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The Nine Circles of Hell! – all the news that gives you fits in print – for Thursday, August, 26, 2010, including a bonus story on South Africa’s strike, are:

Unemployment, no credit, force new home sales to 47-year low

Obama’s stealth green agenda hidden in stimulus package

Oil companies get 33 times more Katrina money than New Orleans

Poorest families are biggest losers in latest UK budget

This year’s largest group of executed Mexicans discovered

Jewish-, Muslim-, Pakistani-, Irish-Americans behind terror

Rwanda allegedly tries to cover-up ‘possible genocide’

South African strike could cause ‘total industrial shutdown’

Indian farmers protest latest ‘land grab’ by government

Unemployment, no credit, force new home sales to 47-year low
USA Today
(8/25/10)

Sales of new homes hit 47-year low in July

Sales of newly built homes sank in July to the lowest in four decades amid buyers’ waning confidence and a tepid job market.

Wednesday’s report, a day after one showing that existing-home sales fell far more than expected last month, added to growing evidence of a weakening economy.

New-home sales fell about 12% from June, and about 32% from a year earlier, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 276,000. That was the slowest pace on records going back to 1963, the government reported.

Sales declined in all four regions. The median price also slid 6% from June, to $204,000.

Housing experts say the size of the drop in new-home sales points more to underlying economic weakness than a falloff in demand following the expiration of a federal tax credit in April.

“There is some underlying weakness in the market,” says economist Paul Dales, of Capital Economics. “It’s basically due to a high unemployment rate, low income growth, and tight credit conditions.”

The number of unsold new homes remained flat at 210,000 units, the lowest since September 1968.

Lackluster growth in mortgage applications despite historically low interest rates reflects the decline in housing demand. The Mortgage Bankers Association said Wednesday that mortgage applications rose a seasonally adjusted 4.9% for the week ending Aug. 20, but most of that was driven by refinancings rather than purchase applications. Applications for refinancings showed a 5.7% jump, while applications for new mortgages rose just 0.6%.

Housing demand is now weaker than it has been since the housing downturn began in late 2005, with mortgage applications at 13-year lows, says Patrick Newport, with IHS Global Insight. Much of the drop can be attributed to a shortage of jobs; employment leads to the formation of more households and home buying, he says.

Obama’s stealth green agenda hidden in stimulus package
TIME
(8/26/10)

How the Stimulus Is Changing America

Past This is Hell! guest Michael Grunwald writes …

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus — has been marketed as a jobs bill, and that’s how it’s been judged. The White House says it has saved or created about 3 million jobs, helping avoid a depression and end a recession. Republicans mock it as a Big Government boondoggle that has failed to prevent rampant unemployment despite a massive expansion of the deficit. Liberals complain that it wasn’t massive enough …

Yes, the stimulus has cut taxes for 95% of working Americans, bailed out every state, hustled record amounts of unemployment benefits and other aid to struggling families and funded more than 100,000 projects to upgrade roads, subways, schools, airports, military bases and much more. But in the words of Vice President Joe Biden, Obama’s effusive Recovery Act point man, “Now the fun stuff starts!” The “fun stuff,” about one-sixth of the total cost, is an all-out effort to exploit the crisis to make green energy, green building and green transportation real; launch green manufacturing industries; computerize a pen-and-paper health system; promote data-driven school reforms; and ramp up the research of the future. “This is a chance to do something big, man!” Biden said during a 90-minute interview with TIME.

For starters, the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world’s largest venture-capital fund. It’s pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; energy efficiency; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet …

The stimulus is also stocked with nonenergy game changers, like a tenfold increase in funding to expand access to broadband and an effort to sequence more than 2,300 complete human genomes — when only 34 were sequenced with all previous aid. There’s $8 billion for a high-speed passenger rail network, the boldest federal transportation initiative since the interstate highways. There’s $4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants to promote accountability in public schools, perhaps the most significant federal education initiative ever — it’s already prompted 35 states and the District of Columbia to adopt reforms to qualify for the cash. There’s $20 billion to move health records into the digital age, which should reduce redundant tests, dangerous drug interactions and errors caused by doctors with chicken-scratch handwriting. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius calls that initiative the foundation for Obama’s health care reform and “maybe the single biggest component in improving quality and lowering costs.”

