Wednesday, November 19, 2014

BAUAW NEWSLETTER: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2014

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Bay Area United Against War Newsletter

Table of Contents:

A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS

B. ARTICLES IN FULL



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A. EVENTS AND ACTIONS



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COURAGE TO RESIST
http://couragetoresist.org/
  • EU's top court rules favorably for André Shepherd, resister in Germany
  • Tomas Young (1979-2014), Iraq War veteran and anti-war hero
  • Objector Sara Beining trial set for Dec. 9th at Ft Carson, Colorado
  • Armistice Day statement from Veterans for Peace

André Shepherd gets favorable ruling from EU's top court prior to asylum hearing!

shepherdNovember 11, 2014. By Connection e.V.and Courage to Resist
In the legal case of U.S. AWOL soldier André Shepherd, the European Court of Justice Advocate General, Eleanor Sharpton, ruled that those endangered by prosecution or punishment for refusal to perform military service involving an illegal war or committal of war crimes, should be protected by the European Union. This is a best-case situation for André heading into his asylum hearing.
Rudi Friedrich of Connection e.V. (Germany) stated, "Should the European Union Court of Justice respect the Advocate General's final opinion, the position in asylum cases of military service refusers and deserters will be significantly reinforced.
André Shepherd, upon reading Sharpton's decision, "The final opinion gives me new reason for optimism, both in my own case, and for the rights of other deserters."

Tomas Young (1979-2014)

tomas youngNovember 11, 2014. Excerpts from CommonDreams obituary
Iraq war veteran and outspoken Iraq war critic Tomas Young has died at the age of 34.
Tomas Young enlisted in the Army following the September 11 attacks, volunteering to go to Afghanistan. He was sent to Iraq in 2004, and was left paralyzed by a bullet on the fifth day of his deployment. In 2008, he explained that "many of us volunteered with patriotic feelings in our heart, only to see them subverted and bastardized by the administration and sent into the wrong country."
Young was the subject of the award-wining documentary Body of War by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro.
Last year, Tomas read a letter to Bush and Cheney which read in part: "You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans — my fellow veterans — whose future you stole."
Photo by Jeff Paterson. Tomas Young traveled to Crawford, Texas in an attempt to challenge President Bush on the Iraq War. August 29, 2005.

War resister Sara Beining court martial set for Dec. 9 at Fort Carson, Colorado

sara beiningClick here to contribute to Sara Beining’s legal defense and prison fund
November 11, 2014. Courage to Resist and the Nuclear Resister
Facing a lengthy prison sentence, Army war resister Sara Beining is scheduled to be court martialed at Fort Carson, Colorado at 9am, December 9th, on two counts of desertion.
Supporters are encouraged to attend the trial, contribute to her legal and prison fund, and send her letters letter of support to: Sara Beining, A0305918 / Criminal Justice Center / 2739 E. Las Vegas St / Colorado Springs, CO 80906
Sara is a single mother and Iraq war veteran. She is being held in the civilian county jail prior to her military trial. Sara went AWOL a second time last summer after a nearly year-long delay in resolving the original charge that resulted when she left her unit at Ft. Hood in January, 2007.
Just over one year ago, September 14, 2013, Beining was stopped for a traffic offense and held on an outstanding military warrant, more than six years after she and her newlywed husband had together walked away from war service. She was briefly jailed, then given a plane ticket and orders to report back to Fort Carson, Colorado, where, she said, “I tried for another year to play the game” and be quietly processed out of the army as many other recent military refusers have been. But in her absence without leave, Beining had given birth to a daughter in September, 2008 and become an outspoken opponent of war.


Courage to Resist
484 Lake Park Ave. #41
 Oakland, CA 94610
510-488-3559
couragetoresist.org

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Rasmea Defense Committee statement

Without a full and fair trial,
Rasmea found guilty

In a travesty of justice, Rasmea Odeh today was found guilty of one count of Unlawful Procurement of Naturalization. For over a year, Rasmea, her supporters, and her legal team have been battling this unjust government prosecution, saying from the start that the immigration charge was nothing but a pretext to attack this icon of the Palestine liberation movement. And although there is real anger and disappointment in the jury’s verdict, it was known as early as October 27th that she would not get a full and fair trial.

On that day, Judge Gershwin Drain made a number of rulings that made her defense virtually impossible. The government’s indictment stated that she had unlawfully gained U.S. citizenship because she had allegedly answered a number of questions falsely on her visa application in 1995 and her naturalization application in 2004. She had been in this country as a lawful permanent resident for almost 20 years, and a citizen for over nine, when she was arrested on October 22nd, 2013.

The main basis for the arrest a year ago was that she had allegedly falsely answered “No” to a question asking whether she had ever been arrested or imprisoned. The government claimed that she failed to disclose that she had been convicted by the Israelis of participating in bombings in 1969. This conviction in a military court was the result of a false confession made after she was viciously tortured and raped by Israeli military authorities for weeks. There is no due process in Israeli military courts, which “convict” over 99% of Palestinians who come before them, and “evidence” from these should not be accepted in a court in the U.S.

But Judge Drain did allow the conviction in Israel to be entered into evidence; and even though he suggested that Rasmea’s assertion that she faced torture and sexual abuse at the hands of her Israeli captors was “credible,” he still ruled that it could not be brought up in the course of her trial. So her attorneys had to scrap plans to call to the stand an expert witness, clinical psychologist Dr. Mary Fabri, who has decades of experience working with torture survivors, to testify that the allegedly false answers on the immigration forms were the result of Rasmea’s chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

The judge also rejected Rasmea’s selective prosecution motion, even though it was clear that the case against her grew out of the investigation of 23 anti-war and Palestinian community organizers in Chicago and Minneapolis, who were subpoenaed to a federal grand jury in 2010. Make no mistake. Rasmea came under attack by the U.S. government because she is Palestinian, and because for decades, she has organized for Palestinian liberation and self-determination, the Right of Return, and an end to U.S. funding of Israeli occupation. Palestine support work, especially the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement, has made a number of recent gains, and the long arm of federal law enforcement has attempted to crack down on it, like it has on all effective and impactful movements for social justice in the history of this country. The crackdown reached Rasmea.

More than 200 people from across the Midwest, especially from Chicago, traveled to stand with her throughout the trial. They bore silent witness to her incredible testimony, for despite the judge’s rulings, she and her defense team did put the crimes of Israel on record. Her story of being exiled from the village of her birth, Lifta, in 1948; of being exiled again during the 1967 war; of experiencing the death of her sister after the raid on her home in 1969; and of being a political prisoner, one of the most famous in the history of the Palestine liberation movement—all these are stories of the crimes of apartheid Israel, crimes that continue today in the racist settler and military assaults we have seen in the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, 1948 Palestine, and the West Bank. Israel’s terrorism, and the U.S. government’s complicity, were exposed for all the world to see.

Rasmea’s honesty in the face of cross-examination from Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Tukel was thoroughly convincing as well. She said clearly that she thought the questions on the immigration forms were being asked about her time in the U.S., because she said she had nothing to hide and did not need to lie. She had testified about her torture at the United Nations when she was released in 1979, and as her lead attorney, Michael Deutsch, said, “It was well known that she was convicted, and traded [in a prisoner exchange]. The U.S. Embassy knew it, the State Department knew it, and Immigration should have known it.” So although the government had to prove that she “knowingly lied,” it never met that burden, regardless of what the verdict says.

For over a year, the Rasmea Defense Committee has been organizing educational events, rallies, protests, and call-in days to demand that U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade and Tukel drop the charges against her. We now have more work ahead of us. Rasmea’s brilliant legal team—Deutsch, Jim Fennerty, Bill Goodman, and Dennis Cunningham—will undoubtedly file an appeal, and have strong grounds to do so, based on Judge Drain’s unjust decisions. And we will continue to support their work with our political organizing and mobilizations.

Just like our people in Palestine and across the world will never rest until every inch of historical Palestine is free, we will never rest in our defense and support of Rasmea as she moves forward to challenge this conviction. As Deutsch said in his closing statement to the jury, “It has been one of the great privileges of my long legal career to represent this extraordinary woman of great passion and dignity.” Rasmea’s story is the story of millions of Palestinians, and of millions of freedom-loving defenders of justice everywhere. Her eventual victory will be a victory for Palestine and for all the people’s movements across the world.

Today, we thank everyone who stood with Rasmea this past year, and ask you to continue fighting with us until we achieve that victory.

www.uspcn.org and www.stopfbi.net
Donate to Rasmea! today

http://www.stopfbi.net/events/11-10-14/be-detroit-nov-10-rasmea-odeh-and-final-verdict

 follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend
Copyright © 2014 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
Committee to Stop FBI Repression
PO Box 14183
Minneapolis, MN 55414



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Please forward and distribute widely

Police Censorship of School Curricula Must Stop!
Restore the Urban Dreams Web Site!

Join Teachers For Mumia
at the Oakland School Board Meeting
Wednesday, the 19th of November, at 5 p.m.

Come to:
the Great Room, across from the old OUSD HQ
on 2nd Ave., just up 10th from Laney College
(near Lake Merritt BART Station)

Teachers for Mumia will have small signs reading:
  "Repost Urban Dreams Now!
   No Police Control of Curriculum"

Small signs may be taken into the meeting. Protestors are request to stand and hold up the signs as speakers make their presentations on restoring Urban Dreams.

Individuals are invited to get on the speakers list if you wish. Speakers will have one minute to address the Board members.

Alice Walker Spoke Out, and So Should You!

Join with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker in protesting against this dangerous censorship of school curricula by police!  Come to the School Board meeting and make your voice heard. (See Alice Walker’s letter of protest to the School Board reprinted in this message, below.)

The shutting Down of Urban Dreams was a case of
Police Censorship!

The Urban Dreams web site contained curriculum materials created and posted by teachers. The site was taken down by the School Board after a complaint by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) was aired on Fox News. The complaint was about one curriculum offering which compared the attempts to silence Mumia Abu-Jamal with similar censorship and harassment which was directed against the late Dr Martin Luther King Jr., and against his late writings in particular.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent political prisoner who has been targeted by the FOP for decades, just as Dr. King was targeted by the FBI. After having framed up Mumia for a crime he didn’t commit in the first place, the cops are so determined to silence Mumia that they got a law passed in Pennsylvania explicitly designed to “shut him up.” This law attempts to punish any prisoner convicted of a violent crime who causes “mental anguish” to the victim(s) of the crime by speaking out publicly!

We Must Stop Police Attacks on Free Speech!

The police suppression of the Urban Dreams web site sets an ominous precedent, of cops having a say in what gets taught in schools! And the Oakland School Board caved in to police pressure without a word of explanation. This must be stopped now!

If we are strong enough and loud enough, we can overturn this blatant piece of police censorship.

Come to the Oakland School Board meeting,
Wednesday, the 19th of November,
at 5 p.m.

the Great Room, across from the old OUSD HQ
on 2nd Ave., just up 10th from Laney College
(near Lake Merritt Station on BART)

— This message is from: Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
PO Box 16222  •  Oakland CA 94610  •   510 763-2347
18 November 2014
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       PULITZER PRIZE WINNER ALICE WALKER OPPOSES POLICE CENSORSHIP OF OAKLAND SCHOOLS CURRICULUM



November 8, 2014

I am dismayed to learn that the Oakland School Board has dismantled a website of Social Justice lesson plans because the police objected to it.  The Board has a duty to defend students’ right to learn against police interference.  I am asking the Oakland School District to repost the Urban Dreams website.

