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Tuesday, May 22, 7 P.M.

LABOR'S RESPONSE TO KATRINA

WHAT HAS BEEN DONE?
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

MALCOLM SUBER
PEOPLES HURRICANE RELIEF FUND

REGISTERED NURSE RESPONSE NETWORK
CALIFORNIA NURSES ASSOCIATION

MEMBERS OF OTHER UNIONS

A Member of the
NEW ORLEANS COMMUNITY Residing in the Bay Area

MIKE BISHOP
UC-BERKELEY VOLUNTEER COORDINATOR

TUESDAY MAY 22nd - 7pm

$5-10 sliding scale donation –
no one turned away for lack of funds

CALIFORNIA NURSES ASSOCIATION
2200 FRANKLIN STREET, OAKLAND
(near 19th Street BART Station)

Sponsored By The Bay Area Labor
Committee For Peace & Justice/USLAW
For more info: 510-540-0845

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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s

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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/

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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King

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ARTICLES IN FULL:

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1) PARAMILITARIES MURDER A MEMBER OF THE PEACE COMMUNITY
THE PARAMILITARIES HAVE MURDERED FRANCISCO PUERTA
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, a CSN volunteer translator)
Friday, May 18, 2007
CSN News
http://www.colombiasupport.net/news/

2) Colombia warlord claims US link to funds
By DARCY CROWE, Associated Press Writer
Thu May 17, 9:32 PM ET
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1102AP_Colombia_Paramilitaries_Scandal.html

3) Appellate Judges Deliberate
Mumia Case on Hold
By DAVE LINDORFF
Weekend Edition
May 19 / 20, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/lindorff05192007.html

4) The Immigration Deal
Editorial
May 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/opinion/20sun1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

5) Illegal Migrants Dissect Details of Senate Deal
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and JULIA PRESTON
May 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/us/20immig.html?hp

6) 226 Juvenile Inmates to Be Freed in Texas
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/us/20youth.html

7) 13-Year-Old Arrested In School For Writing On Desk
Principal Urges Cops To Arrest Girl For Writing 'Okay'
Apr 5, 2007 7:51 pm US/Eastern
http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_095170448.html

8) Jamestown: The Lessons of Indians and Empire
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
May 3, 2007
prisonradio.org

9) Congress: Your Money and Your Life
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
May 8, 2007
prisonradio.org

10) "Sicko"
"Michael Moore's scathing, important look at the U.S. healthcare
system has plenty to rile the far right -- and a lot more to enrage
the larger American public."
By Andrew O'Hehir
May 20, 2007
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/05/20/cannes_4/

11) Fatah Troops Enter Gaza With Israeli Assent
"Hundreds Were Trained in Egypt Under U.S.-Backed Program to Counter Hamas"
Washington Post Foreign Service
May 18, 2007; A01
http://snipurl.com/1l3pa

12) Union Cuts Help Delphi As Salaried Cuts Lag
by David Barkholz/The Automotive News
http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=4549

13) Fear of Eating
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
May 21, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/opinion/21krugman.html?hp

14) Will Gentrification Spoil the Birthplace of Hip-Hop?
By DAVID GONZALEZ
May 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/nyregion/21citywide.html?ref=nyregion

15) Honduran Diplomat Assails Police
in Shooting of Unarmed Bronx Man
By THOMAS J. LUECK and TANZINA VEGA
May 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/nyregion/21shoot.html?ref=nyregion

16) Buyout to Form Big Company to Train and Treat Prisoners
By KEN BELSON
May 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/nyregion/21prison.html

17) Prisons' budget to trump colleges'
"No other big state spends as much to incarcerate compared
with higher education funding."
James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, May 21, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/05/21/MNG4KPUKV51.DTL

18) Missile kills Hamas official's family
"At least 8 killed, 13 wounded in attack, officials
say; earlier attacks kill 3."
The Associated Press
Updated: 11:17 p.m. ET May 20, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18732661/

19) CANINE INTELLIGENCE
VIA Email from: Greg McDonald
sabocat59@mac.com

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1) PARAMILITARIES MURDER A MEMBER OF THE PEACE COMMUNITY
THE PARAMILITARIES HAVE MURDERED FRANCISCO PUERTA
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, a CSN volunteer translator)
Friday, May 18, 2007
CSN News
http://www.colombiasupport.net/news/

The continual killings, attacks and threats against our operation
have not stopped. Every manner of destruction is used against us.
They are using social investment as a war weapon, along with
pressure, killing and threats of the paramilitaries, acting in
conjunction with the armed forces. Our historic obligation,
considering our alternative search for respect for the civilian
population in the midst of the armed conflict, is to report all of
their deeds, so that humanity may one day judge these terrorist
actions. Once again we have to report a new murder in contravention
of the humanitarian zones and against our community:

--Today, Monday, May 14 at 7 a.m., in front of the bus terminal in
Apartado, FRANCISCO PUERTA was murdered by the paramilitaries. He
was a farm leader and the ex-coordinator of the humanitarian zone in
the town of Miramar. Two paramilitaries came up to the store that’s
in front of the terminal. He was sitting there and they shot him
several times. Then they just walked off as if nothing had happened,
in the midst of the police that were all around.

In the same way, today at 7:30 a.m., there was a group of six
paramilitaries, dressed in civilian clothes and carrying long guns,
in El Mangolo, along with another four paramilitaries, also dressed
in civilian clothes and carrying pistols. There were soldiers and
police within two minutes of this paramilitary presence.

--On May 13, a businessman from Apartado came to San Josesito at
about 10:40 a.m., looking to buy some pigs. He told several people
in the community that the paramilitaries are talking in the
neighborhoods of Apartado and saying that they are going to carry out
a massacre in the Peace Community.

--On May 9 at 7:10 a.m., three farmwomen who belong to the community
were detained by three paramilitaries in El Mangolo. El Mangolo is
located as you are leaving Apartado heading for San Jose. The three
men were dressed in civilian clothes and carried pistols and radios
for communication. They said they were “Aguilas Negras” (a new
organization of paramilitaries). They told the women they had been
looking for them and they were going to kill them. They took them to
where the road leads away from Apartado, a place where the police
have a checkpoint.