Any of those programs would have been a revolution in its own right …

That was the point. Critics have complained that while the New Deal left behind iconic monuments — courthouses, parks, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Grand Coulee Dam — this New New Deal will leave a mundane legacy of sewage plants, repaved roads, bus repairs and caulked windows. In fact, it will create new icons too: solar arrays, zero-energy border stations, an eco-friendly Coast Guard headquarters, an “advanced synchrotron light source” in a New York lab. But its main legacy will be change. The stimulus passed just a month after Obama’s inauguration, but it may be his signature effort to reshape America — as well as its government …

It takes time to set up new programs, but now money is flowing to deliver high-speed Internet to rural areas, spread successful quit-smoking programs and design the first high-speed rail link from Tampa to Orlando. And deep in the Energy Department’s basement — in a room dubbed the dungeon — a former McKinsey & Co. partner named Matt Rogers has created a government version of Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road, blasting billions of dollars into clean-energy projects through a slew of oversubscribed grant programs. “The idea is to transform the entire energy sector,” Rogers says. “What’s exciting is the way it fits all together.”

The green industrial revolution begins with gee-whiz companies like A123 Systems of Watertown, Mass. Founded in 2001 by MIT nanotechnology geeks who landed a $100,000 federal grant, A123 grew into a global player in the lithium-ion battery market, with 1,800 employees and five factories in China. It has won $249 million to build two plants in Michigan, where it will help supply the first generation of mass-market electric cars. At least four of A123′s suppliers received stimulus money too. The Administration is also financing three of the world’s first electric-car plants, including a $529 million loan to help Fisker Automotive reopen a shuttered General Motors factory in Delaware (Biden’s home state) to build sedans powered by A123 batteries. Another A123 customer, Navistar, got cash to build electric trucks in Indiana. And since electric vehicles need juice, the stimulus will also boost the number of U.S. battery-charging stations by 3,200%.

“Without government, there’s no way we would’ve done this in the U.S.,” A123 chief technology officer Bart Riley told TIME. “But now you’re going to see the industry reach critical mass here.”

The Recovery Act’s clean-energy push is designed not only to reduce our old economy dependence on fossil fuels that broil the planet, blacken the Gulf and strengthen foreign petro-thugs but also to avoid replacing it with a new economy that is just as dependent on foreign countries for technology and manufacturing. Last year, exactly two U.S. factories made advanced batteries for electric vehicles. The stimulus will create 30 new ones, expanding U.S. production capacity from 1% of the global market to 20%, supporting half a million plug-ins and hybrids. The idea is as old as land-grant colleges: to use tax dollars as an engine of innovation. It rejects free-market purism but also the old industrial-policy approach of dumping cash into a few favored firms. Instead, the Recovery Act floods the zone, targeting a variety of energy problems and providing seed money for firms with a variety of potential solutions. The winners must attract private capital to match public dollars — A123 held an IPO to raise the required cash — and after competing for grants, they still must compete in the marketplace. “They won’t all succeed,” Rogers says. “But some will, and they’ll change the world” …

Today, grid-scale storage, solar energy and many other green technologies are too costly to compete without subsidies. That’s why the stimulus launched the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a blue-sky fund inspired by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the incubator for GPS and the M-16 rifle as well as the Internet. Located in an office building a block from the rest of the Energy Department, ARPA-E will finance energy research too risky for private funders, focusing on speculative technologies that might dramatically cut the cost of, say, carbon capture — or not. “We’re taking chances, because that’s how you put a man on the moon,” says director Arun Majumdar, a materials scientist from the University of California, Berkeley. “Our idea is it’s O.K. to fail. You think America’s pioneers never failed?” …

ARPA-E is funding the new pioneers — mad scientists and engineers with ideas for wind turbines based on jet engines, bacteria to convert carbon dioxide into gasoline, and tiny molten-metal batteries to provide cheap high-voltage storage. That last idea is the brainchild of MIT’s Donald Sadoway, who already has a prototype fuel cell the size of a shot glass. The stimulus will help him create a kind of reverse aluminum smelter to make prototypes the size of a hockey puck and a pizza box. The ultimate goal is a commercial scale battery the size of a tractor trailer that could power an entire neighborhood. “We need radical breakthroughs, so we need radical experiments,” Sadoway says. “These projects send chills down the spine of the carbon world. If a few of them work, [Venezuela's Hugo] Chávez and [Iran's Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad are out of power.”

