trouble swallowing pills.
In Missouri, the availability of drugs and litigation have slowed the pace of executions. There have been two since 2009.
“We are going to continue to be affected by these pharmaceutical company decisions time and again, unless the death penalty states can find a pharmaceutical product that has some supply stability around it,” said Chris Koster, the attorney general in Missouri, which dropped plans to use the anesthetic propofol after the European Union threatened to limit exports of the drug if it was used in an execution.
The drug shortages and legal wrangling have led some officials to discuss older methods of execution. In July, Mr. Koster suggested that the state might want to bring back the gas chamber. Dustin McDaniel, the attorney general in Arkansas, which has struggled with its lethal-injection protocol, told lawmakers the state’s fallback method of execution was the electric chair.
Mr. Koster and Mr. McDaniel said they were not advocating the use of the gas chamber or the electric chair, but were talking about the possible legal alternatives to an increasingly problematic method for states.
“No state has had any success with getting their hands on the cocktail that has heretofore been relied upon,” Mr. McDaniel said. He said that lawyers for the state are trying to navigate the appeals process in death penalty cases while knowing that “if the legal hurdles were magically to go away, we are in no position to carry out an execution in this state.”
In their rush to find drugs, death penalty states have opened a new wave of lawsuits that have delayed executions at a time when public support for the death penalty has waned and a handful of states have abolished it in recent years. A recent Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, the lowest support in nearly 41 years.
Lawyers for seven Florida death row inmates have challenged the constitutionality of a lethal-injection protocol that uses midazolam as an anesthetic. And Missouri was sued by the American Civil Liberties Union after it added drug suppliers to its execution team. Such a move prevents the public and the courts from learning the names of the suppliers, because a state secrecy law provides anonymity to members of the execution team.
Those laws not only protect drug suppliers from negative publicity and harassment, but make it easier for prison systems to get the drugs because they can offer anonymity to reluctant suppliers. A similar law in Georgia is under review by the State Supreme Court, delaying for months the execution of Warren Hill.
But even the method of drug payment has entered a strange new realm.
Texas prison officials bought pentobarbital at a compounding pharmacy in a Houston suburb, using a credit card instead of the usual purchase order. Oklahoma has been quietly buying its lethal injection drugs using the state prison agency’s petty-cash accounts, and at one point got money for the drugs from the same account it used to pay for released inmates’ Greyhound bus tickets. State prison officials said they use the petty-cash funds to leave no public paper trail of the identities of drug suppliers or the state’s executioners.
“You want to be able to protect the identities of the people participating, the executioners and the supplier of the drugs,” said Jerry Massie, the Oklahoma Corrections Department spokesman.
Other moves by states to get drugs, including using compounding pharmacies, have troubled death penalty opponents. In Texas, prison officials bought compounded pentobarbital without a prescription. Maurie Levin, a lawyer representing death row inmates, said the lack of a prescription raised legal questions.
Katherine Fretland contributed reporting from New Orleans.
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3) Honesty Doesn't Pay Off for Ex-Homeless Man
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
HACKENSACK, N.J. — A good deed has come back to haunt a formerly homeless northern New Jersey man.
James Brady found $850 on a Hackensack sidewalk last April and turned it in to police. Brady was awarded the money six months later after no one contacted police during the required waiting period.
Now, The Record (http://bit.ly/1bfBrVI ) reports that Brady has been denied General Assistance and Medicaid benefits by the Hackensack Human Services Department through Dec. 31 because he failed to report the $850 as new income he received.
The director of human services tells the newspaper they are just following the rules.
Brady was homeless when he found the money but has since found housing. He was featured in news reports nationwide for turning in the money, despite his own financial struggles.
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Information from: The Record (Woodland Park, N.J.), http://www.northjersey.com *---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*
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4) Storied Party of Mandela Faces South Africa Unrest
By LYDIA POLGREEN
MARIKANA, South Africa — When Alton Dalasile got his first job as a
miner in the late 1980s, he immediately joined the National Union of
Mineworkers, a powerful organization that not only fought for workers’
rights but also battled the brutal system of racial segregation known as
apartheid. When his union’s political ally, the African National
Congress, was on the ballot in 1994 in South Africa’s first fully
democratic election, Mr. Dalasile enthusiastically cast his ballot for
Nelson Mandela, the country’s first black president.
Last year, Mr. Dalasile gave up on his union amid a violent season of wildcat strikes that ended with 34 miners being gunned down by the police here in August and joined a radical upstart union that accused the old guard of selling out to mine bosses. Now Mr. Dalasile is contemplating what was once unthinkable: voting against the African National Congress in elections next year.
“They have abandoned and betrayed us,” Mr. Dalasile said. “The A.N.C. is no longer the party of the poor man, the working man. They care only about enriching themselves.”
Next year South Africa will hold elections for its National Assembly, which elects the country’s president. Twenty years after the end of apartheid, when the African National Congress swept to power on a wave of international good will, Mr. Mandela’s party is facing perhaps its fiercest electoral challenge yet.
The elections will take place in the shadow of the killings here in Marikana, a flash point many have likened to apartheid-era massacres that spurred the fight against white rule. Only this time, the police officers and the politicians who led them were almost entirely black. The A.N.C. government, accused of slaughtering unarmed protesters, responded by charging the striking miners with the murder of their colleagues.
The party’s handling of the strike and its aftermath, along with allegations of cronyism and corruption at the highest levels of leadership, have led to widespread frustration with the A.N.C., and a crop of new political players is trying to ride the wave of discontent.
Julius Malema, the firebrand who led the party’s youth league until he was expelled this year for sowing disunity, has started his own political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters.
He began the party at a giant rally here last month to cheers of adulation, striking a hard-line pose in a red beret like his self-proclaimed hero, the former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, as he called for the nationalization of mines and the seizing of white-owned property.
“We must restore the dignity of the black majority,” he declared to a crowd of thousands. “Now is the time to deliver on the promises of 1994.”
Despite his popularity, Mr. Malema may not be the best-placed candidate to challenge the A.N.C. on issues of corruption and cronyism. As a prominent leader in the A.N.C., he became notorious for his lavish lifestyle, wearing Breitling watches and Louis Vuitton loafers, driving a top-of-the-line Range Rover and building a house in one of Johannesburg’s most luxurious suburbs.
He has been accused of bankrolling his luxury by steering millions of dollars in state contracts to himself and his allies, and he is currently facing a charge of money laundering in connection with contracts with an engineering company linked to him in his home province, Limpopo.
Mr. Malema has denied those accusations and, in an interview, said that his expulsion from the A.N.C. was a sign that “the movement has become a pig and is eating its own children.” He said that President Jacob Zuma had forced him out of the party because he felt threatened and wanted to appease white business leaders.
“He removed me because people said to him, ‘Remove Malema and white people will be happy,’ ” Mr. Malema said.
He has pitched himself as the man to finish South Africa’s incomplete revolution by transferring wealth from white men, who control the vast majority of industry and much of the arable land, to the black majority. He has excoriated the A.N.C.’s black empowerment programs as a get-rich scheme for a chosen few and accuses the party of abandoning the poor.
He says that he can speak with new authority about poverty now. As a result of the corruption investigation, his assets were seized and sold to pay off back taxes, stripping him of his fortune. His current address, he said, is the tiny house where he grew up with his grandmother.
“We don’t theorize about poverty,” Mr. Malema said. “We grew up under poverty.”
Mr. Malema is not the only politician trying to dislodge the A.N.C. from its vast electoral majority. Another prominent figure, Mamphela Ramphele, a business executive and the former partner of the slain black consciousness leader Steve Biko, has started a centrist political party that she hopes will pull in middle-class voters of all races, though analysts say she is more likely to take votes from the main opposition party, the largely white and mixed-race Democratic Alliance.
That party has made steady inroads into the A.N.C.’s urban strongholds, harnessing anger among many black residents over bad schools, insufficient housing and poor government services.
“There is no question that people are unhappy with the performance of the A.N.C.,” said Aubrey Matshiqi, a veteran political analyst.
No matter how dissatisfied voters are, the A.N.C. is almost certain to remain in power. Its majorities have narrowed in the years since Mr. Mandela’s election but remain robust. Analysts say that if the A.N.C.’s share of the vote falls below 60 percent, it will be a symbolic blow.
Here in Marikana, people who live in tin shacks in squatter camps are questioning their allegiance to the party that brought freedom to South Africa’s black majority.
Andile Mahlangeni, a 29-year-old locomotive operator at a platinum mine in Marikana, said that members of his family had been waiting years for the houses, jobs, schools and medical care that the A.N.C. had promised.
“They haven’t delivered for us,” he said, sitting on a rough-hewed bench outside the lean-to he shares with his wife and children. “It is nothing but empty promises from politicians. We need some change.”
Whether this frustration adds up to votes is another question.
“Young people who are unemployed are angry, and that anger seems to be directed at the A.N.C.,” Mr. Matshiqi said. “Whether they can succeed in transforming that anger into votes for the E.F.F. remains to be seen.”
Last year, Mr. Dalasile gave up on his union amid a violent season of wildcat strikes that ended with 34 miners being gunned down by the police here in August and joined a radical upstart union that accused the old guard of selling out to mine bosses. Now Mr. Dalasile is contemplating what was once unthinkable: voting against the African National Congress in elections next year.
“They have abandoned and betrayed us,” Mr. Dalasile said. “The A.N.C. is no longer the party of the poor man, the working man. They care only about enriching themselves.”
Next year South Africa will hold elections for its National Assembly, which elects the country’s president. Twenty years after the end of apartheid, when the African National Congress swept to power on a wave of international good will, Mr. Mandela’s party is facing perhaps its fiercest electoral challenge yet.
The elections will take place in the shadow of the killings here in Marikana, a flash point many have likened to apartheid-era massacres that spurred the fight against white rule. Only this time, the police officers and the politicians who led them were almost entirely black. The A.N.C. government, accused of slaughtering unarmed protesters, responded by charging the striking miners with the murder of their colleagues.
The party’s handling of the strike and its aftermath, along with allegations of cronyism and corruption at the highest levels of leadership, have led to widespread frustration with the A.N.C., and a crop of new political players is trying to ride the wave of discontent.
Julius Malema, the firebrand who led the party’s youth league until he was expelled this year for sowing disunity, has started his own political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters.
He began the party at a giant rally here last month to cheers of adulation, striking a hard-line pose in a red beret like his self-proclaimed hero, the former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, as he called for the nationalization of mines and the seizing of white-owned property.
“We must restore the dignity of the black majority,” he declared to a crowd of thousands. “Now is the time to deliver on the promises of 1994.”
Despite his popularity, Mr. Malema may not be the best-placed candidate to challenge the A.N.C. on issues of corruption and cronyism. As a prominent leader in the A.N.C., he became notorious for his lavish lifestyle, wearing Breitling watches and Louis Vuitton loafers, driving a top-of-the-line Range Rover and building a house in one of Johannesburg’s most luxurious suburbs.
He has been accused of bankrolling his luxury by steering millions of dollars in state contracts to himself and his allies, and he is currently facing a charge of money laundering in connection with contracts with an engineering company linked to him in his home province, Limpopo.
Mr. Malema has denied those accusations and, in an interview, said that his expulsion from the A.N.C. was a sign that “the movement has become a pig and is eating its own children.” He said that President Jacob Zuma had forced him out of the party because he felt threatened and wanted to appease white business leaders.
“He removed me because people said to him, ‘Remove Malema and white people will be happy,’ ” Mr. Malema said.
He has pitched himself as the man to finish South Africa’s incomplete revolution by transferring wealth from white men, who control the vast majority of industry and much of the arable land, to the black majority. He has excoriated the A.N.C.’s black empowerment programs as a get-rich scheme for a chosen few and accuses the party of abandoning the poor.
He says that he can speak with new authority about poverty now. As a result of the corruption investigation, his assets were seized and sold to pay off back taxes, stripping him of his fortune. His current address, he said, is the tiny house where he grew up with his grandmother.
“We don’t theorize about poverty,” Mr. Malema said. “We grew up under poverty.”
Mr. Malema is not the only politician trying to dislodge the A.N.C. from its vast electoral majority. Another prominent figure, Mamphela Ramphele, a business executive and the former partner of the slain black consciousness leader Steve Biko, has started a centrist political party that she hopes will pull in middle-class voters of all races, though analysts say she is more likely to take votes from the main opposition party, the largely white and mixed-race Democratic Alliance.
That party has made steady inroads into the A.N.C.’s urban strongholds, harnessing anger among many black residents over bad schools, insufficient housing and poor government services.
“There is no question that people are unhappy with the performance of the A.N.C.,” said Aubrey Matshiqi, a veteran political analyst.
No matter how dissatisfied voters are, the A.N.C. is almost certain to remain in power. Its majorities have narrowed in the years since Mr. Mandela’s election but remain robust. Analysts say that if the A.N.C.’s share of the vote falls below 60 percent, it will be a symbolic blow.
Here in Marikana, people who live in tin shacks in squatter camps are questioning their allegiance to the party that brought freedom to South Africa’s black majority.
Andile Mahlangeni, a 29-year-old locomotive operator at a platinum mine in Marikana, said that members of his family had been waiting years for the houses, jobs, schools and medical care that the A.N.C. had promised.
“They haven’t delivered for us,” he said, sitting on a rough-hewed bench outside the lean-to he shares with his wife and children. “It is nothing but empty promises from politicians. We need some change.”
Whether this frustration adds up to votes is another question.
“Young people who are unemployed are angry, and that anger seems to be directed at the A.N.C.,” Mr. Matshiqi said. “Whether they can succeed in transforming that anger into votes for the E.F.F. remains to be seen.”
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5) Venezuelan Soldiers Deployed to Stores
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
CARACAS, Venezuela — The Christmas shopping season has started with a jolt here, with the socialist Venezuelan government dispatching soldiers to “occupy” a major chain of electronic goods stores, ordering prices slashed there and in other shops that it has accused of price gouging.
Huge crowds formed outside stores in several cities over the weekend as inflation-weary Venezuelans showed up hoping for bargains. Others took the government’s order as a license to loot: Some posted cellphone videos online showing large-screen televisions and other items being carted off in Valencia, the country’s third-largest city.
The dramatic measures, ordered on Friday by President Nicolás Maduro, were reminiscent of the populist gestures of his immediate predecessor, Hugo Chávez, the country’s longtime leader who died in March.
They come as the government grapples with serious economic problems, including inflation of 54 percent a year and shortages of many basic goods, including toilet paper, milk and flour.
All of that is weighing on Mr. Maduro a month ahead of municipal elections that the opposition is seeking to cast as a referendum on his young government. Mr. Maduro argues that his government is facing an “economic war” waged by what he calls the right-wing opposition in Venezuela and its backers in Colombia and the United States.
In announcing that military personnel would occupy the five-store electronics chain Daka, Mr. Maduro said that the government would supervise sales at significantly lower prices and that the store’s stock would be liquidated.
“Let nothing remain on the shelves!” he said during a television broadcast.
Mr. Maduro also dispatched officials to inspect other stores around the country, saying they, too, would be forced to charge what the government considers fair prices.
Officials said over the weekend that several store managers had been arrested and would face charges of setting overly high prices. Luisa Ortega, the national prosecutor, said that some people had also been arrested and accused of looting.
Vice President Jorge Arreaza, who is married to one of Mr. Chávez’s daughters, said on Twitter on Sunday that the campaign against what the government calls speculators would continue forcefully. “We will protect the PEOPLE against bourgeois parasitism,” he wrote, echoing language often used by Mr. Maduro.
Henrique Capriles Radonski, the opposition leader whom Mr. Maduro narrowly beat in an election to replace Mr. Chávez in April, criticized the measures on his Twitter account, writing, “Maduro in desperation over his failure and inability to lead the country takes measures that do not solve the economic crisis.”
The crowds forming outside stores over the weekend included both government loyalists and opponents. What they shared was a growing frustration with the country’s economic malaise and prices that keep soaring, fostering anger with both the government and merchants. The main government television station on Sunday repeatedly showed video clips in which Hebert García, the head of the recently created Supreme Organ for the Popular Defense of the Economy, and other officials vowed to keep up the pressure on so-called speculators.
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6) Devastation in Typhoon’s Path Slows Relief in Philippines
By KEITH BRADSHER
November 11, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/world/asia/vast-challenges-for-philippines-after-typhoon.html?ref=world
CEBU, Philippines — The scale of the devastation and the desperation wrought by one of the most powerful storms ever to buffet the Philippines came into much clearer view on Monday, three days after it hopscotched across the country’s midsection whipping up monstrous walls of seawater.
Survivors spoke of people being swept away in tsunami-like torrents, their corpses strewn among the wreckage of the storm, Typhoon Haiyan. Photos from the hard-hit city of Tacloban showed vast stretches swept clean of homes, and reports emerged of people who were desperate for food and water raiding aid convoys and stripping the stores that had been left standing.
Residents of Tacloban described a terrifying experience on Friday evening in which seawater suddenly filled the streets, rising within minutes until it had submerged the ground floors of homes and was waist-deep on the second floors of those that had second floors. Screaming people bobbed in the water — many grabbing for floating debris, but not all succeeding.
“Swirling water from the ocean filled the streets,” said Virginia Basinang, 54, a retired teacher in Tacloban. “Some of them were able to hold on, some were lucky and lived, but most did not.” When the water receded, 14 bodies lay on the broken wall of the house across the street from her home, Ms. Basinang said. They were still there on Monday, she said.
As Monday dawned, it became increasingly obvious that Typhoon Haiyan’s destructive force had been exponentially worse than first assumed, ravaging cities, towns and fishing villages across the islands of the central Philippines on Friday.
By some estimates, at least 10,000 people may have died in Tacloban alone, and with phone service out across stretches of the far-flung archipelago, it was difficult to know if the storm was as deadly in more remote areas.
The storm barreled across palm-fringed beaches and plowed into frail homes with a force that by some estimates approached that of a tornado.
The main effect, however, increasingly appeared to be a storm surge that was driven by the winds, believed to be among the strongest ever recorded in the Philippines, lifting walls of water onto the land as they struck. By some accounts, the winds reached 190 miles an hour.