The police attack on Urban Dreams is part of a long campaign to injure and defame political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a brilliant journalist and author who is innocent of all charges against him.  In October the police obtained a state gag law in Pennsylvania specifically intended to silence Mumia Abu-Jamal.  One lesson on the Urban Dreams website in Oakland asked students to compare media suppression of Mumia’s writings with suppression of the radical thoughts of Martin Luther King, and the police call for censorship was meant to shut out the words of both these defenders of freedom.

I hope that the educators of the Oakland School Board will defend free speech and academic freedom by restoring the Urban Dreams website.

In Peace,
Alice Walker

CC:  Antwan Wilson, Superintendent
David Kakishiba, School Board President
Oakland Teachers for Mumia
Oakland Tribune
San Francisco Chronicle


REPOST URBAN DREAMS NOW!
e-mail:  Superintendent@ousd.k12.ca.us to support Urban Dreams reposting



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First Amendment Lawsuit

"Abu-Jamal v. Kane" filed 11/10 in Federal Court!

Dear Friends,

Today the Abolitionist Law Center, Amistad Law Project, and the
Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center are filing a historic lawsuit in Federal Court on behalf of Prison Radio, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Educators for Mumia, and other plaintiffs. We seek to overturn a new PA Law designed to allow the state to silence targeted prisoners by preventing their speech.

What is at stake is your right to hear Mumia and other prisoners, journalists right to record, and prisoners right to speak.  As a puppet for the agenda of the Fraternal Order of Police, and to add to his poll numbers, PA Governor Tom Corbett signed SB508 into law on 10/21, (effective immediately), and specifically targeting Mumia Abu-Jamal's right to free speech.

The law puts Prison Radio, our correspondents, and our listeners in jeopardy. So in response we have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in the middle district of PA (Harrisburg).

We will win this lawsuit.
We will continue to record Mumia.
We can uphold all prisoners’ rights to speak their truth.
But we need your help to do it.

DONATE:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protect-freedom-of-speech-keep-mumia-on-the-air


Defeat Pennsylvania’s Prisoner Gag Law!

Free Speech Under Threat from Police & Politicians!

Mumia is the Immediate Target, but We’re All in the Cross-Hairs!

How You Can Help… see below…

07 November 2014 — An outrageous new law threatening the free speech of convicts has been passed in Pennsylvania in a lightning fast process. The chief target of this law?  Innocent political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, and others like him. The perpetrators of this law?  The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), and their lap-dog friends in the state legislature and governor’s mansion of PA. The victims of this law? Convicts like Mumia; non-profits that distribute the writings and speech of convicts; and ultimately the working class and all who oppose this racist, capitalist system.

The new law, the “Re-victimization Relief Act,” enables crime victims—as well as local authorities and the state, using taxpayer funds—to sue any imprisoned convict whose conduct “perpetuates the continuing effect of the crime on the victim,” ie, causes “mental anguish.” This broad and subjective definition could mean anything!

PA Governor: Convicts Have No Rights

This law was hashed together, and quickly passed and signed in reaction to a pre-recorded commencement address to a Goddard College graduating class by Mumia Abu-Jamal, himself a graduate of Goddard College.  Mumia’s inspiring address at Goddard said absolutely nothing about his case, yet cops protested at the college entrance; and days later the law was signed by PA Governor Corbett in a ceremony at 13th and Locust in Philadelphia, the spot where Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot to death—by someone other than Mumia—in 1981. Corbett said that “convicted felons in prison have abused and surrendered their rights,” a blatantly false assertion.

Protestors shouted “free Mumia,” and “one-term Tom” at the Governor, which is what he turned out to be after losing his seat in the recent mid-term elections. But the threatening law he signed continues to menace convicts.

“Mumia Bill” Designed to “Shut Him Up”

This new law is just the latest manifestation of the blatant targeting of Mumia, by the very cops, courts and politicians who put him away for a crime he didn’t commit in the first place. Called the “Mumia Bill,” this act was designed to “shut him up” (Philly.com, 07.Oct.2014). It follows a long line of “Mumia rules,” in which courts have literally changed precedent when considering Mumia’s case, only to change back again on other cases later. Will this blatantly unconstitutional law get overturned, or will it be allowed to stand as yet another “Mumia rule,” in defiance of all precedent? We cannot take that chance!

Mumia’s case is just the immediate pretext for this legal atrocity. The danger here is that this blatantly unconstitutional law could have far-reaching effects, even if it does eventually get overturned. What about radio stations such as the Pacifica Network, and non-profit organizations such as Prison Radio, which promote the defense cases, and distribute the writings of Mumia and other convicts, wrongfully convicted or otherwise?  They all have the right of free speech!

Lawyers with the Abolitionist Law Center and the Amistad Law Project have joined with Prison Radio (publishers of Mumia’s commentaries) to mount an aggressive defense against this vindictive, so-called “legal” challenge to the right of free speech. These folks need you help!

— Donate Now To Defeat PA’s Prisoner Gag Law —

Go to: http://bit.ly/defendfreespeech

Mumia has been definitively shown to be innocent of the 1981 crime for which he was convicted. He was the victim of an orchestrated frame-up by cops and prosecutors, who were not only targeting a known leftist and former Black Panther, and not only covering up their own rampant corruption in Philadelphia’s inner city; but they were also covering their probable complicity in the execution of one of their own, who was talking to the Feds about the corruption at the time.

The system has chickened out of trying to execute Mumia, since the evidence of his innocence is so overwhelming. But they’ve confined him to state prison for life without the possibility of parole (LWOP). Our job remains unchanged: Mumia is Innocent! For labor action to free Mumia!

Defeat Pennsylvania’s Prisoner Gag Law!

http://bit.ly/defendfreespeech

This message brought to you by:

The Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

PO Box 16222, Oakland CA 94610 • www.laboractionmumia.org • 510.762.2347

November 2014



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Support Prison Radio

$35 is the yearly membership.

$50 will get you a beautiful tote bag (you can special order a yoga mat bag, just call us).

$100 will get the DVD "Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary"

$300 will bring one essay to the airwaves.

$1000 (or $88.83 per month) will make you a member of our Prison Radio Freedom Circle. Take a moment and Support Prison Radio

Luchando por la justicia y la libertad,

Noelle Hanrahan, Director, Prison Radio

PRISON RADIO

P.O. Box 411074 San Francisco, CA 94141

www.prisonradio.org
info@prisonradio.org 415-706-5222

Pennsylvania legislators are trying to stop prisoners from speaking about their ideas and experiences. Last week, PA Representative Mike Vereb introduced a bill (HB2533) called the “Revictimization Relief Act,” which would allow victims, District Attorneys, and the Attorney General to sue people who have been convicted of “personal injury” crimes for speaking out publicly if it causes the victim of the crime “mental anguish.”

The bill was written in response to political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s commencement speech at Goddard College, and is a clear attempt to silence Mumia and other prisoners and formerly incarcerated people. We believe that this legislation is not actually an attempt to help victims, but a cynical move by legislators to stop people in prison from speaking out against an unjust system.

While to us this seems like a clear violation of the first amendment, unfortunately the PA General Assembly doesn’t appear to agree, and they have fast-tracked the bill for approval and amended another bill (SB508) to include the same language. The legislation could be voted on as early as Wednesday.

If this bill passes, it will be a huge blow to the movement against mass incarceration. People inside prisons play a leading role in these struggles, and their perspectives, analysis, and strategies are essential to our work. Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people who write books, contribute to newspapers, or even write for our Voices from the Inside section would run the risk of legal consequences just for sharing their ideas.

That’s why we are asking you to take action TUESDAY OCTOBER 14 by calling Pennsylvania lawmakers to tell them that prisoners should not be denied the right to speak.

Please call your legislators and demand that they vote NO on HB2533 and SB508. You can look up contact information at http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/.

We are also asking folks to call the following Senate leaders and ask them to stop the bill from moving forward:

Senate Majority Whip Pat Browne  (717) 787-1349

Senate Minority Whip Anthony Williams  (717) 787-5970

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi  (717) 787-4712

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (717) 787-7683

Not sure what to say on the phone? Click here for a sample call script.

Want to write a letter to your legislators, or looking for more talking points? Click here for more info!

- See more at: http://decarceratepa.info/freespeech#sthash.TtdN3AkI.dpuf


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 Medical Care Needed for Chelsea Manning!

 ACLU files lawsuit against Army demanding medical care for Manning

 By the Chelsea Manning Support Network

Yesterday, the ACLU and Chelsea Manning filed a lawsuit against the Army demanding the necessary medical treatment for Manning’s previously diagnosed gender dysphoria.

By continuing to deny Manning treatment, the Army is directly violating Chelsea’s constitutional rights under the 8th amendment. Chase Strangio, attorney in the ACLU Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender project and co-counsel on Ms. Manning’s case, notes “such clear disregard of well-established medical protocols constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”

Due to a full year of neglecting Manning’s medical care, the ACLU had previously announced a Sept 4th deadline for the Army to provide treatment. After continued failure to provide treatment, the ACLU filed a lawsuit yesterday and released the following statement:

ACLU Demands Government Provide Chelsea Manning Necessary Medical Care

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 23, 2014

CONTACT: Crystal Cooper, ACLU National, 212-549-2666; media@aclu.org

WASHINGTON—Today, Chelsea Manning filed a lawsuit in federal court in the District of Columbia against Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and other Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of the Army officials for their failure to provide necessary medical treatment for her gender dysphoria, a condition with which she was originally diagnosed by Army doctors more than four years ago.

The complaint is accompanied by a motion for preliminary injunction demanding that Ms. Manning be provided hormone therapy, permission to follow female grooming standards, and access to treatment by a medical provider qualified to treat her condition. Ms. Manning is currently serving a thirty-five year prison sentence at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Ft. Leavenworth Kansas, and though the military recognizes that she has gender dysphoria requiring treatment, critical care has been withheld without any medical basis.

“The government continues to deny Ms. Manning’s access to necessary medical treatment for gender dysphoria, without which she will continue to suffer severe psychological harms,” said Chase Strangio, attorney in the ACLU Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender project and co-counsel on Ms. Manning’s case. “Such clear disregard of well-established medical protocols constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”

Ms. Manning is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of the Nation’s Capital, the ACLU of Kansas and civilian defense counsel David E. Coombs. Last month, Ms. Manning’s legal team sent a letter to the DOD and Army officials demanding that she receive treatment for gender dysphoria in accordance with medical standards of care, including hormone therapy and permission to follow female grooming standards. Her treatment needs have continued to be unmet and her distress has escalated.

“I am proud to be standing with the ACLU behind Chelsea on this very important issue.” said David E. Coombs, “It is my hope that through this action, Chelsea will receive the medical care that she needs without having to suffer any further anguish.”

Gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition that requires hormone therapy and changes to gender expression, like growing hair, to live consistently with one’s gender identity as part of accepted standards of care.

Without necessary treatment, gender dysphoria can cause severe psychological distress, anxiety, and suicidality. For this reason, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and the American Psychological Association have issued policy statements that support providing treatment to prisoners diagnosed with the condition in accordance with established standards of care, as the Federal Bureau of Prisons and many state corrections agencies are already doing.

