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Protester doesn't quite stick it to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
Agence France Presse
(7/22/08)

Climate protester tries to glue himself to British PM

A climate change protester unsuccessfully tried to superglue himself to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at an event in the leader's residence, a government spokesman said Tuesday.
Dan Glass, a 24-year-old member of Plane Stupid, which campaigns against airport expansion, tried to attach himself to Brown's suit as he was about to shake hands with the premier at his Downing Street residence.
Glass, who had been invited to the event held to recognise the British voluntary sector, asked Brown why the government was ignoring public objections to the construction of a third runway at London's Heathrow Airport.
Brown can be heard laughing as Glass began his demonstration ...
"We can beat climate change, but this is not going to happen by planning the world's largest international airport at Heathrow," (Glass) added.
"As far as we are concerned, nothing really happened," a Downing Street spokesman said.
"There was a light-hearted and not particularly successful demonstration at a reception that was being hosted at Downing Street."
A Scotland Yard spokesman said no police action was taken ...

• If this had happened to President Bush in the US, a dozen Secret Service agents would have whisked the protester away, charged him with a dozen infractions of the Patriot Act and shipped him off to Gitmo as a terrorist threat. That's what happens when you fear nonviolent protests and you have lost your sense of humor. MM
• We gotta get somebody from Plane Stupid on This is Hell! Curbing air traffic is a great step toward environmental protection. CM

Repressing speech in China the American way
The Guardian
(7/23/08)

China to create 'protest pens' for demonstrations during Olympics

China will create three "protest pens" in the capital's parks to allow people to demonstrate during the Olympics, an official said today.
The move follows speculation as to whether the government, which strictly limits protests, would allow public displays of dissent – especially given that the games have already been the target of campaigns on issues ranging from media freedom to Darfur and Tibet ...
... Human Rights Watch attacked the decision, arguing that the restrictions negated the right to demonstrate under international law.
Nicholas Bequelin, spokesman for Human Rights Watch, said: "The obstacles and deterrents are so high as to negate the right to demonstrate.
"We are also concerned about the possibility that the authorities might use the existence of these zones to justify repressive measures against demonstrators outside of the zones.
"Aggressive or systematic video taping, requirement for individual registrations and excessive controls at the entry and exit points of the protest zones would amount to deterring protesters, who have legitimate concerns in China about possible retaliation afterwards."
Protest zones have been created at previous games, including Athens in 2004, because the International Olympic Committee's charter bans demonstrations or "political, religious or racial propaganda" at Olympic venues or sites.
... Liu Shaowu, director of the security department at Beijing's Olympics organising committee, told a news conference ...
"Chinese law protects the legal right of people to hold lawful demonstrations and marches."
He stressed that under Chinese law all demonstrations must be approved by police in advance, but declined to say whether that applied to the zones - or whether approval would be granted for protests outside them.

• You could see this coming from miles away... ahh, the power of the pen. KB
• What does it say when a totalitarian government copies the tactics used by a supposedly free 'democratic' US to repress demonstrators? MM
• And what does it say about the Olympics when they condone these restrictions to the freedom of speech and assembly? CM

Best evidence yet that an electronic election was rigged
Election Defense Alliance
(7/21/08)

Arizona Activists Outline Evidence of 2006 Electronic Vote Theft

Electronic vote count fraud is very hard to prove. Yet for several years, a group of election integrity activists and Democratic Party officials in Tuscon, Arizona, have made as much progress as anyone in the country. At issue was a 2006 regional transit bond vote that was behind in pre-election polls but won on Election Day. Attorney Bill Risner, the Pima County Democratic Party, and AuditAZ, an election integrity group, sued and won the release of the vote's electronic records. That established for the first time in the country that such data was a public record. Now Risner and the activists have a sworn confession from a whistleblower who says he was told the transit bond vote count was altered and much related evidence. In this recent letter to Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, Risner asks the state to reopen its own investigation and recount the 2006 ballots.

• The above is from an "Editor's Note" preceding said letter. It looks like AlterNet's editor could use, well, an editor. CM

In Chicago, suspects still serving time after tortured confessions
AlterNet
(7/23/08)

How Scores of Black Men Were Tortured Into Giving False Confessions by Chicago Police

Tillman is one of at least 24 African-American men that the People's Law Office in Chicago claims are still serving sentences for crimes they say they confessed to only after enduring hours of torture at the hands of Chicago police officers under Commander Jon Burge between 1972 and 1992. Although 10 of Burge's victims have been pardoned or given new trials after their illegally obtained confessions were exposed, the vast majority of the 100-plus cases have yet to be reviewed by the state of Illinois. Those men have either served out their sentences, died in custody or, like Tillman, continue to live their lives behind bars, hoping that one day they will have a fair trial.
According to Tillman's 1986 trial testimony, when he arrived at the Area 2 police station in the predawn hours of July 21, 1986, Detectives Ronald Boffo and Peter Dignan took him to a second-floor interrogation room and pressed him for information about the murder of 42-year-old Betty Howard, whose body was found the day prior in the apartment building Tillman oversaw. When he told the detectives that he knew nothing about the murder, he says that Boffo and Dignan, along with three other officers, became abusive. Without ever reading him his Miranda rights, he says they handcuffed him to the wall, hit him in the face and punched him in the stomach until he vomited blood. During the course of what appeared to be three days, rotating pairs of officers brought him to the railroad tracks behind the station and held a gun to his head, suffocated him repeatedly with thick plastic bags, poured soda up his nose and forced him into Dumpsters outside of the apartment building, ordering him to search through the rubbish for a murder weapon until, according to Detective John Yucaitis, Tillman confessed to the crime.
According to Tillman's mother, she, her husband and an attorney they called for counsel were all denied access to her son during his three days of interrogation.

• Posted in the comments on this article; How many Chicago coppers does it take to beat up a perp? None – he fell down the stairs. MM

Police killing of Jena Six lead defendant's cousin could re-ignite racial tensions in rural Louisiana
Chicago Tribune
(7/19/08)

Taser death ignites racial tensions

At 1:28 p.m. last Jan. 17, Baron "Scooter" Pikes was a healthy 21-year-old man. By 2:07 p.m., he was dead.
What happened in the 39 minutes in between--during which Pikes was handcuffed by local police and shocked nine times with a Taser device, while reportedly pleading for mercy--is now spawning fears of a political cover-up in this backwoods Louisiana lumber town infamous for backroom dealings.
Even more ominously, because Pikes was black and the officer who repeatedly Tasered him is white, racial tensions over the case are mounting in a place that's just 40 miles from Jena, La. Jena is the site of the racially explosive prosecution of six black teenagers charged with beating a white youth that last year triggered one of the largest American civil rights demonstrations in decades. And in a bizarre coincidence, Pikes turns out to have been a first cousin of Mychal Bell, the lead defendant in the Jena 6 case.
No novelist could have invented Winnfield, a place so steeped in corruption that they built a local museum to try to sanitize it all.
Here in the birthplace of two of Louisiana's most colorful and notorious governors--Huey and Earl Long--the police chief committed suicide three years ago after losing a close election marred by allegations of fraud and vote-buying.
Just four months later, the district attorney killed himself after allegedly skimming $200,000 from his office budget and extorting payments from criminal defendants to make their cases go away.
The current police chief is a convicted drug offender who got a pardon from Edwin Edwards, the former Louisiana governor who is serving time in federal prison for corruption convictions.
All of that tangled history is now wrapped up in the Pikes case, because Scott Nugent, the officer who Tasered him, is the well-connected son of the former police chief who killed himself--and the protégé of the current chief, who hired him onto the force.