There the police asked for their identification and started calling
by radio, giving the information on the three of them. The answer on
the radio was that these women were not the ones they were looking
for and that the police should note it down and let them go.
Immediately the three paramilitaries took photos of them told them
that if they said anything about what happened, they would kill them;
that they were going to continue to be around the area because the
orders are to start killing the people in that son-of-a-bitching
peace community.

The paramilitaries continued to ridicule them and told them that they
had a list, that they had gotten away this time but that they
shouldn’t claim any triumph because the paramilitaries had already
been ordered to go into San Josesito, la Union and the other towns
and carry out a massacre.

The women told the paramilitaries that they ought not to do that and
the paramilitaries answered angrily that it had already been
coordinated and the order had been given and that you don’t fool with
the police and with the Army. You have to respect them, they said,
and they said the Army and the police had already given them the
names of those who were to be killed.

The paramilitaries asked the women about some of the leaders of the
community and their wives or partners. They said that those sons of
bitches would not get away, that all the area of San Jose was
entirely guerrilla, and that after two years of having the police
there, there were only a few that would work with them. The others
all were pimps and collaborators with the guerrillas.

After keeping them there for half an hour and continuing to insult
and threaten them, they let them go, repeating that they would be
killed if they said anything about what happened.

These facts are proof of the murderous paramilitary actions that the
government is trying to hide. A new wave of killings of leaders of
the humanitarian zones is starting, with new deadly acts against the
community, as we have reported before.

This plan of extermination by the government against our community
has failed again, as we do not intend to back down on our
principles. We continue more firmly than ever. We are encouraged to
continue openly with our search and we have the solidarity of many
people at the national and international level—people who believe in
a different and just world. The work of FRANCISCO and his memory
give us the strength to continue in even greater solidarity with his
children and his family.

PEACE COMMUNITY OF SAN JOSE DE APARTADO

May 14, 2007

CSN recommends that you send messages to your Members of Congress
expressing outrage for this killing and question if the paramilitary
demobilization really took place in that region of Apartado . Call
for a full and impartial investigation into the killing of Francisco
Puerta and into the reported paramilitary threats against the Peace
Community. Request from the following Colombian authorities to take a
decisive action to confront and dismantle paramilitaries operating in
this region and to break their relations with the security forces.

APPEALS TO:

President of the Republic
Señor Presidente Álvaro Uribe Vélez
Presidente de la República, Palacio de Nariño, Carrera 8 No.7-2,
Bogotá, Colombia
Fax: +57 1 337 5890 / 342 0592
Salutation: Dear President Uribe

Minister of the Interior and Justice
Dr. Carlos Holguín Sardi
Ministro del Interior y Justicia
Ministerio Del Interior Y De Justicia, Carrera 9a. No. 14-10, Bogotá
D.C. Colombia
Fax: +57 1 560 46 30
Salutation: Dear Sir

Attorney General
Dr. Mario Germán Iguarán Arana
Fiscal General de la Nación, Fiscalía General de la Nación
Diagonal 22B (Av. Luis Carlos Galán No. 52-01) Bloque C, Piso 4
Bogotá, Colombia
Fax: + 57 1 570 2000 (a message in Spanish will ask you to enter
extension 2017)
Salutation: Dear Mr Iguarán

COPIES TO:
Human Rights Ombudsman
Sr. Volmar Antonio Pérez Ortiz, Defensor del Pueblo, Defensoría del
Pueblo
Calle 55, No. 10-32/46 oficina 301, Bogotá, Colombia

Colombia Support Network
P.O. Box 1505
Madison, WI 53701-1505
phone: (608) 257-8753
fax: (608) 255-6621
e-mail: csn@igc.org
http://www.colombiasupport.net

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2) Colombia warlord claims US link to funds
By DARCY CROWE, Associated Press Writer
Thu May 17, 9:32 PM ET
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1102AP_Colombia_Paramilitaries_Scandal.html

BOGOTA, Colombia -- A warlord accused of spearheading civilian
massacres claimed Thursday that some U.S. companies who buy
Colombia's bananas had made regular payments to his illegal
right-wing militias.

Imprisoned paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso did not specify why
the companies would have paid money, but the militias commonly
exacted "war taxes" from businesses and ranchers in areas where they
operated, countering extortion tactics carried out by leftist rebels.

Mancuso claimed in his testimony that the companies "paid one cent
for each box of bananas they exported," according to Jesus Vargas, a
lawyer for victims of paramilitary violence who was present at the
hearing, to which the press was barred.

He named Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte as having made such payments,
according to Vargas. Mancuso's lawyer, Hernando Benavides, confirmed
his client's testimony.

A spokesman for California-based Dole Food Co. denied the accusation.

"Recent press accounts implicating Dole with illegal organizations in
Colombia is absolutely untrue," said Marty Ordman.

Messages seeking comment left with the other fruit companies that
operate in Colombia were not immediately returned.

Chiquita Brands International Co. has acknowledged paying
paramilitaries $1.7 million over six years. Chiquita says the
payments were made to protect the safety of its workers but
Colombia's chief prosecutor has said companies that made such
payments shared the responsibility for paramilitary violence. In an
agreement with the U.S. Justice Department, the company paid a $25
million fine.

Mancuso — who was testifying as part of a peace deal with the
government — and about 60 other jailed warlords ordered the massacres
of about 10,000 people, many civilians, over a period of about 10
years beginning in the mid-1990s, according to Colombia's chief
prosecutor. They also stole millions of acres of land.

In his testimony, he also accused Colombians beverage giants Postobon
and Bavaria of paying "taxes" to the paramilitaries in return for
permission to operate along the Atlantic coast, a longtime stronghold
of the illegal militia.

"Bavaria has not made payments of any kind to illegal groupings
operating in various areas in Colombia," a company statement said.

Mancuso also said that the coal companies that operated in the
province of Cesar, home to one of the world's largest coal reserves,
paid "taxes", and that the companies that transported coal paid
$70,000 a month to the paramilitaries.

Wealthy landowners and drug traffickers first created the
paramilitaries in the early 1980s to protect them from rebel
extortion and kidnapping but the groups have since largely
degenerated into murderous gangs.

The paramilitaries, known by their Spanish acronym AUC, were listed
as a "foreign terrorists organization" in 2001 by the U.S. government.

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3) Appellate Judges Deliberate
Mumia Case on Hold
By DAVE LINDORFF
Weekend Edition
May 19 / 20, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.com/lindorff05192007.html

Momentous decisions are ahead in the 25-year-long case
of Philadelphia death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal,
following a hearing before a three-judge panel of the
Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia Thursday.

