Tuesday, February 22

In fact, men have gained 438,000 jobs since the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, while women have lost 366,000 over the same period, according to Labor Department figures.

And the 984,000 new jobs created from January 2010 to January 2011? Only 47,000 went to women.

That’s less than 1 of every 20 new job openings.

These numbers would barely draw a second look in the aftermath of past recessions, when women made up a much smaller share of the labor force. But women now account for nearly half of all U.S. workers, so the great disparity is all the more startling.

The trend has given a new gender-specific meaning to the phrase “jobless recovery” and is further proof that the hiring rebound isn’t reaching all groups.

GOP election commissioners want direct corporate campaign funding
The Washington Post
(2/17/11)

Republicans on FEC want firms to be able to raise money for candidates

The fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission keeps coming.

The case loosened restrictions on corporations that do political campaigning with the proviso that they do it without working with candidates. But in a little-noticed document, three FEC commissioners have said they think corporations should be allowed to raise money directly for candidates.

As it is now, corporations are prohibited from helping candidates raise money. The furthest they can go is allowing a candidate to hold fundraisers on their property, and even then, the campaign must pay for the space in advance. But the three commissioners, all Republicans, said those prohibitions are “at best suspect” in light of Citizens United’s protection of free speech for corporations.

The commissioners’ statement, while not a change in the law or regulations, indicates how far they are willing to take the court’s decision when policing the rules for money in politics.

“The idea that corporations could finance and underwrite fundraising for candidates without limit is something that would fully open the spigot,” said Larry Norton, a lawyer with Womble Carlyle and a former general counsel for the FEC. “If a corporation can host a major fundraising event with entertainment, with food, with everything else that goes into a top-flight event and it can use corporate funds to do so, that’s a big change from where we are now.”

Indiana becomes the next Wisconsin
Indianapolis Star
(2/22/11)

Indiana Democrats trigger Statehouse showdown over anti-union legislation

Seats on one side of the Indiana House were nearly empty today as House Democrats departed the the state rather than vote on anti-union legislation.

A source tells the Indianapolis Star that Democrats are headed to Illinois, though it was possible some also might go to Kentucky. They need to go to a state with a Democratic governor to avoid being taken into police custody and returned to Indiana.

The House was came into session twice this morning, with only three of the 40 Democrats present. Those were needed to make a motion, and a seconding motion, for any procedural steps Democrats would want to take to ensure Republicans don’t do anything official without quorum.

With only 58 legislators present, there was no quorum present to do business. The House needs 67 of its members to be present.

House Speaker Brian Bosma said he did not know yet whether he would ask the Indiana State Police to compel the lawmakers to attend, if they can be found.

Today’s fight was triggered by Republicans pushing a bill that would bar unions and companies from negotiating a contract that requires non-union members to kick-in fees for representation. It’s become the latest in what is becoming a national fight over Republican attempts to eliminate or limit collective bargaining.

Gov. Mitch Daniels had warned his party late last year against pursuing so-called “right to work” legislation. While he agreed with it philosophically, he said it was a big issue that needed a state-wide debate and noted no Republican had run on this in the November election.

Supreme Court to hear ‘war on terror’ case against former AG Ashcroft
USA Today
(2/21/11)

High court to hear case against Ashcroft

Abdullah al-Kidd was arrested at a Dulles Airport ticket counter in March 2003, led away in handcuffs and sent to three different jails across the country. He says he was strip searched and subjected to humiliating conditions. After two weeks, he was released and never charged with a crime.

Al-Kidd, a U.S. citizen who is African-American and Muslim, later sued then-attorney general John Ashcroft and other officials for violating his rights. In a case now before the Supreme Court, he claims his arrest wrongly flowed from aggressive Justice Department policies after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The dispute tests when top officials can be held responsible for a policy that violates someone’s rights. It is one of the lingering controversies surrounding Bush administration actions after 9/11, pitting national security concerns against civil liberties.

“It’s one of the more visible cases this term,” says University of Pennsylvania law professor Stephanos Bibas, who has written a “friend of the court” brief on behalf of legal history and criminal procedure professors. Their brief sides with al-Kidd and urges the justices to look deeply at the rights of detained witnesses through the centuries.

At the center of the case, which justices will hear March 2, is a longstanding federal law that allows “material witnesses” — people who might have significant information and be crucial to a case — to be held even though they are not suspected of wrongdoing. The law allows such individuals to be picked up if they might flee or elude a subpoena for testimony.