Guantanamo's former chief prosecutor admits trials are "tainted" and "a black eye for the country"
SpyTalk
(7/22/08)

Former Gitmo Prosecutor Says Trials Rigged

Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, who resigned last year after two years as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, today described the military commissions system as fatally "tainted" by politics and designed to produce guilty verdicts, no matter what the costs ...
Morris said the politicization of the system began at the top, with the appointment of  Susan Crawford, a "political appointee" with no time in uniform, to run the military commissions.
Morris also said that Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartman, senior legal advisor to the convening authority, "broke the law" by exercizing command influence on the proceedings ...
Morris also said that on Jan. 2, 2007, two hours after President Bush withdrew the nomination of DoD General Counsel Jim Haynes, implicated in torture policy memos, to be a federal judge, Haynes called him up to demand the quick prosecution of Australian David Hicks, a Guantanamo inmate who has since been freed. 
"How quickly can you charge David Hicks?" Haynes said, according to Morris ...
Haynes compared the Guantanamo proceedings to the Nurenburg trials of Nazi officials at the end of World War Two. But when Morris noted that those trials had also rendered aquittals, Haynes expoloded. 
"Acquittals? We're not going to have any acquittals," Haynes said, according to Morris. "We've been holding these guys for years. How could you explain that if we had acquittals? We've gotta have convictions."
Morris said there was no doubt in his mind that Salim Hamdan, on trial now, was far more than a cluless chaffeur for Osama bin Laden. But the "black eye" the proceedings have earned will taint his conviction.

• ... and it looks like SpyTalk could use an editor, too. CM

Now that Romania and Bulgaria are in the EU, they can get back to their corrupt ways
Inter Press Service
(7/23/08)

Romania and Bulgaria In the Dock

After putting up a reformist face in order to join the European Union (EU) in 2007, Romanian and Bulgarian politicians have quickly returned to fostering corruption. And there is little the EU can do about it.
In its bi-annual reports on the state of justice system reforms in Romania and Bulgaria published Jul. 23, the European Commission (EC), the executive arm of the EU, admonished both countries for failing to achieve concrete results in fighting corruption.
In an additional report on the management of EU funds in Bulgaria, the Commission suspended hundreds of millions of euros in structural aid by discontinuing the licences of two agencies in charge of distributing the funds.
Romania and Bulgaria were allowed to join the EU on Jan. 1, 2007, in spite of their insufficient progress in fighting corruption and organised crime. They have been closely monitored since, under the threat that if reforms are not continued European funds could be withheld, and sentences passed by courts in these countries might not be recognised in other EU states.
The report on Bulgaria says that "institutions and procedures look good on paper but do not produce results in practice." Especially worrisome are "the connections between a part of the political class, business and organised crime," which led to the defrauding of EU taxpayers' money that should have been used for infrastructure programmes to benefit the Bulgarian people.
In the week preceding the EC report, the European Anti-Fraud Office had issued its own report on Bulgaria, emphasising links between the government and the criminal network 'Nikolov/Stoikov', which is currently under investigation for projects fraudulently funded with 6.5 million euros (10.2 million dollars) from the EU.
While Bulgarian prosecutors have started investigating cases of high-level corruption, the EC says few convictions have been made to date. The police and prosecutors remain overburdened and underfinanced.
The report on Romania had a more neutral tone and brought no immediate sanctions against the country. However, the Commission criticised the politicisation of high-level corruption cases ...
British historian Tom Gallagher from Bradford University, who has been studying Romania for decades, thinks that the mild tone of the report on Romania illustrates not so much the progress made by the country as the inability of the EU to really check the evolution of its member states.
In a piece 'How the EU Let Romania Off' published Jul. 21 in the Financial Times, Gallagher explains how successive Romanian governments "have launched numerous action plans and other reform rituals which were essentially just public relations gimmicks in order to satisfy Eurocrats that Romania was busy internalising European norms and values."
Appearing to make reforms, writes the historian, Romanian political elites, regardless of party allegiance, have focused on amassing wealth, including EU funds, while offering enough contracts to infrastructure companies well-connected in Brussels to keep the EC rather lenient.
"The European Union still prides itself on being a progressive entity capable of projecting eastwards into once inhospitable terrain values and institutions essential for good governance and economic success," says Gallagher. "But the two reports being released this week on Romania and Bulgaria, members since 2007, show how hollow such rhetoric is becoming. Corruption remains entrenched and efforts to counter it are blocked at high level."

Haitian children the target of kidnappings, sexual violence, trafficking and murder
UN News
(7/23/08)

Haiti's children still suffering grave human rights violations - UN report

Haitian children remain the target of kidnappings, killings, sexual violence and child trafficking, and they have also been active participants in recent public protests, the United Nations peacekeeping mission to the impoverished Caribbean country reports.
The latest report from MINUSTAH, covering the period from January to July this year and released this week, found that children continue to be affected by armed violence, despite the general improvement in the security situation in Haiti.
Kidnapping is a particularly strong concern, with children comprising more than one in three victims and girls becoming an increasingly favoured target of armed gangs. Since the start of the year 66 minors have been abducted, compared to 80 for all of 2007 ...
Overall, sexual violence against children remains "a high concern," according to the report, although some local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have indicated there has been a decrease compared with last year.
There has also been an "alarming increase" in the trafficking of children to the neighbouring Dominican Republic for labour and sexual exploitation. Nearly 750 children were repatriated by Dominican authorities in the first five months of the year.

"What is currently taking place in southern Iraq is nothing less than the eradication of the material record of the world's first urban, literate civilization"
The New York Review of Books
(8/14/08)

The Devastation of Iraq's Past

In May 2003—some eight weeks after the American invasion had begun— Abdul-Amir Hamdani, the archaeology inspector of Dhi Qar province in southern Iraq, traveled to Najaf to call on the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. He had an urgent request. "We needed his help to stop the pillage," Hamdani recalled. The province, which is midway between Baghdad and Basra, covers much of what was once the land of Sumer. In the third millennium BC, it was a fertile plain densely populated by such cities as Ur, Lagash, Girsu, Larsa, and Umma; today, the shifting course of the Euphrates and Saddam Hussein's brutal campaign to drain the marshes, to the southeast, have left it in large part an impoverished wasteland. With the fall of the Baathist regime, hundreds of poor farmers and villagers—often backed by armed militias—were turning to archaeological plunder; in some Dhi Qar towns, such as al-Fajr, the black market trade in antiquities was accounting for upward of 80 percent of the local economy.
Al-Sistani was sufficiently moved by Hamdani's plea to pronounce a fatwa. He proclaimed that digging for antiquities is illegal; that both Islamic and pre-Islamic artifacts are part of Iraqi heritage; and that people who have antiquities in their possession should return them to the museum in Baghdad or in Nasiriya, the capital of Dhi Qar province. Copies of the fatwa were distributed widely in the south, and published in the Iraqi press. "At this point some of the looters stopped their work, because when Ayatollah al-Sistani says something, they listen," Hamdani said.
The fatwa was a small victory in what has been, for Hamdani, a largely intractable struggle to save one of the deep sources of human culture. Settling in the southern part of what the Greeks later called Mesopotamia some six thousand years before the birth of Christ, the Sumerians developed year-round cultivation, built the earliest city-states, and devised a complex system of writing. Over time, the area came under the sway of the Akkadians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians; later, it fell under Persian and Hellenistic influence before the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. Left behind were the rich remains of history and literature, often in the form of baked mud-brick tablets covered with wedge-shaped script called cuneiform; and small engraved seals—cylinder-shaped objects made of imported hematite, lapis lazuli, and other semiprecious stones that, when rolled onto wet clay or other soft material, produce intricate and often stunningly beautiful impressions of ancient life and ritual.
Remote and mostly lacking in monumental architecture above ground, the buried cities in which this material was preserved withstood centuries of violence, from the arrival of Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BC to the Mongol invasion in 1258. An absence of much subsequent urban development also meant that the archaeological record was unusually clear. Yet since 2003, several important sites have been destroyed beyond recognition; perhaps tens of thousands of cylinder seals and cuneiform tablets have been removed and channeled into the underground art market.
"What is currently taking place in southern Iraq," Gil Stein, the director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, writes in the catalog to "Catastrophe!," the institute's disturbing new exhibition on the subject, "is nothing less than the eradication of the material record of the world's first urban, literate civilization." All the more remarkable, at a time of growing international concern for the devastating effects of archaeological plunder, the destruction of Sumer following the 2003 invasion was largely unchallenged by American and British forces. How did this happen?