Assistant District Attorny Hugh Burns, who has been the
lead attorney for the Philadelphia DA on this case since
at least 1995, and who heads the appeals unit, went
up against San Francisco death penalty appellate
attorney Robert R. Bryan, who assumed the role of
lead attorney for Abu-Jamal in 2003.

Abu-Jamal, who was not present at the packed hearing
in the ceremonial courtroom of the Federal Courthouse
across from the Liberty Bell museum in Philadelphia,
had three claims before the Appellate Court, all
challenging his conviction for the 1981 murder of
Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. Judith
Ritter, Abu-Jamal's local counsel, argued argued
against a claim by the District Attorney to overturn
a 2001 decision by a lower federal court which threw
out his death sentence. Christina Swarns, a counsel
with the NAACP Legal defense Fund, argued in support
of Abu-Jamal's appeal as a "friend of the court."

The two-and-a-half-hour hearing began with prosecutor
Burns tryng to make the case that Federal District
Judge William Yohn had erred in vacating Abu-Jamal's
death sentence. Judge Yohn had ruled in 2001 that an
ambiguous and poorly worded jury verdict form, and an
even more ambiguous instruction from the judge in the
case, Albert Sabo, had left jurors believing, wrongly,
that they had to all agree on any mitigating circumstances
before weighing them in their decision as to the death
penalty. In fact, any one juror can find a mitigating
circumstance, while a death penalty decision must be
unanimous. Burns claimed that Yohn's basis for his
ruling was flawed. But all three of the judges-Chief
Judge Anthony Scirica and Judge Robert Cowen, both
Reagan appointees, and Thomas Ambro, a Clinton appointee-
seemed to take a dim view of Burns' arguments. Judging
from their challenging questions to Burns, and their
generally favorable questions to Abu-Jamal's attorneys,
it seemed likely that they would, in the end, uphold
Yohn's decision.

If they do, Abu-Jamal's death sentence would be lifted
once and for all. At that point, the DA would have 180
days to decide whether to seek a retrial on just his
sentence (not guilt). Several years ago, in an interview
with this reporter, Joseph McGill, the original prosecutor
at Abu-Jamal's trial, said the DA's office had apparently
not decided whether it would seek a retrial on the death
penalty if Yohn was upheld on appeal, as this would
require impaneling a new jury, and essentially retrying
the case, since a new jury would not know the issues
leading to conviction. The DA has to realize that a
death sentence would be much harder to win in today's
Philadelphia, where it would be much harder for the
prosecution to obtain a jury of 10 whites and two blacks,
as it managed to do for the trial in 1982. Also, in 1982,
Jamal had an attorney who had never handled a death penalty
case before, and he didn't even attempt to bring in witnesses
to offer mitigating evidence against a death sentence.

A definitive end to Abu-Jamal's death sentence, even if
his conviction remained in place or on appeal, would mean
a major change in his status. For one thing, the DA's
office would no longer be able, as it has done since 2001,
to pressure the courts into keeping him locked away in
solitary confinement on the state's super-max death
row outside Pittsburgh.

On the conviction issues, the court and Abu-Jamal's
attorneys focused on a claim that his jury had been
unconstitutionally purged of African Americans by
a prosecutor who had a history of removing blacks
from capital juries-a so-called Batson claim (after
the US Supreme Court decision in 1986). The main
presentation of the case by attorney Bryan was
hampered by frequent questions from the judges, who
kept asking for more evidence than just the undisputed
fact that prosecutor McGill had used peremptory
challenges to remove 10 otherwise qualified black
jurors from the jury, compared with only five whites.
Bryan pointed out that McGill had made his concern
about black jurors clear when, during the trial,
he raised an alarm that a black judge had entered
the courtroom and sat near Abu-Jamal's supporters
in the spectators' gallery. Reading from the court
transcript, Bryan noted that McGill had said,
"If the court pleases, the two black jurors may
know him." (Of course, as Abu-Jamal's then attorney
Anthony Jackson noted, there was an equal chance
any of the white jurors might have known the judge,
but McGill didn't seem to care about them.) In his
written brief to the court, Bryan also notes that
McGill, over the course of six capital trials
including Abu-Jamal's, used peremptory challenges
to strike 74 percent of qualified black jurors,
compared to only 25 percent of white jurors. That
brief also notes that over Ed Rendell's two terms
as Philadelphia district attorney, when the man
who is now Pennsylvania's governor was McGill's boss,
the DA's office struck black jurors in capital cases
58 percent of the time, compared to only 22 percent
of the time for whites. (Indeed, in 1982, and until
the high court's Batson ruling in 1986, the
Philadelphia DA actually followed a state supreme
court decision called Henderson, which ruled that
it was permissible for prosecutors to strike blacks
from a jury if they thought they might tend to favor
a defendant of the same race.)

Prosecutor Burns, for his part, focused on an argument
that Abu-Jamal's jury bias claim had been forfeited
on procedural grounds because he allegedly had not
made it soon enough-either during his trial or in
the early stages of his state court appeal. This
argument was weakened by the fact that the Supreme
Court only made race-based jury selection clearly
illegal in 1986, well after Abu-Jamal's trial, and
by the fact that documentary scientific evidence
of the Philadelphia prosecutor's systematic rejection
of black jurors did not come to light until after 1997,
after Abu-Jamal's state appeal had been exhausted.

At least one judge, Ambro, seemed clearly sympathetic
with Abu-Jamal's Batson claim. The other two judges
were harder to read, as they asked tough questions
of both Bryan and Burns. One judge, Cowen, on several
occasions suggested the improbable possibility that
since nobody knew the racial mix of the Abu-Jamal
jury pool, it "might have been" majority African-
American, "in which case the prosecutor's peremptory
challenges might be seen as having been biased against
whites." This view is clearly preposterous in a city
where the court system had been--and to some extent
still is--struggling to obtain an appropriate representation
of African Americans on juries. Indeed, back in 1982, the
city was still using only voter registration lists to call
people to jury duty, and blacks at that time, while
constituting 40 percent of the city's population, were
notoriously under-represented on the voter rolls. Years
later, following a federal lawsuit, the city has changed
its method for compiling jury pools, but a lawyer long
familiary with the issue says it would have been "almost
inconceivable" for there to have been a majority black
jury pool in 1982 under the old system.