Then again, the easiest way to blow up the energy world would be to stop wasting so much. That’s the final link in the chain, a full-throttle push to make energy efficiency a national norm. The Recovery Act is weatherizing 250,000 homes this year. It gave homeowners rebates for energy-efficient appliances, much as the Cash for Clunkers program subsidized fuel-efficient cars. It’s retrofitting juice-sucking server farms, factories and power plants; financing research into superefficient lighting, windows and machinery; and funneling billions into state and local efficiency efforts …

The stimulus really is starting to change Washington — and not just the buildings. Every contract and lobbying contact is posted at Recovery.gov, with quarterly data detailing where the money went. A Recovery Board was created to scrutinize every dollar, with help from every major agency’s independent watchdog. And Biden has promised state and local officials answers to all stimulus questions within 24 hours. It’s a test-drive for a new approach to government: more transparent, more focused on results than compliance, not just bigger but better. Biden himself always saw the Recovery Act as a test — not only of the new Administration but of federal spending itself. He knew high-profile screwups could be fatal, stoking antigovernment anger about bureaucrats and two-car funerals. So he spends hours checking in, buttering up and banging heads to keep the stimulus on track, harassing Cabinet secretaries, governors and mayors about unspent broadband funds, weatherization delays and fishy projects. He has blocked some 260 skate parks, picnic tables and highway beautifications that flunked his what-would-your-mom-think test. “Imagine they could have proved we wasted a billion dollars,” Biden says. “Gone, man. Gone!”

So far, despite furor over cash it supposedly funneled to contraception (deleted from the bill) and phantom congressional districts (simply typos), the earmark-free Recovery Act has produced surprisingly few scandals. Prosecutors are investigating a few fraud allegations, and critics have found some goofy expenditures, like $51,500 for water-safety-mascot costumes or a $50,000 arts grant to a kinky-film house. But those are minor warts, given that unprecedented scrutiny. Biden knows it’s early — “I ain’t saying mission accomplished!” — but he calls waste and fraud “the dogs that haven’t barked.” (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

The Recovery Act’s deeper reform has been its focus on intense competition for grants instead of everybody-wins formulas, forcing public officials to consider not only whether applicants have submitted the required traffic studies and small-business hiring plans but also whether their projects make sense. Already staffed by top technologists from MIT, Duke and Intel, ARPA-E recruited 4,500 outside experts to winnow 3,700 applications down to 37 first-round grants. “We’ve taken the best and brightest from the tech world and created a venture fund — except we’re looking for returns for the country,” Majumdar says. These change agents didn’t uproot their lives to fill out forms in triplicate and shovel money by formula. They want to reinvent the economy, not just stimulate it. Sadoway, the MIT battery scientist, is tired of reporting how many jobs he’s created in his lab: “If this works, I’ll create a million jobs!” …

Polls suggest the actual contents of the Recovery Act are popular. But the idea of the stimulus itself remains toxic — and probably will as long as the recovery remains tepid. “Today, it’s judged by jobs,” Rogers says of the act. “But in 10 years, it’ll be judged by whether it transformed our economy.”

Oil companies get 33 times more Katrina money than New Orleans
Newsweek
(8/25/10)

No-Go Zone

Standing in a generator-lit French Quarter square 17 days after Hurricane Katrina, President George W. Bush ended his first major prime-time address in the post-catastrophe city with a call for reinvestment in the battered region. Speaking in a dark, mostly empty New Orleans, he described a business-incentive program that would lure people and commerce back to devastated Gulf Opportunity Zones in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Within these GO Zones (also known as disaster areas), subsidies would “create jobs, and loan guarantees for small businesses, including minority-owned enterprises, to get them up and running again,” Bush told an audience still wide-eyed from endless newsreels of poor black people stranded on waterlogged rooftops.

The GO Zone program’s largesse included $323 million in tax credits for affordable-housing construction, significant tax deductions for real-estate investors, and billions in tax-free bonds for private development. Louisiana, which had suffered the most damage, received the lion’s share of the bonds: $7.9 billion out of an available $14.9 billion.