Italians sunbathe next to bodies of two drowned Roma girls
The Independent
(7/22/08)

The picture that shames Italy

It's another balmy weekend on the beach in Naples. By the rocks, a couple soak up the southern Italian sun. A few metres away, their feet poking from under beach towels that cover their faces and bodies, lie two drowned Roma children.
The girls, Cristina, aged 16, and Violetta, 14, were buried last night as the fallout from the circumstances of their death reverberated throughout Italy.
It is an image that has crystallised the mounting disquiet in the country over the treatment of Roma, coming after camps have been burnt and the government has embarked on a bid to fingerprint every member of the minority. Two young Roma sisters had drowned at Torregaveta beach after taking a dip in treacherous waters. Their corpses were recovered from the sea – then left on the beach for hours while holidaymakers continued to sunbathe and picnic around them.
They had come to the beach on the outskirts of Naples on Saturday with another sister, Diana, nine, and a 16-year-old cousin, Manuela, to make a little money selling coloured magnets and other trinkets to sunbathers. But it was fiercely hot all day and, about 2pm, the girls surrendered to the temptation of a cooling dip – even though they apparently did not know how to swim.
"The sea was rough on Saturday," said Enzo Esposito, the national treasurer of Opera Nomadi, Italy's biggest Roma organisation. "Christina and Violetta went farther out than the other two, and a big wave came out of nowhere and dashed them on to the rocks.
For a few moments, they disappeared; Manuela, who was in shallow water with Diana, came to the shore, helped out by people on the beach, and ran to try and get help."
Other reports said that lifeguards from nearby private beaches also tried to help, without success. "When Manuela and Diana came back," Esposito went on, "the bodies of her cousins had reappeared, and they were already dead."
It was the sort of tragedy that could happen on any beach. But what happened next has stunned Italy. The bodies of the two girls were laid on the sand; their sister and cousin were taken away by the police to identify and contact the parents. Some pious soul donated a couple of towels to preserve the most basic decencies. Then beach life resumed.
The indifference was taken as shocking proof that many Italians no longer have human feelings for the Roma, even though the communities have lived side by side for
generations.
"This was the other terrible thing," says Mr Esposito, "besides the fact of the girls drowning: the normality. The way people continued to sunbathe, for three hours, just metres away from the bodies. They could have gone to a different beach. It's not possible that you can watch two young people die then carry on as if nothing happened.
It showed a terrible lack of sensitivity and respect."

• And Italian treatment of Roma may be in violation of international agreements. Read more here. MM

Texas incinerator wants to burn banned toxins imported from Mexico
Houston Chronicle
(7/21/08)

EPA told to rethink import of PCBs

The congressional committee responsible for the Environmental Protection Agency is challenging a proposal that would allow the operator of a Port Arthur incinerator to import toxic waste from Mexico for disposal.
In a letter to the EPA on Monday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce told the federal agency's chief administrator that the proposed approval of Veolia Environmental Services' petition would "effectively create an open border" for other countries' PCBs to be disposed of in the United States.
The confrontation comes nearly 30 years after legislation that banned the manufacture of PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, also prohibited bringing them into the country. Veolia has proposed importing up to 20,000 tons of the chemical compound from Mexico for incineration, and the EPA has indicated it would approve the plan.
The committee's leadership raised several issues with the proposal, including the risk to residents of the Gulf Coast refinery town and surrounding Jefferson County, the availability of alternative disposal methods and the plant's safety record.
"The people of Southeast Texas already live with a large concentration of industries, and they deserve to know why the EPA intends to exempt this facility from the federal ban on importing toxic PCBs," said Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston, a committee member

Two Iranian doctors who fight HIV/Aids detained
BBC News
(7/22/08)

Iran urged to free HIV pioneers

A human rights group is calling on Iran to release immediately or charge two doctors renowned for their work on the prevention and treatment of HIV/Aids.
Human Rights Watch says the authorities have not disclosed why Arash Alaei and Kamyar Alaei were detained last month, or where they are being held.
The two brothers have travelled widely outside Iran, including to the US, to take part in conferences on HIV/Aids.
They were due to take part in a major meeting in Mexico next month.
Arash Alaei was scheduled to give a presentation on some of Iran's innovative HIV programmes, Human Rights Watch says.
The brothers are credited with getting the Iranian authorities to tackle the stigma of HIV infection and the disease Aids, in a country where sex, drug abuse and the disease itself are taboo subjects.

Toyota imports Chinese, Vietnamese labor for their Japan-based sweatshops
In These Times
(7/16/08)

The Dark Side of the Toyota Prius

The National Labor Committee (NLC), a New York-based human rights group, has been investigating working conditions at Toyota Motor Corp., and the labor used to produce its best-selling Prius hybrid cars.
In its 65-page report released in June, NLC includes first-hand testimony of factory conditions in “Toyota City,” outside of Nagoya, Japan — less than 200 miles southwest of Tokyo — where the largest auto company in the world employs some 70,000 people.
The report alleges that Toyota exploits guest workers, mostly shipped in from China and Vietnam. According to the NLC, these workers are “stripped of their passports and often forced to work — including at subcontract plants supplying Toyota — 16 hours a day, seven days a week, while being paid less than half the legal minimum wage.” Workers are forced to live in company dormitories and deported for complaining about poor treatment, the report finds.
Low-wage temporary workers make up one-third of Toyota’s Prius assembly-line workers, mostly in the auto-parts supply chain. They are signed to contracts for periods as short as four months, and are paid only 60 percent of a full-time employee’s wage.
Parts plants run by subcontractors advertise standard, nine-hour, five-day-a-week jobs. But according to the NLC, “the typical shift was 15 to 16.5 hours a day, from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. or 1:00 a.m.”

Failure of G7 trade negotiations wouldn't be as bad as leaders want you to believe
The Guardian
(7/21/08)

Why a Doha breakdown wouldn't spell disaster

We are being warned, yet again, by leaders of the G7, their trade officials and sundry commentators that failure to reach a successful conclusion to the Doha round of trade negotiations will put the entire international trading system at risk and with it the continued economic growth and prosperity of the world economy. Gordon Brown has described this week's special meeting of trade ministers in Geneva as a "make or break" event taking place "at one minute to midnight" with billions of dollars on the line for the world's poorest people.
There is a large dose of irresponsible rhetoric in all this, no doubt intended to alarm the negotiators. Max Corden, a distinguished and level-headed trade economist, noted many years ago that most economic policy changes other than macroeconomic ones have only small effects on GDP and "the effects of trade policy changes are often overrated".
Charlene Barshevsky, the former US trade representative has said she does not believe a failure of the Doha negotiations will have "any short-term negative effect" although she does worry that protectionism could increase if there is any weakening of international rules.
She also admitted that there was never any real enthusiasm for the round in the first place: it was launched more as an emotional act of solidarity with the US after 9/11 than a carefully thought out policy initiative with development objectives.
As to the promises of poverty alleviation, the World Bank's own estimates of the gains from complete trade liberalisation vary between $80bn and $800bn with some of their latest estimates for the partial liberalisation of the Doha round dropping to as little as $7bn for developing countries. And, as studies by the Carnegie Endowment have shown, the highly uneven distribution of the gains could mean, contra Brown, that some of the poorest countries would be among the likely net losers.

BC Bud quickly becoming the 'King of Herbs'
BBC News
(7/22/08)

Canada's spreading cannabis crop

Inspector Brian Cantera of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Vancouver believes that John's small grow-op is one of 20,000 to be found in residential houses around the province.
That figure excludes the larger grow-ops in industrial locations, not to mention the huge dope farms that are scattered around British Columbia's vast interior.
If Inspector Cantera's estimates are accurate, then British Columbia is probably home to the largest concentration of organised criminal syndicates in the world.
The striking aspect of BC's marijuana trade is that it has gone beyond the boundaries of traditional organised crime groups (although some are still heavily involved) and entered into the middle classes.
Much of the revenue derived from BC Bud, as the cannabis crop is known, goes on paying college fees, perhaps buying a second car or making that holiday to the Caribbean just a little bit more affordable.
The trade is so large that the police in BC are faced with an impossible task.