A copy of the complaint is available at:

aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/manning-v-hagel-et-al-complaint-declaratory-and-injunctive-relief

The motion for preliminary injunction is available at:

aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/manning-v-hagel-et-al-plaintiffs-motion-preliminary-injunction

This press release is available at:

aclu.org/lgbt-rights-prisoners-rights/aclu-demands-government-provide-chelsea-manning-necessary-medical-care

—Free Chelsea Manning, September 24, 2014

http://www.chelseamanning.org/press/aclu-files-lawsuit-against-army-demands-medical-care-for-manning

Write to Chelsea Manning:

Mail must be addressed exactly as follows:

CHELSEA E. MANNING     89289

1300 NORTH WAREHOUSE ROAD

FORT LEAVENWORTH, KANSAS 66027-2304



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 B. ARTICLES IN FULL




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1) Shift on Marijuana Policy Was a Long Time Coming, and Too Late for One Man
By





2) Fatal Encounter in Ferguson Took Less Than 90 Seconds, Police Communications Reveal
By





3) A Familiar Anger Begins to Boil Again in Mexico
By




4) More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover Operations
By and WILLIAM M. ARKIN




5) Cold Numbers on G.M. Crisis: A Peek Inside
By HILARY STOUT




6) Another Widening Gap: The Haves vs. the Have-Mores
By ROBERT FRANK





7) A Cuban Brain Drain, Courtesy of the U.S.
By




8) In Ferguson, Tactics Set for Grand Jury Decision in Michael Brown Case
By , and
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/us/groups-in-ferguson-prepare-for-grand-jury-decision.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below




9) How Medical Care Is Being Corrupted
By PAMELA HARTZBAND and JEROME GROOPMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/how-medical-care-is-being-corrupted.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region




10) Israel Demolishes Family Home of Palestinian Driver Who Killed 2 Pedestrians
By




11) Wife of Mexican President to Sell Mansion
By ELISABETH MALKIN




12) In Test for Premier, Italians Rally Against Plan to Relax Labor Rules
By




13) Deal by Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Raises Cash and Some Concern
By










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1) Shift on Marijuana Policy Was a Long Time Coming, and Too Late for One Man
By

Anthony Welfare closely followed this week’s news that New York City no longer will bring criminal charges against people who are seen with small amounts of marijuana, as long as they are not smoking it in public.

“I find that funny,” Mr. Welfare, 28, said.

But not hah-hah funny.

Not LOL funny.

After seven years of steady work, Mr. Welfare automatically lost his job as a school bus driver in August when a police officer swore under oath that he saw a pipe in the center console of a car in which Mr. Welfare was a passenger. The pipe had a residue of marijuana, the officer said.

Therefore, everyone in the car — the driver and his passenger, Mr. Welfare — was openly displaying marijuana, a misdemeanor.Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton on Monday said police officers would no longer file misdemeanor charges against people who displayed small amounts of marijuana in public. Instead, the officers would charge them with merely possessing the pot, a violation, which is like getting a traffic ticket.

The difference is not trivial. The ticket would not have cost Mr. Welfare a job that paid him about $40,000 a year. He was arrested on Aug. 16, the first time he had ever had any trouble with the law. That was a Saturday. By Monday, the bus company he worked for had been notified, and he was fired on the spot. His experience was chronicled last month in this column. (At the time, Mr. Welfare asked that his last name not be revealed.) Since then, the charge against him has been dismissed and his record is once again clean. But he has not yet been able to regain his old job, and to date, he has lost nearly $10,000 in wages.

“Now the change goes into effect — after what I just been through,” Mr. Welfare said.

For the most part, the policy change won’t affect white pot users, who were not likely to be stopped and told to turn out their pockets, or to be accused of openly displaying marijuana — or its residue — in the center console of a car. Pot in someone’s pocket is mere possession, not a crime; having it in the open is a misdemeanor. Tricking people into displaying it was called manufacturing misdemeanors. For much of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration, such misdemeanor marijuana arrests took place at the rate of one every 12 minutes, or 50,000 a year. Overwhelmingly, those charged were black, like Mr. Welfare, or Latino. Most had never been in trouble with the law.

Mr. Bloomberg and his aides scoffed at the notion that the arrests were a big deal, saying most of those cases were dismissed and sealed. Indeed, that is what happened with Mr. Welfare’s case — after he was fired. A pot charge can cost people jobs that require clean criminal records, like security guards for city and state agencies, or home health care attendants. For immigrants, there can be other harrowing consequences: A Liberian man was held in an immigration jail for a year pending deportation on a marijuana case before the charge was downgraded, said Mitch Briskey, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society.

How did this go on so long? Part of it, Mr. Bratton said, is that a large number of public complaints come to the police about open pot dealing or smoking.

But there is more. During the stop-and-frisk era, police precincts set numerical goals for “activity” by officers, a standard management productivity tool in all lines of work. It was an article of faith that the stops would help drive down crime. But the numbers became an end unto themselves, a toxic force propelling a machine that devoured the people it was supposed to keep safe.

Millions of searches yielded only a tiny amount of criminality — and a majority of it was the spuriously manufactured public displays of marijuana. Now that the searches have been curtailed, crime has continued to drop.

The Bronx Defenders, which represents poor people, tried in 2012 to fight the marijuana arrests on the grounds that the searches were illegal. In 54 test cases, which lasted an average of eight months, not once were they able to get a hearing before the cases were dismissed anyway.

For Mr. Welfare, contesting the search would have kept the case open and delayed the possibility of his return to work, said his lawyer, Marquita Johnson of the Legal Aid Society.

No single rogue committed an overt act of bigotry to create a grotesque separate regimen of punishment for blacks and Latinos. The racism was mixed into the concrete that held up the system. It richly deserves the sledgehammer that Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton are now swinging.


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2) Fatal Encounter in Ferguson Took Less Than 90 Seconds, Police Communications Reveal
By


FERGUSON, Mo. — Audio of police radio communications and video from surveillance cameras at the Ferguson Police Department offer new details from the day that Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot dead by a white police officer in August.

As the region waits tensely for a grand jury to decide whether to indict the officer, Darren Wilson, in the shooting, the new disclosures gave yet another glimpse of the complicated and unusually abundant information that the jurors may be sifting through.

The audio and video were published on Friday by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.The police radio communications, including remarks by Officer Wilson, reveal that the encounter with Mr. Brown on Aug. 9 was brief — less than 90 seconds from start to finish. Though the time was short, questions remain about the encounter: Were Mr. Brown’s hands raised in the air in a motion of surrender when he was shot, as some witnesses have said? Was Officer Wilson punched and scratched in a struggle with Mr. Brown, as he has told the authorities? Did Officer Wilson view Mr. Brown as a suspect in a theft that had just occurred at a store?


The newly published audio, which the newspaper said it obtained through the state’s public records law, makes it clear that Officer Wilson was aware that other officers were investigating a “stealing in progress” that had been reported at a local market before he came across Mr. Brown and a friend on Canfield Drive. But the radio dispatches do not clarify whether Officer Wilson, who had initially warned the two friends not to walk in the street, suspected Mr. Brown at that point in connection with the theft.

“Put me on Canfield with two,” Officer Wilson told a dispatcher at 12:02 p.m., moments before the shooting. “And send me another car.” Not long after the shooting, officials released video from the market, showing Mr. Brown pushing a store clerk and taking cigarillos a short time before his fatal confrontation with Officer Wilson.

The videotapes, according to the newspaper, came from later in the afternoon of Aug. 9 and show Officer Wilson walking out of the police department to go to the hospital and returning later. The video images do not reveal injuries on Officer Wilson, but they do not show his face clearly or close up.

On Saturday, lawyers for Mr. Brown’s family said the videotapes contradicted reports of the officer’s injuries. “Information was leaked from within the police department that Wilson was severely beaten and suffered an orbital eye socket ‘blowout,’ indicating that Michael Brown somehow deserved to die,” a statement from the lawyers said. “From the video released today it would appear the initial descriptions of his injuries were exaggerated.”


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3) A Familiar Anger Begins to Boil Again in Mexico
By

MEXICO CITY — The fate of 43 college students missing and presumed killed and burned to ashes in a mass abduction in September has bred ire and indignation in many corners of Mexico.

Spectators held up posters with the faces of the students at a soccer match last week between Mexico and the Netherlands.

Thousands of demonstrators, mostly teachers and students and young sympathizers, have poured into the streets of Mexico City and have blocked major intercity highways, while setting fires that damaged the door to the national palace in Mexico City and regional political party offices and the state congress building in Guerrero, where the students attended school.And social media has lit up with related hashtags, including #YaMeCansedelMiedo (“I am tired of fear”), a play on a remark by the attorney general who cut off a question at the end of an hourlong news conference on the students’ case by saying, “Ya me cansé” — “I’m tired now.” (He later defended the remark by saying that he was tired because he had not slept in over 40 hours.)

For the past week, President Enrique Peña Nieto was in China on a trade mission, even as the instability troubled the international business community he has aggressively courted. The question that awaited his return on Saturday night was: What now? Will the case prompt Mr. Peña Nieto to throw his weight behind efforts to address corruption, impunity and the rule of law with the same vigor he applied to his bold economic policies?

Mexico has seen these convulsions over sensational crimes before, with only modest changes in their wake. In 2011, galvanized by the kidnapping and murder of the son of a poet, Javier Sicilia, tens of thousands of protesters marched under the banner and hashtag #HastaLaMadre — roughly, “We have had it!” — and eventually Felipe Calderón, then the president, held a nationally televised meeting with relatives of the tens of thousands of people abducted and murdered during the drug war in his term.

That meeting gave rise to an underfunded office to address the needs of victims of violence but little else.

Andrew Selee, a Mexico scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, said isolated areas like Ciudad Juárez and Monterrey received more attention after mass killings, resulting in some drops in crime. But politicians have been unable to carry out effective anticorruption measures and a broad retooling of institutions.

“Politicians of all parties have a great opportunity to make transparency and fighting corruption a banner that they all want to march behind, but it is an open question if that will happen,” Mr. Selee said. “Historically, there is a lot of tolerance for corruption in all the parties; no one wants to offend an ally or friend. But the political class risks losing more credibility with citizens if they don’t come out clearly to do something.”

A general tolerance for corruption may explain the muted reaction from opposition parties to revelations about a private $7 million house Mr. Peña Nieto’s wife is buying on credit from a company whose owner won large government construction contracts from Mexico State when Mr. Peña Nieto was its governor.

The owner of the house also has a company that was a partner in a Chinese-led consortium for a bullet-train contract Mr. Peña Nieto abruptly canceled before his trip, bowing to complaints that the bidding process was not transparent.

“One of the consequences of this scandal is it undermines the legitimacy of the government right at a moment that requires strength and credibility,” said Luis Carlos Ugalde, director of Integralia, a political consulting firm, and the former president of Mexico’s election commission.

But the shocking reports about the students in Iguala, who the authorities said were swept up by the police on orders of a mayor, turned over to a drug gang and killed and incinerated, strike at the frustration and contempt many people hold toward corrupt politicians and the police.

The street protests, largely organized by students and teachers’ unions, may be written off as more of the same, with violent anarchist groups in the mix, but the public venting is spreading to some normally quiet sectors like the members of the Roman Catholic bishops conference and the chief justice of the Supreme Court, both of whom made statements last week calling for dialogue, transparency and concrete actions. “We think it is necessary to move from protests to proposals,” the bishops conference said in a statement.