For battered and broke New Orleans, the untaxed borrowing was to be the cash infusion needed to attract developers facing sky-high insurance costs and a risky, uncertain market. “This was the money that was supposed to get people rebuilding our housing, our hotels, our stores,” said Jimmie Thorns, a New Orleans real-estate appraiser who, until 2008, headed the city-appointed board responsible for approving all local bond allocations.

But five years after Congress passed the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act of 2005, more of the tax-free benefits have gone to the state’s powerful oil industry than to development in hard-hit areas. New Orleans has so far received a total of $55 million in bonds shared between eight projects—or less than 1 percent of the more than $5.9 billion issued statewide. None of the bonds issued for New Orleans projects went to development in hard-hit and still-struggling areas like the Lower Ninth Ward.

Instead, the federal largesse has been poured into oil companies operating far from New Orleans. Since Congress’s unanimous approval of the GO Zone Act, Louisiana officials have issued nearly $1.7 billion in tax-free bonds—about one third of the total issued—for projects that contribute to the production of oil. Preliminary approval has been secured to tap millions more.

The money issued for oil infrastructure includes $1 billion for the expansion of a Marathon Oil refinery in an area that wasn’t severely damaged by the 2005 storms; $120 million for an offshore tank storage facility; and $75 million in bonds issued for improvements to an existing ExxonMobil refinery and chemical plant in Baton Rouge, according to Louisiana Bond Commission records. And on Sept. 15—exactly five years after Bush stood in a storm-battered Jackson Square and explained how the GO Zone bonds would help New Orleans—the state commission is slated to issue ExxonMobil another $300 million in untaxed loan money. The cash will pay for further improvements on the oil giant’s Baton Rouge facility.

Poorest families are biggest losers in latest UK budget
Guardian
(8/25/10)

Poor families bear brunt of coalition’s austerity drive

Past This is Hell! guest Larry Elliott co-writes …

Britain’s leading independent tax  experts today flatly rejected the coalition government’s claims to have shielded poor families from five years of austerity when they described George Osborne’s emergency budget as “clearly regressive”.

In a direct challenge to Treasury claims that the package of spending cuts and tax increases announced in June was fair, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said in a report that welfare cuts meant working families on the lowest incomes – particularly those with children – were the biggest losers.

The IFS said it had always been sceptical about Osborne’s claim that the budget was “progressive” but added that this instant judgment had been reinforced by a study of proposed changes to housing benefit, disability allowances and tax credits due to come in between now and 2015.

Passing judgment that is likely to make uncomfortable reading for the Liberal Democrats, the IFS concluded: “Once all of the benefit cuts are considered, the tax and benefit changes announced in the emergency budget are clearly regressive as, on average, they hit the poorest households more than those in the upper middle of the income distribution in cash, let alone percentage, terms.”

Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, has argued that the budget represented “progressive austerity” by sparing the poorest families from the brunt of the attack on the UK’s record peacetime deficit.

Alistair Darling, the shadow chancellor, said: “Just last week George Osborne told us that his budget was fair. But it’s decisions, not warm words, that count. Today there’s conclusive evidence that far from being fair the coalition has hit the poorest hardest, especially those with children.

“While Nick Clegg is in charge he would do well to ask himself what he thinks he’s doing providing cover for this old-fashioned Tory budget” …

Fiona Weir, a spokeswoman for the End Child Poverty campaign, which commissioned the report, said: “The coalition has committed to ending child poverty by 2020, but its cuts are hitting the poorest families hardest. It’s not fair that children should have to pay for the cuts and shocking that the poorest families are bearing the brunt.

“The coalition must reconsider its cuts, including changes to housing benefit and uprating benefits. The spending review will need to show clearly how the government will deliver on the commitment to ending child poverty, ensuring that cuts fall on those most able to pay.”

The IFS said: “Low-income households of working age lose the most as a proportion of income from the tax and benefit reforms announced in the emergency budget. Those who lose the least are households of working age without children in the upper half of the income distribution. They do not lose out from cuts in welfare spending, and they are the biggest beneficiaries from the increase in the income tax personal allowance.”