TV news now shills products on anchor desk
The New York Times
(7/22/08)

A Product’s Place Is on the Set

Name-brand products make regular appearances on television shows, where they are typically written into a drama, comedy or reality program. “American Idol” viewers, for example, have come to expect to see a Coke cup in front of Simon Cowell as he dresses down contestants.
But TV news?
In recent weeks, anchors on the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas, KVVU, sit with cups of McDonald’s iced coffee on their desks during the news-and-lifestyle portion of their morning show. The anchors rarely touch the cups.
Executives at the station, one of 12 owned by Meredith Corporation, say the six-month promotion is meant to shore up advertising revenue and, as they told the news staff, will not influence content.
“There was a healthy dose of skepticism, and I’m pleased there was — it means they’re being journalists,” said Adam P. Bradshaw, news director of KVVU. The product placement was first reported Monday in The Las Vegas Sun.
The arrangement does raise questions about potential conflicts between the intended message and news content. The ad agency that arranged the promotion said the coffee cups would most likely be whisked away if KVVU chooses to report a negative story about McDonald’s.
“If there were a story going up, let’s say, God forbid, about a McDonald’s food illness outbreak or something negative about McDonald’s, I would expect that the station would absolutely give us the opportunity to pull our product off set,” said Brent Williams, account supervisor at Karsh/Hagan, the advertising agency that arranged the deal between McDonald’s and KVVU.
If that did not happen, “it might lead to the termination of an agreement” to appear on the show, he said. KVVU, for its part, said it would continue to report truthfully and honestly about McDonald’s. Mr. Bradshaw said the station would remove the cups, just as it would remove spot advertising from a newscast for any advertiser who is the subject of a negative report ...
But what if the reporters sitting in front of McDonald’s products are doing segments about, say, gang violence or outbreaks of tainted food?
“That’s something we’ve taken into account,” said Mr. Williams of Karsh/Hagan, part of the TBWA Worldwide unit of Omnicom Group.
“I’m kind of relying, my client is relying, on just the inner workings of that station,” he said. “Not that editorial would ever give a heads-up to sales or be expected to give a heads-up to sales, but these are professionals. They do realize that some businesses’ brands, some businesses’ reputations, could be at stake in terms of how commerce and news are interacting here.”

• WOW! That's quite a contradiction, Mr. Williams. In the case of a negative story, would you "expect that the station would absolutely give us the opportunity to pull our product off set"? Or are you saying, as you are quoted 16 paragraphs later, "Not that editorial would ever give a heads-up to sales or be expected to give a heads-up to sales"?
  By the way, media activists, other stations doing the same product placement during news-like programming are: WFSB, the CBS affiliate in Hartford, Connecticutt; WGCL, the CBS affiliate in Atlanta; WFLD, the Fox affiliate in Chicago; KCPQ, Seattle's Fox affiliate owned by the Tribune Company; and on Univision 41 in New York City. CM

Hey PUMAs! John McCain is anti-choice, anti-contraception, anti-family planning, anti-sex education, anti-women's healthcare and anti-science
In These Times
(7/21/08)

McSexist

... the chatter about the voting decisions of former presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) supporters continues. Much of the recent talk has focused on PUMAs (the acronym stands for “Party Unity My Ass”), a group supposedly so angry about the Democratic primary that they won’t vote for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). But as blogger Amanda Marcotte reported, PUMA PAC was started by a McCain donor, according to the Federal Election Commission.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t angry Clinton voters. But the number of progressive or even moderate voters who would seriously consider voting for McCain is much smaller than the media would have you believe. Unfortunately, McCain’s propaganda seems to be working, at least on those who aren’t aware of his record on issues of concern to women voters.
A February Planned Parenthood poll of 1,205 women voters in 16 battleground states found that 50 percent of women voters don’t know McCain’s position on abortion, and that 49 percent of women who backed McCain were pro-choice. Forty-six percent of women supporting McCain said they’d like to see Roe v. Wade upheld — though McCain says he supports overturning the decision. When they learned of his position on Roe, 36 percent of women who identified as both pro-choice and likely McCain voters said they would be less likely to vote for him.
These moderate, often suburban, middle-class women could be critical swing voters this election. At the time of the Planned Parenthood poll, Obama held only a 5 percentage-point margin over McCain with its swing-state demographic, 41 percent to 36 percent.
Planned Parenthood concludes that these findings suggest “that just filling in McCain’s actual voting record and his publicly stated positions on a handful of key issues has the potential to diminish his total vote share among battleground women voters by about 17 to 20 percentage points.”
“The only reason [McCain is] saying he’s going after Clinton voters is because if he doesn’t win their votes, he’s not going to win this election,” says Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood. “Even though I think it’s a real wash-up for him, he’s got to find some more voters somewhere. That’s the political math here" ...
McCain is no better when it comes to the issues of providing access to contraception, family planning information and basic women’s healthcare. He has voted to require parental consent for teenagers who want access to contraceptives, and against an amendment to the Senate’s 2006 budget that would have allocated $100 million for the prevention of teen pregnancy by providing education and contraceptives.
He opposed legislation requiring that abstinence-only programs be medically accurate and based in science. He voted to abolish funding for birth control and gynecological care for low-income women, and against funding for public education on emergency contraception.
He also voted against a measure that would require insurance companies to cover prescription contraception, despite the fact that many currently fund male reproductive pharmaceuticals, such as Viagra.
And he supports President Bush’s restoration of the “global gag rule” — which cuts off federal funding for nongovernmental organizations that provide abortion services and information — and he opposes funding international family planning, in general. Yet he doesn’t seem particularly well-informed on the subject.
In March 2007, the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney asked McCain whether grants for sex education in the United States include instructions about using contraceptives, or if they should abide by Bush’s abstinence-only policy.
After a pause, McCain responded, “Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.”
Nagourney followed up: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception? Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”
After another pause, McCain replied, “You’ve stumped me.”

With the Dow Jones down 25% since 2000, are the '00s more like the '30s or the '70s?
Huffington Post
(7/17/08)

Lies, Damn Lies and Government Inflation Statistics

Describing the decade that began in 2000 as the "naughties" or "oughties" offers a useful shorthand -- and particularly for people interested in discussing the U.S. economy's perilous dual pathway of rising commodity inflation coupled with financial assets deflation.
Ought and naught, of course, are two old-fashioned ways of saying "nothing" or "zero," appropriate for a painful decade that stretches from ought-one and ought-two to ought-nine.
But the term's negativism is also appropriate. As financial economists have begun to point out, between 2000 and mid-July 2008, the leading stock market yardstick, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, dropped from a 2000 peak of 11,700 to a level 500-700 points lower. Moreover, allowing for eight years worth of inflation, by official data, the decline was nearer 25%, making the real return much worse than "naught." This is what people have to watch in a stagflationary economy, which the new Consumer Price Index numbers (June's one-month increase of 1.1 percent) have finally started to admit.
The possibility that inflation could even reach double digits should start to resolve today's central debate: whether this decade's unhappy U.S. economy is more like that of the depression 1930s or that of the stagflationary 1970s. Alas, there are elements of both.
To begin with, even the national media agree that home prices are in their biggest nationwide decline since the 1930s. Also, last month's slump in the Dow-Jones Industrial Average was the biggest June slide since the early depression year of 1930. And depending on who you talk to, the financial crisis is either the biggest since World War Two or the biggest since the 1930s. Yet there is also escalating resemblance to the 1970s, when a global food and energy price surge followed the loose fiscal policy and boom of the Vietnam war era. No such trend existed in the 1930s. However, especially since 9/11 and then the invasion of Iraq, our decade has also seen has that kind of easy money and loose fiscal policy. As a result, global food and energy prices have been soaring.
The just-released inflation numbers suggest a gruesome possibility. Our own decade, like the years from 1966 to 1982, could see another severe economic downturn and stock market slump, but one partially camouflaged by fast-rising prices. Here is the precedent: between a Dow-Jones (intra-day) peak of 1000 in early 1966 and an
August 1982 bottom of some 780, the Dow declined a nominal 22%. However, a truer calculation, adjusting for soaring inflation, put the real decline close to 70 percent -- a disguised disaster.
Could it happen again? Maybe. It is possible to imagine somewhat similar economic terrain. In 2010 or 2012, the Dow-Jones could easily be at 10,500 or 11,500, for a seemingly small ten-year or twelve year decline. But if simultaneous inflation has totaled some 30 percent, then the real decline would be 30-40% -- major league erosion, in other words.
And there is a worse possibility -- that the changed Consumer Price Index measurements in place since the 1990s have significantly underestimated inflation, and the true damage has already been much deeper. Why would Washington allow this, you might ask. The answer: that because a large chunk of the federal budget rises with inflation, the savings from understating it are enormous, however unfair to retirees and workers.
We are not talking small numbers. With global inflation heating up, the investment firm of Morgan Stanley recently noted that "The percentage of the world's population living under double-digit inflation is 42 percent. Six out of the ten most populous countries have inflation running at more than 10 percent."