Alfonso Zárate, a political analyst, said: “It seems encouraging to me that the voices of complaint are multiplying. Corruption was seen for a long time as a lubricant that humanized power. This cynical view allowed it to avoid being seen as truly a cancer. The problem is it has metastasized and strikes all sectors.”

So Mr. Peña Nieto returns home politically wounded and facing an angry citizenry demanding a bold response to corruption and impunity, as well as new warnings from financial analysts that the lawlessness could discourage the kind of investment he has been seeking.

“We are asking, What do we expect from the most senior officials in government?” said Juan Francisco Torres Landa, a leader of Mexico Unido Contra la Delincuencia (Mexicans United Against Crime), an anti-crime civic group that has organized marches in the past but is not doing so now. “We are beyond that,” he said. “We don’t want them to say, ‘O.K., the people are not happy,’ and then go on with their usual business. We want them to move into actual activity with specific results.”

While the political parties have joined together to speed through a host of changes to revamp the economy and educational system, addressing domestic security issues has been more difficult.

The events in Iguala have discredited the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, known as the PRD, which is usually quick to condemn the corruption in Mr. Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party. Both the mayor of Iguala and the disgraced former governor of the state are PRD members.

On the right, the National Action Party has its own burden in dealing with the role of its standard-bearer, Mr. Calderón, in the drug war, as well as its share of corruption among current and former officials.

“The political parties are paralyzed,” said Ernesto López Portillo, director of Insyde, a security think tank in Mexico City, who has long advocated better training and accountability for local and state police forces. “Social frustration has grown, and this is expressed peacefully for the most part, but political power has not transformed.”


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4) More Federal Agencies Are Using Undercover Operations
By and WILLIAM M. ARKIN

WASHINGTON — The federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with officers from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers to ferret out wrongdoing, records and interviews show.

At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity, according to officials familiar with the practice.

At the Internal Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers, accountants drug dealers or yacht buyers and more, court records show.

At the Agriculture Department, more than 100 undercover agents pose as food stamp recipients at thousands of neighborhood stores to spot suspicious vendors and fraud, officials said.

Undercover work, inherently invasive and sometimes dangerous, was once largely the domain of the F.B.I. and a few other law enforcement agencies at the federal level. But outside public view, changes in policies and tactics over the last decade have resulted in undercover teams run by agencies in virtually every corner of the federal government, according to officials, former agents and documents.

Some agency officials say such operations give them a powerful new tool to gather evidence in ways that standard law enforcement methods do not offer, leading to more prosecutions. But the broadened scope of undercover work, which can target specific individuals or categories of possible suspects, also raises concerns about civil liberties abuses and entrapment of unwitting targets. It has also resulted in hidden problems, with money gone missing, investigations compromised and agents sometimes left largely on their own for months.

“Done right, undercover work can be a very effective law enforcement method, but it carries serious risks and should only be undertaken with proper training, supervision and oversight,” said Michael German, a former F.B.I. undercover agent who is a fellow at New York University’s law school. “Ultimately it is government deceitfulness and participation in criminal activity, which is only justifiable when it is used to resolve the most serious crimes.”

Some of the expanded undercover operations have resulted from heightened concern about domestic terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But many operations are not linked to terrorism. Instead, they reflect a more aggressive approach to growing criminal activities like identity theft, online solicitation and human trafficking, or a push from Congress to crack down on more traditional crimes.

At convenience stores, for example, undercover agents, sometimes using actual minors as decoys, look for illegal alcohol and cigarette sales, records show. At the Education Department, undercover agents of the Office of Inspector General infiltrate federally funded education programs looking for financial fraud. Medicare investigators sometimes pose as patients to gather evidence against health care providers. Officers at the Small Business Administration, NASA and the Smithsonian do undercover work as well, records show.

Part of the appeal of undercover operations, some officials say, is that they can be an efficient way to make a case.

“We’re getting the information directly from the bad guys — what more could you want?” said Thomas Hunker, a former police chief in Bal Harbour, Fla., whose department worked with federal customs and drug agents on hundreds of undercover money-laundering investigations in recent years.

Mr. Hunker said sending federal and local agents undercover to meet with suspected money launderers “is a more direct approach than getting a tip and going out and doing all the legwork and going into a court mode.”

“We don’t have to go back and interview witnesses and do search warrants and surveillance and all that,” he added.

But the undercover work also led federal auditors to criticize his department for loose record-keeping and financial lapses, and Mr. Hunker was fired last year amid concerns about the operations.

‘A Critical Tool’

Most undercover investigations never become public, but when they do, they can prove controversial. This month, James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., was forced to defend the bureau’s tactics after it was disclosed that an agent had posed as an Associated Press reporter in 2007 in trying to identify the source of bomb threats at a Lacey, Wash., high school. Responding to criticism from news media advocates, Mr. Comey wrote in a letter to The New York Times that “every undercover operation involves ‘deception,’ which has long been a critical tool in fighting crime.”

Just weeks before, the Drug Enforcement Administration stoked controversy after disclosures that an undercover agent had created a fake Facebook page from the photos of a young woman in Watertown, N.Y. — without her knowledge — to lure drug suspects.

And in what became a major political scandal for the Obama administration, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed guns to slip into Mexico in 2011 in an operation known as Fast and Furious that involved undercover operations.

In response to that episode, the Justice Department issued new guidelines to prosecutors last year designed to tighten oversight of undercover operations and other “sensitive” investigative techniques, officials said. Before prosecutors approve such tactics, the previously undisclosed guidelines require that they consider whether an operation identifies a “clearly defined” objective, whether it is truly necessary, whether it targets “significant criminal actors or entities,” and other factors, the officials said.

Peter Carr, a department spokesman, said that undercover operations are necessary in investigating crime but that agents and prosecutors must follow safeguards. “We encourage these operations even though they may involve some degree of risk,” he said.

Those guidelines apply only to the law enforcement agencies overseen by the Justice Department. Within the Treasury Department, undercover agents at the I.R.S., for example, appear to have far more latitude than do those at many other agencies. I.R.S. rules say that, with prior approval, “an undercover employee or cooperating private individual may pose as an attorney, physician, clergyman

An I.R.S. spokesman acknowledged that undercover investigators are allowed to pose in such roles with approval from senior officials. But the agency said in a statement that senior officials “are not aware of any investigations where special agents have ever posed as attorneys, physicians, members of the clergy or members of the press specifically to gain information from a privileged relationship.”

The agency declined to say whether I.R.S. undercover agents have posed in these roles in an effort to get information that was not considered “privileged,” meaning the type of confidential information someone shares with a lawyer or doctor.

José Marrero, a former I.R.S. supervisor in Miami, said he knew of situations in which tax investigators needed to assume the identity of doctors to gain the trust of a medical professional and develop evidence that is tightly held.

“It’s very rare that you do that, but it does happen,” Mr. Marrero, who has a consulting firm in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and continues to work with federal agents on undercover investigations, said in an interview. “These are very sensitive jobs, and they’re scrutinized more closely than others.”

Oversight, though, can be minimal. A special committee meant to oversee undercover investigations at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, for instance, did not meet in nearly seven years, according to the Justice Department’s inspector general. That inquiry found that more than $127 million worth of cigarettes purchased by the bureau disappeared in a series of undercover investigations that were aimed at tracing the black-market smuggling of cigarettes.

In one investigation, the bureau paid an undercover informant from the tobacco industry nearly $5 million in “business expenses” for his help in the case. (The agency gained new authority in 2004 allowing it to take money seized in undercover investigations and “churn” it back into future operations, a source of millions in revenue.)

Financial oversight was found lacking in the I.R.S.’s undercover operations as well. Detailed reviews of the money spent in some of its undercover operations took as long as four and a half years to complete, according to a 2012 review by the Treasury Department’s inspector general.

Wires Crossed

Across the federal government, undercover work has become common enough that undercover agents sometimes find themselves investigating a supposed criminal who turns out to be someone from a different agency, law enforcement officials said. In a few situations, agents have even drawn their weapons on each other before realizing that both worked for the federal government.“There are all sorts of stories about undercover operations gone bad,” Jeff Silk, a longtime undercover agent and supervisor at the Drug Enforcement Administration, said in an interview. “People are always tripping and falling over each other’s cases.”

Mr. Silk, who retired this year, cited a case that he supervised in which the D.E.A. was wiretapping suspects in a drug ring in Atlanta, only to discover that undercover agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were trying to infiltrate the same ring. The F.B.I. and the New York Police Department were involved in the case as well.

To avoid such problems, officials said, they have tightened “deconfliction” policies, which are designed to alert agencies about one another’s undercover operations. But problems have persisted, the officials said.

It is impossible to tell how effective the government’s operations are or evaluate whether the benefits outweigh the costs, since little information about them is publicly disclosed. Most federal agencies declined to discuss the number of undercover agents they employed or the types of investigations they handled. The numbers are considered confidential and are not listed in public budget documents, and even Justice Department officials say they are uncertain how many agents work undercover.

But current and former law enforcement officials said the number of federal agents doing such work appeared to total well into the thousands, with many agencies beefing up their ranks in recent years, or starting new undercover units. An intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the agency alone spent $100 million annually on its undercover operations. With large numbers of undercover agents at the F.B.I. and elsewhere, the costs could reach hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

In a sampling of such workers, an analysis of publicly available résumés showed that since 2001 more than 1,100 current or former federal employees across 40 agencies listed undercover work inside the United States as part of their duties. More than half of all the work they described is in pursuit of the illicit drug trade. Money laundering, gangs and organized crime investigations make up the second-largest group of operations.

Significant growth in undercover work involves online activity, with agents taking to the Internet, posing as teenage girls to catch predators or intercepting emails and other messages, the documents noted. The F.B.I., Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon all have training programs for online undercover operations.

Defendants who are prosecuted in undercover investigations often raise a defense of “entrapment,” asserting that agents essentially lured them into a criminal act, whether it is buying drugs from an undercover agent or providing fraudulent government services.

But the entrapment defense rarely succeeds in court.

In terrorism cases — the area in which the F.B.I. has used undercover stings most aggressively — prosecutors have a perfect record in defeating claims of entrapment. “I challenge you to find one of those cases in which the defendant has been acquitted asserting that defense,” Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, said at an appearance this year.

The Times analysis showed that the military and its investigative agencies have almost as many undercover agents working inside the United States as does the F.B.I. While most of them are involved in internal policing of service members and defense contractors, a growing number are focused, in part, on the general public as part of joint federal task forces that combine military, intelligence and law enforcement specialists.

At the Supreme Court, all of the court’s more than 150 police officers are trained in undercover tactics, according to a federal law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity because it involved internal security measures. At large protests over issues like abortion, small teams of undercover officers mill about — usually behind the crowd — to look for potential disturbances.

The agents, often youthful looking, will typically “dress down” and wear backpacks to blend inconspicuously into the crowd, the official said.

At one recent protest, an undercover agent — rather than a uniformed officer — went into the center of a crowd of protesters to check out a report of a suspicious bag before determining there was no threat, the official said. The use of undercover officers is seen as a more effective way of monitoring large crowds.

A Supreme Court spokesman, citing a policy of not discussing security practices, declined to talk about the use of undercover officers. Mr. German, the former F.B.I. undercover agent, said he was troubled to learn that the Supreme Court routinely used undercover officers to pose as demonstrators and monitor large protests.