“We are seeing a lot of dead throughout the province,” said Brig. Gen. Domingo Tutaan Jr., a spokesman for the Philippine armed forces. “I have been in the service for 32 years, and I have been involved with a lot of calamities. I don’t have words to describe what our ground commanders are seeing in the field.”
United Nations officials said Monday that Valerie Amos, the organization’s top relief official, was en route to the Philippines to lead the international aid effort, which had already begun mobilizing on the ground. Ms. Amos, the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, released $25 million from an emergency response fund to help pay for immediate priorities and planned to launch a “flash appeal” for more money when she arrived on Tuesday.
“We are focused first and foremost on the requirements for food, shelter, medical support, to prevent the outbreak of public health disasters,” John Ging, the operations coordinator for United Nations relief, told reporters in New York.
Asked if he thought the death toll could rise, Mr. Ging said, “We hope it doesn’t get any higher but we have to be prepared for the worst.”
As aid crews struggled to reach ravaged areas, the storm exposed some of the perennial problems of the Philippines. The country’s roads and airports, long starved of money by corrupt and incompetent governments, are some of the worst in Southeast Asia and often make traveling long distances a trial. On Monday, clogged with debris from splintered buildings and shattered trees, the roads in the storm’s path were slowing rescue teams.
Richard Gordon, the chairman of the Philippine Red Cross, said that a Red Cross aid convoy to Tacloban had to turn back on Sunday after it stopped at a collapsed bridge and was nearly hijacked by a crowd of hungry people. “There is very little food going in, and what food there was, was captured” by the crowd, Mr. Gordon said Monday morning in a telephone interview.
The storm posed new challenges for President Benigno S. Aquino III, who just two months ago struggled to wrest control of a major city in the south from insurgents. Mr. Aquino has been praised at home and abroad for his fight against corruption during his three and a half years in office, leading to increased foreign investment and an impressive growth rate. But he must still contend with Muslim separatists in the south and with provinces that have long been the domains of regional strongmen, resistant to government control.
Now added to that list was one of the country’s worst natural disasters, at a time when emergency funds have been depleted by other calamities, most notably a magnitude-7.2 earthquake that struck the middle of the country four weeks ago. On Monday, amid rising fears of a breakdown of law and order after reports of widespread looting and robberies, the government said it was flying more police officers to the region.
Although deadly storms are not unusual in the Philippines, Typhoon Haiyan appears to stand apart, both in the ferocity of its winds, which some described as sounding like a freight train, and in its type of destruction.
Most deaths from typhoons in the Philippines are caused by mudslides and rain-swollen rivers. So when Haiyan sped across the islands on Friday, some officials and weather experts in the Philippines thought they had witnessed something of a miracle. The storm that lit up social media for days with dire warnings was thought to have mostly spared the islands because it did not linger long enough to dump a deluge of rain.
What they did not account for was a storm surge that some reports said reached 13 feet in Tacloban, leaving a trail of destruction that in some ways mirrored a tsunami. One photo of a merchant ship left stranded on land resembled images from Japan in 2011, when an earthquake flung a wall of water onto that nation’s northeastern shore.
Prof. Rick Murray, an oceanographer with expertise in Asian climate systems at Boston University’s department of earth and environment, said in an email that several factors contributed to Haiyan’s destructiveness, starting with its intensity. “Just by looking at the satellite images, the eye is perfectly formed,” he said. “The storm is tight, nearly perfectly circular, with incredibly high wind speeds. It is right out of the textbooks.”
The low atmospheric pressure of the storm’s eye helped pull the storm surge, in which water can rise by dozens of feet very rapidly, Professor Murray said. “This is, of course, on top of the wind, on top of the waves, on top of the normal tidal cycle,” he said. “You have swollen rivers from the intense rain, falling at inches per hour. The bottom line is that there is a heck of a lot of water arriving from all directions.”
While it was unclear whether the power of the storm was tied to climate change, the surge may serve as another reminder to low-lying cities of the need to prepare for the worst.
Mr. Aquino had urged residents to leave low-lying areas, but he did not order an evacuation. On Sunday, he toured some stricken areas and declared a “state of calamity,” a first step in the release of emergency money from the government.
As Mr. Aquino arrived in Tacloban to meet with victims of the storm and to coordinate rescue and cleanup efforts, his defense secretary, Voltaire Gazmin, described the chaos in the city of 220,000. “There is no power, no water, nothing,” Mr. Gazmin said. “People are desperate.”
Richard Heydarian, a foreign policy adviser to the Philippine Congress, said, “The challenge now is mobilization and reconstruction and rehabilitation of the affected areas, and I think the president is determined to showcase his leadership now and underscore the importance of the national government.”
Lynette Lim, a spokeswoman for Save the Children, weathered the storm in a local government office in Tacloban before leaving the city on a military aircraft Sunday morning. She said that even schools, gymnasiums and other sites the local government had designated as evacuation centers had failed to hold up.
“The roofs had been ripped off, the windows had shattered and sometimes the ceilings had caved in,” Ms. Lim said in a telephone interview from Manila.
Poor neighborhoods fared especially badly, with virtually no structures left standing other than a few government buildings. With no police officers in sight on Sunday morning, Ms. Lim said, people had begun grabbing food and other items off pharmacy and grocery shelves.
Video from Tacloban on ABS-CBN television showed scores of people entering stores and stuffing suitcases and bags with clothing and housewares. One photo showed a man with a gun guarding his store.
News reports from Tacloban told of how officials were unable to get an accurate death count because law enforcement and government personnel could not be found after the storm. Tacloban’s mayor, Alfred S. Romualdez, was reported to have been “holding on to his roof” before being rescued, according to The Philippine Daily Inquirer.
The storm also appeared to have obliterated most structures in northern Panay Island, about 300 miles west. While the number of deaths was unclear, fishing boats in Estancia, a busy Panay port, were returning Monday morning with hauls of corpses that had been swept out to sea.
“We retrieved 11 more bodies from the ocean today, and they are still washing ashore,” said Eugene Tentativo, Estancia’s disaster risk reduction officer. “The morgues are full.”
The weakened typhoon made landfall early Monday in Vietnam; hundreds of thousands of people there had been evacuated as the storm approached, but there were no reports of significant damage or injuries, according to The Associated Press. Haiyan was downgraded to a tropical storm as it entered southern China, The A.P. said.
International aid agencies and foreign governments sent emergency teams to the Philippines. At the request of the Philippine government, the United States defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, ordered the deployment of ships and aircraft to deliver supplies and help in the search-and-rescue efforts, the Defense Department said. The United States Embassy in Manila made $100,000 immediately available for health and sanitation efforts, according to its Twitter feed.
President Obama issued a statement on Sunday that said he expected “the incredible resiliency of the Philippine people” to help the country, an American ally, through the trauma. He said the United States also stood ready to assist the government’s relief and recovery efforts.
On Sunday, about 90 American Marines and sailors based in Okinawa, Japan, landed in the Philippines as part of an advance team assessing the disaster to determine what the Pentagon might need to help in relief efforts.
According to Col. Brad Bartlet, a Marine spokesman, the team has made requests for C-130 cargo airplanes, MV-22 Osprey helicopters and other aircraft to participate in search and recovery at sea. The Navy has also sent two P-3 Orion surveillance planes, which are often used during natural disasters to patrol the seas in search of survivors stranded in ships and boats.
Mar Roxas, the Philippine interior minister, said that while relief supplies were beginning to reach the Tacloban airport, they could go no farther because debris was blocking the roads in the area.
“The entire airport was under water up to roof level,” Mr. Roxas said, according to The Philippine Daily Inquirer. Speaking to reporters in Tacloban, he added, “The devastation here is absolute.”
Robert S. Zeigler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, Philippines, said he was concerned that the damage reports seemed to be mainly from Tacloban, where aid has been concentrated so far, and not from the many fishing communities that line the coast.
“The coastal areas can be quite vulnerable — in many cases, you have fishing communities right up to the shoreline, and they can be wiped out” by a powerful storm surge, he said. “The disturbing reports are the lack of reports, and the areas that are cut off could be quite severely hit.”
On Panay Island, Mary Ann Baitan, 42, said she cowered with her two daughters, 6 and 10, under a bamboo table for more than two hours, singing to them as winds ripped away the roof of their home in Banat, another hard-hit town. “All we could do was hide and pray,” she said.
Across Cebu Province, 43 people were killed, 111 were injured and five were missing, said Wilson Ramos, the deputy disaster management officer for Cebu. The authorities were trying to conduct aerial surveys of the area directly in the storm’s center, particularly the town of Daanbantayan and Bantayan Island, Mr. Ramos said.
“We are very tired already,” he said in the province’s disaster offices. “But we hope to send relief to those affected.”
Residents of Cebu, one of the country’s largest cities, said many roads to the north of Cebu Island were still closed after towns there suffered heavy damage, although the city was spared the brunt of the storm.
“It was very loud, like a train,” said Ranulfo L. Manatad, a night watchman at a street market in Mandaue City, on the northern outskirts of Cebu.
In Mabolo, another town on the northern flank of Cebu, the winds toppled a locally famous tree with a trunk roughly a yard in diameter. The tree had withstood every typhoon for more than a century.
Reporting was contributed by Gerry Mullany from Hong Kong; Floyd Whaley from Estancia, Philippines; Austin Ramzy from Cebu, Philippines; Mark Mazzetti from Washington; and Rick Gladstone and Alan Feuer from New York.
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7) Removing Fuel Rods Poses New Risks at Crippled Nuclear Plant in Japan
By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: November 10, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/world/asia/removing-fuel-rods-poses-new-risks-at-crippled-nuclear-plant-in-japan.html?ref=world
TOKYO — It was the part of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that spooked American officials the most, as the complex spiraled out of control two and a half years ago: the spent fuel pool at Reactor No. 4, with more than 1,500 radioactive fuel assemblies left exposed when a hydrogen explosion blew the roof off the building.
In the next 10 days, the plant’s operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, is set to start the delicate and risky task of using a crane to remove the fuel assemblies from the pool, a critical step in a long decommissioning process that has already had serious setbacks.
Just 36 men will carry out the tense operation to move the fuel to safer storage; they will work in groups of six in two-hour shifts throughout the day for months. A separate team will work overnight to clear any debris inside the pool that might cause the fuel to jam when a crane tries to lift it out, possibly causing damage.
“We are making our final preparations,” Naomi Hirose, the president of the company, known as Tepco, said at a news conference on Friday. “We hope to be done by the end of next year.”
The attempt to remove the fuel rods underscores the complicated, potentially hazardous work that lies ahead at the plant, which was crippled by explosions and by meltdowns in three of its reactors in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
The operation addresses a threat that has hung over the plant since the crisis started. Though the fuel has cooled significantly since the early days of the crisis, and Tepco has shored up the reactor building, it is still dangerous to have the fuel high up in a damaged structure that could collapse in another quake, experts warn.
But removing it poses dangers, too. The fuel rods must remain immersed in water to block the gamma radiation they emit and allow workers to be in the area, and to prevent the rods from overheating. An accident could expose the rods and — in a worst-case scenario, some experts say — allow them to release radioactive materials beyond the plant.
Plant engineers will use a crane to lift the fuel assemblies from the pool and put them into giant casks of water. Each cask will be placed on a trailer and moved to a more secure pool at ground level.
“There are potentially very big risks involved,” Shunichi Tanaka, the head of Japan’s nuclear regulator, said last week. “Each assembly must be handled very carefully.”
Tepco hopes that a smooth start to the removals will help it regain at least some of the credibility it lost in its response to the quake and tsunami that overwhelmed the plant and in the cleanup.
A string of blunders by Tepco, including underestimating the potential for large amounts of groundwater to become contaminated and reach the ocean, has some experts wondering whether the company is up to the task.
Even minor problems with the fuel removal could strengthen calls for the decommissioning work to be taken out of Tepco’s hands.
“All I can do is pray that nothing goes wrong,” said Yasuro Kawai, a former plant engineer who now heads a group that is independently monitoring the decommissioning process.
He said much depends on whether the assemblies were damaged during removal — for example, if the casks carrying them were to accidentally fall to the ground, exposing the rods — and whether such damage was severe enough to force workers to evacuate.
“If they drop the rods, will the situation be easily contained, or do we need to worry about a more dangerous chain of events?” Mr. Kawai said. “There are just too many variables involved to say for sure.”
Tepco officials said the removal plan has been vetted by the company’s engineers and outside experts, including the International Atomic Energy Agency. But the work will be carried out by a Tepco-led team and without external supervision.
The company said it has taken extra precautions. The plant has been preparing for months, erecting a steel structure around and over the damaged reactor building and fitting it with a crane to lift the casks about 100 feet in the air. Underwater cameras will help engineers search for debris, left from the original explosion, that might jam the assemblies, and a robotic arm will be used to try to remove any debris that does get in the way.
The crane is designed to hold its load if power is lost, and Tepco said it has doubled the cabling that will lift the cask, which could weigh as much as 90 tons when filled.
The biggest fear is that an earthquake or tsunami will disrupt the fuel assembly transfer. Sizable aftershocks from the 2011 quake frequently jolt the region. Last month, a magnitude-7.1 quake off the coast near Fukushima caused a small tsunami.
Tepco has said the steel covering structure and crane can withstand an earthquake as strong as the magnitude-9.0 quake that damaged the plant in 2011.
Lake H. Barrett, a former United States Department of Energy official who was in charge of removing fuel from a stricken reactor after an accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, is now a special adviser to the president of Tepco. He said he believed that the risks in removing the fuel from the Reactor No. 4 pool at Fukushima were small and that a significant release of radioactive material was highly unlikely.
And when the job is done, Mr. Barrett said, the overall danger will be reduced.
This fuel “really needs to come back down to a ground-level pool that is not damaged,” he said. “That’s going to improve the risk situation.”
In the early days of the crisis, American officials were so worried about the pool that they advised Americans to stay farther from the plant than the Japanese government ordered, which many Japanese officials still remember with humiliation. The worst-case scenario of a breach in the pool, leaving the fuel rods uncovered, has not happened, and Tepco believes the fuel assemblies have relatively little damage.
Makiko Inoue and Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington.
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8) South Florida Faces Ominous Prospects From Rising Waters
By NICK MADIGAN
MIAMI BEACH — In the most dire predictions, South Florida’s delicate barrier islands, coastal communities and captivating subtropical beaches will be lost to the rising waters in as few as 100 years.
Further inland, the Everglades, the river of grass that gives the region its fresh water, could one day be useless, some scientists fear, contaminated by the inexorable advance of the salt-filled ocean. The Florida Keys, the pearl-like strand of islands that stretches into the Gulf of Mexico, would be mostly submerged alongside their exotic crown jewel, Key West.
“I don’t think people realize how vulnerable Florida is,” Harold R. Wanless, the chairman of the geological sciences department at the University of Miami, said in an interview last week. “We’re going to get four or five or six feet of water, or more, by the end of the century. You have to wake up to the reality of what’s coming.”
Concern about rising seas is stirring not only in the halls of academia but also in local governments along the state’s southeastern coast.
The four counties there — Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach, with a combined population of 5.6 million — have formed an alliance to figure out solutions.
Long battered by hurricanes and prone to flooding from intense thunderstorms, Florida is the most vulnerable state in the country to the rise in sea levels.
Even predictions more modest than Professor Wanless’s foresee most of low-lying coastal Florida subject to increasingly frequent floods as the polar ice caps melt more quickly and the oceans surge and gain ground.
Much of Florida’s 1,197-mile coastline is only a few feet above the current sea level, and billions of dollars’ worth of buildings, roads and other infrastructure lies on highly porous limestone that leaches water like a sponge.
But while officials here and in other coastal cities, many of whom attended a two-day conference on climate change last week in Fort Lauderdale, have begun to address the problem, the issue has gotten little traction among state legislators in Tallahassee.
The issue appears to be similarly opaque to segments of the community — business, real estate, tourism — that have a vested interest in protecting South Florida’s bustling economy.
“The business community for the most part is not engaged,” said Wayne Pathman, a Miami land-use lawyer and Chamber of Commerce board member who attended the Fort Lauderdale conference. “They’re not affected yet. They really haven’t grasped the possibilities.”
It will take a truly magnificent effort, Mr. Pathman said, to find answers to the critical issues confronting the area. Ultimately, he said, the most salient indicator of the crisis will be the insurance industry’s refusal to handle risk in coastal areas here and around the country that are deemed too exposed to rising seas.
“People tend to underestimate the gravity here, I think, because it sounds far off,” said Ben Strauss, the director of the Program on Sea Level Rise at Climate Central, an independent organization of scientists. “People are starting to tune in, but it’s not front and center. Miami is a boom town now, but in the future that I’m very confident will come, it will be obvious to everyone that the sea is marching inland and it’s not going to stop.”
The effects on real estate value alone could be devastating, Mr. Strauss said. His research shows that there is about $156 billion worth of property, and 300,000 homes, on 2,120 square miles of land that is less than three feet above the high tide line in Florida.
At that same level, Mr. Strauss said, Florida has 2,555 miles of road, 35 public schools, one power plant and 966 sites listed by the Environmental Protection Agency, such as hazardous waste dumps and sewage plants.
The amount of real estate value, and the number of properties potentially affected, rises incrementally with each inch of sea-level rise, he said.
Professor Wanless insists that no amount of engineering proposals will stop the onslaught of the seas. “At two to three feet, we start to lose everything,” he said.
The only answer, he said, is to consider drastic measures like establishing a moratorium on development along coastal areas and to compel residents whose homes are threatened to move inland.
Local officials say they are doing what they can. Jason King, a consultant for the Seven50 Southeast Florida Prosperity Plan, an economic blueprint for seven southeastern counties over the next half-century, said it proposed further replenishing of beaches and mangrove forests, raising roads, and building flood-control gates, backflow preventers and higher sea walls.
Here on Miami Beach, a densely populated 7.5-square-mile barrier island that already becomes flooded in some areas each time there is a new moon or a heavy rain, city officials have approved a $200 million project to retrofit its overwhelmed storm-water system, which now pumps floodwaters onto the island when it should be draining them off, and make other adjustments.