Why Americans hate Congress even more than they hate President Bush
USA Today
(7/21/08)

A congressman's arrogance

According to the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, just 14% of voters have a favorable view of Congress. Ouch! Even President Bush polls at twice that number.
To be sure, when voters are in a foul mood ... Congress is an easy target. More so when individual members do things to earn the low grades. The latest example is Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., influential chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
The New York Times disclosed recently that Rangel has no fewer than four rent-controlled apartments in his Harlem district, three for his family and one for a campaign office. For these he pays a fraction of the market rate.
The Washington Post added to the narrative, reporting that the congressman has been raising money from people and businesses with interests before the Ways and Means panel for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service, a $30 million monument to himself and home for his papers at the City College of New York.
Then there's Rangel's car, a 2004 Cadillac DeVille he leases at taxpayer expense for $777.54 a month. "I want (my constituents) to feel that they are somebody and their congressman is somebody," he told The Times.
With the possible exception of his campaign apartment, these actions might adhere to the letter of laws, but they violate the spirit of public service ...
As for the Rangel Center, it's hard enough to abide the increasingly opulent presidential libraries being built with contributions from billionaires, foreign governments and other interested parties. Now, Rangel wants congressmen to get into the act.
... he, like many of his colleagues, has grown overly accustomed to the trappings of power. That's one reason Congress' ratings are as low as they are.

The political corrections of John McCain
The New York Times
(7/21/08)

After 2000, McCain Learned to Work Levers of Power

Senator John McCain was all but a sworn enemy of Senator Trent Lott, the former Republican leader.
Mr. Lott had quashed Mr. McCain’s most cherished legislative goals. And, worse, Mr. McCain believed that in the 2000 Republican primaries, Mr. Lott had spread rumors about his colleague’s mental stability on behalf of his rival for the nomination, George W. Bush.
But when Mr. Bush turned on Mr. Lott in 2002, helping to push him out of the leadership over a racially insensitive remark, Mr. McCain saw a shared grievance and found an opportunity. He leapt to Mr. Lott’s defense, urging Republicans to stick by him.
“He said, ‘I know how you are feeling; you have been treated unfairly,’ ” Mr. Lott recalled. “I am a grateful guy, and I will never forget it.” A legendary dealmaker with a deep store of chits, Mr. Lott became a valuable ally to his former foe, backing him in public debates and less visible Senate intrigues.
Their alliance was just one step in the political reinvention of Mr. McCain, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Previously a marginal player better known for heckling the Senate than for influencing it, Mr. McCain returned from the 2000 campaign with a new national reputation and a new political sophistication.
Over the next eight years, he mastered the art of political triangulation — variously teaming up with Mr. Lott against the president or the new Republican leaders, with Democrats against Republicans, and with the president against the Democrats — to become perhaps the chamber’s most influential member.

• Matt loved this part of the story: Before the 2008 campaign heated up, Mr. McCain would go to dinner about twice a month in Washington — he favors spicy Vietnamese food, the movie "Borat" and trading jokes about colleagues — with a small group of Republicans that included Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Senator Michael DeWine of Ohio and the actor and former Senator Fred D. Thompson (who briefly jumped into this year's Republican primaries himself). Entertaining guests at his property in Sedona, Ariz., he invariably drags them for long walks to indulge his passion for bird watching. "If you took all the people at Gitmo, put them in the cabin for a weekend and made them listen to John talk about the birds, they would all spill their guts," Mr. Graham said.

President Bush playing the 'fear card' again to silence the press
The New York Times
(7/17/08)

The Right to Know

In the face of near hysterical opposition from the Bush administration, the Senate Democratic leadership intends to take up a proposed shield law to provide journalists with limited protection against being compelled to reveal confidential sources in federal court. A similar measure won House approval last October in a bipartisan 398-to-21 landslide. But the White House, as ever, is playing the fear card, orchestrating a barrage of warnings that the law would “wreak havoc” on national security and “completely eviscerate” the ability to investigate terrorism.
Such hype and manipulation is predictable from an administration so obsessed with concealing its own abuses. The Senate must not be cowed. Only through robust reporting has the nation learned the hard lessons of President Bush’s illegal programs to eavesdrop on Americans and run torture prisons abroad.
Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, a Republican conservative, punctured the White House alarms with a blunt warning: “The only check on government power in real time is a free and independent press" ...
The bill has ample protection for law enforcement and national security while making sure journalists are not hounded into jail for protecting sources who point to government law-breaking and corruption.
The measure has been endorsed by the attorneys general of most of the 49 states that already extend qualified shield protections to journalists. Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have endorsed the bill.

Past This is Hell! guest spied on by Maryland State Police
The Huffington Post
(7/20/08)

COINTELPRO Comes to My Town: My First-Hand Experience With Government Spies

Past This is Hell! guest Dave Zirin writes...

Finally, at long last, I have something in common with Muhammad Ali.
No, I'm not the heavyweight champion of the world, and haven't been named spokesperson for Raid bug spray. Like "the Greatest" - not to mention far too many others -- I have been a target of state police surveillance for activities -- in my case against the death penalty -- that were legal, non-violent, and, so we assumed, constitutionally protected. In classified reports compiled by the Maryland State Police and the Department of Homeland Security, I am "Dave Z." This nickname was given by an undercover agent known to us as "Lucy." She sat in our meetings of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, smiling and engaged, taking copious notes about actions deemed threatening by the Governor of Maryland, Robert Ehrlich. Our seditious crimes, as Lucy reported, involved such acts as planning to set up a table at the local farmer's market and writing up a petition. Adding a dash of farce to this outrage, she was monitoring us in the liberal enclave of Takoma Park, Maryland, a place known more for vegans than violence, more for tie-dying than terrorism.
Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act and the ACLU, we now know that "Lucy" was only one part of a vast, insidious project. The Maryland State Police's Department of Homeland Security devoted near 300 hours and thousands of taxpayer dollars from 2005 and 2006 to harassing people whose only crime was dissenting on the question of the war in Iraq and Maryland's use of death row.

The framing of Alabama Governor Don Siegelman
Ig Publishing
(7/21/08)

Scary Politics in Alabama: How the GOP Framed Gov. Don Siegelman

From a new book edited by past This is Hell! guest Mark Crispin Miller ...