“There is a danger to democracy,” he said, “in having police infiltrate protests when there isn’t a reasonable basis to suspect criminality.”

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.

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5) Cold Numbers on G.M. Crisis: A Peek Inside
By HILARY STOUT

WASHINGTON — If this Monday is like almost every other one this fall, the death toll from General Motors’ defective ignition switch will rise.

Inside a hushed suite of law offices here, 500 miles away from the automaker’s Detroit headquarters, the victim-compensation team led by Kenneth R. Feinberg will post its weekly update of the number of death and injury claims it has found to be eligible for payment by the automaker. G.M. is Mr. Feinberg’s client, paying him for his work, and weighing in behind the scenes on dozens of cases. But Mr. Feinberg has already identified well more than twice as many deaths from the defective switch than the company did — 32 instead of 13 — and is on pace to pinpoint many more.The review process is confidential, but recently, Mr. Feinberg and his deputy, Camille Biros, agreed to provide The New York Times with a glimpse of how they evaluate claims. They answered questions, allowed a reporter into the windowless conference room of Mr. Feinberg’s law offices where they make the final decisions and showed a handful of claims, with names and additional details concealed to protect claimants’ identities.

G.M. declined to make anyone available for interviews but agreed to answer questions about the same process in writing.

The program stipulates that the company cannot overrule Mr. Feinberg but it is entitled to be heard. Interviews show that during the review stages over the last three months, G.M. has participated in conference calls with Mr. Feinberg’s team, submitted documents and presented its own engineers’ analysis of certain cases.

But rarely, say Mr. Feinberg and G.M., has the automaker’s feedback changed Mr. Feinberg’s mind.

“Ken Feinberg ultimately decides who is eligible and we support his determinations,” G.M. said.

Mr. Feinberg said the company has never questioned the amount of an award, many of which are in the millions of dollars. “It has nothing to do with dollars,” he said. “G.M.’s focus is exclusively eligibility.”

His last experience developing a victim compensation plan for a corporate client — BP after the 2010 Gulf oil spill — was fraught. The company complained that he was awarding too much money to too many businesses claiming economic loss, even as business owners and plaintiffs’ lawyers said he was too slow and not generous enough.

No such public uproar has surrounded the G.M. effort. But G.M. keeps close tabs on the claims coming to Mr. Feinberg. Every name and vehicle identification number is submitted to the company as it arrives.

So far, G.M. has “asked to talk to us” about 72 cases, Ms. Biros said. “They give us whatever information they want us to hear,” she said.

Mr. Feinberg’s reputation as the country’s most renowned victim compensation expert — a man who has been called on to devise programs in disasters like the Virginia Tech shootings, the World Trade Center attacks and the Boston Marathon bombings — has been valuable to G.M.’s effort to restore public trust as it faces multiple investigations and mounting lawsuits over its long delay in addressing the safety issue and recalling the cars with the defective switch.

But his determinations have wrested control of the death count from the company and have effectively become the official record of the human toll. Week after week, G.M. has been rendered a bystander as the number of death claims accepted by the Feinberg program edges up.

The automaker has already made its first payments to families under the program, though it has not publicly announced it.

Ms. Biros said the discussion with the company usually takes place during a conference call, with engineers who are familiar with the cases and other administrative employees. One may be a lawyer, she said, but usually the engineers dominate. Often documents are submitted, including correspondence from customer service files or records from reviews of claims filed against the company. Sometimes, the engineers provide their own analysis of so-called E.D.R. (commonly referred to as black box) data or circumstances of the crash.

“We listen and sometimes, we pick up a bit of information that we didn’t previously know,” she said. “But I would say it rarely changes our determination if we’ve already made one on the claim.”

G.M. explained: “We provide the documentation G.M. has, if any, on claims previously filed with G.M., namely information provided to G.M. by the claimant, to help ensure Ken Feinberg has all of the information available to assist with his determination.”

Ms. Barra, the chief executive, “receives regular updates on the program and had initial communication with Mr. Feinberg before the program began,” G.M. said.

The program never announces when it makes payment offers or how much those offers are. But when asked, Mr. Feinberg and Ms. Biros said they had made 40 official offers so far. Twenty-eight families have accepted, thus waiving their right to sue G.M. No one has yet declined. G.M. has already sent checks to 15 families, a company spokesman said.

Mr. Feinberg’s formula for deaths starts at $1 million and can run into several million after adding a lifetime’s projected lost earnings and $300,000 each for surviving dependents and spouse. Payments to cover life-care plans for certain catastrophic injuries can run into the double-digit millions.

(Neither Mr. Feinberg nor G.M. has disclosed his compensation, saying only that his law firm is being paid, as it was by BP. His work on the funds for the Boston Marathon, 9/11 and other noncorporate clients was done for the public good without charge.)

Mr. Feinberg and Ms. Biros have years of experience putting cold numbers to human tragedy, and in this case, they are giving claimants the benefit of the doubt at every turn. Most claims they have reviewed so far are deficient, but rather than denying them on the spot, they offer more time and guidance in locating acceptable documentation.

Of the 2,036 claims that had been filed to the program as of last week, 1,095 had been submitted with no documentation — just names, vehicle identification numbers and basic information. Many of those were filed in bulk by a handful of lawyers representing large numbers of plaintiffs and Mr. Feinberg said he suspected the lawyers were simply trying to get in the queue.

Mr. Feinberg acknowledges that his threshold of proof is more lenient than that used by G.M. in determining what accidents are connected to the defect.

“It is, for all intents and purposes, circumstantial evidence,” he said. “May we infer the ignition switch failure as the proximate cause of the accident? It is right out of Torts 1 in law school.”

The faulty switch can cause a moving car to suddenly turn off, making it difficult to control and deactivating the airbag system. While G.M. relied on hard data from black boxes retrieved from the wrecked vehicles in making its estimate of 13 victims, Mr. Feinberg said that in many cases, it was impossible to find such definitive proof because the accidents happened so long ago. The cars, and the black boxes, are long gone.

And so they will accept a wide net for evidence that indicates airbags did not deploy or the car suddenly stalled, including police reports, photographs, insurance claims, contemporaneous witness accounts, hospital records and warranty and maintenance records that show similar problems in the past.

Asked whether it thought the program should use stricter criteria, G.M. replied: “We support the protocol developed by Mr. Feinberg.”

In one claim his team recently reviewed, photographs from the accident scene showed the twisted, charred metal of a Saturn Ion. An enlarged detail provided a critical piece of evidence: the key in the ignition was nearly vertical, indicating that the vehicle’s power had shifted off before the crash. The victim suffered permanent brain damage.

“ELIGIBLE,” read the cover of the spiral-bound claim in bright green letters.

One death claim that The Times viewed was denied because a photo indicated that side airbags had gone off even though the police report said there was no frontal deployment. If the power had cut out, the side airbags would not have been able to deploy, the team concluded.

“INELIGIBLE” was written in bright red letters.

Final determinations are made in the fourth stage of review, during a grueling four- or five-hour meeting around an oval conference table over what Ms. Biros calls a “massive spreadsheet.” Economists and statisticians are available by phone, for calculating awards, and two other lawyers from the firm are in the room.

Slides of mangled cars flash on a screen and discussions can be long, precise and serious.

G.M. is not involved.

John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.


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6) Another Widening Gap: The Haves vs. the Have-Mores
By ROBERT FRANK

Philip Rushton has been selling private jets to the global rich for more than three decades. In just about every economic cycle, sales of small jets and big jets tended to move together — rising and falling with financial markets and fortunes of the wealthy.

Now, however, the jet market is splitting in two. Sales of the largest, most expensive private jets — including private jumbo jets — are soaring, with higher prices and long waiting lists. Smaller, cheaper jets, however, are piling up on the nation’s private-jet tarmacs with big discounts and few buyers.

“The real demand is at the very top,” said Mr. Rushton, the president of Aviatrade, a private-jet brokerage and advisory company. “The big guys, the billionaires, have plenty of money, and they’re buying. But the middle and lower end has been much slower to recover from the crisis.”

The wealthy now have a wealth gap of their own, as economic gains become more highly concentrated at the very top. As the top one-hundredth of the 1 percent pulls away from the rest of that group, the superrich are leaving the merely very rich behind. That has created two markets in the upper reaches of the economy: one for the haves and one for the have-mores.

Whether the product is yachts, diamonds, art, wine or even handbags, the strongest growth and biggest profits are now coming from billionaires and nine-figure millionaires, rather than mere millionaires.

“The very wealthy are often the ones pulling the trigger right now, and they have a very big trigger,” said Jim Taylor, a wealth specialist and managing partner of YouGov, the marketing research and survey firm.

Of course, the lesser 1 percenters are still doing just fine. But a closer look at the divergence at the very top rungs of the ladder offers a more detailed view of the drivers of inequality today. And the divide is reshaping the luxury end of the consumer economy.

According to a recent paper by the economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics, almost all of the increase in American inequality over the last 30 years is attributable to the “rise of the share of wealth owned by the 0.1 percent richest families.” And much of that rise is driven by the top 0.01 percent.

The wealth of the top 1 percent grew an average of 3.9 percent a year from 1986 to 2012, though the top one-hundredth of that 1 percent saw its wealth grow about twice as fast. The 16,000 families in that tiptop category — those with fortunes of at least $111 million — have seen their share of national wealth nearly double since 2002, to 11.2 percent.

“Wealth is getting more concentrated in the United States,” the authors wrote. “But this phenomenon largely owes to the spectacular dynamics of fortunes of dozens and hundreds of million dollars, and much less to the growth in fortunes of a few million dollars.”

Dr. Saez and Dr. Zucman wrote that a “snowballing effect” was creating extravagant wealth at the very top. Outsize incomes — fueled in part by stock — are put into savings and investments, which generate more income, which creates even more wealth.

Mr. Rushton, the jet broker, has seen that snowball up close. During the financial crisis in 2009, the market for virtually all private jets collapsed. Yet, in a contrast to earlier recoveries, the demand for new, large-cabin jets has staged a much stronger comeback while the supply of new and used smaller and midsize jets is piling up.

According a jet market report from Citi Private Bank, deliveries of new so-called light jets — the smaller, cheaper models — were down 17 percent last year from 2012 and 67 percent from their 2008 peak. But deliveries of the biggest new private jets jumped 18 percent last year.

Demand for billionaires’ most coveted jet, the $65 million G650 from Gulfstream, is so strong that some G650 owners are now flipping their planes for millions of dollars in profit just months after buying them. Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One auto-racing promoter and billionaire, flipped his for about $72 million last fall — just weeks after he received it.

Sales of personal, V.I.P. jetliners are also strong. Boeing has received several orders from individuals for its 777-300ER (which normally carries 400 passengers) and its even bigger 747-800.

“The really top guys are insulated from fluctuations in the economy,” Mr. Rushton said. “They’ve always got money, and they have even more today.”

For decades, a rising tide lifted all yachts. Now, it is mainly lifting megayachts. Sales and orders of boats longer than 300 feet are at or near a record high, according to brokers and yacht builders. But prices for boats 100 to 150 feet long are down 30 to 50 percent from their peak.

Henk de Vries, chief executive of Feadship, the yacht builder, says the strongest market in yachting today is for boats more than 250 feet long. The company is about to deliver its largest boat — a 330-footer that sells for more than $250 million — and it recently expanded its shipyard to make ever-bigger hulls. (The largest yacht is now the 590-foot Azzam, owned by the president of the United Arab Emirates.)