“The sky is not falling, but the water is rising,” said Charles Tear, the Miami Beach emergency management coordinator, who stood at an intersection at the edge of Maurice Gibb Park, just two feet above sea level, that floods regularly.
Mr. Tear said he and other city officials were focused on the more conservative prediction that the seas will rise by five to 15 inches over the next 50 years.
“We can’t look at 100 years,” he said. “We have to look at the realistic side.”
James F. Murley, the executive director of the South Florida Regional Planning Council, was similarly unmoved by the more calamitous predictions.
“We’re not comfortable looking at 2100,” he said, noting that for planning purposes he adhered to a projection that foresaw two feet of sea-level rise by 2060.
Whatever the specifics of the predictions, the Miami Beach city manager, Jimmy L. Morales, said he and his staff had to consider whether “we should adopt more aggressive assumptions” about the effects of climate change.
Officials here are seeking advice from the Netherlands, famous for its highly effective levees and dikes, but the very different topography of Miami Beach and its sister coastal cities does not lend itself to the fixes engineered by the Dutch. “Ultimately, you can’t beat nature, but you can learn to live with it,” Mr. Morales said. “Human ingenuity is incredible, but do we have the political will? Holland sets aside $1 billion a year for flood mitigation, and we have a lot more coastline than they do.”
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9) In Detroit, Protests of Shooting of Woman Who Sought Help
By RAVI SOMAIYA
Civil rights groups protested in Detroit this weekend after a young black woman was shot on the porch of a suburban home earlier this month, as she apparently sought help after she had car trouble.
The woman, Renisha McBride, 19, was fatally shot in the early hours of Nov. 2, the Dearborn Heights police said.
“She was in a car accident,” her uncle Sean McBride, 45, told The New York Times on Sunday. “Her cellphone had died and she went to a house for help. The homeowner said it sounded like she was trying to break in. But how much of a threat can someone be?”
Cheryl A. Carpenter, a lawyer for the homeowner, who has not been named by the authorities, told The Detroit News that she was “confident when the evidence comes it will show that my client was justified and acted as a reasonable person would who was in fear for his life.” Ms. Carpenter did not respond to messages seeking comment late Sunday.
The case comes in the wake of protests that swept the nation this summer when a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted after fatally shooting a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, during an altercation in Sanford, Fla. Mr. Martin had been buying snacks. In September, in Charlotte, N.C., a police officer was charged with voluntary manslaughter after he shot and killed Jonathan Ferrell, 24, a former college football player who had also been seeking help after a car accident.
Ms. McBride’s case has stoked similar outrage, and was the subject of at least two protests and rallies this weekend, said LaToya Henry, of the Detroit branch of the N.A.A.C.P., “because this was a young black woman in a neighborhood that is predominantly white.” The local and national N.A.A.C.P. will await a final report before deciding on further actions, Ms. Henry said.
The investigation into the death is continuing, Maria Miller, a spokeswoman for the Wayne County prosecutor’s office, said on Sunday. The police will present evidence to prosecutors this week, she said, “so we can make a decision on whether to issue charges.”
Rev. W. J. Rideout III, a pastor at All God’s People Church in Detroit who attended a vigil last week at the home where the shooting occurred, said the family was disheartened. “They don’t feel like the justice system has given them justice,” he said.
“He shouldn’t be walking the streets,” he said of the homeowner. ”This sends out a message that it’s O.K. to shoot people.”
Steven Yaccino contributed reporting.
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10) Bystanders Shot by the Police Face an Uphill Fight to Win Lawsuits
By J. DAVID GOODMAN
Outside the Empire State Building in Midtown one mild morning in the
summer of 2012, the crowd consisted of tourists and office workers — and
a solitary gunman who was fleeing the site of a murder. As the police
closed in, the gunman drew his .45-caliber handgun, and two officers opened fire, discharging 16 shots in all.
Ten people were hit: the gunman, who was killed, and nine pedestrians caught in the hail and ricochet of police bullets.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg described the shooting in August 2012 as an appropriate, heroic response by the officers, but sympathized with those wounded. “It’s sad that anybody else was injured,” he said then.
In the months since, however, lawyers for the City of New York have presented a far more aggressive stance against the wounded bystanders who have sued, essentially refusing to settle the cases and moving to have them thrown out before trial.
Since 2011, 16 bystanders have been struck by police bullets in the city. The most recent case occurred in September, when two officers near Times Square shot at a man they mistakenly believed had a gun. The man was not wounded, but two female bystanders were. One of the women, Sahar Khoshakhlagh, has filed a notice of claim, the precursor to a lawsuit, accusing the officers of being negligent in papers received by the city in October. If she files suit, Ms. Khoshakhlagh will almost certainly face a battle in court.
Since 2010, after the State Court of Appeals threw out a lawsuit by a bystander hit by police bullets, city lawyers have taken the position that most bystander cases should be similarly dismissed.
“The state’s highest court has recognized that police officers’ split-second decisions to use deadly force must be protected from this kind of second-guessing,” Michael A. Cardozo, who is in charge of the city’s Law Department, said in a statement, after a woman wounded in the Empire State Building shooting sued.
For city lawyers, the hard-line stance is an extension of the city’s strategy in fighting most policing lawsuits, contesting cases that they believe have little legal merit, and designating them as “no-pay cases.” But for those suing the police, the prospect of a protracted legal fight presents an odd experience: to be shot by police officers, then to have the city defend the shooting and deny any responsibility for it.
“On the one hand they’re trying to protect people,” said Jeffrey L. Seglin, an ethicist and lecturer on public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “On the other hand, you think they would try to take care of people who get hurt in that process. The legal thing isn’t always the right thing.”
Law Department officials would not comment on the strategy, in part because it involved continuing cases. A spokeswoman for the Law Department said the city evaluated “each case based on its individual merit.” But several defense lawyers who are representing bystanders wounded by the police said they had been told the same thing: The city is not interested in negotiating a settlement.
“They said it’s a no-pay case,” said Amy B. Marion, a lawyer representing a woman from North Carolina, Chenin Duclos, who was wounded near the Empire State Building. “They said to me, ‘Absolutely we feel that the law is very clear in this area.’ That’s their position. That’s what it’s about for them. It’s nuts and bolts.”
How other cities handle bystander lawsuits can vary greatly. For six years, the Chicago Law Department battled a 13-year-old who was wounded by officers firing at a fleeing suspect, before winning at trial in 2010. “So a 13-year-old girl who was shot in the shoulder ended up getting nothing,” her lawyer, Russell Ainsworth, said. Philadelphia reportedly reached a $1.8 million settlement last year in the case of a bystander fatally shot in 2008 by officers aiming at an armed suspect; they were cleared of wrongdoing.
New York’s legal strategy does not call for contesting every lawsuit involving a bystander shot by the police, especially in cases where the officers’ actions cannot be justified, or if plaintiffs are willing to accept small awards. Bystanders can apply to the state Office of Victim Services for reimbursement of their medical bills and other expenses.
Since 2010, the city has chosen to settle three bystander cases stemming from two police shootings. In total, the city has paid more than $18 million in 21 bystander cases since 2003, according to the city comptroller’s office, mostly from shootings in the 1990s and early 2000s. About $9.8 million came in three substantial jury awards.
Last year, the city paid $850,000 to settle a lawsuit stemming from a police shooting in 2010 in Harlem. Four officers discharged 46 shots on a crowded block after the police said one of two men, who had been fighting, pulled a gun and fired on them. Both men were shot, one fatally; ballistics tests showed that the man who died was killed by a police bullet.
Four other people, including two police officers, were injured in the fusillade. One of the bystanders, Cedric Simmons, who was hit in the shoulder and leg, agreed to a settlement. Two other suits stemming from that shooting are moving forward: one by another bystander, and the other by one of the men in the initial confrontation, Angel Alvarez, whom a grand jury declined to indict on gun charges.
The other settlements, in 2011, stemmed from a New Year’s Day shooting in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 2003. Three officers pursuing an armed man, who was shooting at them, fired at him in front of a nightclub, as people waited in line around 3 a.m. In the cross-fire, two men were hit in the legs. “For the longest time, the police were saying that it was the perpetrator’s bullets that were in my clients’ body,” a lawyer for both men, Mark Shaevitz, said. When doctors later removed a bullet, he said, tests showed it came from a police gun.
Even so, Mr. Shaevitz said, the city moved for summary judgment. The case settled only after a judge warned the city that the trial would most likely go forward. Each man got $135,000.
Legal observers said the shooting near Times Square on Sept. 14 — in which the man being pursued did not have a weapon and there were visible crowds all around — presented a tougher set of facts that could force the city to soften its approach.
Nonetheless, the 2010 Court of Appeals decision presents a new hurdle for plaintiffs.
That decision came in a lawsuit filed by Tammy D. Johnson, a Harlem woman who was one of two bystanders shot as police officers exchanged gunfire with an armed robbery suspect in 2005. The other bystander, Garnold M. King, 78, who was wounded in the back, settled for $250,000.
In Ms. Johnson’s case, the panel ruled in a 4-to-3 decision that Police Department guidelines do not prohibit officers from opening fire when bystanders are around, but rather require that they exercise professional judgment that doing so will not “unnecessarily endanger innocent persons.”
None of the five officers testified to seeing pedestrians on the street before opening fire. In a dissent, three judges said that failure to observe bystanders presented enough of a question of police procedure for the lawsuit to go forward.
“The Johnson case gives them more leverage in these kinds of cases, and I’m not surprised that they are willing to exercise that leverage,” said Victor A. Kovner, who was the city’s corporation counsel in the early 1990s.
Another lawsuit that could test the city’s resolve involves the death of Denise Gay, who was killed as police officers fired 73 shots in a gun battle with a suspect in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in September 2011. “The burden is a high burden, but the issue is recklessness,” said a lawyer for her family, Sanford Rubenstein. “Our position is that 73 shots was reckless.”
Frederick A.O. Schwartz Jr., another former corporation counsel for the city, said determining how to handle such lawsuits was tricky. “The question for the city is, without saying they would pay a lot of money, should it — as a matter of grace and recognition that the person who was hit or killed was completely innocent — make some form of compensation?”
In the Empire State Building shooting, on Aug. 24, 2012, Ms. Duclos was crossing 34th Street when a police bullet shattered her femur. It was a life-changing injury, said Ms. Duclos, who has undergone two surgeries so far. “Their actions caused this injury,” she said in a telephone interview. “The idea that they would just dismiss it altogether, it makes me sad.”
Ten people were hit: the gunman, who was killed, and nine pedestrians caught in the hail and ricochet of police bullets.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg described the shooting in August 2012 as an appropriate, heroic response by the officers, but sympathized with those wounded. “It’s sad that anybody else was injured,” he said then.
In the months since, however, lawyers for the City of New York have presented a far more aggressive stance against the wounded bystanders who have sued, essentially refusing to settle the cases and moving to have them thrown out before trial.
Since 2011, 16 bystanders have been struck by police bullets in the city. The most recent case occurred in September, when two officers near Times Square shot at a man they mistakenly believed had a gun. The man was not wounded, but two female bystanders were. One of the women, Sahar Khoshakhlagh, has filed a notice of claim, the precursor to a lawsuit, accusing the officers of being negligent in papers received by the city in October. If she files suit, Ms. Khoshakhlagh will almost certainly face a battle in court.
Since 2010, after the State Court of Appeals threw out a lawsuit by a bystander hit by police bullets, city lawyers have taken the position that most bystander cases should be similarly dismissed.
“The state’s highest court has recognized that police officers’ split-second decisions to use deadly force must be protected from this kind of second-guessing,” Michael A. Cardozo, who is in charge of the city’s Law Department, said in a statement, after a woman wounded in the Empire State Building shooting sued.
For city lawyers, the hard-line stance is an extension of the city’s strategy in fighting most policing lawsuits, contesting cases that they believe have little legal merit, and designating them as “no-pay cases.” But for those suing the police, the prospect of a protracted legal fight presents an odd experience: to be shot by police officers, then to have the city defend the shooting and deny any responsibility for it.
“On the one hand they’re trying to protect people,” said Jeffrey L. Seglin, an ethicist and lecturer on public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “On the other hand, you think they would try to take care of people who get hurt in that process. The legal thing isn’t always the right thing.”
Law Department officials would not comment on the strategy, in part because it involved continuing cases. A spokeswoman for the Law Department said the city evaluated “each case based on its individual merit.” But several defense lawyers who are representing bystanders wounded by the police said they had been told the same thing: The city is not interested in negotiating a settlement.
“They said it’s a no-pay case,” said Amy B. Marion, a lawyer representing a woman from North Carolina, Chenin Duclos, who was wounded near the Empire State Building. “They said to me, ‘Absolutely we feel that the law is very clear in this area.’ That’s their position. That’s what it’s about for them. It’s nuts and bolts.”
How other cities handle bystander lawsuits can vary greatly. For six years, the Chicago Law Department battled a 13-year-old who was wounded by officers firing at a fleeing suspect, before winning at trial in 2010. “So a 13-year-old girl who was shot in the shoulder ended up getting nothing,” her lawyer, Russell Ainsworth, said. Philadelphia reportedly reached a $1.8 million settlement last year in the case of a bystander fatally shot in 2008 by officers aiming at an armed suspect; they were cleared of wrongdoing.
New York’s legal strategy does not call for contesting every lawsuit involving a bystander shot by the police, especially in cases where the officers’ actions cannot be justified, or if plaintiffs are willing to accept small awards. Bystanders can apply to the state Office of Victim Services for reimbursement of their medical bills and other expenses.
Since 2010, the city has chosen to settle three bystander cases stemming from two police shootings. In total, the city has paid more than $18 million in 21 bystander cases since 2003, according to the city comptroller’s office, mostly from shootings in the 1990s and early 2000s. About $9.8 million came in three substantial jury awards.
Last year, the city paid $850,000 to settle a lawsuit stemming from a police shooting in 2010 in Harlem. Four officers discharged 46 shots on a crowded block after the police said one of two men, who had been fighting, pulled a gun and fired on them. Both men were shot, one fatally; ballistics tests showed that the man who died was killed by a police bullet.
Four other people, including two police officers, were injured in the fusillade. One of the bystanders, Cedric Simmons, who was hit in the shoulder and leg, agreed to a settlement. Two other suits stemming from that shooting are moving forward: one by another bystander, and the other by one of the men in the initial confrontation, Angel Alvarez, whom a grand jury declined to indict on gun charges.
The other settlements, in 2011, stemmed from a New Year’s Day shooting in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 2003. Three officers pursuing an armed man, who was shooting at them, fired at him in front of a nightclub, as people waited in line around 3 a.m. In the cross-fire, two men were hit in the legs. “For the longest time, the police were saying that it was the perpetrator’s bullets that were in my clients’ body,” a lawyer for both men, Mark Shaevitz, said. When doctors later removed a bullet, he said, tests showed it came from a police gun.
Even so, Mr. Shaevitz said, the city moved for summary judgment. The case settled only after a judge warned the city that the trial would most likely go forward. Each man got $135,000.
Legal observers said the shooting near Times Square on Sept. 14 — in which the man being pursued did not have a weapon and there were visible crowds all around — presented a tougher set of facts that could force the city to soften its approach.
Nonetheless, the 2010 Court of Appeals decision presents a new hurdle for plaintiffs.
That decision came in a lawsuit filed by Tammy D. Johnson, a Harlem woman who was one of two bystanders shot as police officers exchanged gunfire with an armed robbery suspect in 2005. The other bystander, Garnold M. King, 78, who was wounded in the back, settled for $250,000.
In Ms. Johnson’s case, the panel ruled in a 4-to-3 decision that Police Department guidelines do not prohibit officers from opening fire when bystanders are around, but rather require that they exercise professional judgment that doing so will not “unnecessarily endanger innocent persons.”
None of the five officers testified to seeing pedestrians on the street before opening fire. In a dissent, three judges said that failure to observe bystanders presented enough of a question of police procedure for the lawsuit to go forward.
“The Johnson case gives them more leverage in these kinds of cases, and I’m not surprised that they are willing to exercise that leverage,” said Victor A. Kovner, who was the city’s corporation counsel in the early 1990s.
Another lawsuit that could test the city’s resolve involves the death of Denise Gay, who was killed as police officers fired 73 shots in a gun battle with a suspect in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in September 2011. “The burden is a high burden, but the issue is recklessness,” said a lawyer for her family, Sanford Rubenstein. “Our position is that 73 shots was reckless.”
Frederick A.O. Schwartz Jr., another former corporation counsel for the city, said determining how to handle such lawsuits was tricky. “The question for the city is, without saying they would pay a lot of money, should it — as a matter of grace and recognition that the person who was hit or killed was completely innocent — make some form of compensation?”
In the Empire State Building shooting, on Aug. 24, 2012, Ms. Duclos was crossing 34th Street when a police bullet shattered her femur. It was a life-changing injury, said Ms. Duclos, who has undergone two surgeries so far. “Their actions caused this injury,” she said in a telephone interview. “The idea that they would just dismiss it altogether, it makes me sad.”
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11) Anger Takes Hold in City Ravaged by Typhoon
By KEITH BRADSHER
November 12, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/13/world/asia/anger-rising-over-conditions-in-tacloban-ravaged-philippine-city.html?hp
TACLOBAN, the Philippines — Wearing face masks or pulling their shirts up over their noses to mask the smell of rotting flesh, a procession of typhoon survivors three miles long walked toward the shattered airport here on Tuesday to beg for food, water or a flight out of the chaos of what used to be a city of 220,000.
They witnessed personal tragedies like that of Erroll de la Cruz, 34, who squatted next to the pavement to scrawl the names of his wife, Michelle, and 7-year-old son, Matthew, on a piece of plywood. Then he walked across the crowded road and laid the plywood between their corpses, in the hope that their lives would be remembered, and perhaps their bodies someday traced.
“I don’t think I can handle this by myself,” he said with the quiet voice of someone who has not yet begun to come to terms with the sudden deaths of loved ones.
The people of Tacloban, on Leyte Island in the east-central Philippines, have been struggling largely on their own for almost five days to deal with the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan, as the civilian and military authorities of the Philippines struggle to cope with a natural disaster of a scope far beyond expectations. The pace of relief flights by the Philippines and United States air forces has finally accelerated, but only after a long series of delays and hiccups.