On Election Day 2002, the Alabama governorship seemed all but certain to be delivered to the Democratic incumbent, Don Siegelman. In a largely Republican state, the popular Siegelman had been the only person in Alabama history to hold all of the state's highest offices, having served as Attorney General, Secretary of State, Lieutenant Governor and finally, as Governor. When the polls closed on election night, and the votes were being counted, it seemed increasingly apparent that Governor Siegelman had been victorious in his re-election bid against the Republican challenger, Bob Riley. But, sometime in the middle of the night, a single county changed everything, and by the next morning, Alabamians awoke to find that Riley was their new governor.
According to CNN, the confusion over who the actual winner was stemmed from what appeared to be two different sets of numbers coming in from Baldwin County ...
Riley's electoral victory had rested on a razor-thin margin of 3,120 votes. According to official reports, Baldwin County had conducted a recount sometime in the middle of the night, when the only county officers and election supervisors present were Republicans. While there were many electronic anomalies across the state, the Baldwin County recount had put Riley over the finish line. State and county Democrats quickly requested another Baldwin County recount with Democratic observers present, as well as a statewide recount. But before the Baldwin County Democratic Party canvassing board could act, Alabama's Republican Attorney General William Pryor had the ballots sealed. Unless Siegelman filed an election contest in the courts, Pryor said, state county canvassing boards did not have the authority "to break the seals on ballots and machines under section 17-9-31" of the state constitution.
Pryor had won his reelection bid in 1998 to Alabama's top legal office with the help of two campaign managers, one of whom is remarkably well known because he would later go on to lead the George W. Bush victory in the 2000 election: Karl Rove. Pryor's other campaign manager was a longtime GOP operative by the name of Bill Canary. Canary would emerge as the campaign manager for Siegelman's opponent, Bob Riley, in the 2002 election. After Pryor was re-elected in 1998, he almost immediately began investigating Siegelman, who was then Lieutenant Governor. Siegelman appears to have made an enemy of Pryor as early as 1997, when he criticized the latter's close relationship with the tobacco industry. Pryor's history and relationship with Canary and Rove should have been reason enough for the Alabama Attorney General to recuse himself from the November 2002 election controversy. But Pryor refused.
A year earlier, in 2001, President Bush had appointed Leura Canary to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama. If that last name sounds familiar, it is because her husband is Bill Canary. Leura Canary had begun working on Siegelman's case almost as soon she took office, when she federalized Attorney General Pryor's ongoing state probe. After spending six months investigating Siegelman, Leura Canary was forced to formally recuse herself from the investigation because of her husband's connections to the Riley campaign. At least she gave the appearance of recusing herself; no evidence of this recusal has ever been found, and all requested documents from the Department of Justice are MIA. By all accounts, Leura Canary continued to conduct the investigation from behind the scenes. This resulted in her delivering an indictment in 2004 of conspiracy and fraud in which Siegelman and two alleged co-conspirators were said to have rigged Medicaid contracts in 1999. However, only a few months after filing the indictment, the US Attorney's prosecuting the case were held in contempt of court, and the case against Siegelman was dismissed.
After Siegelman indicated his intention to seek reelection, Canary's original investigation resurfaced in 2005 ...
... this story became even more twisted when a long time Alabama Republican attorney who had handled opposition research for Bob Riley's 2002 campaign against Siegelman came forward with some astonishing allegations. Dana Jill Simpson had spent the 2002 election cycle digging into Don Siegelman's background. In 2007, Simpson filed an affidavit in which she alleged direct White House involvement in the 2002 Alabama election. According to Simpson's affidavit, Siegelman had conceded the election and did not push for a recount because Riley's team had threatened him with prosecution if he did not withdraw from the race. In addition, Simpson also revealed an alleged conference call that took place on November 17, 2002 between herself, Bill Canary, Rob Riley-Governor Bob Riley's son-and other members of the Riley campaign:
"Rob Riley told her in early 2005 that his father and a Republican operative met with Rove months earlier to discuss Siegelman's prosecution. Simpson said Rob Riley told her Rove spoke to Bob Riley and William Canary. 'He proceeds to tell me that Bill Canary and Bob Riley had had a conversation with Karl Rove again, and that they had this time gone over and seen whoever was the head of the department' at Justice overseeing the Siegelman prosecution, Simpson testified."
Expanding on her original allegations, Simpson testified on September 14, 2007 before lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee and dropped a bombshell revelation. Describing a conference call among Bill Canary, Rob Riley and other Riley campaign aides, which she said took place on November 18, 2002-the same day Don Siegelman conceded the election-Simpson alleged that Canary had said that "Rove had spoken with the Department of Justice" about "pursuing" Siegelman and had also advised Riley's staff "not to worry about Don Siegelman" because "'his girls' would take care of" the governor.
The "girls" allegedly referenced by Bill Canary were his wife, Leura, and Alice Martin, another 2001 Bush appointee as the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Simpson added that she was told by Rob Riley that Judge Mark Fuller was deliberately chosen when the Siegelman case was prosecuted in 2005, and that Fuller would "hang" Siegelman.
Before Simpson testified before the House Judiciary Committee, her house was burned down and her car was run off the road. Simpson was not the only one to have had experienced such bizarre misfortune. Dana Siegelman, Don Siegelman's daughter, said that her family's home was twice broken into during the trial and that Siegelman's attorney had had his office broken into as well.
In the end, what then are we to make of the Alabama election of 2002 and its aftermath, during which not only did Don Siegelman lose, but so did those of us who believe in the rule of law, the Constitution, fair elections, and a Justice System above politics? Is this the type of story you expect to read about in the United States of America?

For Americans in the Bush era, economy expands, inflation rises and wages drop
Bloomberg News
(7/21/08)

US Expansion May Be First Without Income Recovery

The current US economic expansion is the first in 60 years that may end before many Americans have recovered from the last slowdown. Annual family incomes adjusted for inflation have grown just 0.8 percent since the end of 2001 even as the economy expanded an average 2.7 percent a year, leaving households little cushion to absorb higher food and fuel prices ...
Now, as prices pick up, the deterioration in income growth means households are likely to cut spending, restraining the economy. Economists don't anticipate annualized growth to breach 2 percent until the third quarter of 2009, according to a monthly Bloomberg News survey.
The Labor Department reported July 16 that consumer prices jumped 5 percent in the year to June, the most in 17 years. That pushed the so-called Misery Index, which adds inflation to the unemployment rate, to 10.5, a level unseen since 1993, the year Democrat Bill Clinton was inaugurated as president after campaigning on promises to revive the economy.
The lack of wage growth during George W. Bush's presidency means Democrats are likely to make gains in this year's election, said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
"People vote their pocketbooks,'' he said. "They're likely to take out their problems on the incumbent party. It's going to be pretty hard'' for Republican presidential candidate John McCain "to escape Bush's mantle on the economic front.''

• The neutering of labor has made it so owners can pocket all the profits. MM

Activist Catholic group ordains three women priests
The Associated Press
(7/20/08)

Group says it ordains 3 women Catholic priests

An activist group hoping to pressure the Roman Catholic church into dropping its long-standing prohibition barring women from the priesthood says it ordained three women on Sunday.
Church officials did not recognize the ordination, and the Vatican has previously warned that women taking part in ordination ceremonies will be excommunicated.
The group known as Roman Catholic Womenpriests held the ceremony at the Church of the Covenant, a Protestant Church in Boston.

'Cool or creepy?': The militarization of pot
AlterNet
(7/20/08)

Synthetic Pot as a Military Weapon? Meet the Man Who Ran the Secret Program

Past This is Hell! guest Martin Lee writes ...

It was billed as a panel discussion on "the global shift in human consciousness." A half-dozen speakers had assembled inside the Heebie Jeebie Healers tent at Burning Man, the annual post-hippie celebration in Black Rock, Nev., where 50,000 stalwarts braved intense dust storms and flash floods last August. Among the notables who spoke at the early evening forum was Dr. Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, the Bay Area-based psychochemical genius much beloved among the Burners, who synthesized Ecstasy and 200 other psychoactive drugs and tested each one on himself during his unique, offbeat career.
Sitting on the panel next to Shulgin was an unlikely expositor. Dr. James S. Ketchum, a retired U.S. Army colonel, told the audience, "When Sasha was trying to open minds with chemicals to achieve greater awareness, I was busy trying to subdue people."
Ketchum was referring to his work at Edgewood Arsenal, headquarters of the US Army Chemical Corps, in the 1960s, when America's national security strategists were high on the prospect of developing a nonlethal incapacitating agent, a so-called humane weapon, that could knock people out without necessarily killing anyone. Top military officers hyped the notion of "war without death," conjuring visions of aircraft swooping over enemy territory releasing clouds of "madness gas" that would disorient the bad guys and dissolve their will to resist, while US soldiers moved in and took over.
Ketchum was into weapons of mass elation, not weapons of mass destruction. He oversaw a secret research program that tested an array of mind-bending drugs on American GIs, including an exceptionally potent form of synthetic marijuana. (Most of these drugs had no medical names, just numbers supplied by the Army.) "Paradoxical as it may seem," Ketchum asserted, "one can use chemical weapons to spare lives, rather than extinguish them."
Some of the Burners were perplexed. Was this guy cool or creepy?