This year’s largest group of executed Mexicans discovered
The New York Times
(8/25/10)

Victims of Massacre in Mexico Said to Be Migrants

The bullet-pocked bodies of 72 people, believed to be migrants heading to the United States who resisted demands for money, have been found in a large room on a ranch in an area of northeast Mexico with surging violence, the authorities said Wednesday.

Initial reports after the victims were found Tuesday suggested that the mass of bodies was the largest of several dumping grounds, often with dozens of dead, discovered in recent months and attributed to the violence of the drug business.

But if the victims, found after a raid on a ranch in Tamaulipas State by Mexican naval units, are confirmed as migrants, their killings would provide a sharp reminder of the violence in human smuggling as well.

It was not clear if the victims, from Central and South America, were shot all at once. The police were relying on a harrowing but sketchy account from a wounded survivor, published by the newspaper Reforma and confirmed by government officials, who said several people were killed in short order after the migrants refused to pay or cooperate with the gunmen.

A law enforcement official said all were found in a large room, some sitting, some piled atop one another …

The unidentified survivor, an Ecuadorean traveling with people from Ecuador, Brazil, Honduras and El Salvador, told investigators that the migrants had entered Mexico from the south and that they were making their way to Texas when they were confronted by the gunmen in San Fernando, about 100 miles south of Brownsville, Tex.

In a statement to the police, he said the leaders of the armed group had tried to extort fees from them and, when the migrants resisted, ordered their gunmen to open fire.

Wounded in the neck by the gunfire, the survivor heard screams and pleas for mercy. Once the men retreated, the witness said, he ran from the ranch where they were being held Monday and found a military checkpoint.

The military units reached the ranch on Tuesday and engaged in a firefight in which one marine and three suspects were killed. One Mexican, a minor, was taken into custody.

The authorities said 58 men and 14 women had been killed in the room by the gunmen. It was unclear how long they had been dead or detained.

The discovery of the bodies was the largest of at least three such finds this year. In May, 55 bodies were pulled from an abandoned mine south of Mexico City, and in July, 51 bodies were discovered in a field near Monterrey, an industrial and commercial hub in northeast Mexico that had been relatively quiet until this year.

Jewish-, Muslim-, Pakistani-, Irish-Americans behind terror
Haaretz
(8/26/10)

Leaked CIA memo cites U.S. Jews among exporters of terrorism

The Wikileaks website released a CIA document on Wednesday that examines the trend of Americans committing terrorist acts overseas, including American Jews in Israel.

American Jews in Israel were one of four groups mentioned in the classified report, titled “What if Foreigners See the United States as an Exporter of Terrorism?”

“Some American Jews have supported and even engaged in violent acts against perceived enemies of Israel,” the report reads. “In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an American Jewish doctor from New York, emigrated to Israel, joined the extremist group Kach, and killed 29 Palestinians during their prayers in the mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron which helped trigger a wave of bus bombings by Hamas in early 1995.”

Other groups mentioned were Irish-Americans who supported the Irish Republican Army; a group of Muslim-American men who traveled to Pakistan last year to engage in Jihad; and a Pakistani-American man, David Headley, who conducted surveillance for the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba terrorist group ahead of the attack in Mumbai, India in November 2008 that killed more than 160 people.

The leaked report was compiled in February 2010 by the CIA’s Red Cell, which, according to the memorandum, was tasked with “taking a pronounced ‘out-of-the-box’ approach that will provoke thought and offer an alternative viewpoint on the full range of analytic issues.”

Rwanda allegedly tries to cover-up ‘possible genocide’
Agence France Presse
(8/26/10)

UN uncovers possible genocide in Congo

UN investigators have uncovered mass human rights abuses in Congo in the 1990s including the possible genocide of Hutu refugees by Rwandan forces, a French newspaper reported Thursday.

A leaked report by the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights (UNHCR), details murders, rapes and looting by fighters from various countries in two wars that rocked the former Zaire between 1993 and 2003, Le Monde said.

The most serious claims target Rwanda, whose forces along with Congolese troops allegedly shot, clubbed and axed to death vast numbers of ethnic Hutu refugees in Congo, including women, children and the elderly in the late 1990s.