If at least two of the three judges on the Third Circuit
panel were to find prima facie evidence of a Batson violation
in Abu-Jamal's trial, they would likely send the case back
to the Federal District Court, where Judge Yohn would be
ordered to hold a full evidentiary hearing on the issue.
In general, courts have held that the threshold for proving
a prima facie case of a Batson violation--and thus winning
an evidentiary hearing--is fairly low, while proving an
actual case of bias--and winning a new trial--can be
much harder.

The second appeal claim by Abu-Jamal--that his trial
had been unconstitutionally tainted by a summation
statement to the jury by prosecutor McGill in which
he told jurors their guilty verdict would "not be final"
because Abu-Jamal would have "appeal after appeal," was
given relatively short shrift at the hearing, because
of the time spent on the Batson issue. Nonetheless it
won support from a surprising quarter.

Prosecutor Burns argued to the court that they should
not even be considering the issue, since the US Supreme
Court has never ruled that such clearly improper
language by a prosecutor should undo a conviction--
only a death sentence. But Judge Cowen, looking
incredulous, asked Burns, "Isn't saying that undermining
a defendant's right to a fair trial?"

If Cowen took that question seriously--and feels that
telling jurors that their judgment isn't really final,
could undermine the concept of "proof beyond a reasonable
doubt"-then he could be considering overturning the
guilty verdict. If a second judge went along with his
view, that would mean a new trial for Abu-Jamal--except
for the fact that the DA would certainly appeal such
a decision to the US Supreme Court, (which would be
bound to consider it, because of such a ruling's
far-reaching implications).

There was no discussion of Abu-Jamal's third claim,
which was that his post-conviction hearing had been
constitutionally flawed because of a pro-prosecution
bias on the part of Judge Albert Sabo, the same judge
who had presided over his trial. The fact that there
was no argument on this claim by either side doesn't
matter much, since both sides have filed detail briefs
with the court, as they also did on the other claims.
Apparently, the three judges had no major questions
for either side regarding their respective arguments.

There is no specific timetable for the court to decide
on the four claims before it, though some attorneys
predict a decision can probably be expected in one
or two months.

Outside the courtroom, in the plaza in front of the
courthouse, and along 6th Street, several hundred
pro-Abu-Jamal demonstrators, many carrying "Free Mumia"
signs, staged a spirited demonstration. Inside the
courtroom, Abu-Jamal supporters filled most of the
seats reserved for spectators. Near the front sat
Officer Faulkner's widow, Maureen, and several family
members and supporters, who were allowed to enter
the courtroom via a private entrance while other
spectators had to go through security gates and
line up at the courthouse's main entrance.

Prosecutor McGill was also in attendance.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an
Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-
Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled
"This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common
Courage Press. Information about both books and other
work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

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4) The Immigration Deal
Editorial
May 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/opinion/20sun1.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

The immigration deal announced in the Senate last week poses
an excruciating choice. It is a good plan wedded to a repugnant
one. Its architects seized a once-in-a-generation opportunity
to overhaul a broken system and emerged with a deeply flawed
compromise. They tried to bridge the chasm between brittle
hard-liners who want the country to stop absorbing so many
outsiders, and those who want to give immigrants — illegal
ones, too — a fair and realistic shot at the American dream.

But the compromise was stretched so taut to contain these
conflicting impulses that basic American values were uprooted,
and sensible principles ignored. Many advocates for immigrants
have accepted the deal anyway, thinking it can be improved
this week in Senate debate, or later in conference with the
House of Representatives. We both share those hopes and
think they are unrealistic. The deal should be improved.
If it is not, it should be rejected as worse than a bad
status quo.

The good. Part of the compromise is strikingly appealing.
It is the plan to give most of the estimated 12 million
immigrants here illegally the chance to live and work
without fear and to become citizens eventually. The
conditions are tough, including a $5,000 fine, and a wait
until certain “trigger” conditions on border security
are met and immigration backlogs are cleared. It requires
heads of households to apply in their home countries,
sending them on a foolish “touchback” pilgrimage. That
is a large concession to Republican hard-liners, but
they, too, have come a long way: consider that last
year the House of Representatives wanted to brand the
12 million and those who gave them aid as criminals.
A winding and expensive path to citizenship is still
a path.

The bad. The deal badly erodes two bedrock principles
of American immigration: that employers can sponsor
immigrants to fill jobs and that citizens and legal
permanent residents have the right to sponsor family
members — young children and spouses, of course, but
also their grown children, siblings and parents. The
proposal would eliminate several categories of family-
based immigration, and it would distribute green cards
according to a point-based system that shifts the
preference toward those who have education and skills
but not necessarily roots in this country. Supporters
say that the proposal has been tweaked to give some
weight to kinship, and that many immigrants would
still be able to bring loved ones in. But the repellent
truth is that countless families will be split apart
while we cherry-pick the immigrants we consider brighter
and better than the poor, tempest-tossed ones we used
to welcome without question.

The awful. The agreement fails most dismally in its
temporary worker program. “Temporary means temporary”
has been a Republican mantra, motivated by the thinly
disguised impulse to limit the number of workers,
Latinos mostly, doing the jobs Americans find most
distasteful. The deal calls for the creation of a new
underclass that could work for two years at a time,
six at the most, but never put down roots. Immigrants
who come here under that system — who play by its rules,
work hard and gain promotions, respect and job skills —
should be allowed to stay if they wish. But this deal
closes the door. It offers a way in but no way up,
a shameful repudiation of American tradition that
will encourage exploitation — and more illegal
immigration.

It is painful, for many reasons, to oppose this
immigration deal. It is no comfort to watch as this
generation’s Know-Nothings bray against “amnesty”
from their anchor chairs and campaign lecterns,
knowing that it gives hope to the people they hate.

It is especially difficult because lives are in the
balance. The millions without documents live in
constant fear: a campaign of federal raids has
spread panic and shattered families. Congress’s
dithering has encouraged the rise of homegrown
zealots: mayors, police departments, county executives
and legislators who take reform into their own hands,
with cruelly punitive measures. No amount of hostile
legislation is going to drive the immigrants away.
A collapsed immigration deal could put off reform
for years, and encourage more of this cruelty.