Ecstasy production destroying 'one of the last forest wildernesses in mainland southeast Asia'
IRIN News
(7/21/08)

Cambodia: Ecstasy tabs destroying forest wilderness

The production of sassafras oil, which is used to make the recreational drug ecstasy, in southwest Cambodia, is destroying trees, the livelihoods of local inhabitants and wreaking untold ecological damage, according to David Bradfield, adviser to the Wildlife Sanctuaries Project of Fauna and Flora International (FFI).
The sassafras oil comes from the Cardamom Mountain area, one of the last forest wildernesses in mainland southeast Asia, and where the FFI project is based.
"The illicit distilling of sassafras oil in these mountains is slowly but surely killing the forests and wildlife," Bradfield told IRIN. "The production of sassafras oil is a huge operation, which affects not only the area where the distilleries are actually located, but ripples outwards, leaving devastation and destruction in its wake."

Protecting privacy is "one of the most difficult situations a library can face"
The Associated Press
(7/19/08)

Library confrontation points up privacy dilemma

Children's librarian Judith Flint was getting ready for the monthly book discussion group for 8- and 9-year-olds on "Love That Dog" when police showed up.
They weren't kidding around: Five state police detectives wanted to seize Kimball Public Library's public access computers as they frantically searched for a 12-year-old girl, acting on a tip that she sometimes used the terminals.
Flint demanded a search warrant, touching off a confrontation that pitted the privacy rights of library patrons against the rights of police on official business.
"It's one of the most difficult situations a library can face," said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of intellectual freedom issues for the American Library Association ...
The librarians did agree to shut down the computers so no one could tamper with them, which had been a concern to police.
Once in police hands, how broadly could police dig into the computer hard drives without violating the privacy of other library patrons?
(Col. James Baker, director of the Vermont State Police) wouldn't discuss what information was gleaned from the computers or what state police did with information about other people, except to say the scope of the warrant was restricted to the missing girl investigation.
"The idea that they took all the computers, it's like data mining," said Caldwell-Stone. "Now, all of a sudden, since you used that computer, your information is exposed to law enforcement and can be used in ways that (it) wasn't intended.'"

Maryland police acting like spies for an authoritarian government
The Progressive
(7/17/08)

Maryland State Police Infiltrated Groups Opposed to War and the Death Penalty

Past This is Hell! guest Matthew Rothschild writes ...

Max Obuszewski is a seasoned, nonviolent peace activist in Maryland. But to the Maryland State Police, he is suspected of committing the “primary crime” of "terrorism—anti-war protestors" and the "secondary crime" of "terrorism—anti-govern."
That is how the Maryland State Police designated him in internal documents that the ACLU of Maryland obtained through a lawsuit and released on July 17. The documents also show that the Maryland State Police entered his name into a database dealing with "high intensity drug activity." These documents reveal an elaborate undercover operation against peace groups and anti-capital-punishment groups.
"Agents collectively spent at least 288 hours on their surveillance over the 14-month period" in 2005 and 2006, the ACLU of Maryland says. Agents "monitored private organizing meetings, public forums, and events held in several churches, as well as anti-death penalty rallies outside the state’s SuperMax facility and in Lawyer’s Mall in Annapolis."
Groups discussed in the documents include the ACLU, the American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International, the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, the International Socialist Organization, the NAACP, and United Catholic Charities. (The mention of the ACLU pertained to an upcoming meeting where the group was to "discuss the Patriot Act and how it is applied to the general population in relation to civil rights and liberties.")
The operation by the Maryland State Police included infiltrating undercover troopers into the small organizing sessions that the activists held. Sometimes only four people attended those meetings—along with the snoop ...
David Rocah is a staff attorney for the ACLU of Maryland.
"To say my jaw hit the floor, to say I'm stupefied, doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction," Rocah says. "This is downright terrifying and ought to send chills down the spine of every American who cherishes freedom and who believes that we have freedom to voice our opinions in this country."
Rocah worries that this type of surveillance and infiltration will discourage people from exercising their First Amendment freedoms.
"It is deeply pernicious," he says. "If your involvement in political activity will result in you being entered into a government criminal database, that will inevitably deter lots of people from being involved in the first place. And being involved in political activity, working together with your fellow citizens, is the foundation of our country, the cornerstone of democracy, the entire reason we exist as a country. If there’s anything more fundamental, I'll be damned to know what it is."
Rocah says that such spying is the hallmark of authoritarianism.
"If you think the next person who shows up is potentially an undercover government agent, you immediately begin suspecting everyone, and it becomes impossible to work together effectively," he says, "which is precisely why authoritarian governments around the world engage in these kinds of tactics."
The Maryland State Police denies any wrongdoing.
Here is the statement it released on July 17 in its entirety:
"In response to allegations of inappropriate surveillance by members of the Maryland State Police, Colonel Terrence B. Sheridan, Superintendent of the Maryland State Police, is stating the Department does not inappropriately curtail the expression or demonstration of the civil liberties of protestors or organizations acting lawfully. In a post 9/11 world, one of the main responsibilities of the Maryland State Police is to protect the citizens of Maryland from threats both foreign and domestic. No illegal actions by State Police have ever been taken against any citizens or groups who have exercised their right to free speech and assembly in a lawful manner. Only when information regarding criminal activity is alleged will police continue to investigate leads to ensure the public safety. "
Rocah calls that statement "a bald-faced lie," adding, "Where is the allegation of criminal activity?" In fact, to the contrary, the surveillance logs are replete with the undercover officers’ own statements about how polite the demonstrators are.
The logs contain nothing except references to perfectly lawful speech, fully protected by the First Amendment.”
Rocah also says that it is "flat-out false" that the state police engaged in no illegal actions. Law enforcement agents must have a "reasonable suspicion" that an individual is involved in criminal conduct or activity before they can spy on that individual, and they are not allowed to collect information on an individual on the basis of "political" or “religious” beliefs unless it directly relates to that person’s criminal conduct or activity, Rocah says, citing 28 cfr, section 23.20.
Rocah further disputes the claim that this spying was to ensure the safety of the citizens of Maryland.
"I defy Colonel Sheridan to show me how following these groups in their lawful, Constitutional rights to organize around the death penalty and the war makes you, me, or anyone in the state of Maryland or in the country any safer," Rocah says. "Focusing on this kind of nonsense makes us all a lot less safe. This would be Kafkaesque in its insanity and humor if it wasn’t so serious."
The ACLU of Maryland has sent a letter to Maryland Governor Martin J. O'Malley asking him to order "an immediate stop to the surveillance and monitoring of peaceful protest activity and prohibit police from keeping files on the views and expressive activities of peaceful activist organizations."
The governor's press secretary did not return a call for comment.
If the governor and the state police do not cease and desist, the ACLU "will use every legal tool at our disposal to make sure it doesn’t happen again," says Rocah.