Jonathan Beckett, the chief executive of Burgess, the yacht broker and advisory company, put it this way: “The folks at the top feel like they’ve come through the crisis intact.” He added, “They’re a fairly confident group, and they’re saying, ‘If I’m going to build a boat, I want to do it right.’ ”

ROBERT FRANK is CNBC wealth editor and the author of “Richistan.”


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7) A Cuban Brain Drain, Courtesy of the U.S.
By

Secretary of State John Kerry and the American ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, have praised the work of Cuban doctors dispatched to treat Ebola patients in West Africa. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently sent an official to a regional meeting the Cuban government convened in Havana to coordinate efforts to fight the disease. In Africa, Cuban doctors are working in American-built facilities. The epidemic has had the unexpected effect of injecting common sense into an unnecessarily poisonous relationship.

And yet, Cuban doctors serving in West Africa today could easily abandon their posts, take a taxi to the nearest American Embassy and apply for a little-known immigration program that has allowed thousands of them to defect. Those who are accepted can be on American soil within weeks, on track to becoming United States citizens.There is much to criticize about Washington’s failed policies toward Cuba and the embargo it has imposed on the island for decades. But the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, which in the last fiscal year enabled 1,278 Cubans to defect while on overseas assignments, a record number, is particularly hard to justify.

It is incongruous for the United States to value the contributions of Cuban doctors who are sent by their government to assist in international crises like the 2010 Haiti earthquake while working to subvert that government by making defection so easy.

American immigration policy should give priority to the world’s neediest refugees and persecuted people. It should not be used to exacerbate the brain drain of an adversarial nation at a time when improved relations between the two countries are a worthwhile, realistic goal.

The program was introduced through executive authority in August 2006, when Emilio González, a hard-line Cuban exile, was at the helm of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. Mr. González described the labor of Cuban doctors abroad as “state-sponsored human trafficking.” At the time, the Bush administration was trying to cripple the Cuban government. Easily enabling medical personnel posted abroad to defect represented an opportunity to strike at the core of the island’s primary diplomatic tool, while embarrassing the Castro regime.

Cuba has been using its medical corps as the nation’s main source of revenue and soft power for many years. The country has one of the highest numbers of doctors per capita in the world and offers medical scholarships to hundreds of disadvantaged international students each year, and some have been from the United States. According to Cuban government figures, more than 440,000 of the island’s 11 million citizens are employed in the health sector.

Havana gets subsidized oil from Venezuela and money from several other countries in exchange for medical services. This year, according to the state-run newspaper Granma, the government expects to make $8.2 billion from its medical workers overseas. The vast majority, just under 46,000, are posted in Latin America and the Caribbean. A few thousand are in 32 African countries.

Medical professionals, like most Cubans, earn meager wages. Earlier this year, the government raised the salaries of medical workers. Doctors now earn about $60 per month, while nurses make nearly $40. Overseas postings allow these health care workers to earn significantly more. Doctors in Brazil, for example, are making about $1,200 per month.

The 256 Cuban medical professionals treating Ebola patients in West Africa are getting daily stipends of roughly $240 from the World Health Organization. José Luis Di Fabio, the head of the W.H.O. in Havana, said he was confident the doctors and nurses dispatched to Africa have gone on their own volition. “It was voluntary,” Mr. Di Fabio, an Uruguayan whose organization has overseen their deployment, said in an interview. “Some backtracked at the last minute and there was no problem.”Some doctors who have defected say they felt the overseas tours had an implicit element of coercion and have complained that the government pockets the bulk of the money it gets for their services. But the State Department says in its latest report on human trafficking that reported coercion of Cuban medical personnel does “not appear to reflect a uniform government policy.” Even so, the Cuban government would be wise to compensate medical personnel more generously if their work overseas is to remain the island’s economic bedrock.

Last year, the Cuban government liberalized its travel policies, allowing most citizens, including dissidents, to leave the country freely. Doctors, who in the past faced stricter travel restrictions than ordinary Cubans, no longer do. Some 20,000 Cubans are allowed to immigrate to the United States yearly. In addition, those who manage to arrive here in rafts or through border crossing points are automatically authorized to stay.

The Cuban government has long regarded the medical defection program as a symbol of American duplicity. It undermines Cuba’s ability to respond to humanitarian crises and does nothing to make the government in Havana more open or democratic. As long as this incoherent policy is in place, establishing a healthier relationship between the two nations will be harder.

Many medical professionals, like a growing number of Cubans, will continue to want to move to the United States in search of new opportunities, and they have every right to do so. But inviting them to defect while on overseas tours is going too far.


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8) In Ferguson, Tactics Set for Grand Jury Decision in Michael Brown Case
By , and

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/us/groups-in-ferguson-prepare-for-grand-jury-decision.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth&region=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below

FERGUSON, Mo. — Several dozen people gathered in a dim church basement here on Thursday night to share plans for what to do if a grand jury chooses not to indict the white police officer who shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth, three months ago. Among their ideas was to descend in large numbers on the nearby county seat of Clayton at 7 a.m. on the day after the grand jury’s announcement to snarl business.

A day earlier, a different group, chanting “no justice, no profit,” met in St. Louis to announce it will boycott the region’s retailers during the Thanksgiving shopping period as a response to Mr. Brown’s death.

Since August, a disparate array of demonstrators — some from longstanding organizations, others from new groups with names like Hands Up United and Lost Voices — has been drawn here to protest not just the shooting of Mr. Brown, but also the broader issues of racial profiling and police conduct.

Now, with the grand jury’s decision expected in the coming days, the groups are preparing with intricate precision to protest the no-indictment vote most consider inevitable. Organizers are outlining “rules of engagement” for dealing with the police, circulating long lists of equipment, including bandages and shatterproof goggles, and establishing “safe spaces” where protesters can escape the cold — or the tear gas.

Yet the most important part of the planning may also be the hardest: how to prevent demonstrations from turning violent. Organizers say they want their efforts here to blossom into a lasting, national movement. So they say they hope for the protests to be forceful, loud and unrelenting, but without the looting or arson that could undermine their message. But they also know that some among the ranks may be more volatile and harder to control.

“We’ve come to the conclusion that we really don’t want violence,” said one organizer with Lost Voices, who goes by the name Bud Cuzz. “We want to fix this. We still want to fight to make the laws change. We still want to raise awareness. But we don’t want the city to turn upside down.”

Montague Simmons, a leader of the Organization for Black Struggle, said there was a growing circle of demonstrators with “a clear message about what we are about and what kind of behavior we are looking for.” Yet beyond their carefully orchestrated plans for a series of shows of protest and civil disobedience, leaders here acknowledge that there are disagreements about what form of response is fitting and whether militant acts might spill over into violence.

At least one group has said on Twitter that it was offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of the officer, Darren Wilson, and, at another point, that it was “restocking on 7.62 & 9 mm ammo.” Law enforcement authorities said they would not discuss individual groups, but that they were “constantly looking,” at several groups, according to Brian Schellman of the St. Louis County Police, “trying to separate the rhetoric from the actual threats.”

Immediately after Mr. Brown’s death on Aug. 9, protests began. For days, people marched and chanted along West Florissant Avenue, not far from where the shooting took place and, for brief periods, the protests grew violent. Stores were looted, and the police said demonstrators threw gasoline bombs and tried to set fires. The police used tear gas and rubber bullets. Protesters said the police response was an overreaction to just a few in the otherwise peaceful crowd.

Though the confrontations quieted, the demonstrations have continued nearly nightly since. About 50 organizations, including Mr. Simmons’s, have joined forces in a “Don’t Shoot Coalition,” and the level of planning is intense.

In dozens of training meetings like the one held at the church here on Thursday, demonstrators have been given lists of items to keep at the ready for when a decision is announced: gloves, maps, protest team names and phone numbers, medical supplies and a “jail support number,” in case of arrest, to be written in permanent marker on a protester’s arm. Leaders have shared text alert numbers to keep in constant contact.

They have announced safe spaces in area churches where leaders say protesters can warm up and stay clear of the police, as well as “hot spots,” locations around Ferguson where demonstrations seem likely. In another indication of the level of planning going on, some leaders say they intend to carry out their acts of protest even if the grand jury brings charges against Officer Wilson to show that the issues raised by this case reach beyond a single shooting. One more sign of the elaborate organizing: the group Hands Up United has produced its own polished video.

And they have proposed 19 “rules of engagement” with law enforcement authorities, including tolerance for “more minor lawbreaking” (like thrown water bottles) and 48 hours’ notice for the protesters before a grand jury decision comes in. Some of the rules have been agreed to during talks with law enforcement authorities, leaders said, but others have been rejected.

At the meeting here, Derek Laney, an organizer for a group called Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, drew a fine line on the question of how far to go. He said the protesters wanted to be peaceful, but they also wanted to rouse the community.

Mr. Laney said: “We want to appear strong and forceful because we believe in what we’re pursuing. But we also definitely want everyone to know we’re committed to nonviolence. We want to disrupt. We want to make the comfortable uncomfortable.”

Organizers declined to provide details of their new plans, but they pointed to the “Weekend of Resistance” in October as a model. The acts of civil disobedience throughout the region that weekend included protesters stepping into a police line to be arrested outside the Ferguson police station and unfurling banners inside St. Louis City Hall. In another hint at what may be ahead, protesters on Sunday held a “die-in” that stopped traffic on a local street while they lay in the snowy road as their bodies were outlined in chalk.

Protest leaders here say there have been conflicts, at times, over leadership, tactics and even over individuals. The St. Louis County Police say they are still investigating a report by a university student who says he was beaten after a strategy meeting last week and questions about whether he was trying to broadcast the events. Some protest leaders say he was not harmed.

But leaders say that is the nature of a movement that has taken place, in part, on social media and that does not match an earlier-era protest structure where a single, outspoken leader might have led the way. “This is not your momma’s civil rights movement,” said Ashley Yates, a leader of Millennial Activists United. “This is a movement where you have several different voices, different people. The person in charge is really — the people. But the message from everyone is the same: Stop killing us.”

At times, there has been a split between national civil rights leaders and the younger leaders here, who see their efforts as more immediate, less passive than an older generation’s. But some here said relations have improved in recent weeks.

Some of the national leaders met with President Obama on Nov. 5 for a gathering that included a conversation about Ferguson.

According to the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has appeared frequently in St. Louis with the Brown family and delivered a speech at Mr. Brown’s funeral, Mr. Obama “was concerned about Ferguson staying on course in terms of pursuing what it was that he knew we were advocating. He said he hopes that we’re doing all we can to keep peace.”

Protest leaders said wholesale change was ultimately what they were demanding, though not all agreed on what that meant. Some called for the removal of the Ferguson police chief or the entire department. Others said they want the police to wear cameras; civilian review boards for all police shootings; or a requirement that ethnic and racial makeup of police departments match the communities they serve.

“It must be changing how police and citizens relate to one another,” said Michael T. McPhearson, the co-chairman of the Don’t Shoot Coalition. “We’re calling for police accountability, police transparency, changing how the police do their work. If there’s an indictment or if there’s not an indictment, we still have that work to do.”

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9) How Medical Care Is Being Corrupted
By PAMELA HARTZBAND and JEROME GROOPMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/how-medical-care-is-being-corrupted.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

WHEN we are patients, we want our doctors to make recommendations that are in our best interests as individuals. As physicians, we strive to do the same for our patients.