It is the nation’s duty to welcome immigrants, to
treat them decently and give them the opportunity
to assimilate. But if it does so according to the
outlines of the deal being debated this week, the
change will come at too high a price: The radical
repudiation of generations of immigration policy,
the weakening of families and the creation of
a system of modern peonage within our borders.

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5) Illegal Migrants Dissect Details of Senate Deal
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and JULIA PRESTON
May 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/us/20immig.html?hp

TUCSON, May 19 — Under the shade of a mesquite tree here
one morning this week, waiting for work that did not come,
Elías Ramírez weighed the hurdles of what could be the
biggest overhaul in immigration law in two decades.

To become full legal residents, under a compromise Senate
leaders announced Thursday, Mr. Ramírez and other illegal
immigrants would have to pay a total of $5,000 in fines,
more than 14 times the typical weekly earnings on the
streets here, return to their home countries at least
once, and wait as long as eight years. During the wait,
they would have limited possibilities to bring other
family members.

“Well, it sounds difficult, but not impossible,” said
Mr. Ramírez, 24, a native of Chiapas, Mexico, who has
been here a year. “I would like to be here legally
in the future, so these things are what I might
have to do.”

Another man among the group gathered outside a church
here that serves as a hiring site for day laborers
overheard Mr. Ramírez and approached with disdain.

“It’s almost impossible to bring your family,” he said,
rattling off information he had gleaned from a Spanish-
language newspaper. “You have to go back first, and what
are you going to do in Mexico while you are there and
there is no work? I’ve been here 20 years and I still
work and support my family, so why would I do any
of these things?”

The compromise bill has offered a glimmer of hope to
illegal immigrants here, 60 miles from the border, and
elsewhere. But they and others, through news reports,
advocates and lawyers, are just now learning the fine
print.

Advocacy groups here said they would lobby lawmakers
to reject the bill, saying it would place onerous
restrictions on illegal workers who want to win legal
status and also hurt efforts to unify immigrant families.

“This is an unprecedented shift from family unity
being the cornerstone of our immigration policy,” said
Isabel Garcia, a lawyer and a chairwoman of Derechos
Humanos, an advocacy group here. Ms. Garcia also objected
to what she called “insurmountable” obstacles in the bill.

The compromise Senate bill proposes an initiative to give
legal status to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants.
It also portends a major shift in the priorities and values
of American immigration for the future. It would gradually
change a system based primarily on family ties, in place
since 1965, into one that favors high-skilled and highly
educated workers who want to become permanent residents.

In the future, low-skilled workers like the men waiting
for work here would largely be channeled to a vast new
temporary program, where they would be allowed to work
in the United States for three stints of two years each,
broken up by one-year stays in their homeland.

“This is a different architecture,” said Doris Meissner,
a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute,
a nonpartisan research group in Washington, and
commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service from 1993 to 2000.

Illegal workers already here would gain a provisional
legal status, known as a Z visa, fairly quickly. But
to become permanent residents they would have to pay
the big fines and get in an eight-year line behind
others who have already applied legally for green cards,
as permanent resident visas are known.

Still, despite the outcry from immigrant advocates,
a reading of the details of the legislation suggests
important benefits for relatives of legal immigrants
and naturalized American citizens who have been waiting
for green cards for as long as 22 years in some cases.

A first step is to eliminate, within eight years, the
backlog of 4 million people who have applied to come
legally to the United States, allotting 440,000 visas
a year for that purpose, according to summaries provided
by the Department of Homeland Security and the office
of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat
who was a chief author of the bill.

“We are adding to our family-based system, we are not
substituting merit for family,” said Laura Capps,
a spokeswoman for Mr. Kennedy.

After the backlog is cleared, a slowly increasing number
of permanent visas would be approved through a merit
system, based on points granted for English language
proficiency (an acute hurdle for the men waiting for
work here, as none spoke English), level of education
and job skills, among other factors.

Siblings and adult children of legal immigrants will
no longer be able to apply for visas, and visas for
parents of United States citizens will be limited
to 40,000 a year.

In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President
Bush said that the measure “will improve security
at our borders. It will give employers new tools
to verify the employment status of workers and hold
businesses to account for those they hire.”

Mr. Bush added, “The legislation will clear the backlog
of family members who’ve applied to come to our country
lawfully, and have been waiting patiently in line. This
legislation will end chain migration by limiting the
relatives who can automatically receive green cards
to spouses and minor children. And this legislation will
transform our immigration system so that future immigration
decisions are focused on admitting immigrants who have
the skills, education, and English proficiency that will
help America compete in a global economy.”

The immigration debate has long stirred politics, sometimes
dividing members of the same party and forcing lawmakers
to reconsider positions. This bill is no different.

Last year, as he sought re-election, Senator Jon Kyl
of Arizona, a Republican, was critical of giving illegal
immigrants legal status. But this week Mr. Kyl stood with
John McCain, Arizona’s senior senator and a candidate
for the Republican presidential nomination, as the
compromise was announced, saying ideological sacrifices
had to be made.

The proposal, though, divided the two Democratic members
of Congress from here in southern Arizona, Gabrielle
Giffords and Raúl M. Grijalva.

Ms. Giffords called it a positive step while Mr. Grijalva,
whose father was a migrant farm worker, told The Arizona
Daily Star it was “tentative and unfinished.”

In south Tucson, outside the Southside Presbyterian Church,
where immigrants — mostly men — have gathered for decades
to find work, the immigration debate is also playing out
as the men wait for jobs.

There are people like Mr. Ramírez, who spent several years
just over the border in Sonora before finally coming
to Arizona for construction and other work. He has not
seen his family, he said, for 10 years.

Sipping from a bottle filled with ice as the day’s heat
soared, Mr. Ramírez occasionally broke away when pickup
trucks and other vehicles approached, joining others
begging for a day’s work.

The biggest obstacle, Mr. Ramírez said, would probably
be paying the $5,000 in fines on the way to permanent
legal status. He does not have health insurance now,
which he would be required to provide for his family if
he decided to return to Mexico and come back as
a temporary worker. “I don’t know who sells that
or what it costs,” he said.

Still, all in all, “the important thing is saving.
The fines are similar to what we pay polleros,”
Mr. Ramírez said, using a Spanish slang term for
the smugglers who guide people across the border.

Teoforo Valdés, 32, nodded in agreement. He has lived
in and around Tucson for 10 years and still makes
occasional trips home to Sonora, evading the Border
Patrol.