"MoveOn can be tremendously successful without being effective"
The Nation
(7/16/08)

MoveOn at Ten

Marshall Ganz--who organized with the farm workers, recently ran training workshops for Obama's field staff and now studies and teaches organizing at Harvard's Kennedy School--says much of what MoveOn does is marketing, not organizing. "The genius of the Internet is more the way it can create a marketplace than create organization," he says. "It's important to distinguish between sharing information and forming relationships. Forming a relationship, we make a commitment to work together. Participation in democratic organizations is not just an individual act. It's an act of affiliation with others." If you were to map the arrows of relationship between MoveOn's staff and its members, Ganz points out, nearly all the arrows would run between the members and the staff: you receive an e-mail, you respond, you give money, etc.--but relatively few go from member to member.
"They're gonna send letters to Congress and the President," says Ganz. "And man, we generate a lot of fucking letters. That's great. So what sort of capacity have we created in the process? Have we developed a new leadership? Probably not. Have members learned more about relating to each other? Not so much."
Ganz's criticism is mild compared with that of (past This is Hell! guest) John Stauber, who founded the Center for Media and Democracy and has written scathingly of MoveOn. According to Stauber, MoveOn has become "primarily a money-raising and marketing arm of the Pelosi wing of the Democratic Party. They clearly haven't shown any interest in building an organization that would empower the millions of people whose e-mail addresses they have.... The so-called MoveOn membership is really just a group of people who are used for fundraising purposes."
Stauber is among a small handful of people on the left willing to express such harsh criticisms on the record. Privately, more progressive activists will make familiar complaints about grievances and frictions that have developed from working together. "In the early days they were great partners and had an interest in building up other progressive organizations," one prominent progressive who's worked with MoveOn told me. "That seems to have changed."
Perhaps the most damning criticism leveled at MoveOn is that by creating a clear and easy outlet for people's frustration and angst, the organization delivers people a false sense of accomplishment. In other words, MoveOn can be tremendously successful without being effective. Consider the vaunted petition, MoveOn's bread and butter. In 1998 a petition with 100,000 signatures would make any politician sit up and take notice, but over time the value has been degraded as more organizations have learned how to leverage the Internet. Clay Shirky calls this the "cost/value paradox" and says it can spell big trouble for MoveOn. As the transaction cost for a specific piece of activism declines, so does its value, since politicians know it doesn't require much effort. One former Democratic Senate staffer told me that when her boss was presented the weekly mail summary, the staff made sure that if an issue had landed on the top of the list as a result of a MoveOn mass e-mailing, it was marked with an asterisk. "They've been selling: Millions of E-mails Sold, the old McDonald's line," says Shirky. "They're now realizing that in a way they're empty calories."

Supreme Court ruling on DC handgun ban leads to uncertainty on all US gun laws
The Associated Press
(7/19/08)

Guns ruling spawns legal challenges by felons

Twice convicted of felonies, James Francis Barton Jr. faces charges of violating a federal law barring felons from owning guns after police found seven pistols, three shotguns and five rifles at his home south of Pittsburgh.
As a defense, Barton and several other defendants in federal gun cases argue that last month's Supreme Court ruling allows them to keep loaded handguns at home for self-defense.
"Felons, such as Barton, have the need and the right to protect themselves and their families by keeping firearms in their home," says David Chontos, Barton's court-appointed lawyer.
Chontos and other criminal defense lawyers say the high court's decision means federal laws designed to keep guns out of the hands of people convicted of felonies and crimes of domestic violence are unconstitutional as long as the weapons are needed for self-defense.
So far, federal judges uniformly have agreed these restrictions are unchanged by the Supreme Court's landmark interpretation of the Second Amendment ...
The legal attacks by Chontos and other criminal defense lawyers are separate from civil lawsuits by the National Rifle Association and others challenging handgun bans in Chicago and its suburbs as well as a total ban on guns in public housing units in San Francisco.
People on both sides of the gun control issue say they expect numerous attacks against local, state and federal laws based on the high court's 5-4 ruling that struck down the District of Columbia's ban on handguns. The opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia also suggested, however, that many gun control measures could remain in place.
Denis Henigan, vice president for law and policy at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said Scalia essentially was reassuring people that the laws keeping guns from felons and people with mental illness and out of government buildings and schools would withstand challenges. But Henigan said he is not surprised by felons pressing for gun-ownership rights.
"The court has cast us into uncharted waters here. There is no question about that," Henigan said.
"There is now uncertainty where there was none before," he said. "Gun laws were routinely upheld and they were considered policy issues to be decided by legislatures."

Is Israel using rats to drive Arabs out of Jerusalem?
The Jerusalem Post
(7/20/08)

Palestinians: Israel uses rats against J'lem Arabs

The Palestinian Authority's official news agency Wafa says Israel is using rats to drive Arab families out of their homes in the Old City of Jerusalem.
In the past the news agency, which is controlled and funded by PA President Mahmoud Abbas's office, has accused Israel of using wild pigs to drive Palestinians out of their homes and fields in the West Bank. In the reports, Palestinians were quoted by the agency as saying that they had seen Israelis release herds of wild pigs, which later attacked them.
But this is the first time that Palestinians have spoken of rats being used against them.
"Rats have become an Israeli weapon to displace and expel Arab residents of the occupied Old City of Jerusalem," Wafa reported under the title, "Settlers flood the Old City of Jerusalem with rats." The report continued: "Over the past two months, dozens of settlers come to the alleyways and streets of the Old City carrying iron cages full of rats. They release the rats, which find shelter in open sewage systems."

China says entertainers that threaten the state will be banned from Olympics
International Herald Tribune
(7/18/08)

China to ban entertainers it deems a threat

Foreign entertainers who have taken part in activities that China deems a threat to its sovereignty will not be allowed to perform here, according to new rules posted Thursday on the Web site of the Ministry of Culture.
The rules say that the background credentials of performers from foreign countries, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan will be scrutinized. "Those who used to take part in activities that harm our nation's sovereignty are firmly not allowed to perform in China," the rules say.
They also call for barring performers who promote ethnic hatred or "advocate obscenity or feudalism and superstition."
The rules are the latest attempt by China to clamp down on any political dissent before the Beijing Olympics, which begin on Aug. 8. Government officials have set up security checkpoints throughout Beijing, deported some foreigners or refused to renew visas and shut down protests by grieving parents whose children died in school collapses in the May 12 earthquake.
China had promised a more open atmosphere this summer and had told the International Olympic Committee that it would adhere to strict standards for human rights. Many people outside China now doubt its commitment to those pledges.
The rules on performers may have come about after an outburst in March by Bjork, the popular Icelandic singer. She used a concert in Shanghai to advocate Tibetan independence. She shouted "Tibet! Tibet!" after performing "Declare Independence," a song from her 2007 album, "Volta." The outcry drew sharp criticism from Chinese Internet users and praise from international supporters of an independent Tibet.

Foreclosures, caused by deregulation, force children onto the streets
OneWorld
(7/8/08)

Mortgage Crisis Hits 2 Million U.S. Children

Children's advocates say the impacts of the housing and foreclosure crisis are being felt in K-12 classrooms and communities across the country.
The United States' current record-breaking rates of mortgage foreclosure will directly impact 2 million children this year and next, according to a recent report from First Focus, a bipartisan child advocacy organization.
"Our homeless education liaisons are noticing increases in the number of students who are homeless, not just in high-poverty families but also those who have typically been middle class and facing this for the first time," says Patricia Popp, state coordinator for homeless education in Virginia.
Under federal law, school districts are required to have homeless education liaisons to identify and assist homeless students.
Kathy Kropf has served as the homeless liaison in Macomb Intermediate School District in suburban Michigan for 14 years. "Our numbers are the highest they've ever been this year," she says. This school year, the county served 514 homeless students, a 33-percent increase over last year. At least 50 of those students were made homeless by recent foreclosures, according to Kropf.
The national data on homelessness during the 2007-08 school year will not be available until the Fall, but preliminary evidence suggests a rise.
In April, the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, a grassroots membership and advocacy organization, surveyed over 1,000 school districts about the impact of the foreclosure crisis. Those districts reported serving a total of about 250,000 homeless students as of April 2008. With two months left in the school year, that number was already almost equal to the number of homeless children served the previous year.
The districts reporting the highest increases in homeless students appear to match those currently leading in foreclosures -- namely, areas in California, Florida, Texas, Michigan, and Ohio, says Barbara Duffield, the organization's policy director.

Would Obama lead US into an even bigger quagmire?
AlterNet
(7/16/08)

Obama Wants to Shrink One War, But Expand Two Others

Past This is Hell! guest Tom Hayden writes ...

Barack Obama has restated his phased withdrawal plan for Iraq in response to public questioning, but committed himself to expanding the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Any proposal to transfer American troops from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan is sure to cause debate and questions among peace