But financial forces largely hidden from the public are beginning to corrupt care and undermine the bond of trust between doctors and patients. Insurers, hospital networks and regulatory groups have put in place both rewards and punishments that can powerfully influence your doctor’s decisions.

Contracts for medical care that incorporate “pay for performance” direct physicians to meet strict metrics for testing and treatment. These metrics are population-based and generic, and do not take into account the individual characteristics and preferences of the patient or differing expert opinions on optimal practice.

For example, doctors are rewarded for keeping their patients’ cholesterol and blood pressure below certain target levels. For some patients, this is good medicine, but for others the benefits may not outweigh the risks. Treatment with drugs such as statins can cause significant side effects, including muscle pain and increased risk of diabetes. Blood-pressure therapy to meet an imposed target may lead to increased falls and fractures in older patients.

Physicians who meet their designated targets are not only rewarded with a bonus from the insurer but are also given high ratings on insurer websites. Physicians who deviate from such metrics are financially penalized through lower payments and are publicly shamed, listed on insurer websites in a lower tier. Further, their patients may be required to pay higher co-payments.

These measures are clearly designed to coerce physicians to comply with the metrics. Thus doctors may feel pressured to withhold treatment that they feel is required or feel forced to recommend treatment whose risks may outweigh benefits.

It is not just treatment targets but also the particular medications to be used that are now often dictated by insurers. Commonly this is done by assigning a larger co-payment to certain drugs, a negative incentive for patients to choose higher-cost medications. But now some insurers are offering a positive financial incentive directly to physicians to use specific medications. For example, WellPoint, one of the largest private payers for health care, recently outlined designated treatment pathways for cancer and announced that it would pay physicians an incentive of $350 per month per patient treated on the designated pathway.

This has raised concern in the oncology community because there is considerable debate among experts about what is optimal. Dr. Margaret A. Tempero of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network observed that every day oncologists saw patients for whom deviation from treatment guidelines made sense: “Will oncologists be reluctant to make these decisions because of an adverse effects on payments?” Further, some health care networks limit the ability of a patient to get a second opinion by going outside the network. The patient is financially penalized with large co-payments or no coverage at all. Additionally, the physician who refers the patient out of network risks censure from the network administration.

When a patient asks “Is this treatment right for me?” the doctor faces a potential moral dilemma. How should he answer if the response is to his personal detriment? Some health policy experts suggest that there is no moral dilemma. They argue that it is obsolete for the doctor to approach each patient strictly as an individual; medical decisions should be made on the basis of what is best for the population as a whole.We fear this approach can dangerously lead to “moral licensing” — the physician is able to rationalize forcing or withholding treatment, regardless of clinical judgment or patient preference, as acceptable for the good of the population.

Medicine has been appropriately criticized for its past paternalism, where doctors imposed their views on the patient. In recent years, however, the balance of power has shifted away from the physician to the patient, in large part because of access to clinical information on the web.

In truth, the power belongs to the insurers and regulators that control payment. There is now a new paternalism, largely invisible to the public, diminishing the autonomy of both doctor and patient.

In 2010, Congress passed the Physician Payments Sunshine Act to address potential conflicts of interest by making physician financial ties to pharmaceutical and device companies public on a federal website. We propose a similar public website to reveal the hidden coercive forces that may specify treatments and limit choices through pressures on the doctor.

Medical care is not just another marketplace commodity. Physicians should never have an incentive to override the best interests of their patients.

Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman are physicians on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and co-authors of “Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What is Right for You.”
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10) Israel Demolishes Family Home of Palestinian Driver Who Killed 2 Pedestrians
By

JERUSALEM — Moving ahead with a revival of a controversial policy suspended a decade ago, Israeli security forces early Wednesday demolished the East Jerusalem family home of a Palestinian man who plowed his car into pedestrians last month, killing a baby and a young woman.

Inas al-Shaloudy, the mother of the driver, Abdel Rahman al-Shaloudy, said border police officers arrived “in large numbers” on Wednesday at 1 a.m. and evacuated about 50 people from her five-story building and nearby structures. Huddled with the group in a protest tent, she said she heard an explosion at 4 a.m. and returned an hour later to find her apartment filled with broken glass, its inner walls destroyed, and those of her neighbors cracked.

“This is not only collective punishment, it is a call for a violent reaction,” said Ms. Shaloudy, 43, who teaches English.

Israel sealed or destroyed the homes this summer of four other Palestinians who killed Jews, and did so twice in 2009, after halting the widespread practice in 2005 when a commission found that it rarely worked as a deterrent and instead inflamed hostility.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed to renew the policy as part of a wider crackdown following a wave of deadly attacks over the last month, the latest killing four worshipers and a police officer at a Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday.

“You need a means of deterrence against the next suicide attacker,” Mr. Netanyahu said at a televised news conference Tuesday night. “When he knows that his house, the house in which his family lives, will be demolished, this will have an impact.”

Human rights groups have long condemned such demolitions as collective punishment banned by international law. They and others argue that it is also ineffective, and complain that similar measures are not taken against Jewish extremists like those now on trial for kidnapping and killing a 16-year-old Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem in July.

“Such acts may also awaken and invoke a desire to revenge such acts and not to stay passive in the wake of such penalizing steps,” Alon Evyatar, a former lieutenant colonel in the Israeli Army, warned in a radio interview. “Israel should also prepare for the possibility of someone who will rebuild these demolished homes for those families, and they will end up with larger and fancier homes instead of deterrence.”

Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot , adopted a sardonic tone, writing on Wednesday that “house demolitions photograph well.” He said the government was ordering the demolitions because “it feels that it must show the public that it is punishing the other side, otherwise it will be said that it is either left-wing or weak.”

The attack by Mr. Shaloudy on Oct. 22 at a light-rail station in Jerusalem was the first of five by Palestinians in the past month that have claimed a total of 11 lives and have been attributed largely to a struggle over the holy site in the Old City that Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims the Noble Sanctuary. Chaya Zissel Braun, who was 3 months old, died immediately after being knocked from her stroller by the car while her parents watched in horror, and Karen Mosquera, 22, an immigrant from Ecuador, died of her wounds days later.

Mr. Shaloudy, who relatives said was suffering from psychological problems and had served two stints in Israeli prisons since 2012 for throwing stones, was shot dead as he tried to flee the scene. His mother said she had emptied furniture from the home in the Silwan neighborhood near the Old City after being notified of the impending demolition last Friday at 2:30 p.m. She said she planned to move in with relatives elsewhere in Jerusalem.

“Netanyahu can’t stop these operations by demolishing homes, he is pouring fuel on the fire,” said Talaat al-Shaloudy, 42, an uncle who works as a driver. “As long as we aren’t safe, they won’t be safe.”

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group that opposes demolition and has tracked its use closely for years, said the Shaloudy family was one of six — four in East Jerusalem and two in the West Bank — that had been notified recently of Israel’s plans to knock down their homes. The other homes have not yet been demolished.

After receiving a demolition order, families have 48 hours to object to the military, then another 48 hours to appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court, but Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B’Tselem, said the court “has always, every single time, approved the use of this policy.”

During the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, from 2000-2005, Israel knocked down about 675 apartments, leaving more than 4,000 people homeless, according to B’Tselem. The group has counted a total of nearly 2,500 Palestinian homes destroyed as punishment since Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war.

The Geneva Conventions prohibit an occupying power from destroying property “except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.” Israel does not consider East Jerusalem, which it captured in 1967 and later annexed, to be occupied, but most of the world does. Israeli officials have also argued that the term “military operations” includes “military response.”

“Our position is it’s illegal and it’s also immoral,” Ms. Michaeli of B’Tselem said in an interview. “It’s a deliberate policy for harming the innocent. The people responsible for these attacks are either dead or facing trial.”

Noting that similar actions were not taken against the family of Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli physician who killed 29 Muslim worshipers in a 1994 massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, or against those suspected in this summer’s killing of the East Jerusalem teenager, she added: “It’s obviously political.”

Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev, said Jewish extremists were not treated similarly because Israeli society does not celebrate such attacks in the way that Palestinians often do.

“There is a culture of support within Palestinian society — these people are put up on a pedestal, they become martyrs, they become heroes, they are praised by the Palestinian leadership, their families are embraced, there are also very practical benefits for the family vis-à-vis financial support,” Mr. Regev said. “In many ways, an action against the house is evening of the playing field. One is saying that by committing a heinous crime, in this case by murdering a baby, there will be a price to be paid.”

“This is a step that is not taken lightly,” he added. “But after weighing all the different aspects and after going through the correct legal processes, we believe, and the security services are convinced, that this can provide a deterrence that will save lives. Obviously it won’t save the baby, but it could save future lives.”

Said Ghazali contributed reporting.


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11) Wife of Mexican President to Sell Mansion
By ELISABETH MALKIN

MEXICO CITY — The wife of President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico said on Tuesday that she would give up her opulent new home in one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods.

A growing scandal over the home and its financing is threatening to further undermine Mr. Peña Nieto, who is already under fire over the disappearance of 43 students at a rural college in September.

In a videotaped statement, Mexico’s first lady, Angélica Rivera, a former soap opera star, described how she had financed the purchase of the home. She said she earned $10 million in 2010, the year her contract with the Mexican television network Televisa ended, more than twice what she agreed to pay for the property two years later.

“I don’t want this to continue to be a pretext to offend and defame my family,” Ms. Rivera said in the statement, which was first broadcast on Televisa’s nightly newscast. “Today, I am here to defend my integrity, that of my children and of my husband.”

But Ms. Rivera failed to address a possible conflict of interest that is at the center of the criticism. She signed a contract to buy the 15,000-square-foot house from a subsidiary of a company that won multimillion-dollar contracts from the State of Mexico, the populous state surrounding the capital, while Mr. Peña Nieto was its governor.

Another subsidiary of the company, Grupo Higa, was part of a Chinese-led consortium that won an uncontested bid this month to build a $3.7 billion high-speed rail line. But Mr. Peña Nieto abruptly canceled the contract on Nov. 6, three days after the project was announced, after opposition politicians raised questions about the deal.

Ms. Rivera, her voice rich with indignation, said that she had met Grupo Higa’s owner, Juan Armando Hinojosa, “just as I have met many other business people, professionals, artists and other people.”

By revealing her income and making public the contract, Ms. Rivera sought to quell suspicions that she had benefited from a favorable deal with a government contractor.

Ms. Rivera said that Mr. Hinojosa’s company first acquired the property in 2009 and began construction in 2010 according to her specifications. By then she was engaged to Mr. Peña Nieto.

She signed a purchase agreement in January 2012, after the couple had married and when Mr. Peña Nieto was running for president. Under the contract, Ms. Rivera agreed to buy the house for about $4 million over eight years, at 9 percent interest. She has paid almost 30 percent of the price and said she would sell her rights to the purchase.

The existence of the house, which was first reported on Nov. 9 by Carmen Aristegui, a prominent journalist, came as Mr. Peña Nieto faces a crisis over the disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers’ college.

According to the government’s investigation, the students were arrested by police officers in the town of Iguala, in the southwestern state of Guerrero, and handed over to the local drug gang on the orders of the mayor, José Luis Abarca, on the night of Sept. 26.