Al-Kidd says that after the 9/11 attacks, federal authorities distorted the material-witness law and used it to arrest suspects that the government lacked grounds to charge but wanted to investigate …

When he was arrested in 2003, he said he was headed to Saudi Arabia for language and religious study. FBI agents picked him up on a material-witness warrant issued in the case of Sami Omar al-Hussayen, also of Idaho, who had been charged with visa fraud and making false statements. (Al-Hussayen was not convicted of those charges, and al-Kidd was never called to testify. During al-Kidd’s time in jail, his lawyers say, he was interrogated about his own activities.)

Al-Kidd says the material-witness policy, which led to his “punitive, excessive and unlawful” 16-day detention, violated the Fourth Amendment rule that a person not be arrested without probable cause of wrongdoing.

“The Fourth Amendment does not permit locking up people just to investigate them,” says Georgetown University law professor (and past This is Hell! guest) David Cole, who has tracked terrorism cases. “We are not seeing the kind of aggressive, systematic use of the material-witness statute as we did in the wake of Sept. 11, but what’s at stake is … the next time (the government) wants to … use it for purposes never intended.”

For second year in a row, Mali Muslim festival turns into deadly stampede
Guardian
(2/22/11)

Mali stadium stampede kills worshippers

Thirty-six people were killed and at least 64 others injured in a stampede at a stadium hosting a religious ceremony in Mali.

Tens of thousands had gathered to receive blessings from one of Mali’s best-known imams, Ousmane Madani Haidara, during the Muslim festival of Maouloud.

Witnesses said the 25,000-seat Modibo Keita stadium in the capital, Bamako, had been filled well beyond its maximum capacity.

As the participants left the ceremony on Monday night, the crowd surged against a metal barrier, said Sadio Gassama, Mali’s security minister. Another official said nearly all those who died were women …

Last year at least 15 people died in another stampede at a mosque in Timbuktu during Maouloud.

Government “subverted the will of the people of Uganda” in election
AfricaNews.com
(2/22/11)

Kampala on security alert as opposition rejects results

Two hours before the results of the Feb. 18 Ugandan presidential election were declared, the main opposition candidate Dr. Kizza Besigye rejected the final outcome and vowed not to recognise the government President Yoweri Museveni would form on re-election. This followed accusations of rigging, bribery and poor organisation of the electoral process which the opposition says “subverted the will of the people of Uganda.”

About a month to the general election, Parliament passed a supplementary budget of about $ 300 million, about $ 50 of which went to State House, the President’s official residence. This was the biggest supplementary budget in Uganda’s history and the supplementary budget for State House, the opposition say, was meant to bribe voters.

In the run-up to the election, the President’s son-in-law and his brother former bush war fighter Gen. Salim Saleh were accused of attempting to bribe opposition leaders at the local level in deals worth about $ 1 million each.

So widespread was the use of state resources in campaign-related work that Finance Minister Syda Bbumba admitted last month that “government is broke”. Work in ministries and other government departments stalled because their recurrent budgets were wiped out.

The opposition now say such an environment couldn’t have allowed for the expression of the will of Ugandans. One of the candidates, former UN undersecretary Dr. Olara Otunnu, went through the campaigns but skipped the voting and later told the press he couldn’t participate in a “fraud”.

Otunnu particularly spent the entire three-month campaign vilifying the Electoral Commission and calling for its removal. Opposition candidates agree that the current Commission, appointed by the President and liable to dismissal at his pleasure, cannot organise free and fair elections in a multi-party setting. They called for its reconstitution to give rise to one to which the various political players nominate members to no avail.

The Commission has come under fresh attack especially over the voters roll and late commencement of polling especially in places where the opposition enjoys sizeable support.

In some parts of Kampala, the capital, voting started at 11 am yet it was supposed to commence at 7 am due to late delivery of election materials. Throngs of voters were turned away since their names were missing on the register while others had to move back-and-forth trying to locate the polling stations where they were supposed to cast their ballots.

The opposition say this was calculated to frustrate their supporters and advantage the incumbent. The opposition coalition that fronted Besigye, the Interparty Cooperation, says it sampled 80 districts and found that there was unacceptable disenfranchisement of voters in 61 districts.