But Mr. Valdés has grown tired of the journey, he said,
and, at least upon first look at the proposal,
sees reason for optimism.

“Right now, we have nothing, no real way to legalize
ourselves,” he said. “This government is giving us
steps and so we have to think how we can take them.”

As the morning wore on, the number of potential employers
driving past grew thin. The workers began to disperse,
though some stayed behind to use the bathroom and
a shower at the church.

Jesús Antonio Rodríguez, 49, who said he was a legal
resident and acts as an informal adviser to the men,
summed up the dilemma.

“People do not believe it but we really do come to work,”
Mr. Rodríguez said. “We are not delinquents here. We have
to work. And we want to cooperate, but everything
is always so hard here.”

Randal C. Archibold reported from Tucson, and Julia
Preston from New York.

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6) 226 Juvenile Inmates to Be Freed in Texas
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/20/us/20youth.html

AUSTIN, Tex., May 19 (AP) — The agency that runs the state’s
juvenile prison system said it would release 226 inmates
after a review found their sentences were improperly
extended.

Advocates for Texas Youth Commission inmates and their
families have complained that sentences are often extended
inconsistently or in retaliation for filing grievances.

Jay Kimbrough, who is heading an investigation into
accusations of physical and sexual abuse at the agency’s
facilities, formed a panel to review the records of nearly
all inmates with extended sentences. The six-member panel,
which included community advocates and prosecutors, reviewed
the cases of 1,027 inmates whose sentences were extended.

“For the youth we’re releasing, we did not find that the
extensions were warranted,” an agency spokesman, Jim Hurley,
said Friday. “The others will be reviewed on a regular basis.”

Mr. Hurley said the 226 inmates would be released on parole
as soon as guardians can pick them up or they can be
transferred to an interim halfway house.

The commission incarcerates about 4,700 offenders
ages 10 to 21.

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7) 13-Year-Old Arrested In School For Writing On Desk
Principal Urges Cops To Arrest Girl For Writing 'Okay'
Apr 5, 2007 7:51 pm US/Eastern
http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_095170448.html

(CBS) NEW YORK In this day and age where young students are
frequently charged for serious school offenses such
as possessing weapons, dealing drugs, or assaulting
other students on school property, one Brooklyn teen's
arrest may come as a surprise. A 13-year-old girl was
handcuffed and placed under arrest in front of her
classmates in Dyker Heights after she wrote "Okay"
on her desk.

The "suspect," Chelsea Fraser, says she's sorry for
scribbling the word on her desk, but both she and her
mother are shocked at the punishment.

"I'm appalled, because here we have rapists, murderers,
and you're taking a 13-year-old kid? Wasting valuable
manpower to arrest a child who wrote on a desk?"
Fraser's mother Diana Silva told CBS 2.

Police confirm that that's exactly what's written on
her arrest record and for the crime, she's been charged
with criminal mischief and the making of graffiti.
Fraser says the day she marked her desk, she was
wrongly grouped together with troublemakers who had
plastered stickers all over the classroom.

Fraser was arrested at the Dyker Heights Intermediate
School on March 30 along with three other male students.
She says she was made to empty her pockets and take off
her belt. Then she was handcuffed and led out of the
school in front of her classmates and placed in the
back of a police car.

"It was really embarrassing because some of the kids,
they talk, and they're going to label me as a bad kid.
But I'm really not," Fraser said. "I didn't know writing
'Okay' would get me arrested."

"All the kids were ... watching these three boys and
my daughter being marched out with four -- they had
four police officers -- walking them out, handcuffed,"
Silva said. "She goes to me, 'Mommy, these hurt!'"

The students were taken to the 68th Precinct station
house where Silva says they were separated for three
hours. "MY child is 13-years-old -- doesn't it stand
that I'm supposed to be present for any questioning?"
Silva said. "I'm watching my daughter, she's handcuffed
to the pole. I ask the officer has she been there the
entire time? She says, 'Yes.'"

On her report card, under conduct, Fraser has earned all
"satisfactory" marks and one "excellent" mark.

"My daughter just wrote something on a desk. I would have
her scrub it with Soft Scrub on a Saturday morning when
she should be out playing, and maybe a day of in-house
and a formal apology to the principal," Silva said.

CBS 2 contacted both the NYPD and the Board of Education
for a response. The police say the arrests followed
a request by the school's principal. The Board of Education
said the matter is under investigation, adding that
graffiti was found on several desks.

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8) Jamestown: The Lessons of Indians and Empire
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
May 3, 2007
prisonradio.org

It was a bright spring day, May 14th, 1607, when one hundred
and eight men and boys from England went ashore in an area
that we now call Virginia. Before a generation could pass,
the indigenous people would be all but destroyed. They would
become the sad reflection of the English missions
of civilization and Christianizing. Having failed
in this dubious experiment, the soˆcalled Indians would
be reduced to beggars in the land of their fathers.

Jamestown. During this month, and throughout the year,
we may be hearing of memorials or even celebrations
of the English settlement. We‚re taught about the great
English leader, Captain John Smith, and the struggle
of an Indian's chief's daughter, Pocahontas, to save
his life. Her plea for the man's life is as central
to America's founding mythology as the fantastic wolf-fed
children of Romulus and Remus was to Rome. When most
Americans think of America's founding families, they
think more often of Plymouth, Massachusetts, than of
Virginia. England's settlers landed in Virginia thirteen
years before settlers arrived in New England. When local
Indians resolved to let the English starve rather than
endure their harsh treatments, Smith chose to attack
and take what he wanted from his neighbors. As one
recorder noted, "seeing by trade and courtesy there was
nothing to be had, he, Smith, made bold to try such
conclusions as necessity enforced, though contrary
to his commission, let fly his musket, ran his boat
on shore, whereat they all fled into the woods."

Englishmen were poor farmers, and further, many felt
such work beneath them, so they either bartered foodstuffs
from the Indians, stole it, or forced them to work for them.
How many of us know that the first cross-cultural slavery
in the Americas was of Indians, not Africans. The Dominican
friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who accompanied Columbus
on the voyage from Spain, wrote home to request permission
to exploit Africans as slaves because the Indians were
dying too quickly.