There is no reliable evidence that slow relief work has caused further loss of life. The deaths of the wife and stepson of Mr. de la Cruz, for example, appear to have occurred during the initial rush of wind and water from the storm.
But difficulties in distributing relief assistance have made the lives of the survivors far more difficult.
Some residents were understanding of the delays in distributing food. Lamberto Patau, 31, a bus dispatcher, said that more relief shipments had arrived than could be handed out. “There is food, but there is no one to distribute it, because they were all victims,” he said.
The devastation apparent during an eight-mile drive into the city center made the extent of the challenge clear. Mounds of debris up to 15 feet high towered next to the main road. Concrete pillars and other hazards had fallen into the traffic lanes, forcing drivers, motorcyclists and pedestrians to dodge and weave.
Police officers were operating a series of simple checkpoints, built of little more than scraps of wood, to try to restrain unruly behavior. An 8 p.m. curfew has been imposed.
Jennifer Cicco, the administrator of the Leyte Island chapter of the Philippines Red Cross, said the conservative estimate from provincial officials was that in addition to the deaths in Tacloban, a city of 220,000, some 10,000 people had died in the surrounding province, where some 1.3 million people live, almost all of them on the coast where many fishing villages were unprepared for the fury of the storm.
The International Committee of the Red Cross tried to send a dozen truckloads of supplies to Tacloban from Davao in the southern Philippines ahead of the typhoon, only to find that the storm moved so fast that the trucks did not reach their destination in time. An attempted hijacking of the convoy around 20 miles south of Tacloban by a hungry crowd forced it to stop, and by Tuesday night the roads were still too unsafe for the convoy to proceed, Ms. Cicco said.
Instead of experienced police officers directing the ever-growing crowds at the airport who were trying to flee the city on Tuesday, there were young soldiers with M-16 assault rifles and bandoleers of ammunition.
The airport still had no radar or other effective air traffic control system; it was relying instead on contacting the relief planes via radio once they came within ni9 to 12 miles of the city, and asking them to take turns using the runway. Only small planes with limited capacity, mostly propeller planes, could use the airport, because of the air traffic control problem and because no one had brought in new portable staircases for reaching the doorways of larger jets; virtually all of the airport’s staircases were destroyed by the storm.
In the city, conditions were even worse than on the road. So many rotting bodies lay uncollected in the streets that senior Philippine military officers complained of severe nausea from the stench. Water and food were scarce, and looters picked through the mangled remains of retail stores in the hope of finding anything of value that previous looters may have missed. The municipal prison had released all its prisoners as the typhoon hit the city, urging them to save themselves from drowning. Little effort had yet been made to find them.
Relief operations in this devastated city were slowly starting to pick up Tuesday as the Philippines struggled to cope with the scale of the damage.
Some survivors, however, were growing angry.
“There’s no food coming, but that is not as big a problem as dealing with the dead,” said Juanita Experas, a 63-year-old resident of a village near Tacloban. “There are dead bodies everywhere, and it is making us sick.
Manuel Aballe, a 27-year-old resident who began the long trudge to the airport with his wife and 2-month-old baby, said, “We have to get out of Tacloban or we will die here of hunger.”
In some ways, the damage in Tacloban is even worse than it was in Indonesia after a giant tsunami swept ashore in 2004. In Indonesian cities like Banda Aceh, the tsunami inundated neighborhoods closest to the coast, but homes, cars and diesel generators farther inland were spared and provided bases for relief efforts.
But in Tacloban, a city of 220,000 wrapped around a horseshoe-shaped bay, the water overflowed from the bay in all directions. It flooded practically everything in sight with fast-moving torrents as the sea level rose as much as four meters, or 13 feet. Winds exceeding 140 miles an hour tore away the roofs and windows that withstood the walls of water. Cars were overturned or floated away, their engines ruined.
As people from other towns have driven here to search for relatives, they have found that there is essentially no gasoline available in the city or nearby. Lines have formed at service stations.
Backyard diesel generators, usually used during blackouts, were also wrecked by the water, so the city has been dark at night, when large bands of looters gather. Virtually no diesel fuel is available at any price, although the government has its own supplies.
Mayor Alfred S. Romualdez of Tacloban said in a brief interview that he was aware of difficulties, but described them as affecting nearby villages more than his own city.
“These communities are very difficult to access,” he said. “Many people are confused and don’t have cellphone service.”
Mr. Romualdez said that he had personally lost everything, including his house. But he suggested that reports of damage to his own city might have been exaggerated, saying that only a couple hundred deaths had been confirmed by the authorities. Some officials have estimated that as many as 10,000 people died in Tacloban.
A Philippine Army colonel acknowledged that it was unusual for soldiers with assault rifles to perform crowd control, like at the Tacloban airport, instead of the police. But the rifles do not have rounds in the chambers, he said, before adding that the soldiers are responsible for their weapons and so carry them everywhere.
The colonel said that “everything is in chaos.” He insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Despite the many difficulties, there were hints of improvements on Tuesday. The United States sent in C-130 propeller cargo planes at a faster tempo to take survivors to safety. Some roads opened to nearby towns and villages.
But the crowds milling at the airport grew faster than what the Philippine and United States Air Forces were taking out, possibly because word had started to spread of additional flights.
Sally Reyes, who is 29 years old and seven months pregnant, said that she had been waiting for four days at the airport with no food or water from the government, only donations from relatives. She has been pleading for a flight out every day, she said, and plans to keep pleading.
Robert Gonzaga and Jes Aznar contributed reporting.
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11) Typhoon in Philippines Casts Long Shadow Over U.N. Talks on Climate Treaty
By HENRY FOUNTAIN and JUSTIN GILLIS
The typhoon that struck the Philippines produced an outpouring of emotion on Monday at United Nations
talks on a global climate treaty in Warsaw, where delegates were quick
to suggest that a warming planet had turned the storm into a lethal
monster.
Olai Ngedikes, the lead negotiator for an alliance of small island nations, said in a statement that the typhoon, named Haiyan, which by some estimates killed 10,000 people in one city alone, “serves as a stark reminder of the cost of inaction on climate change and should serve to motivate our work in Warsaw.”
Naderev Saño, the chief representative of the Philippines at the conference, said he would stop eating in solidarity with the storm victims until “a meaningful outcome is in sight.”
“What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness; the climate crisis is madness,” Mr. Saño said. “We can stop this madness right here in Warsaw.”
His declaration, coupled with the scope of the disaster, moved many of the delegates to tears.
Yet scientists remain cautious about drawing links between extreme storms like this typhoon and climate change. There is not enough data, they say, to draw conclusions about any single storm.
“Whether we’re seeing some result of climate change, we find that impossible to find out,” said Kerry A. Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at M.I.T.
Scientists largely agree that it appears that storms will become more powerful as the climate changes. Dr. Emanuel helped write a 2010 study, for example, that forecast that the average intensity of hurricanes and typhoons — different names for the same phenomenon — would increase by up to 11 percent by the end of the century.
Typhoon Haiyan, with winds of at least 140 miles an hour, was considered one of the strongest storms to make landfall on record. “The data suggests that things like this will be more frequent with global warming,” said James P. Kossin, an atmospheric scientist at the National Climatic Data Center.
Dr. Emanuel said that as the planet warms because of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, the difference between sea and air temperatures increases. It is this difference that fuels these kinds of cyclonic storms.
“As you warm the climate, you basically raise the speed limit on hurricanes,” he said.
As with Hurricane Sandy last year in the United States, powerful storm surges contributed to the deaths and destruction in the Philippines. And Dr. Kossin and others noted that one of the impacts of climate change — an overall rise in sea levels — is sure to worsen storm surges. While factors like wind speed, storm track, geography and the timing of tides affect the height and extent of a surge and the damage it causes, a higher sea level baseline will lead to a higher surge.
“When you strip everything else away, we’re seeing a general rise in sea level,” Dr. Kossin said. “There’s no question that storm surge is going to be compounded.”
The effect of climate change on storms in the Pacific is especially difficult to study, scientists said, because no governments fly research planes into storms there to gather data. In the Atlantic, the United States government regularly sends reconnaissance flights into hurricanes, but the last regular flights into Pacific typhoons — also by American aircraft — occurred more than a quarter of a century ago. “Since then, we’ve been pretty much blind,” Dr. Emanuel said.
Instead, researchers have to rely on remote sensing data from satellites that essentially detect the degree of cloud cover, and use pattern-recognition software and algorithms to come up with estimates of storm intensity. Dr. Kossin used that data in a 2008 study of the Pacific that found “that the strongest storms are getting stronger,” he said.
In Warsaw, some of the delegates expressed hope that the typhoon and its aftermath would give fresh impetus to the talks.
“The scale of the response in the talks must match with what is clearly an escalating situation,” Dessima Williams, a former chairwoman of the alliance of island states, said in an interview from Warsaw.
The negotiations, which will last about two weeks, are another step in a long effort to replace a weak treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, which failed to slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, with a new one that would take effect in 2020.
The Philippines disaster is likely to be cited by delegates debating one of the main issues, a longstanding fight about climate justice. As global warming proceeds, some of the poorest people in the world, who have had the least to do with the burning of fossil fuels, stand to be among the primary victims in small island nations and in countries like Bangladesh, India and the Philippines.
Developing countries want the West — historically responsible for emissions, for the most part — not only to take the lead in reducing the use of fossil fuels, but to put up huge amounts of money to help poorer countries adapt to climatic changes that have already become inevitable. Western governments, which in some cases are already starting to consider their own adaptations to climate change, agree in principle that they should help poor countries. But they have committed relatively small sums, and they are wary of letting fast-growing countries like China off the hook on emissions.
Analysts say the likeliest outcome of the Warsaw negotiations is a weak pact that essentially urges countries to do what they can to cut emissions.
Olai Ngedikes, the lead negotiator for an alliance of small island nations, said in a statement that the typhoon, named Haiyan, which by some estimates killed 10,000 people in one city alone, “serves as a stark reminder of the cost of inaction on climate change and should serve to motivate our work in Warsaw.”
Naderev Saño, the chief representative of the Philippines at the conference, said he would stop eating in solidarity with the storm victims until “a meaningful outcome is in sight.”
“What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness; the climate crisis is madness,” Mr. Saño said. “We can stop this madness right here in Warsaw.”
His declaration, coupled with the scope of the disaster, moved many of the delegates to tears.
Yet scientists remain cautious about drawing links between extreme storms like this typhoon and climate change. There is not enough data, they say, to draw conclusions about any single storm.
“Whether we’re seeing some result of climate change, we find that impossible to find out,” said Kerry A. Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at M.I.T.
Scientists largely agree that it appears that storms will become more powerful as the climate changes. Dr. Emanuel helped write a 2010 study, for example, that forecast that the average intensity of hurricanes and typhoons — different names for the same phenomenon — would increase by up to 11 percent by the end of the century.
Typhoon Haiyan, with winds of at least 140 miles an hour, was considered one of the strongest storms to make landfall on record. “The data suggests that things like this will be more frequent with global warming,” said James P. Kossin, an atmospheric scientist at the National Climatic Data Center.
Dr. Emanuel said that as the planet warms because of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, the difference between sea and air temperatures increases. It is this difference that fuels these kinds of cyclonic storms.
“As you warm the climate, you basically raise the speed limit on hurricanes,” he said.
As with Hurricane Sandy last year in the United States, powerful storm surges contributed to the deaths and destruction in the Philippines. And Dr. Kossin and others noted that one of the impacts of climate change — an overall rise in sea levels — is sure to worsen storm surges. While factors like wind speed, storm track, geography and the timing of tides affect the height and extent of a surge and the damage it causes, a higher sea level baseline will lead to a higher surge.
“When you strip everything else away, we’re seeing a general rise in sea level,” Dr. Kossin said. “There’s no question that storm surge is going to be compounded.”
The effect of climate change on storms in the Pacific is especially difficult to study, scientists said, because no governments fly research planes into storms there to gather data. In the Atlantic, the United States government regularly sends reconnaissance flights into hurricanes, but the last regular flights into Pacific typhoons — also by American aircraft — occurred more than a quarter of a century ago. “Since then, we’ve been pretty much blind,” Dr. Emanuel said.
Instead, researchers have to rely on remote sensing data from satellites that essentially detect the degree of cloud cover, and use pattern-recognition software and algorithms to come up with estimates of storm intensity. Dr. Kossin used that data in a 2008 study of the Pacific that found “that the strongest storms are getting stronger,” he said.
In Warsaw, some of the delegates expressed hope that the typhoon and its aftermath would give fresh impetus to the talks.
“The scale of the response in the talks must match with what is clearly an escalating situation,” Dessima Williams, a former chairwoman of the alliance of island states, said in an interview from Warsaw.
The negotiations, which will last about two weeks, are another step in a long effort to replace a weak treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, which failed to slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, with a new one that would take effect in 2020.
The Philippines disaster is likely to be cited by delegates debating one of the main issues, a longstanding fight about climate justice. As global warming proceeds, some of the poorest people in the world, who have had the least to do with the burning of fossil fuels, stand to be among the primary victims in small island nations and in countries like Bangladesh, India and the Philippines.
Developing countries want the West — historically responsible for emissions, for the most part — not only to take the lead in reducing the use of fossil fuels, but to put up huge amounts of money to help poorer countries adapt to climatic changes that have already become inevitable. Western governments, which in some cases are already starting to consider their own adaptations to climate change, agree in principle that they should help poor countries. But they have committed relatively small sums, and they are wary of letting fast-growing countries like China off the hook on emissions.
Analysts say the likeliest outcome of the Warsaw negotiations is a weak pact that essentially urges countries to do what they can to cut emissions.
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12) Blighted Cities Prefer Razing to Rebuilding
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
BALTIMORE — Shivihah Smith’s East Baltimore neighborhood, where he lives with his mother and grandmother, is disappearing. The block one over is gone. A dozen rowhouses on an adjacent block were removed one afternoon last year. And on the corner a few weeks ago, a pair of houses that were damaged by fire collapsed. The city bulldozed those and two others, leaving scavengers to pick through the debris for bits of metal and copper wire.
“The city doesn’t want these old houses,” lamented Mr. Smith, 36.
For the Smiths, the bulldozing of city blocks is a source of anguish. But for Baltimore, as for a number of American cities in the Northeast and Midwest that have lost big chunks of their population, it is increasingly regarded as a path to salvation. Because despite the well-publicized embrace by young professionals of once-struggling city centers in New York, Seattle and Los Angeles, for many cities urban planning has often become a form of creative destruction.
“It is not the house itself that has value, it is the land the house stands on,” said Sandra Pianalto, the president and chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. “This led us to the counterintuitive concept that the best policy to stabilize neighborhoods may not always be rehabilitation. It may be demolition.”
Large-scale destruction is well known in Detroit, but it is also underway in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo and others at a total cost of more than $250 million. Officials are tearing down tens of thousands of vacant buildings, many habitable, as they seek to stimulate economic growth, reduce crime and blight, and increase environmental sustainability.
A recent Brookings Institution study found that from 2000 to 2010 the number of vacant housing units nationally had increased by 4.5 million, or 44 percent. And a report by the University of California, Berkeley, determined that over the past 15 years, 130 cities, most with relatively small populations, have dissolved themselves, more than half the total ever recorded in the United States.
The continuing struggles of former manufacturing centers have fundamentally altered urban planning, traditionally a discipline based on growth and expansion.
Today, it is also about disinvestment patterns to help determine which depopulated neighborhoods are worth saving; what blocks should be torn down and rebuilt; and based on economic activity, transportation options, infrastructure and population density, where people might best be relocated. Some even focus on returning abandoned urban areas into forests and meadows.
“It’s like a whole new field,” said Margaret Dewar, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan, who helped plan for a land bank in Detroit to oversee that city’s vacant properties.
In all, more than half of the nation’s 20 largest cities in 1950 have lost at least one-third of their populations. And since 2000, a number of cities, including Baltimore, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Buffalo, have lost around 10 percent; Cleveland has lost more than 17 percent; and more than 25 percent of residents have left Detroit, whose bankruptcy declaration this summer has heightened anxiety in other postindustrial cities.
The result of this shrinkage, also called “ungrowth” and “right sizing,” has been compressed tax bases, increased crime and unemployment, tight municipal budgets and abandoned neighborhoods. The question is what to do with the urban ghost towns unlikely to be repopulated because of continued suburbanization and deindustrialization.
“In the past, cities would look at buildings individually, determine there was a problem, tear them down and then quickly find another use for the land,” said Justin B. Hollander, an urban planning professor at Tufts University. “Now they’re looking at the whole DNA of the city and saying, ‘There are just too many structures for the population we have.' ”
Cleveland, whose population has shrunk by about 80,000 during the past decade to 395,000, has spent $50 million over the past six years to raze houses, which cost $10,000 each to destroy, compared with $27,000 annually to maintain.
Some neighborhoods have lost two-thirds of their residents since 2000. There are so many vacant lots that the city, now home to more than 200 community gardens and farms, zones for urban farms and allows people to keep pigs, sheep and goats in residential areas. A vineyard has popped up as well.
Two miles northwest of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, which has at least 6,000 vacant buildings, is an uninhabited deciduous forest where a sprawling 74-acre housing development once stood before the city demolished it because so few people lived there.
Philadelphia, which has 40,000 vacant lots, has promoted the benefits of lower-density living by allowing people in largely vacant neighborhoods to spread out to the lot next door — where a neighbor’s home once was. The city has been studying a plan to sell $500 leases to urban farmers. One such farm, Greensgrow, which was built on a former Superfund site, sold $1 million in produce in 2012.
Baltimore has begun to turn over vacant lots to groups of amateur farmers. Boone Street Farm, boxed in by abandoned rowhouses on an eighth of an acre, is completing its third season of growing tomatoes, spinach, sweet potatoes and other fruits and vegetables in the city’s Midway neighborhood. It sells produce to restaurants, has a table at a local farmers market and delivers $10 boxes of produce weekly to members of its community-supported agriculture program.
But even as they bulldoze thousands of vacant houses, Baltimore and other shrinking cities have continued to seek new people.