The government says the mayor and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, who have both since been arrested, worked closely with the local gang, Guerreros Unidos.

Investigators say they believe that the students were killed that night and that their bodies were burned to ashes. But the families of the students have refused to believe the government’s version and daily protests, led by demonstrators bearing pictures of the missing, are a steady reminder of the government’s failure to improve security and its inability to tackle corruption.

Against the backdrop of Iguala, the pictures of Ms. Rivera’s sleek white house, with swimming pool, elevator, and recessed blue, orange and magenta lighting, became an irritant.

Earlier Tuesday, Mr. Peña Nieto defended his wife, promising that she would explain how she had acquired the property.

“I will not allow this issue, this allegation, to place in doubt the confidence that the majority of Mexicans have placed in me,” he said.


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12) In Test for Premier, Italians Rally Against Plan to Relax Labor Rules
By

ROME — In Naples, demonstrators blocked traffic. In Padua, Pisa and Milan, they clashed with the police. Here, they lobbed eggs at government buildings and climbed to the top of the Colosseum to unfurl a protest banner.

While their grievances are many, much of what has propelled Italians into the streets by the tens of thousands in recent weeks is the mere hint of a change to labor laws that, among other things, would make it easier for businesses to get rid of workers.

No matter that the law, known as the Jobs Act, has yet to be fully written, or that many economists consider it inadequate to solving the problems of Italy’s economy, which continues to stumble through recession.

On Tuesday, after weeks of protests that have become an ever-clearer gauge of the obstacles confronting Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, lawmakers were already considering proposals to water down the plan.

“The Jobs Act institutionalizes the continual precariousness we have been living in Italy,” said Cristian Sica, 37, who works on a project-by-project basis for a ministry and joined a sit-in against the plan in front of Parliament last month.

Workers’ rights and protections should be broadened, not curtailed, he said, echoing a common refrain. “We are the precarious generation, in work, but above all in life,” he added.

Mr. Renzi, 39, assumed office in February, pledging to shake up Italy’s sclerotic system and overcome entrenched interests, including in his own center-left Democratic Party and the powerful labor unions that have long been a base of support.

He now faces pressure from various quarters to show he can deliver on his promises of change, not least from his eurozone partners, who are eager to see progress as Mr. Renzi seeks flexibility for Italy on budget limits set by Brussels.

But in a country where the first article of the Constitution declares it a republic “founded on work,” rolling back labor protections is not to be taken lightly. It is particularly telling that many of those opposing Mr. Renzi’s plans are young people.

They are deeply skeptical that the proposed change would in fact open jobs to them — so many other overhaul efforts before it have failed to do so. Instead, they are demanding the same guarantees that their parents have had, something it is not at all clear Italy can still afford.

“All he’s doing is destroying the rights of full-time workers without giving rights to people in precarious job situations,” said Francesco Raparelli, 36, one of the coordinators of a nationwide strike last Friday by thousands of workers who hold temporary contracts.

The prime minister argues that a change toward a looser labor market would benefit young people in particular, by creating jobs and getting Italy’s economy moving again. Nearly 43 percent of those 15 to 24 are unemployed.

He also says it would help solve the problem of what has become a two-tier work force in Italy. Solidly protected full-time workers — mostly older — are all but immovable and are still guaranteed ample pensions and retirement benefits.

Behind them is a wave of mostly younger workers who subsist on temporary, usually low-paid contracts, with few or no benefits.

Mr. Renzi is pushing for more flexible labor rules to make it easier to hire and fire workers, as a way to make entrepreneurs feel safer in taking on more full-time employees.

The current workers’ statute was written in 1970. Even though it was modified in 2012 to make it easier to get rid of employees with full-time contracts in firms with more than 15 people — for example, in the case of economic difficulty — Mr. Renzi argues that it is still too outdated.

“It’s like taking an iPhone and wondering, ‘Where do I put in the phone token?’ ” he told a recent gathering in Florence, in the typically homespun manner that has made him popular with millions of Italians eager for change.

But the debate over labor flexibility has swamped other parts of Mr. Renzi’s plan, which also includes gradual access to severance compensation, job training, simplified contracts and the extension of unemployment benefits to many who currently do not have any.

“At the core of the Jobs Act is the idea of shifting protection from the job to the individual, and protecting the transitions,” said Stefano Sacchi, a political scientist at the University of Milan, who helped draft the Jobs Act and is a consultant for the Labor Ministry.

Critics of the new measures say they would further erode protections without doing much to create new jobs.

“It’s a design, in the face of this crisis, drafted by the real powers — banking and finance — which have decided to cancel the rights of workers and the freedom that were sanctioned by the conquests” of 1970, said Giorgio Cremaschi, a former trade union leader.

Others, including some economists and business leaders, say that making firing easier is “not the right recipe” to spur Italy’s economic recovery. Even business leaders who support Mr. Renzi’s effort say stimulating the economy will require a much more multipronged approach.

That would include reducing labor costs, overhauling a justice system in which lawsuits are mired for years and drastically simplifying bureaucracy for things like permits.

“You have to start from the concept that it has to be feasible to do business here; that’s where the change has to happen,” said Marco Gay, the president of Confindustria, a national business lobby for young entrepreneurs.

“A business can go badly or can succeed, but you have to have the possibility to allow a company to be born,” he said.

Elisabetta Addis, an economics professor at the University of Sassari, said the fight over the labor law had become “more political than economic.” Despite the turmoil on the streets and in Parliament, the effect would probably be negligible.

“The debate over job reintegration will have no effect on the labor market at all,” she said, “So there’s no reason for Renzi to present it as leading to new jobs, nor for the unions to make it a point of honor.”

“People aren’t not hiring because of labor laws, but because there’s no internal or external demand,” she added. “Companies aren’t selling, and if that doesn’t change, it’s going to be difficult for the economy to restart.”

It also remains to be seen how the government would ultimately shape the changes. Until the rules are specified, there is no telling what the law’s effect would be.

“Let’s see how it is turned into law before we assess how it can impact the labor market,” said Stefano Scarpetta, the director for employment, labor and social affairs at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In the meantime, the protests are likely to continue. The Italian General Confederation of Labor, an especially combative union that brought an estimated one million people to a rally in Rome in late October, is now planning a general strike for Dec. 5.


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13) Deal by Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Raises Cash and Some Concern
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About 15 years ago, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation made what was considered a risky foray for a nonprofit organization into the world of business. It began giving money to a small biotechnology company to entice it to develop drugs for the deadly lung disease.

But that funding, a total commitment of $150 million, has now paid off enormously. The foundation is to announce on Wednesday that it will receive $3.3 billion from selling the rights to the royalties to those drugs. That is 20 times the foundation’s budget last year.

The payout is believed to be the largest financial return ever achieved for a charitable organization pursuing treatments for disease and is likely to encourage other patient advocacy groups to seek their own deals with pharmaceutical companies; a growing number are already doing so.

Proponents say it speeds drug development while also providing potential monetary rewards that can pay for even more research.But there is some concern that a profit motive could divert the organizations from their primary mission — helping patients — and create a conflict of interest. For instance, the price of the main drug developed through Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s investment is $300,000 a year.

Critics say that perhaps because a higher price means higher royalty payments, the foundation did not do enough to bring the cost down.

“I would like to see them do more to get the price of this drug down to something that is going to be sustainable,” said Paul M. Quinton, a cystic fibrosis researcher at the University of California campuses in Riverside and San Diego, who has the disease himself. “And I have some concern about the possible appearance of a conflict.”

Robert J. Beall, the chief executive of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, said the organization had expressed concern over the cost of the drug to the manufacturer, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, but had no power to set the price. He said the foundation’s mission had always been to get treatments to patients, and that financial returns would only help.

“This is a transformational day for people with cystic fibrosis and their families,” he said in an interview. “It gives us an amazing opportunity to accelerate the research we’ve already started.”

The foundation’s grants to Vertex and a smaller company it acquired led to the development of Kalydeco, which was approved in 2012. It is the first drug that treats the underlying cause of cystic fibrosis rather than just the symptoms, slowing the rate of decline in lung function. Vertex, which is based in Boston, is testing two other drugs that have also shown promise in clinical trials. Wall Street analysts project that the family of medicines could eventually have sales of several billion dollars a year.

Rather than receiving royalties on sales of those drugs over the next two decades, the foundation decided to cash in now so it could have more money to put into research quickly. So it sold the rights to future royalties to Royalty Pharma, an investment firm that specializes in buying such assets, for a one-time $3.3 billion payment. Royalty will profit if, over time, the royalties amount to more than it paid.

Executives at Royalty Pharma say it is by far the largest payment ever made for pharmaceutical royalties. The next-biggest transactions were worth around $700 million each, including one in which Royalty Pharma acquired half the future royalties owed to Northwestern University for the invention of the pain and epilepsy drug Lyrica.

Pablo Legorreta, chief executive of Royalty Pharma, said, “This will demonstrate to many research organizations that by getting the royalties they can fuel their future investments.”

In the past, disease foundations might have supported only academic research. But many are now following the lead of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in getting involved with companies — an approach often called venture philanthropy.

“If we wanted to get therapies to patients faster, we needed to be partnering with the industry that actually brings those drugs to patients,” said Louis J. DeGennaro, chief executive of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Other organizations pursuing venture philanthropy include JDRF (formerly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation), the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and some groups involved in muscular dystrophy.

Some organizations do not ask for royalties, saying that the return they seek is merely getting a drug to market. But increasingly they are asking for financial returns as well.

Dr. DeGennaro said that, to his knowledge, financial returns for his society and others had so far been modest. “That’s remarkable news,” he said of the payout to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Dr. Michael Boyle, director of the adult cystic fibrosis program at Johns Hopkins University, which receives financing from the foundation, said it made sense that some of the profit from drugs should benefit patients, not only drug companies.“I think it’s going to transform the whole C.F. community,” and lead to better care, he said.

One risk for the foundation is that donors will see less need to give money or to organize fund-raising events. The foundation raises about $130 million a year from donations.

Dr. Beall said much more needed to be done in the fight against cystic fibrosis. Kalydeco works only for a small fraction of patients, those with particular genetic mutations. And it must be taken every day. The foundation’s ultimate goal is a one-time treatment that can cure everyone.

Experts in the disease say the foundation has helped sponsor much of the work that since 1980 has roughly doubled the life expectancy for those with cystic fibrosis to around 40 years. About 30,000 Americans have the inherited disease. The foundation has sponsored academic research and has provided about $400 million to three dozen companies, Dr. Beall said.

The foundation gave its first money in the late 1990s to Aurora Biosciences, a small San Diego company, to see if its technology for screening compounds could find drugs that might work for cystic fibrosis.

Vertex acquired Aurora in 2001 for the screening technology. Cystic fibrosis was not a priority, and Vertex officials have said the program might have been dropped if the foundation had not been paying for it.

Today Vertex counts on cystic fibrosis for its current sales and future prospects. The foundation is entitled to royalties ranging from a single-digit to a low-double-digit percentage of sales of the cystic fibrosis drugs. The $3.3 billion it is getting from Royalty Pharma is in addition to $400 million it has already received from another party, unnamed, for partial royalty rights.

Dr. Beall said the foundation would establish an endowment but that it was too soon to say how much its research spending would increase.

“This was a dramatic example of risk-taking that has paid off in a remarkable way,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, who co-discovered the gene behind cystic fibrosis in 1989 while at the University of Michigan.
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