Jamestown was four hundred years ago, yet it set a pattern
of conquest, destruction, and self-deception that continues
down to this very day. The history that began with Indians
did not end with them. The successful conquest of Indians
led inexorably to the conquest of a third of Mexico, and
seizure of their lands. It led to the Monroe Doctrine,
looking at the nearest continent as this nation's "backyard."
Jamestown. Four hundred years. Yes, let us celebrate and
commemorate conquest, death and genocide. There's something
to be learned in this. But I doubt it's the lesson we think
it is.

From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

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9) Congress: Your Money and Your Life
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
May 8, 2007
prisonradio.org

With congressional passage of the administration’s
supplemental money bill, the president threatens
a veto because of his aversion to timetables. But
whether he vetoes it or not, the die is cast. More
money for war, a war that never should have been
waged in the first place.

When news broke of the congressional passage,
I thought not of Congress but of a robber, like
the ones of old time movies who snarled, “Your
money or your life.” Congress goes one better,
for it’s your money and your life. For while bowing
to the false political imagery of supporting the
troops, congress has socked more U.S. billions into
a losing proposition to prop up a doddering regime
in Baghdad. The troops trope is a political maneuver
meant to evade the charge that the democratically
controlled Congress is soft on defense and betrayed
the military in the midst of war.

Instead of recognizing the handwriting on the wall,
imperial hubris of left and right feeds the illusion
that more money can save Iraq. Only Iraqis can save
Iraq. What we are witnessing are simply the limits
of U.S. imperial power. When Rome reached the limits
of its stretch, Emperor Hadrian ordered the building
of a wall across Britain's colonial areas. The U.S.
has ordered the building of walls throughout Baghdad,
to further divide an already divided city.
Echoes of empire, echoes of history.

Vietnam was waged years after it was abundantly clear
that peace was inevitable. In that interim, tens
of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands
of Vietnamese, perished in a maelstrom of madness
to save the faces of presidents. A generation later,
although the scope is different, the dismal reality
is the same. More war, more needless death.

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10) "Sicko"
"Michael Moore's scathing, important look at the U.S. healthcare
system has plenty to rile the far right -- and a lot more to enrage
the larger American public."
By Andrew O'Hehir
May 20, 2007
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/05/20/cannes_4/

May. 20, 2007 | "I know the storm awaits me back in the United
States," Michael Moore told a wall-to-wall throng of reporters here
after the Saturday morning press premiere of his new film, "Sicko."
Then he heaved a deep breath and added, "But this is just so pleasant."

It was indeed another gorgeous, summery morning on the French
Riviera, but the real heat was indoors. There wasn't a single empty
seat inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière -- which holds more than 2,000
people -- for "Sicko," and dozens of stragglers were locked out on
the sidewalk. Moore's screed against the outrageous state of American
healthcare was received with uproarious affection, but one might
argue that Cannes provided the softest possible crowd. An American
left-wing populist, attacking America's profit-motive, private-sector
ideology before a roomful of international intellectuals, at least
half of them Europeans. May I introduce a new phrase into the
Franglais dictionary? C'était un slam-dunk.

"Sicko" does not display Moore at his most cinematically inventive or
imaginative. It presents a TV-documentary-style parade of episodes,
characters and settings, bouncing from various American cities to
Canada, Britain, France and Cuba (and yes, don't worry, we'll get to
that). Moore plays a far smaller personal role in this film,
appearing only occasionally in his comic-relief role as the clueless
buffoon who can't seem to grasp that healthcare in all those other
countries is free, or virtually so. When he's eating dinner with a
group of Americans living in Paris who begin to list all the things
they can have as free or nearly free entitlements -- not just
healthcare but an emergency doctor who makes house calls; not just
childcare but a part-time in-home nanny -- Moore puts his hands over
his ears and begins singing "La la la la la." (If you have kids or
any kind of chronic family health problems, your reactions might
include weeping in despair, slitting your wrists or booking a one-way
ticket.)

Still, there is no mistaking the passion and political intelligence
at work in "Sicko." It's both a more finely calibrated film and one
with more far-reaching consequences than any he's made before. Moore
is trying to rouse Americans to action on an issue most of us agree
about, at least superficially. You may know people who will still
defend the Iraq war (although they're less and less eager to talk
about it). But who do you know who will defend the current method of
healthcare delivery, administered by insurance companies whose
central task is to minimize cost and maximize shareholder return?
Americans of many different political stripes would probably share
Moore's conclusions at the press conference: "It's wrong and it's
immoral. We have to take the profit motive out of healthcare. It's as
simple as that."

"Sicko" purposefully does not focus on the 50 million or so Americans
who don't have health insurance, as scandalous as that is, but on the
horror stories of middle-class working folks who believed they were
adequately covered. There are so many of these they begin to blur
into each other: the woman in Los Angeles whose baby was denied
treatment at an emergency room outside her HMO network, and died as
it was being transferred hours later; the woman in Kansas City whose
husband was repeatedly denied various drugs his physician prescribed
for kidney cancer, and who in the last stage of life was denied a
bone-marrow transplant that could have saved his life; the woman who
was told her brain tumor was not a life-threatening illness, and
died; the woman who was told her cancer must have been a preexisting
condition, and died.

One might respond that anecdotes like these have tremendous emotional
power but little analytical rigor, but in this case I think we all
know (and fear) that these worst-case outcomes exemplify the system
perfectly. Moore interviews two healthcare whistle-blowers, both now
plagued with guilt, who explain what should be obvious: The point of
the system is to treat as few people as possible as cheaply as
possible, and those who get ahead in the healthcare industry are
those who find ever more devious ways to deny coverage. (For example,
you can now be denied for certain preexisting conditions you didn't
know about, on the premise that you should have known about them.)

OK, let's get to the headlines: Yes, in the film Moore travels with a
group of ill and injured 9/11 rescue workers (along with several
other of his film's protagonists) to Cuba, where they receive free
and apparently excellent medical treatment. It's unquestionably
another button-pushing Michael Moore stunt, designed to provoke
controversy. It's cheap but funny, dubious as evidence but affecting
anyway. Moore does not even seem aware of the possibility that the
Cubans were shrewd enough to see the propaganda value in this
exercise, and put on a dog-and-pony show for his and our benefit.
(For that matter, we don't know how much of the visit was planned in
advance with Cuban authorities.) All that aside, within the context
of the film and the argument Moore is building, Cuba makes as much
sense as anywhere else.