“I’m trying to grow the city, not get smaller,” said Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore’s mayor, about the notion that the city could be fine with between 500,000 and 600,000 people. “I’m not the first to say that a city that’s not growing is dying.”
Baltimore lost nearly 110,000 jobs from 1990 to 2010, about 23 percent, and has seen its population drop from 950,000 in 1950 to 621,000 today. The city has 20,000 vacant buildings and lots, and more than one house in eight is vacant.
Mayor Rawlings-Blake wants to attract 10,000 families to the city within a decade and has reached out to immigrants, gays and lesbians (Maryland allows same-sex marriage), and Orthodox Jews who might want to buy newly refurbished three-story rowhouses that the city is selling for as little as $100,000.
At least one city that has taken a pioneering approach to confronting diminution has found that accepting shrinkage does not mean problems go away. Youngstown, Ohio, once a bustling steel city of 170,000 but now with only 66,000 people, has sought to head off collapse by tearing down thousands of vacant houses — 3,000 so far and 10 more each week.
But while the city had planned on a stable population of 80,000, more than 1,000 people move away every year, leaving behind 130 additional empty homes in addition to the city’s 22,000 vacant properties and structures. Four thousand of those homes are in dangerous condition, according to the city, but each demolition costs $9,000 and the city has yet to decide whether to close nearly abandoned neighborhoods to try to save money.
“It’s almost anti-American to say our city is shrinking,” said Heather McMahon, the executive director of the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, a Youngstown community group. “But if we’re going to survive as a city and not go bankrupt like Detroit,” she said, “we’re going to have to figure something out.”
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13) Protests Escalate in Bangkok, Rattling Government and Raising Fears of Clashes
By THOMAS FULLER
BANGKOK — With thousands of antigovernment protesters in the streets of Bangkok on Monday, Thailand’s opposition announced a campaign of civil disobedience, including a three-day general strike later this week and a call for businesses to delay paying their taxes.
The protests against the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra signaled a return to the fractious and volatile politics that destabilized Thailand several years ago. At least four large demonstrations were held simultaneously across Bangkok on Monday, closing schools and stoking fears of clashes between rival groups.
“I would like to urge all Thais to fight with the people so that a great, absolute and sustainable victory belongs to Thailand,” Suthep Thaugsuban, a protest leader and senior member of the opposition Democrat Party, told a crowd of thousands on Monday.
It was not yet clear late on Monday evening whether his call for a general strike Wednesday through Friday would be widely heeded.
The initial spark for the protests, which began a week ago, was an amnesty bill proposed by the government that would have eased the return of Thaksin Shinawatra, a polarizing figure who was ousted as prime minister in a 2006 military coup. The lower house of Parliament passed the bill earlier this month, but the Senate rejected it decisively on Monday.
“The opposition to the amnesty bill has been deep and wide,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. “It has now escalated into an effort to overthrow the government.”
The protests have rattled the government of Ms. Yingluck, Mr. Thaksin’s sister. The prime minister has said repeatedly that if the amnesty bill is defeated, it will not be considered in Parliament again, and she has pleaded with protesters to stop their demonstrations.
The bill initially angered many of the governing party’s supporters, known as the red shirts, because along with pardoning Mr. Thaksin in the corruption cases he faces, it would have offered amnesty to those responsible for the bloody crackdown on his followers in 2010. But the majority of red shirts appeared to have swung back to the government’s side, and they staged their own rally with tens of thousands of people on Sunday and another in northeastern Thailand on Monday.
Thai politics, which until recently had enjoyed relative calm during Ms. Yingluck’s more than two years in office, appear to have returned to the polarized and unpredictable deadlock between opponents and supporters of Mr. Thaksin.
One of Mr. Thaksin’s main rivals, Sondhi Limthongkul, described the political conflict on Monday as a battle of good and evil. In a measure of the frustration with Thailand’s political problems, he repeated a call to return political power to Thailand’s king. “I think Thailand must suspend the role of politicians for at least two to three years,” he said. He asserted that Mr. Thaksin was exercising power from abroad, including deciding who got major appointments in the government.
Mr. Thaksin, the de facto leader of the governing party, Pheu Thai, has been weakened by the amnesty controversy, Mr. Thitinan said. But, he added, Pheu Thai retains strong support, especially in northeastern Thailand, where a third of the electorate lives.
Mr. Thaksin is “farther away than ever from coming home,” Mr. Thitinan said. “But the avenues to his return are not totally closed.”
Poypiti Amatatham contributed reporting.
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14) Wisconsin Supreme Court Hears Arguments on Collective Bargaining Law
By STEVEN YACCINO
The
Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments on the
constitutionality of a 2011 law that all but eliminated collective
bargaining for most public employees.
The law, which prompted large protests and thrust the Republican administration of Gov. Scott Walker into the national spotlight, has divided the state along partisan lines for more than two years. The latest battle has centered largely on a broad legal question: Can state lawmakers so significantly curtail collective bargaining that union membership is made less desirable?
“I don’t believe the two ships pass in the night,” J. B. Van Hollen, the attorney general of Wisconsin, said when asked by a judge about the dueling legal theories. “I believe they collide.”
Mr. Van Hollen argued that group bargaining was not a constitutional guarantee but rather a “benefit” permitted by lawmakers. He added that he believed state officials had a “bigger ship” and would win in the end.
The law, which led to a failed attempt to remove Mr. Walker from office last year, has been challenged by a teachers union in Madison and by a labor group representing employees of the city of Milwaukee. Both plaintiffs contend that the measure violates freedom of association rights and equal protection of the law by subjecting unionized public employees to burdens not faced by their nonunion colleagues.
“If you are an employee and you choose to associate in this activity, you will be penalized,” said Lester A. Pines, a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, Madison Teachers Inc. The law, he said, essentially forces public employees to “walk away from their associational choice.”
Wisconsin’s Republican-majority legislature drew national attention when it passed the law during Mr. Walker’s first year in office, drawing tens of thousands of protesters to the Capitol building and leading more than a dozen Senate Democrats to leave the state to delay a vote on the bill.
Although the measure exempted police officers and firefighters, it limited collective bargaining for teachers and most local government workers so that only wages could be negotiated, omitting other matters, such as vacation days and sick leave, that had long been part of bargaining agreements. It also required annual recertification elections for bargaining representatives and prohibited municipal employers from deducting union dues from employee paychecks.
Amid the uproar, opponents collected hundreds of thousands of signatures to force a recall election in June 2012. Governor Walker overcame that with 53 percent of the vote.
Wisconsin’s highest court was asked early on to determine whether the measure had been enacted illegally. In 2011, it disagreed with a lower court that had found that the legislature had rushed it through and violated the state’s open-meetings requirement. The justices voted 4 to 3, along what many see as the court’s conservative-liberal divide.
Those same justices will now weigh the law on its merits after a county judge struck down some of its provisions in September 2012. The judge, Juan B. Colás of Dane County Circuit Court, overturned aspects of the law that applied to local government and school district workers, saying they infringed on state and federal constitutional protections. State government workers were not included in the legal challenge.
On Monday, lawyers for the state and the unions also disagreed on whether the law infringed on local governments’ authority to set the terms of their own labor agreements.
“It all comes down to the ability of a locality to control its own local affairs,” said M. Nicol Padway, who represented Public Employees Local 61, the Milwaukee city employees union, dismissing the state’s arguments that collective bargaining with municipalities was still a statewide concern.
In his closing remarks, Mr. Van Hollen, the attorney general, countered that the more expenditures cities have, the less money is available for them to spend on projects that benefit all of Wisconsin.
Tom Sheehan, a spokesman for the Supreme Court, said there was no time frame for the justices to make their final decision.
The law, which prompted large protests and thrust the Republican administration of Gov. Scott Walker into the national spotlight, has divided the state along partisan lines for more than two years. The latest battle has centered largely on a broad legal question: Can state lawmakers so significantly curtail collective bargaining that union membership is made less desirable?
“I don’t believe the two ships pass in the night,” J. B. Van Hollen, the attorney general of Wisconsin, said when asked by a judge about the dueling legal theories. “I believe they collide.”
Mr. Van Hollen argued that group bargaining was not a constitutional guarantee but rather a “benefit” permitted by lawmakers. He added that he believed state officials had a “bigger ship” and would win in the end.
The law, which led to a failed attempt to remove Mr. Walker from office last year, has been challenged by a teachers union in Madison and by a labor group representing employees of the city of Milwaukee. Both plaintiffs contend that the measure violates freedom of association rights and equal protection of the law by subjecting unionized public employees to burdens not faced by their nonunion colleagues.
“If you are an employee and you choose to associate in this activity, you will be penalized,” said Lester A. Pines, a lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, Madison Teachers Inc. The law, he said, essentially forces public employees to “walk away from their associational choice.”
Wisconsin’s Republican-majority legislature drew national attention when it passed the law during Mr. Walker’s first year in office, drawing tens of thousands of protesters to the Capitol building and leading more than a dozen Senate Democrats to leave the state to delay a vote on the bill.
Although the measure exempted police officers and firefighters, it limited collective bargaining for teachers and most local government workers so that only wages could be negotiated, omitting other matters, such as vacation days and sick leave, that had long been part of bargaining agreements. It also required annual recertification elections for bargaining representatives and prohibited municipal employers from deducting union dues from employee paychecks.
Amid the uproar, opponents collected hundreds of thousands of signatures to force a recall election in June 2012. Governor Walker overcame that with 53 percent of the vote.
Wisconsin’s highest court was asked early on to determine whether the measure had been enacted illegally. In 2011, it disagreed with a lower court that had found that the legislature had rushed it through and violated the state’s open-meetings requirement. The justices voted 4 to 3, along what many see as the court’s conservative-liberal divide.
Those same justices will now weigh the law on its merits after a county judge struck down some of its provisions in September 2012. The judge, Juan B. Colás of Dane County Circuit Court, overturned aspects of the law that applied to local government and school district workers, saying they infringed on state and federal constitutional protections. State government workers were not included in the legal challenge.
On Monday, lawyers for the state and the unions also disagreed on whether the law infringed on local governments’ authority to set the terms of their own labor agreements.
“It all comes down to the ability of a locality to control its own local affairs,” said M. Nicol Padway, who represented Public Employees Local 61, the Milwaukee city employees union, dismissing the state’s arguments that collective bargaining with municipalities was still a statewide concern.
In his closing remarks, Mr. Van Hollen, the attorney general, countered that the more expenditures cities have, the less money is available for them to spend on projects that benefit all of Wisconsin.
Tom Sheehan, a spokesman for the Supreme Court, said there was no time frame for the justices to make their final decision.
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15) Socialist candidate takes lead in City Council race in left-leaning Seattle as count continues
By Associated Press
, 2013
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/seattle-on-the-verge-of-electing-socialist-candidate-for-the-first-time-in-modern-history/2013/11/13/cf8ac8a6-4c82-11e3-bf60-c1ca136ae14a_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/seattle-on-the-verge-of-electing-socialist-candidate-for-the-first-time-in-modern-history/2013/11/13/cf8ac8a6-4c82-11e3-bf60-c1ca136ae14a_story.html
SEATTLE — Voters in left-leaning Seattle, where police recently handed out snacks at a large marijuana festival and politicians often try to out-liberal each other, are close to electing a Socialist candidate to the City Council.
Following the latest ballot count Tuesday night, Kshama Sawant had a 41-vote lead over 16-year incumbent Richard Conlin.
Given Washington state’s mail-in voting system, a winner won’t be named for days or even weeks after the Nov. 4 election.
Still, the strong showing by Sawant, a college economics professor and prominent figure in Seattle’s Occupy Wall Street movement, has surprised many people.
Scott Cline, the city’s archivist, said research showed no Socialist candidate had won a citywide office in the past 100 years.
“This is new territory. There really isn’t any precedent,” said Stuart Elway, a longtime political pollster. “You think Seattle has a pretty liberal electorate, but you haven’t seen someone who calls themselves a socialist win.”
Sawant, 41, drew attention as part of local Occupy Wall Street protests that included taking over a downtown park and a junior college campus in late 2011. She then ran for legislative office in 2012, challenging the powerful speaker of the state House, a Democrat. She was easily defeated.
This year, she ran against Conlin, pushing a platform that appeared to resonate with the city. She backed efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15; called for rent control in the city where rental prices keep climbing; and supports a tax on millionaires to help fund a public transit system and other services.
“I think we have shown the strongest skeptics that the Socialist label is not a bad one for a grassroots campaign to succeed,” said Sawant, who is on leave from her job as an professor at Seattle Central Community College.
During her campaign, she condemned economic inequality, contending that some people aren’t benefiting from the city’s declining jobless rate, ongoing recovery from the recession, and downtown building boom.
“This is one of wealthiest cities in the wealthiest country in the world,” she said. “For people to struggle for basic needs is absurd.”
City Council races are technically non-partisan in Seattle. Sawant, however, made sure people knew she was running as a Socialist, a label that would ensure defeat in many areas of the country.
The last time a self-declared Socialist ran for office in Seattle was 1991, when Yolanda Alaniz emerged from the primary in second place but was easily defeated in the general election.
“There were certainly populist candidates,” said Cline, the city archivist. “I don’t think any of them you could remotely call Socialist. Certainly there has never been anybody who has run as strongly as Sawant has.”
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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16) Philippines’ President Faces Growing Anger
By ANDREW JACOBS
MANILA — Five days after a devastating typhoon swept through the midsection of this impoverished island nation, Filipinos are losing patience with the slow relief effort, increasingly angry with their president, Benigno S. Aquino III, a popular figure who has until now navigated multiple crises during his three years in office.
The heir to a political dynasty, Mr. Aquino, 53, is facing the biggest challenge of his presidency, and even allies say he appears to have been caught off guard by the scope of the crisis. “He has to move fast, otherwise this will engulf him,” said Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago, a veteran politician.
Although planes have begun arriving with badly needed supplies, much of the aid remains undistributed because of impassable roads, a dearth of working vehicles and inadequate access to fuel.
“The situation is catastrophic; it’s total chaos,” Dr. Natasha Reyes, the Philippines emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement.
Mr. Aquino flew to the devastated city of Tacloban on Sunday, but his public statements have struck some as insensitive. He lashed out at looters and seemed to criticize local officials for their initial failure to help the living and count the dead. Some critics say he has held fast to national pride rather than issue forceful appeals for international assistance.
During a meeting with officials in Tacloban, the president expressed annoyance at his top disaster management official and grew peevish when a local business owner complained of being held up at gunpoint by looters. “But you did not die, right?” Mr. Aquino snapped, according to local news media reports, shortly before presidential guards ushered the man out of the room.
On Tuesday, Mr. Aquino played down reports that the death toll could exceed 10,000, suggesting 2,000 might be more realistic. In an interview with CNN, he attributed the larger figure to the “emotional trauma” experienced by those providing the estimates.
Ramon C. Casiple, executive director of the Institute for Political and Electoral Reform in Manila, said the debate over casualty figures was becoming an unnecessary distraction. “I don’t believe the lower figures put out by officials, but if the number turns out to be greater, you’re going to have a political backlash,” he said.
A columnist for The Manila Times, Ben D. Kritz, ridiculed top officials, among them the nation’s defense secretary, for flying to the disaster zone without working phones. He noted that one of the first military planes to land was carrying a van — which could not be used on Leyte Island’s debris-clogged roads. “In the aftermath of the typhoon, the response of the Aquino administration, as usual, has been an uncoordinated, fumbling embarrassment,” he wrote.
The president’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Until now Mr. Aquino, popularly referred to as Noynoy, had a remarkably smooth tenure as the leader of nation long derided as “the sick man of Asia.” The son of former president Corazon C. Aquino and Benigno S. Aquino Jr., a beloved political figure who was assassinated in 1983, Mr. Aquino has earned high marks by taking on the endemic corruption that has long bedeviled the Philippines. Among his most notable achievements was a landmark peace accord with the nation’s largest group of Muslim separatists that had evaded his predecessors.
Since his election in 2010, the economy has been expanding at a heady pace, with 7.6 percent growth during the first half of the year. His administration has bolstered tax collection and has helped fuel increased spending on infrastructure, social welfare and disaster preparation.
But few would deny that Mr. Aquino has been dealt a difficult hand in recent months. In September, the government was caught off guard after a splinter group of Muslim insurgents seized a city in the south, prompting a battle with the army that left more than 200 people dead and destroyed 10,000 homes. There have also been back-to-back natural disasters, including an earthquake last month that killed more than 200 people on Bohol, an island that was battered again last week by Typhoon Haiyan. Last year, Typhoon Bopha killed more than 1,100 people in the southern island of Mindanao, causing $900 million in damage.
Then there is an unfolding corruption scandal involving more than $200 million in public money that ended up in the pockets of elected officials, and a businesswoman accused of setting up fake nongovernmental organizations. Investigators said some of those funds had been earmarked for flood prevention and projects that would have rehoused vulnerable residents living in storm-prone coastal areas.
“We’re already a country under siege by nature, and we have no money to spend on disaster preparation because all our high officials are stealing from us,” said Senator Santiago, who conducted televised hearings on the scandal last week that transfixed the nation just as the storm was approaching.
For the moment, however, all eyes are focused on Mr. Aquino and his administration’s response to the latest natural calamity. That effort will require him to navigate the clannish politics of a region traditionally loyal to the Marcos family, including Imelda Marcos, 84, the wife of former President Ferdinand Marcos who is a member of the House of Representatives.
Initial estimates put the devastation at $14 billion, an enormous sum for a country with a gross domestic product of $250 billion, and where a quarter of all residents live on less than $1.25 a day. Mars S. Buan, a senior analyst at Pacific Strategies and Assessments, said Typhoon Haiyan and the earthquake that struck Bohol last month would probably depress economic output by 5 percent in the final quarter of 2013. “No one was prepared for this kind of disaster,” she said.
Although Ms. Buan and other analysts credit the Aquino administration for increased spending on disaster preparation, there are some who say the nation has to do a better job planning for storms, especially if the predictions of some climate scientists — who warn of increasingly powerful storms fueled by warming seas — prove correct.