In 66 out of the 80 districts sampled, claimed the IPC, their polling agents were denied results declaration forms, which is their right, while in 34 out of the 80 districts the IPC’s polling agents were allegedly arrested, detained or turned away from polling stations.

Another irregularity the opposition cite is ballot-box stuffing. Besigye presented to the press copies of ballots pre-ticked in Museveni’s favour which he said were stuffed in the ballot boxes across the country.

Zimbabwe police arrest those watching Tunisian, Egyptian protest news
The New York Times
(2/21/11)

Arrests in Zimbabwe for Seeing Videos

Dozens of students, trade unionists and political activists who gathered to watch Al Jazeera and BBC news reports on the uprisings that brought down autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt have been arrested on suspicion of plotting to oust President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

James Sabau, a spokesman for the police force, which is part of the security services controlled by Mr. Mugabe’s party, was quoted in Monday’s state-controlled newspaper as saying that the 46 people in custody were accused of participating in an illegal political meeting where they watched videos “as a way of motivating them to subvert a constitutionally elected government.”

The evidence seized by the police included a video projector, two DVD discs and a laptop.

Lawyers for the men and women in custody said they had not yet been formally charged but had been advised that they might be accused of “attempting to overthrow the government by unconstitutional means,” a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Mr. Mugabe, who turned 87 on Monday, and his party ruled Zimbabwe single-handedly from 1980 until 2009, when regional leaders pressured him into forming a power-sharing government with his longtime political rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, after a discredited 2008 election. Mr. Tsvangirai withdrew from a June runoff that year to protest state-sponsored beatings of thousands of his supporters. An estimated 350 people died in the violence.

“The illegal meeting’s agenda, Inspector Sabau said, was ‘Revolt in Egypt and Tunisia: What lessons can be learnt by Zimbabwe and Africa?’ ” the state-controlled Herald reported.

Is high number of baby dolphin deaths due to BP spill?
Biloxi Sun Herald
(2/22/11)

Fourth baby dolphin found dead on Horn Island

The Institute for Marine Mammal Studies has confirmed that a fourth baby dolphin has washed ashore on Horn Island,

The island, one of the longest in the chain that comprises the Gulf Islands National Seashore Park, is about 12 miles south of Ocean Springs.

Three baby dolphins were pinpointed Monday and a fourth was reported today by National Resource Advisory employees who are working with BP cleanup crews on the island.

Researchers with the IMMS are headed to the island now to take tissue samples and possibly remove the bodies back for studies.

These infant dolphins are among the 18 reported since January.

The four are also among the 28 total adult and infant dolphins reported since the beginning of the year. None of the dead adults were pregnant females.

The industry’s leading scientist on marine mammal strandings is concerned about these deaths.

Blair Mase, NOAA’s marine mammal stranding coordinator for the Southeast region, confirmed that the number of baby dolphin deaths is high …

“We’re trying to determine if we do in fact have still births,” she said. There are more in Mississippi than in Alabama and Louisiana.

“With the oil spill, it is difficult,” she said. “We’re trying to determine what’s causing this. It could be infectious related. Or it could be non-infection.

“We run the gamut of causes,” she said, including human impact, which would include the oil spill; infectious disease and bio-toxins,

Climate change can be slowed right now, so why isn’t it being done?
Scientific American
(2/22/11)

Cutting Black Carbon and Methane Promises Immediate Climate Change Impacts

Placing strict limits on a handful of common air pollutants could pay big dividends for efforts to limit climate change, improve public health and increase agricultural productivity, according to a new U.N. report.

Curbing emissions of black carbon, a component of soot, along with methane and tropospheric ozone, could cut projected climate warming by 0.5 degree Celsius, or about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit, by 2070.

Such cuts could be made with existing technology, the report says, and would “have immediate and multiple benefits for human well-being.”

Possible strategies for reducing black carbon, methane and ozone include capturing methane produced by landfills and fossil fuel extraction, introducing cleaner-burning cookstoves, installing particulate filters on diesel engines and banning the practice of burning fields of agricultural waste.

The research shows that cutting black carbon and methane emissions would slow the rate of warming up until about 2040, while starting soon to cut emissions of carbon dioxide would only have an appreciable effect after 2040.

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Wednesday, June 23

Nine Circles of Hell!

Podcast for Saturday, October 3, 2009

Shows

http://thisishell.net