The total number of victims of war crimes by forces from various countries operating in the country, known since 1997 as the Democratic Republic of Congo, is “probably several tens of thousands,” the UNHCR report said, according to the newspaper.

After the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, about a million Hutus fearing reprisals fled across the western border to Congo, where they were later targeted by Rwandan Tutsi forces.

Le Monde quoted the UNHCR report as saying that “the systematic and generalised attacks (against Hutus in Congo) have several damning aspects which, if proved by a competent court, could qualify as crimes of genocide.”

The allegations were among some of “the most serious violations of human rights and international law” in Congo according to the report, which accuses forces from several other neighbouring countries of crimes over the 10 years.

Citing unnamed sources, Le Monde said Rwandan President Paul Kagame had fought to cover up the report, threatening to withdraw Rwandan troops from UN peacekeeping missions.

South African strike could cause ‘total industrial shutdown’
Agence France Press
(8/26/10)

South African workers hold mass protests

Thousands of striking public service workers  gathered for rallies in major cities across South Africa on Thursday to press their claims for higher wages on the ninth day of a crippling strike.

Marches in more than 20 cities and towns were scheduled as unions representing over a million workers, who began an indefinite strike on August 18, threatened to broaden their action into a total industrial shutdown.

“We are expecting thousands and thousands of people,” South African Democratic Teachers Union general secretary Mugwena Maluleke in Johannesburg where workers planned to march through the city centre.

The marches were a message to the government to bring a revised wage offer to unions, said Maluleke, who estimated that nearly 800,000 workers had joined the strike.

“If the government does not do that, this strike will continue. The unions are not willing to back down,” Maluleke told AFP.

The country’s largest trade union federation Cosatu has called on all of its affiliates — which include unions in key mining and manufacturing sectors — to strike in solidarity with public servants if their demands are not met.

• Meanwhile, the BBC story, “South African unions threaten to escalate strike,” reports:
  “Everything will come to a standstill,” said Zwelinzima Vavi, head of the main union federation, Cosatu.
  He was speaking at a rally of thousands of public workers in Johannesburg.
  Some one million civil servants are already on strike but Cosatu’s total affiliated membership is double that.
  Mr Vavi said work would also halt in the key mining and manufacturing industries, while unions representing the police and the military have already said they will join in the stoppage.
  “Today, on 26 August, all Cosatu unions will be organising all their workers to issue notices to employers that they will be joining the public sector strike,” he said, according to the South African Press Agency (Sapa).
  “We will not be defeated,” he told cheering protesters in Johannesburg.
  Cosatu is officially an ally of the governing African National Congress but Mr Vavi warned that their alliance was now “dysfunctional”.
  A court has, however, barred police officers from joining the strike. Officers who went on strike could be fired, police said.
  A previous court injunction ordered the unions to keep essential services going …
  At the march, the BBC’s Karen Allen spoke to teachers with 20-25 years’ experience, who say they cannot live on their salaries of approximately $6,000 (£3,870).

Indian farmers protest latest ‘land grab’ by government
Agence France Presse
(8/26/10)

Land protests bring central Delhi to standstill

Thousands of farmers protested in New Delhi Thursday over forced land acquisitions for a new road in a demonstration that highlights the difficulties of building infrastructure in India.

The farmers, most in traditional white dress, gathered near the national parliament in the early afternoon to listen to speeches from the leaders of the movement.

They came from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh to protest against what they see as a land grab to build a new highway between Agra, home to the Taj Mahal, and New Delhi.

Farmers in the district of Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh have been demonstrating for three weeks to demand higher compensation for their land adjacent to the proposed Yamuna Expressway, resulting in frequent clashes with police.

Four people, including a policeman, have died in the violence, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

Forced land acquisition for infrastructure and industrial facilities — both of which are crucial for India’s economic development — is frequently dogged by controversy and the government has promised a new law to clarify procedures.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has reportedly promised an amendment to the existing 1994 law will be brought in the next session of parliament, which begins in November.

A draft law under consideration redefines when land can be forcibly acquired for “public purposes”, such as defence, infrastructure or for projects deemed useful to the general public.

It will mandate a social impact assessment study for acquisitions resulting in large-scale displacement and widens the net for those eligible for compensation to nomadic tribal groups and anyone with tenancy rights.