Having been warned days in advance about the route and strength of the typhoon, some critics say the government should have evacuated residents from coastal areas, noting India’s successful evacuation last month of more than 800,000 people in the path of Cyclone Phailin. In the end, only a few dozen deaths were reported.
Benito Lim, a political analyst at Ateneo de Manila University, said the Philippine government had long been focused on short-term relief rather than long-range planning.
“The government thinks it’s enough to give out packages of noodles, cans of sardines and rice,” he said. “The problem is that suffering by the poor has become a normal thing in the Philippines.”
The heir to a political dynasty, Mr. Aquino, 53, is facing the biggest challenge of his presidency, and even allies say he appears to have been caught off guard by the scope of the crisis. “He has to move fast, otherwise this will engulf him,” said Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago, a veteran politician.
Although planes have begun arriving with badly needed supplies, much of the aid remains undistributed because of impassable roads, a dearth of working vehicles and inadequate access to fuel.
“The situation is catastrophic; it’s total chaos,” Dr. Natasha Reyes, the Philippines emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement.
Mr. Aquino flew to the devastated city of Tacloban on Sunday, but his public statements have struck some as insensitive. He lashed out at looters and seemed to criticize local officials for their initial failure to help the living and count the dead. Some critics say he has held fast to national pride rather than issue forceful appeals for international assistance.
During a meeting with officials in Tacloban, the president expressed annoyance at his top disaster management official and grew peevish when a local business owner complained of being held up at gunpoint by looters. “But you did not die, right?” Mr. Aquino snapped, according to local news media reports, shortly before presidential guards ushered the man out of the room.
On Tuesday, Mr. Aquino played down reports that the death toll could exceed 10,000, suggesting 2,000 might be more realistic. In an interview with CNN, he attributed the larger figure to the “emotional trauma” experienced by those providing the estimates.
Ramon C. Casiple, executive director of the Institute for Political and Electoral Reform in Manila, said the debate over casualty figures was becoming an unnecessary distraction. “I don’t believe the lower figures put out by officials, but if the number turns out to be greater, you’re going to have a political backlash,” he said.
A columnist for The Manila Times, Ben D. Kritz, ridiculed top officials, among them the nation’s defense secretary, for flying to the disaster zone without working phones. He noted that one of the first military planes to land was carrying a van — which could not be used on Leyte Island’s debris-clogged roads. “In the aftermath of the typhoon, the response of the Aquino administration, as usual, has been an uncoordinated, fumbling embarrassment,” he wrote.
The president’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Until now Mr. Aquino, popularly referred to as Noynoy, had a remarkably smooth tenure as the leader of nation long derided as “the sick man of Asia.” The son of former president Corazon C. Aquino and Benigno S. Aquino Jr., a beloved political figure who was assassinated in 1983, Mr. Aquino has earned high marks by taking on the endemic corruption that has long bedeviled the Philippines. Among his most notable achievements was a landmark peace accord with the nation’s largest group of Muslim separatists that had evaded his predecessors.
Since his election in 2010, the economy has been expanding at a heady pace, with 7.6 percent growth during the first half of the year. His administration has bolstered tax collection and has helped fuel increased spending on infrastructure, social welfare and disaster preparation.
But few would deny that Mr. Aquino has been dealt a difficult hand in recent months. In September, the government was caught off guard after a splinter group of Muslim insurgents seized a city in the south, prompting a battle with the army that left more than 200 people dead and destroyed 10,000 homes. There have also been back-to-back natural disasters, including an earthquake last month that killed more than 200 people on Bohol, an island that was battered again last week by Typhoon Haiyan. Last year, Typhoon Bopha killed more than 1,100 people in the southern island of Mindanao, causing $900 million in damage.
Then there is an unfolding corruption scandal involving more than $200 million in public money that ended up in the pockets of elected officials, and a businesswoman accused of setting up fake nongovernmental organizations. Investigators said some of those funds had been earmarked for flood prevention and projects that would have rehoused vulnerable residents living in storm-prone coastal areas.
“We’re already a country under siege by nature, and we have no money to spend on disaster preparation because all our high officials are stealing from us,” said Senator Santiago, who conducted televised hearings on the scandal last week that transfixed the nation just as the storm was approaching.
For the moment, however, all eyes are focused on Mr. Aquino and his administration’s response to the latest natural calamity. That effort will require him to navigate the clannish politics of a region traditionally loyal to the Marcos family, including Imelda Marcos, 84, the wife of former President Ferdinand Marcos who is a member of the House of Representatives.
Initial estimates put the devastation at $14 billion, an enormous sum for a country with a gross domestic product of $250 billion, and where a quarter of all residents live on less than $1.25 a day. Mars S. Buan, a senior analyst at Pacific Strategies and Assessments, said Typhoon Haiyan and the earthquake that struck Bohol last month would probably depress economic output by 5 percent in the final quarter of 2013. “No one was prepared for this kind of disaster,” she said.
Although Ms. Buan and other analysts credit the Aquino administration for increased spending on disaster preparation, there are some who say the nation has to do a better job planning for storms, especially if the predictions of some climate scientists — who warn of increasingly powerful storms fueled by warming seas — prove correct.
Having been warned days in advance about the route and strength of the typhoon, some critics say the government should have evacuated residents from coastal areas, noting India’s successful evacuation last month of more than 800,000 people in the path of Cyclone Phailin. In the end, only a few dozen deaths were reported.
Benito Lim, a political analyst at Ateneo de Manila University, said the Philippine government had long been focused on short-term relief rather than long-range planning.
“The government thinks it’s enough to give out packages of noodles, cans of sardines and rice,” he said. “The problem is that suffering by the poor has become a normal thing in the Philippines.”
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B. EVENTS AND ACTIONS
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C. SPECIAL APPEALS AND
ONGOING CAMPAIGNS
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U.S. Court of Appeals Rules Against Lorenzo Johnson’s
New Legal Challenge to His Frame-up Conviction!
Demand the PA Attorney General Dismiss the Charges!
Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied Lorenzo Johnson’s motion to file a Second Habeas Corpus Petition. The order contained the outrageous declaration that Johnson hadn’t made a “prima facie case” that he had new evidence of his innocence. This not only puts a legal obstacle in Johnson’s path as his fight for freedom makes its way (again) through the state and federal courts—but it undermines the newly filed Pennsylvania state appeal that is pending in the Court of Common Pleas.
Stripped of “legalese,” the court’s October 15, 2013 order says Johnson’s new evidence was not brought into court soon enough—although it was the prosecution and police who withheld evidence and coerced witnesses into lying or not coming forward with the truth! This, despite over fifteen years and rounds of legal battles to uncover the evidence of government misconduct. This is a set-back for Lorenzo Johnson’s renewed fight for his freedom, but Johnson is even more determined as his PA state court appeal continues.
Increased public support and protest is needed. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson’s freedom is not only a fight for this courageous man and family. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson is also a fight for all the innocent others who have been framed and are sitting in the slow death of prison. The PA Attorney General is directly pursuing the charges against Lorenzo, despite the evidence of his innocence and the corruption of the police. Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!
—Rachel Wolkenstein, Esq.
October 25, 2013
For more on the federal court and PA state court legal filings.
Hear Mumia’s latest commentary, “Cat Cries”
Go to: www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org for more information, to sign the petition, and how to help.
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Two important weeks to support the Iraq War whistleblower
Some dates you just don't forget.
 |
They describe how thousands of innocent Iraqis were targeted for their religious or political beliefs, then detained and tortured in prisons operated by the Iraqi government. These same documents reveal acts in which U.S. soldiers abused and killed Iraqi civilians, and have yet to be held accountable. The documents even revealed to the public how U.S. forces helped teach the Iraqi military interrogation methods that have been banned by the UN as torture.
For the sake of the millions of civilians and the thousands of soldiers who have suffered in this unnecessary war, we ask that you remember the date that the public gained access to this information and take action to support Chelsea and her goal of bringing transparency to government. You can do this by contributing a letter to the official application for clemency that is being sent to Convening Authority Major General Jeffrey S. Buchanan. He is one of two people with the power to free Private Manning now, along with President Obama. There is precedent for convening authorities to reduce or eliminate the sentences of soldiers in cases where they have been convinced that the court martial did not deliver justice.
Given the numerous injustices in Private Manning’s case, we believe that Major General Buchanan should demonstrate leniency: Manning was imprisoned for three years before trial (including one year of solitary confinement); motives of conscience were not considered as an important factor by the judge; shockingly, the prosecution was even allowed to change their charge sheet after presenting their case.
Please follow these guidelines to write a letter. If you have already done so, please encourage at least three of your friends to do the same.
For those looking to take further action, we encourage you to organize a letter-writing party, which you can register on the Events Section of our website. All letters should be scanned electronically and PDF versions should be sent to nathan@bradleymanning.org by November 1.
As we remember the tragedy of the Iraq War, in many ways made clearer by the release of the war logs themselves, we must seize this opportunity to show support for PVT Manning and her work to bring much-needed transparency to international relations. Only through working together with adequate information can people of the world prevent history from repeating.
Thank you for your support.
Help us continue to cover 100%
of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donate today.
https://co.clickandpledge.com/sp/d1/default.aspx?wid=38591
COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610
510-488-3559
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Please sign the NEW petition for Lynne Stewart.
Your signature will send a letter to Bureau of Prisons Director Samuels and to Attorney General Holder requesting that they expedite Lynne Stewart’s current application for compassionate release. The NEW petition is at https://www.change.org/petitions/new-petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-support-compassionate-release
Your signature will send a letter to Bureau of Prisons Director Samuels and to Attorney General Holder requesting that they expedite Lynne Stewart’s current application for compassionate release. The NEW petition is at https://www.change.org/petitions/new-petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-support-compassionate-release
Free Lynne Stewart: Support Compassionate Release
http://www.change.org/petitions/free-lynne-stewart-support-compassionate-release
Renowned defense
attorney Lynne Stewart, unjustly charged and convicted for the “crime”
of providing her client with a fearless defense, is dying of cancer
while imprisoned in the Federal Medical Center, Carswell, Texas.
Your action now can lead to her freedom so that she
may live out her remaining days with the comfort and joy of her family
and those closest to her, including her devoted husband Ralph Poynter,
many children, grandchildren, a great grandchild and lifelong friends.
The conservative medical prognosis by the
oncologist contracted by the prison is that Lynne Stewart has but
16-months to live. Breast cancer, in remission prior to her
imprisonment, reached Stage Four more than a year ago, emerging in her
lymph nodes, shoulder, bones and lungs.
Despite repeated courses of chemotherapy, cancer
advances in her lungs, resistant to treatment. Compounding her dire
condition, Lynne Stewart’s white blood cell count dropped so low that
she has been isolated in a prison hospital room since April 2013 to
reduce risk of generalized infection.
Under the 1984 Sentencing Act, upon a prisoner’s
request, the Bureau of Prisons can file a motion with the Court to
reduce sentences “for extraordinary and compelling reasons,” life
threatening illness foremost among these.
Lynne Stewart’s recent re-application for
compassionate release meets all the criteria specified in guidelines
issued by the Bureau of Prisons in August 2013.
These “new guidelines” followed a searing report
and testimony before Congress by the Department of Justice’s Inspector
General Michael Horowitz. His findings corroborated a definitive report
by Human Rights Watch. Inspector General Horowitz excoriated the Federal
Bureau of Prisons for the restrictive crippling of the compassionate
release program. In a 20-year period, the Bureau had released a scant
492 persons – an average of 24 a year out of a population that exceeds
220,000.
Over 30,000 people of conscience from all walks of
life in the United States and internationally took action to free Lynne
Stewart following her first application for compassionate release in
April of this year.
Among those who raised their voices are former
Attorney General Ramsey Clark – who was co-counsel in the case that led
to Lynne Stewart’s imprisonment, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former
President of the United Nations General Assembly, Father Miguel D’Escoto
Brockmann, Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ed Asner,
Daniel Berrigan, Liz McAllister Berrigan, Richard Falk, Daniel Ellsberg,
Noam Chomsky, Cornell West, Dick Gregory, Alice Walker and Bianca
Jagger.
They along with thousands of individuals and
organizations, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, the
National Lawyers Guild and Lawyers Rights Watch Canada, directed
letters, phone calls and public declarations to the Federal Bureau of
Prisons Director Charles E. Samuels, Jr. and to Attorney General Eric H.
Holder, Jr.
Dick Gregory has refused all solid food since April
4 and his remarkable moral witness will not end until Lynne Stewart is
released.
We call upon all to amplify this outpouring of
support. We ask all within our reach to convey to Bureau of Prisons
Director Samuels his obligation to approve Lynne Stewart’s application
and instruct the federal attorney to file the requisite motion for Lynne
Stewart’s compassionate release.
Please sign this new petition and
reach out to others to sign. The letter below will be sent on your
behalf via email to Charles E. Samuels, Jr., Director of the Federal
Bureau of Prisons and to Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. Telephone
calls also can be made to the Bureau of Prisons:
(202) 307-3250/3262.
http://www.change.org/petitions/free-lynne-stewart-support-compassionate-release
Write to Lynne Stewart at:
Lynne Stewart #53504-054Unit 2N
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
or via:
www.lynnestewart.org
What you can do:
Demand Compassionate Release for Lynne Now!
Write and call:
President Obama
The White House
Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500
(202) 456-1111
Attorney General Eric Holder
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001
(202) 353-1555
Charles E. Samuels, Jr.
Director, Federal Bureau of Prisons
320 First Street, NW
Washington, DC 20534
(202) 307-3250/3262
Write to Lynne Stewart:
Lynne Stewart #53504-054
Unit 2N, Federal Medical Center, Carswell
P.O. Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
Write to Lynne Stewart Defense Committee at:
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
1070 Dean Street
Brooklyn, New York 11216
For further information: 718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759
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Kimberly Rivera
Imprisoned pregnant resister seeks early release for birth
495 supporters from around the world write letters in support of clemency applicationBy James Branum and Courage to Resist. November 4, 2013
Fort Carson, Colorado – Imprisoned war resister PFC Kimberly Rivera has submitted a clemency application seeking a reduction by 45 days in the 10 month prison sentence she received for seeking asylum in Canada rather return to her unit in Iraq.
The request for clemency was based on humanitarian reasons due to pregnancy. Unless clemency is granted, Private First Class Kimberly Rivera will be forced to give birth in prison and then immediately relinquish custody of her son while she continues to serve the remainder of her sentence.
Unfortunately military regulations provide no provisions for her to be able to breastfeed her infant son while she is in prison.
Fort Carson Senior Commander Brigadier General Michael A. Bills will be making a decision on PFC Rivera’s clemency request in the coming weeks.
PFC Rivera’s case made international news when she was the first female US soldier in the current era to flee to Canada for reasons of conscience. After a protracted struggle through the Canadian legal system, she was deported back to the United States in September 2012. She was then immediately arrested and sent back to the Army to stand trial.
In an interview with Courage to Resist on the eve of her court-martial,
Rivera said, “When I saw the little girl [in Iraq] shaking in fear, in
fear of me, because of my uniform, I couldn’t fathom what she had been
through and all I saw was my little girl and I just wanted to hold her
and comfort her. But I knew I couldn’t. It broke my heart. I am against
hurting anyone… I would harm myself first. I felt this also made me a
liability to my unit and I could not let me be a reason for anyone to be
harmed—so I left... Even though I did not fill out the official
application to obtain conscientious objector status, I consider myself a
conscientious objector to all war.”On April 29, 2013, PFC Rivera pled to charges of desertion. She was sentenced by the military judge to fourteen months in prison, loss of rank and pay, and a dishonorable discharge; thanks to a pre-trial agreement her sentence was reduced to an actual sentence to ten months of confinement and a bad-conduct discharge.
Kimberly Rivera has been recognized by Amnesty International as a “prisoner of conscience.” She is the mother of four children, ages 11, 9, 4 and 2.
Kimberly Rivera’s request for clemency was accompanied by 495 letters of support, written by family members, friends, as well as members of Amnesty International from 19 countries.
“We have many organizations to thank for the outpouring of support for Kimberly Rivera, including Amnesty International, Courage to Resist, the War Resisters Support Campaign of Canada, Veterans for Peace and Coffee Strong,” said James M. Branum, civilian defense attorney for PFC Rivera. “We also want to recognize the tireless efforts of local supporters in Colorado Springs and San Diego who have taken the time to visit Kim in prison as well as to provide important support to Kim’s family in her absence.”
While the official clemency request is now complete, supporters of PFC Rivera are still encouraged to continue to speak out on her behalf. Letters in support of PFC Rivera’s clemency request can be sent directly to:
Brigadier General Michael A. Bills
c/o Fort Carson Public Affairs Office
1626 Ellis Street
Suite 200, Building 1118
Fort Carson, CO 80913
(fax: 1-719-526-1021)
Supporters are also encouraged to sign an online petition posted at:c/o Fort Carson Public Affairs Office
1626 Ellis Street
Suite 200, Building 1118
Fort Carson, CO 80913
(fax: 1-719-526-1021)
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/752/756/678/free-a-pregnant-war-resister/
Photos: Top-Kimberly with husband Mario
during her court martial. Middle-Kimberly in Canada prior to being
deported. Bottom-Courage to Resist rallies outside Canadian Consulate,
San Francisco CA, prior to Kimberly's forced return.
Initial press release
by The Center for Conscience in Action, an Oklahoma City-based
organization dedicated to the intersection of peace, conscience and
direct action. CCA’s Legal Support Project provides low and no cost
legal representation to military service members seeking discharge on
the grounds of conscience.For more information or to schedule an interview about this subject, please contact James M. Branum, lead defense counsel for PFC Rivera, at 405-494-0562 or girightslawyer(at)gmail(dot)com. Consolidated Brig Miramar generally forbids inmates from doing interviews with the press, but you are welcome to see if an exception can be made by contacting the Brig Public Affairs office at 858-577-7071.
Additional case updates will be posted at couragetoresist.org and freekimberlyrivera.org.
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SAVE CCSF!
Two campaigns that need funds – Please donate!
Cartoon by Anthonty Mata for CCSF Guardsman
DOE CAMPAIGN
We are working to ensure that the ACCJC’s authority is not renewed by the Department of Education this December when they are up for their 5-year renewal. Our campaign made it possible for over 50 Third Party Comments to be sent to the DOE re: the ACCJC. Our next step in this campaign is to send a delegation from CCSF to Washington, D.C. to give oral comments at the hearing on December 12th. We expect to have an array of forces aligned on the other side who have much more money and resources than we do.
So please support this effort to get ACCJC authority revoked!
LEGAL CAMPAIGN
Save CCSF members have been meeting with Attorney Dan Siegel since last May to explore legal avenues to fight the ACCJC. After much consideration, and consultation with AFT 2121’s attorney as well as the SF City Attorney’s office, Dan has come up with a legal strategy that is complimentary to what is already being pursued. In fact, AFT 2121’s attorney is encouraging us to go forward.
The total costs of pursuing this (depositions, etc.) will be substantially more than $15,000. However, Dan is willing to do it for a fixed fee of $15,000. He will not expect a retainer, i.e. payment in advance, but we should start payments ASAP. If we win the ACCJC will have to pay our costs.
PLEASE HELP BOTH OF THESE IMPORTANT EFFORTS!
Checks can be made out to Save CCSF Coalition with “legal” in the memo line and sent to:
Save CCSF Coalition
2132 Prince St.
Berkeley, CA 94705
Or you may donate online: http://www.gofundme.com/4841ns2132 Prince St.
Berkeley, CA 94705
http://www.saveccsf.org/
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16 Years in Solitary Confinement Is Like a "Living Tomb"
American Civil Liberties Union petition to end long-term solitary confinement:
California Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard: We stand with the prisoners on hunger strike. We urge you to comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long-term solitary confinement.
Sign the petition:
https://www.aclu.org/secure/ca-hunger-strike?emsrc=Nat_Appeal_AutologinEnabled&emissue=criminal_justice&emtype=petition&ms=eml_130719_acluaction_cahungerstrike&af=k%2FxKX1cIRdoonPVmvnAfAit8jzOCulLOnCX4AAFljff%2B%2BVOdOHNe6CKwl7glWQSjSakzXt53zF%2FodPf00T3rRHlglO3tjEA6DcMSLJRlTbfVBHAizX6uOxoSy5%2FbP93EBFj5xi6Lwm3RWHjmDOZDARHLBSl1rqTr07kLhONZrnU1UIIgPs0P%2FXQ%2BJL3reyE8%2BoiI1nlfPZPBVhbfYxUzMQ%3D%3D&etname=130719+CA+prisoners+hunger+strike&etjid=946739
In California, hundreds of prisoners have been held in solitary for more than a decade – some for infractions as trivial as reading Machiavelli's "The Prince."
Gabriel Reyes describes the pain of being isolated for at least 22 hours a day for the last 16 years:
“Unless you have lived it, you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by yourself, between four cold walls, with little concept of time…. It is a living tomb …’ I have not been allowed physical contact with any of my loved ones since 1995…I feel helpless and hopeless. In short, I am being psychologically tortured.”
That’s why over 30,000 prisoners in California began a hunger strike – the biggest the state has ever seen. They’re refusing food to protest prisoners being held for decades in solitary and to push for other changes to improve their basic conditions.
California Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard has tried to dismiss the strikers and refuses to negotiate, but the media pressure is building through the strike. If tens of thousands of us take action, we can help keep this issue in the spotlight so that Secretary Beard can’t ignore the inhumane treatment of prisoners.
Sign the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term solitary confinement.
Solitary is such an extreme form of punishment that a United Nations torture rapporteur called for an international ban on the practice except in rare occasions. Here’s why:
The majority of the 80,000 people held in solitary in this country are severely mentally ill or because of a minor infraction (it’s a myth that it’s only for violent prisoners)
Even for people with stable mental health, solitary causes severe psychological reactions, often leading people to attempt suicide
It jeopardizes public safety because prisoners held in solitary have a harder time reintegrating into society.
And to add insult to injury, the hunger strikers are now facing retaliation – their lawyers are being restricted from visiting and the strikers are being punished. But the media continues to write about the hunger strike and we can help keep the pressure on Secretary Beard by signing this petition.
Sign the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term solitary confinement.
Our criminal justice system should keep communities safe and treat people fairly. The use of solitary confinement undermines both of these goals – but little by little, we can help put a stop to such cruelty.
Thank you,
Anthony for the ACLU Action team
P.S. The hunger strikers have developed five core demands to address their basic conditions, the main one being an end to long-term solitary confinement. They are:
-End group punishment – prisoners say that officials often punish groups to address individual rule violations
-Abolish the debriefing policy, which is often demanded in return for better food or release from solitary
-End long-term solitary confinement
-Provide adequate and nutritious food
-Expand or provide constructive programming and privileges for indefinite SHU inmates
Sources
“Solitary - and anger - in California's prisons.” Los Angeles Times July 13, 2013
“Pelican Bay Prison Hunger-Strikers' Stories: Gabriel Reyes.” TruthOut July 9, 2013
“Solitary confinement should be banned in most cases, UN expert says.” UN News October 18, 2011
"Stop Solitary - Two Pager" ACLU.org
What you Didn't know about NYPD's Stop & Frisk program !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rfJHx0Gj6ys#at=990
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Egypt: The Next President -- a little Egyptian boy speaks his remarkable mind!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeDm2PrNV1I
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Wealth Inequality in America
[This is a must see to believe video...bw]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM
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Read the transcription of hero Bradley Manning's 35-page statement explaining why he leaked "state secrets" to WikiLeaks.
March 1, 2013
Alternet
The statement was read by Pfc. Bradley Manning at a providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification as charged and nine specifications for lesser included offenses. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. This rush transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O'Brien at Thursday's pretrial hearing and first appeared on Salon.com.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bradley-mannings-surprising-statement-court-details-why-he-made-his-historic?akid=10129.229473.UZvQfK&rd=1&src=newsletter802922&t=7
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Call for a Compassionate Release for Lynne Stewart:
Attorney General Eric Holder: 202-514-2001
White House President Obama: 202-456-1414
Bureau of Prisons Director Charles Samuels: 202-307-3198 ext 3
Urgent: Please sign the petition for compassionate release for Lynne Stewart
http://www.change.org/petitions/petition-to-free-lynne-stewart-save-her-life-release-her-now-2
For more information, go to http://www.lynnestewart.org
Write to Lynne Stewart at:
Lynne Stewart #53504-054
??Federal Medical Center, Carswell
PO Box 27137
Fort Worth, TX 76127
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You Have the Right to Remain Silent: NLG Guide to Law Enforcement Encounters
Posted 1 day ago on July 27, 2012, 10:28 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
Occupy Wall Street is a nonviolent movement for social and economic justice, but in recent days disturbing reports have emerged of Occupy-affiliated activists being targeted by US law enforcement, including agents from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. To help ensure Occupiers and allied activists know their rights when encountering law enforcement, we are publishing in full the National Lawyers Guild's booklet: You Have the Right to Remain Silent. The NLG provides invaluable support to the Occupy movement and other activists – please click here to support the NLG.
We strongly encourage all Occupiers to read and share the information provided below. We also recommend you enter the NLG's national hotline number (888-654-3265) into your cellphone (if you have one) and keep a copy handy. This information is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact the NLG or a criminal defense attorney immediately if you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are contacted as well.
You Have the Right to Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Law Enforcement Encounters
What Rights Do I Have?
Whether or not you're a citizen, you have rights under the United States Constitution. The Fifth Amendment gives every person the right to remain silent: not to answer questions asked by a police officer or government agent. The Fourth Amendment restricts the government's power to enter and search your home or workplace, although there are many exceptions and new laws have expanded the government's power to conduct surveillance. The First Amendment protects your right to speak freely and to advocate for social change. However, if you are a non-citizen, the Department of Homeland Security may target you based on your political activities.
Standing Up For Free Speech
The government's crusade against politically-active individuals is intended to disrupt and suppress the exercise of time-honored free speech activities, such as boycotts, protests, grassroots organizing and solidarity work. Remember that you have the right to stand up to the intimidation tactics of FBI agents and other law enforcement officials who, with political motives, are targeting organizing and free speech activities. Informed resistance to these tactics and steadfast defense of your and others' rights can bring positive results. Each person who takes a courageous stand makes future resistance to government oppression easier for all. The National Lawyers Guild has a long tradition of standing up to government repression. The organization itself was labeled a "subversive" group during the McCarthy Era and was subject to FBI surveillance and infiltration for many years. Guild attorneys have defended FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement. The NLG exposed FBI surveillance, infiltration and disruption tactics that were detailed during the 1975-76 COINTELPRO hearings. In 1989 the NLG prevailed in a lawsuit on behalf of several activist organizations, including the Guild, that forced the FBI to expose the extent to which it had been spying on activist movements. Under the settlement, the FBI turned over roughly 400,000 pages of its files on the Guild, which are now available at the Tamiment Library at New York University.
What if FBI Agents or Police Contact Me?
What if an agent or police officer comes to the door?
Do not invite the agents or police into your home. Do not answer any questions. Tell the agent that you do not wish to talk with him or her. You can state that your lawyer will contact them on your behalf. You can do this by stepping outside and pulling the door behind you so that the interior of your home or office is not visible, getting their contact information or business cards and then returning inside. They should cease questioning after this. If the agent or officer gives a reason for contacting you, take notes and give the information to your attorney. Anything you say, no matter how seemingly harmless or insignificant, may be used against you or others in the future. Lying to or misleading a federal agent is a crime. The more you speak, the more opportunity for federal law enforcement to find something you said (even if not intentionally) false and assert that you lied to a federal officer.
Do I have to answer questions?
You have the constitutional right to remain silent. It is not a crime to refuse to answer questions. You do not have to talk to anyone, even if you have been arrested or are in jail. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to consult an attorney. Once you make the request to speak to a lawyer, do not say anything else. The Supreme Court recently ruled that answering law enforcement questions may be taken as a waiver of your right to remain silent, so it is important that you assert your rights and maintain them. Only a judge can order you to answer questions. There is one exception: some states have "stop and identify" statutes which require you to provide identity information or your name if you have been detained on reasonable suspicion that you may have committed a crime. A lawyer in your state can advise you of the status of these requirements where you reside.
Do I have to give my name?
As above, in some states you can be detained or arrested for merely refusing to give your name. And in any state, police do not always follow the law, and refusing to give your name may make them suspicious or more hostile and lead to your arrest, even without just cause, so use your judgment. Giving a false name could in some circumstances be a crime.
Do I need a lawyer?
You have the right to talk to a lawyer before you decide whether to answer questions from law enforcement. It is a good idea to talk to a lawyer if you are considering answering any questions. You have the right to have a lawyer present during any interview. The lawyer's job is to protect your rights. Once you tell the agent that you want to talk to a lawyer, he or she should stop trying to question you and should make any further contact through your lawyer. If you do not have a lawyer, you can still tell the officer you want to speak to one before answering questions. Remember to get the name, agency and telephone number of any investigator who visits you, and give that information to your lawyer. The government does not have to provide you with a free lawyer unless you are charged with a crime, but the NLG or another organization may be able to help you find a lawyer for free or at a reduced rate.
If I refuse to answer questions or say I want a lawyer, won't it seem like I have something to hide?
Anything you say to law enforcement can be used against you and others. You can never tell how a seemingly harmless bit of information might be used or manipulated to hurt you or someone else. That is why the right not to talk is a fundamental right under the Constitution. Keep in mind that although law enforcement agents are allowed to lie to you, lying to a government agent is a crime. Remaining silent is not. The safest things to say are "I am going to remain silent," "I want to speak to my lawyer," and "I do not consent to a search." It is a common practice for law enforcement agents to try to get you to waive your rights by telling you that if you have nothing to hide you would talk or that talking would "just clear things up." The fact is, if they are questioning you, they are looking to incriminate you or someone you may know, or they are engaged in political intelligence gathering. You should feel comfortable standing firm in protection and defense of your rights and refusing to answer questions.
Can agents search my home or office?
You do not have to let police or agents into your home or office unless they have and produce a valid search warrant. A search warrant is a written court order that allows the police to conduct a specified search. Interfering with a warrantless search probably will not stop it and you might get arrested. But you should say "I do not consent to a search," and call a criminal defense lawyer or the NLG. You should be aware that a roommate or guest can legally consent to a search of your house if the police believe that person has the authority to give consent, and your employer can consent to a search of your workspace without your permission.
What if agents have a search warrant?
If you are present when agents come for the search, you can ask to see the warrant. The warrant must specify in detail the places to be searched and the people or things to be taken away. Tell the agents you do not consent to the search so that they cannot go beyond what the warrant authorizes. Ask if you are allowed to watch the search; if you are allowed to, you should. Take notes, including names, badge numbers, what agency each officer is from, where they searched and what they took. If others are present, have them act as witnesses to watch carefully what is happening. If the agents ask you to give them documents, your computer, or anything else, look to see if the item is listed in the warrant. If it is not, do not consent to them taking it without talking to a lawyer. You do not have to answer questions. Talk to a lawyer first. (Note: If agents present an arrest warrant, they may only perform a cursory visual search of the premises to see if the person named in the arrest warrant is present.)
Do I have to answer questions if I have been arrested?
No. If you are arrested, you do not have to answer any questions. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to assert your right to remain silent. Ask for a lawyer right away. Do not say anything else. Repeat to every officer who tries to talk to or question you that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer. You should always talk to a lawyer before you decide to answer any questions.
What if I speak to government agents anyway?
Even if you have already answered some questions, you can refuse to answer other questions until you have a lawyer. If you find yourself talking, stop. Assert that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer.
What if the police stop me on the street?
Ask if you are free to go. If the answer is yes, consider just walking away. If the police say you are not under arrest, but are not free to go, then you are being detained. The police can pat down the outside of your clothing if they have reason to suspect you might be armed and dangerous. If they search any more than this, say clearly, "I do not consent to a search." They may keep searching anyway. If this happens, do not resist because you can be charged with assault or resisting arrest. You do not have to answer any questions. You do not have to open bags or any closed container. Tell the officers you do not consent to a search of your bags or other property.
What if police or agents stop me in my car?
Keep your hands where the police can see them. If you are driving a vehicle, you must show your license, registration and, in some states, proof of insurance. You do not have to consent to a search. But the police may have legal grounds to search your car anyway. Clearly state that you do not consent. Officers may separate passengers and drivers from each other to question them, but no one has to answer any questions.
What if I am treated badly by the police or the FBI?
Write down the officer's badge number, name or other identifying information. You have a right to ask the officer for this information. Try to find witnesses and their names and phone numbers. If you are injured, seek medical attention and take pictures of the injuries as soon as you can. Call a lawyer as soon as possible.
What if the police or FBI threaten me with a grand jury subpoena if I don't answer their questions?
A grand jury subpoena is a written order for you to go to court and testify about information you may have. It is common for the FBI to threaten you with a subpoena to get you to talk to them. If they are going to subpoena you, they will do so anyway. You should not volunteer to speak just because you are threatened with a subpoena. You should consult a lawyer.
What if I receive a grand jury subpoena?
Grand jury proceedings are not the same as testifying at an open court trial. You are not allowed to have a lawyer present (although one may wait in the hallway and you may ask to consult with him or her after each question) and you may be asked to answer questions about your activities and associations. Because of the witness's limited rights in this situation, the government has frequently used grand jury subpoenas to gather information about activists and political organizations. It is common for the FBI to threaten activists with a subpoena in order to elicit information about their political views and activities and those of their associates. There are legal grounds for stopping ("quashing") subpoenas, and receiving one does not necessarily mean that you are suspected of a crime. If you do receive a subpoena, call the NLG National Hotline at 888-NLG-ECOL (888-654-3265) or call a criminal defense attorney immediately.
The government regularly uses grand jury subpoena power to investigate and seek evidence related to politically-active individuals and social movements. This practice is aimed at prosecuting activists and, through intimidation and disruption, discouraging continued activism.
Federal grand jury subpoenas are served in person. If you receive one, it is critically important that you retain the services of an attorney, preferably one who understands your goals and, if applicable, understands the nature of your political work, and has experience with these issues. Most lawyers are trained to provide the best legal defense for their client, often at the expense of others. Beware lawyers who summarily advise you to cooperate with grand juries, testify against friends, or cut off contact with your friends and political activists. Cooperation usually leads to others being subpoenaed and investigated. You also run the risk of being charged with perjury, a felony, should you omit any pertinent information or should there be inconsistencies in your testimony.
Frequently prosecutors will offer "use immunity," meaning that the prosecutor is prohibited from using your testimony or any leads from it to bring charges against you. If a subsequent prosecution is brought, the prosecutor bears the burden of proving that all of its evidence was obtained independent of the immunized testimony. You should be aware, however, that they will use anything you say to manipulate associates into sharing more information about you by suggesting that you have betrayed confidences.
In front of a grand jury you can "take the Fifth" (exercise your right to remain silent). However, the prosecutor may impose immunity on you, which strips you of Fifth Amendment protection and subjects you to the possibility of being cited for contempt and jailed if you refuse to answer further. In front of a grand jury you have no Sixth Amendment right to counsel, although you can consult with a lawyer outside the grand jury room after each question.
What if I don't cooperate with the grand jury?
If you receive a grand jury subpoena and elect to not cooperate, you may be held in civil contempt. There is a chance that you may be jailed or imprisoned for the length of the grand jury in an effort to coerce you to cooperate. Regular grand juries sit for a basic term of 18 months, which can be extended up to a total of 24 months. It is lawful to hold you in order to coerce your cooperation, but unlawful to hold you as a means of punishment. In rare instances you may face criminal contempt charges.
What If I Am Not a Citizen and the DHS Contacts Me?
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is now part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and has been renamed and reorganized into: 1. The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS); 2. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP); and 3. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All three bureaus will be referred to as DHS for the purposes of this pamphlet.
? Assert your rights. If you do not demand your rights or if you sign papers waiving your rights, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may deport you before you see a lawyer or an immigration judge. Never sign anything without reading, understanding and knowing the consequences of signing it.
? Talk to a lawyer. If possible, carry with you the name and telephone number of an immigration lawyer who will take your calls. The immigration laws are hard to understand and there have been many recent changes. DHS will not explain your options to you. As soon as you encounter a DHS agent, call your attorney. If you can't do it right away, keep trying. Always talk to an immigration lawyer before leaving the U.S. Even some legal permanent residents can be barred from returning.
Based on today's laws, regulations and DHS guidelines, non-citizens usually have the following rights, no matter what their immigration status. This information may change, so it is important to contact a lawyer. The following rights apply to non-citizens who are inside the U.S. Non-citizens at the border who are trying to enter the U.S. do not have all the same rights.
Do I have the right to talk to a lawyer before answering any DHS questions or signing any DHS papers?
Yes. You have the right to call a lawyer or your family if you are detained, and you have the right to be visited by a lawyer in detention. You have the right to have your attorney with you at any hearing before an immigration judge. You do not have the right to a government-appointed attorney for immigration proceedings, but if you have been arrested, immigration officials must show you a list of free or low cost legal service providers.
Should I carry my green card or other immigration papers with me?
If you have documents authorizing you to stay in the U.S., you must carry them with you. Presenting false or expired papers to DHS may lead to deportation or criminal prosecution. An unexpired green card, I-94, Employment Authorization Card, Border Crossing Card or other papers that prove you are in legal status will satisfy this requirement. If you do not carry these papers with you, you could be charged with a crime. Always keep a copy of your immigration papers with a trusted family member or friend who can fax them to you, if need be. Check with your immigration lawyer about your specific case.
Am I required to talk to government officers about my immigration history?
If you are undocumented, out of status, a legal permanent resident (green card holder), or a citizen, you do not have to answer any questions about your immigration history. (You may want to consider giving your name; see above for more information about this.) If you are not in any of these categories, and you are being questioned by a DHS or FBI agent, then you may create problems with your immigration status if you refuse to provide information requested by the agent. If you have a lawyer, you can tell the agent that your lawyer will answer questions on your behalf. If answering questions could lead the agent to information that connects you with criminal activity, you should consider refusing to talk to the agent at all.
If I am arrested for immigration violations, do I have the right to a hearing before an immigration judge to defend myself against deportation charges?
Yes. In most cases only an immigration judge can order you deported. But if you waive your rights or take "voluntary departure," agreeing to leave the country, you could be deported without a hearing. If you have criminal convictions, were arrested at the border, came to the U.S. through the visa waiver program or have been ordered deported in the past, you could be deported without a hearing. Contact a lawyer immediately to see if there is any relief for you.
Can I call my consulate if I am arrested?
Yes. Non-citizens arrested in the U.S. have the right to call their consulate or to have the police tell the consulate of your arrest. The police must let your consulate visit or speak with you if consular officials decide to do so. Your consulate might help you find a lawyer or offer other help. You also have the right to refuse help from your consulate.
What happens if I give up my right to a hearing or leave the U.S. before the hearing is over?
You could lose your eligibility for certain immigration benefits, and you could be barred from returning to the U.S. for a number of years. You should always talk to an immigration lawyer before you decide to give up your right to a hearing.
What should I do if I want to contact DHS?
Always talk to a lawyer before contacting DHS, even on the phone. Many DHS officers view "enforcement" as their primary job and will not explain all of your options to you.
What Are My Rights at Airports?
IMPORTANT NOTE: It is illegal for law enforcement to perform any stops, searches, detentions or removals based solely on your race, national origin, religion, sex or ethnicity.
If I am entering the U.S. with valid travel papers can a U.S. customs agent stop and search me?
Yes. Customs agents have the right to stop, detain and search every person and item.
Can my bags or I be searched after going through metal detectors with no problem or after security sees that my bags do not contain a weapon?
Yes. Even if the initial screen of your bags reveals nothing suspicious, the screeners have the authority to conduct a further search of you or your bags.
If I am on an airplane, can an airline employee interrogate me or ask me to get off the plane?
The pilot of an airplane has the right to refuse to fly a passenger if he or she believes the passenger is a threat to the safety of the flight. The pilot's decision must be reasonable and based on observations of you, not stereotypes.
What If I Am Under 18?
Do I have to answer questions?
No. Minors too have the right to remain silent. You cannot be arrested for refusing to talk to the police, probation officers, or school officials, except in some states you may have to give your name if you have been detained.
What if I am detained?
If you are detained at a community detention facility or Juvenile Hall, you normally must be released to a parent or guardian. If charges are filed against you, in most states you are entitled to counsel (just like an adult) at no cost.
Do I have the right to express political views at school?
Public school students generally have a First Amendment right to politically organize at school by passing out leaflets, holding meetings, etc., as long as those activities are not disruptive and do not violate legitimate school rules. You may not be singled out based on your politics, ethnicity or religion.
Can my backpack or locker be searched?
School officials can search students' backpacks and lockers without a warrant if they reasonably suspect that you are involved in criminal activity or carrying drugs or weapons. Do not consent to the police or school officials searching your property, but do not physically resist or you may face criminal charges.
Disclaimer
This booklet is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact an attorney if you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are contacted as well.
NLG National Hotline for Activists Contacted by the FBI
888-NLG-ECOL
(888-654-3265)
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Free Mumia NOW!
Prisonradio.org
Write to Mumia:
Mumia Abu-Jamal AM 8335
SCI Mahanoy
301 Morea Road
Frackville, PA 17932
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Rachel Wolkenstein
August 21, 2011 (917) 689-4009
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL ILLEGALLY SENTENCED TO
LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT PAROLE!
FREE MUMIA NOW!
www.FreeMumia.com
http://blacktalkradionetwork.com/profiles/blogs/mumia-is-formally-sentenced-to-life-in-prison-w-out-hearing-he-s
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"A Child's View from Gaza: Palestinian Children's Art and the Fight Against
Censorship" book
https://www.mecaforpeace.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=25
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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-herm\
an-wallace
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WITNESS GAZA
http://www.witnessgaza.com/
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Write to Bradley
http://bradleymanning.org/donate
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
"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=2071005093\
21891
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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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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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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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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D. 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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Exceptional art from the streets of Oakland:
Oakland Street Dancing
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NYC RESTAURANT WORKERS DANCE & SING FOR A WAGE HIKE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_s8e1R6rG8&feature=player_embedded
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On Gun Control, Martin Luther King, the Deacons of Defense and the history of Black Liberation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzYKisvBN1o&feature=player_embedded
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Fukushima Never Again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-Z4VLDGxU
"Fukushima, Never Again" tells the story of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns in north east Japan in March of 2011 and exposes the cover-up by Tepco and the Japanese government.
This is the first film that interviews the Mothers Of Fukushima, nuclear power experts and trade unionists who are fighting for justice and the protection of the children and the people of Japan and the world. The residents and citizens were forced to buy their own geiger counters and radiation dosimeters in order to test their communities to find out if they were in danger.
The government said contaminated soil in children's school grounds was safe and then
when the people found out it was contaminated and removed the top soil, the government and TEPCO refused to remove it from the school grounds.
It also relays how the nuclear energy program for "peaceful atoms" was brought to Japan under the auspices of the US military occupation and also the criminal cover-up of the safety dangers of the plant by TEPCO and GE management which built the plant in Fukushima. It also interviews Kei Sugaoka, the GE nulcear plant inspector from the bay area who exposed cover-ups in the safety at the Fukushima plant and was retaliated against by GE. This documentary allows the voices of the people and workers to speak out about the reality of the disaster and what this means not only for the people of Japan but the people of the world as the US government and nuclear industry continue to push for more new plants and government subsidies. This film breaks
the information blockade story line of the corporate media in Japan, the US and around the world that Fukushima is over.
Production Of Labor Video Project
P.O. Box 720027
San Francisco, CA 94172
www.laborvideo.org
lvpsf@laborvideo.org
For information on obtaining the video go to:
www.fukushimaneveragain.com
(415)282-1908
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1000 year of war through the world
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiG8neU4_bs&feature=share
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Anatomy of a Massacre - Afganistan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6BnRc11aug&feature=player_embedded
Afghans accuse multiple soldiers of pre-meditated murder
To see more go to http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures
Follow us on Facebook (http://goo.gl/YRw42) or Twitter
(http://www.twitter.com/journeymanvod)
The recent massacre of 17 civilians by a rogue US soldier has been shrouded in
mystery. But through unprecedented access to those involved, this report
confronts the accusations that Bales didn't act alone.
"They came into my room and they killed my family". Stories like this are common
amongst the survivors in Aklozai and Najiban. As are the shocking accusations
that Sergeant Bales was not acting alone. Even President Karzai has announced
"one man can not do that". Chief investigator, General Karimi, is suspicious
that despite being fully armed, Bales freely left his base without raising
alarm. "How come he leaves at night and nobody is aware? Every time we have
weapon accountability and personal accountability." These are just a few of the
questions the American army and government are yet to answer. One thing however
is very clear, the massacre has unleashed a wave of grief and outrage which
means relations in Kandahar will be tense for years to come: "If I could lay my
hands on those infidels, I would rip them apart with my bare hands."
A Film By SBS
Distributed By Journeyman Pictures
April 2012
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Photo of George Zimmerman, in 2005 photo, left, and in a more recent photo.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/02/us/the-events-leading-to-the-sooti\
ng-of-trayvon-martin.html?hp
SPD Security Cams.wmv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WWDNbQUgm4&feature=player_embedded
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Kids being put on buses and transported from school to "alternate locations" in
Terror Drills
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFia_w8adWQ
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Private prisons,
a recession resistant investment opportunity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGLDOxx9Vg
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Attack Dogs used on a High School Walkout in MD, Four Students Charged With
"Thought Crimes"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wafMaML17w
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Common forms of misconduct by Law Enforcement Officials and Prosecutors
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViSpM4K276w&feature=related
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Organizing and Instigating: OCCUPY - Ronnie Goodman
http://arthazelwood.com/instigator/occupy/occupy-birth-video.html
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Rep News 12: Yes We Kony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68GbzIkYdc8
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The New Black by The Mavrix - Official Music Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4rLfja8488
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Japan One Year Later
http://www.onlineschools.org/japan-one-year-later/
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The CIA's Heart Attack Gun
http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/assassination-studies/the-cias-heart-attack-g\
un-.html
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The Invisible American Workforce
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/5/new_expos_tracks_alec_private_prison
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Labor Beat: NATO vs The 1st Amendment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbQxnb4so3U
For more detailed information, send us a request at mail@laborbeat.org.
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The Battle of Oakland
by brandon jourdan plus
http://vimeo.com/36256273
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Officers Pulled Off Street After Tape of Beating Surfaces
By ANDY NEWMAN
February 1, 2012, 10:56 am
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/officers-pulled-off-street-after-ta\
pe-of-beating-surfaces/?ref=nyregion
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This is excellent! Michelle Alexander pulls no punches!
Michelle Alexander, Author of The New Jim Crow, speaks about the political
strategy
behind the War on Drugs and its connection to the mass incarceration of Black
and Brown people in the United States.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P75cbEdNo2U&feature=player_embedded
If you think Bill Clinton was "the first black President" you need to watch this
video and see how much damage his administration caused for the black community
as a result of his get tough attitude on crime that appealed to white swing
voters.
This speech took place at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem on January 12,
2012.
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FREE BRADLEY MANNING
http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/national-call-in-for-bradley
I received the following reply from the White House November 18, 2011 regarding
the Bradley Manning petition I signed:
"Why We Can't Comment on Bradley Manning
"Thank you for signing the petition 'Free PFC Bradley Manning, the accused
WikiLeaks whistleblower.' We appreciate your participation in the We the People
platform on WhiteHouse.gov.
The We the People Terms of Participation explain that 'the White House may
decline to address certain procurement, law enforcement, adjudicatory, or
similar matters properly within the jurisdiction of federal departments or
agencies, federal courts, or state and local government.' The military justice
system is charged with enforcing the Uniform Code of
Military Justice. Accordingly, the White House declines to comment on the
specific case raised in this petition...
That's funny! I guess Obama didn't get this memo. Here's what Obama said about
Bradley:
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
Release Bradley Manning
Almost Gone (The Ballad Of Bradley Manning)
Written by Graham Nash and James Raymond (son of David Crosby)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYG7yJpBbQ&feature=player_embedded
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Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGqE726OAo&feature=player_embedded
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School police increasingly arresting American students?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl-efNBvjUU&feature=player_embedded
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FYI:
Nuclear Detonation Timeline "1945-1998"
The 2053 nuclear tests and explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998 are
plotted visually and audibly on a world map.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9lquok4Pdk&feature=share&mid=5408
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We Are the 99 Percent
We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to
choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are
suffering from environmental pollution. We are working long hours for little pay
and no rights, if we're working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1
percent is getting everything. We are the 99 percent.
Brought to you by the people who occupy wall street. Why will YOU occupy?
OccupyWallSt.org
Occupytogether.org
wearethe99percentuk.tumblr.com
http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/
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We Are The People Who Will Save Our Schools
YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFAOJsBxAxY
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In honor of the 75th Anniversary of the 44-Day Flint Michigan sit-down strike at
GM that began December 30, 1936:
According to Michael Moore, (Although he has done some good things, this clip
isn't one of them) in this clip from his film, "Capitalism a Love Story," it was
Roosevelt who saved the day!):
"After a bloody battle one evening, the Governor of Michigan, with the support
of the President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, sent in the National
Guard. But the guns and the soldiers weren't used on the workers; they were
pointed at the police and the hired goons warning them to leave these workers
alone. For Mr. Roosevelt believed that the men inside had a right to a redress
of their grievances." -Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story'
- Flint Sit-Down Strike http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8x1_q9wg58
But those cannons were not aimed at the goons and cops! They were aimed straight
at the factory filled with strikers! Watch what REALLY happened and how the
strike was really won!
'With babies & banners' -- 75 years since the 44-day Flint sit-down strike
http://links.org.au/node/2681
--Inspiring
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HALLELUJAH CORPORATIONS (revised edition).mov
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws0WSNRpy3g
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ONE OF THE GREATEST POSTS ON YOUTUBE SO FAR!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8C-qIgbP9o&feature=share&mid=552
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ILWU Local 10 Longshore Workers Speak-Out At Oakland Port Shutdown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JUpBpZYwms
Uploaded by laborvideo on Dec 13, 2011
ILWU Local 10 longshore workers speak out during a blockade of the Port of
Oakland called for by Occupy Oakland. Anthony Levieges and Clarence Thomas rank
and file members of the union. The action took place on December 12, 2011 and
the interview took place at Pier 30 on the Oakland docks.
For more information on the ILWU Local 21 Longview EGT struggle go to
http://www.facebook.com/groups/256313837734192/
For further info on the action and the press conferernce go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz3fE-Vhrw8&feature=youtu.be
Production of Labor Video Project www.laborvideo.org
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UC Davis Police Violence Adds Fuel to Fire
By Scott Galindez, Reader Supported News
19 November 11
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/8485-uc-davis-police-violence-add\
s-fuel-to-fire
UC Davis Protestors Pepper Sprayed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4&feature=player_embedded
Police PEPPER SPRAY UC Davis STUDENT PROTESTERS!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuWEx6Cfn-I&feature=player_embedded
Police pepper spraying and arresting students at UC Davis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmJmmnMkuEM&feature=player_embedded
*---------*
UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walks to her car
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CZ0t9ez_EGI#!
Occupy Seattle - 84 Year Old Woman Dorli Rainey Pepper Sprayed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTIyE_JlJzw&feature=related
*---------*
THE BEST VIDEO ON "OCCUPY THE WORLD"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S880UldxB1o
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Shot by police with rubber bullet at Occupy Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0pX9LeE-g8&feature=player_embedded
*---------*
Copwatch@Occupy Oakland: Beware of Police Infiltrators and Provocateurs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrvMzqopHH0
*---------*
Occupy Oakland 11-2 Strike: Police Tear Gas, Black Bloc, War in the Streets
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tu_D8SFYck&feature=player_embedded
*----*
Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest
were actually undercover Quebec police officers:
POLICE STATE Criminal Cops EXPOSED As Agent Provocateurs @ SPP Protest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoiisMMCFT0&feature=player_embedded
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Quebec police admit going undercover at montebello protests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAfzUOx53Rg&feature=player_embedded
G20: Epic Undercover Police Fail
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrJ7aU-n1L8&feature=player_embedded
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WHAT HAPPENED IN OAKLAND TUESDAY NIGHT, OCTOBER 25:
Occupy Oakland Protest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlPs-REyl-0&feature=player_embedded
Cops make mass arrests at occupy Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R27kD2_7PwU&feature=player_embedded
Raw Video: Protesters Clash With Oakland Police
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpO-lJr2BQY&feature=player_embedded
Occupy Oakland - Flashbangs USED on protesters OPD LIES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqNOPZLw03Q&feature=player_embedded
KTVU TV Video of Police violence
http://www.ktvu.com/video/29587714/index.html
Marine Vet wounded, tear gas & flash-bang grenades thrown in downtown
Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMUgPTCgwcQ&feature=player_embedded
Tear Gas billowing through 14th & Broadway in Downtown Oakland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU4Y0pwJtWE&feature=player_embedded
Arrests at Occupy Atlanta -- This is what a police state looks like
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YStWz6jbeZA&feature=player_embedded
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Labor Beat: Hey You Billionaire, Pay Your Fair Share
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY8isD33f-I
*---------*
Voices of Occupy Boston 2011 - Kwame Somburu (Paul Boutelle) Part I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA48gmfGB6U&feature=youtu.be
Voices of Occupy Boston 2011 - Kwame Somburu (Paul Boutelle) Part II
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjKZpOk7TyM&feature=related
*---------*
#Occupy Wall Street In Washington Square: Mohammed Ezzeldin, former occupier of
Egypt's Tahrir Square Speaks at Washington Square!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziodsFWEb5Y&feature=player_embedded
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#OccupyTheHood, Occupy Wall Street
By adele pham
http://vimeo.com/30146870
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Live arrest at brooklyn bridge #occupywallstreet by We are Change
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yULSI-31Pto&feature=player_embedded
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FREE THE CUBAN FIVE!
http://www.thecuban5.org/wordpress/index.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmS4kHC_OlY&feature=player_embedded
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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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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
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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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Coal Ash: One Valley's Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E7h-DNvwx4&feature=player_embedded
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