Moore begins his foreign odyssey in the film after meeting a 22-year-
old Michigan woman who has moved across the Ontario border (not
entirely on the up-and-up) because she's been denied treatment for
cervical cancer. He wanders around emergency rooms in London,
Ontario, and London, England (where he discovers that the cashier's
window is for paying patients their travel expenses, not for settling
the bill). He zips from one Parisian arrondissement to another with
an on-call physician on the night shift. He dines with the
aforementioned Americans abroad, who seem dazed and a little guilty
about their escape from healthcare hell.

Much of this is played as comedy; Moore corners a young Afro-British
couple with a wiggling bundle in the hallway of a London hospital and
says cheerfully, "So -- how much they charge you for that baby?" But
Moore is trying to push us beyond the universally shared idea that
something must be done to the slightly more controversial idea that
something has been done, and that all we have to do is appropriate
it. Americans have of course been conditioned for generations to
believe that socialized medicine is first of all a disaster in its
own terms, and secondly, the pathway to totalitarianism.

His portrayal of the Canadian, British and French systems is
undoubtedly simplistic , and several Canadian reporters took that up
with him at the press conference -- although all of them admitted
they wouldn't trade their system for ours. But Moore's overall point
is, I think, inarguable: Flawed as they may be, those systems are a
hell of a lot more humane and civilized than anything we've got.
(Life expectancy is significantly higher, and infant mortality lower,
in all of those countries than the United States. Whatever outdated
stereotypes you may hold, these days poor people in Britain are
statistically healthier than rich people in America.)

Addressing a series of questions from foreign reporters at the press
conference, Moore said: "We should do what we always do as Americans,
steal the best things you're doing and make them our own. The
Canadians do certain things very well. The Brits do certain things
very well. The French have the best system in the world, and that's
not my opinion. That's how the World Health Organization rates them.
None of them is perfect, but it's not my role to make criticisms.
It's my role as an American to say, why don't we take the best
elements you're doing and blend them together, and call it the
American system?"

Moore decided to go to Cuba, as he explains in the film, after
learning the peculiar irony that detainees at Guantánamo Bay are
entitled to something American citizens are not: free healthcare. In
a brief and awkward scene, he tries to bring a fishing boat with his
9/11 refugees aboard into U.S. waters just off the naval base. They
are refused entry (Moore is evasive about the details) and then seek
treatment at the best hospital in Havana.

"The point of this was not to go to Cuba," Moore said at the press
conference. "The point was to go to Guantánamo Bay, to get the 9/11
workers the same medical care we're giving to members of al-Qaida."
If the detainees had been at a U.S. base in Spain or Italy or
Australia -- all countries with universal healthcare -- he'd have
taken his 9/11 workers there instead. In fact, when Moore drops the
jokes and political attitudinizing during the Cuba sequence, the
pathos of the story makes his point for him: A poor Caribbean island,
whatever its ideology, can afford healthcare for everyone while we do
not. The only possible conclusion is that our society has chosen not to.

When asked about his potential prosecution for violating U.S.
Treasury sanctions against trade with or travel to Cuba, Moore was
uncharacteristically sober. "I know a lot of you have written things
like, 'How dumb are they?'" he said, "but I don't take this lightly.
The Bush administration may try to claim that my footage was obtained
illegally. We haven't discussed this possibility yet, but actions
could be taken to prevent this film from opening on June 29. I know
that sounds crazy to the Americans in the room. I guess it is crazy."

When Americans do get to see "Sicko," Moore says, "They will
understand that this was about helping 9/11 rescue workers who've
been abandoned by the government. They're not going to focus on Cuba
or Fidel Castro or any other nonsense coming out of the Bush White
House. They're going to say: 'You're telling me that al-Qaida
prisoners get better medical treatment than the people who tried to
recover bodies from the wreckage at ground zero?'"

When Moore interviews Tony Benn, a leading figure on the British
left, his larger concerns come into focus. Benn argues that for-
profit healthcare and the other instruments of the corporate state,
like student loans and bottomless credit-card debt, perform a crucial
function for that state. They undermine democracy by creating a
docile and hardworking population that is addicted to constant debt
and an essentially unsustainable lifestyle, that literally cannot
afford to quit jobs or take time off, that is more interested in
maintaining high incomes than in social or political change. Moore
seizes on this insight and makes it a kind of central theme; both in
the film and aloud, at the press conference, he wondered whether some
essential and unrecognized change has occurred in the American
character.

"I hope this film engenders discussion, not just about healthcare,
but about why we are the way we are these days," Moore told us.
"Where is our soul? Why would we allow 50 million Americans, 9
million of them children, not to have health insurance? Maybe my role
as a filmmaker is to go down a road we might be afraid to go down,
because it might lead to a dark place."

Moore's last revelation in "Sicko" is sure to be endlessly debated in
the right-wing blogosphere that is so obsessed with him (and may be
of little interest to ordinary viewers). Some time ago, Jim Kenefick,
proprietor of the especially bilious anti-Moore site Moorewatch,
almost shut down his site to focus on his wife's worsening illness
and escalating healthcare costs. An anonymous donor then sent him
$12,000 to cover his wife's bills and keep the site running. (She has
apparently recovered.) Now that donor has been revealed and, as
Kenefick now says he suspected all along, it turns out to be Michael
Moore.

"I want him to know that it was done with all the best intentions,"
said Moore, adding that he planned to phone Kenefick personally after
the press conference. (According to Kenefick's blog, Moore left him a
voice-mail message later on Saturday.) "I went back and forth about
whether to use that material," Moore went on. "I asked myself, would
you be doing this if it weren't in the film? I decided that I would,
and I should, and that that's the way I think we should live."

Moore says he began exercising and lost 25 pounds while working on
his healthcare film; "I'm actually a fairly skinny person for the
Midwest," he quipped. He says he's tried to maintain a lower public
profile since "Fahrenheit 9/11" and would like Kenefick and his many
other critics to cut him some slack. "You know, I begin to hope that
as I enter the discourse with this film, I might get some kind of a
break. As far as the accuracy of my movies goes, I think the record
speaks for itself. Maybe people will say: He warned us about General
Motors, he warned us about school shootings and he warned us about
Bush."

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11) Fatah Troops Enter Gaza With Israeli Assent
"Hundreds Were Trained in Egypt Under U.S.-Backed Program to Counter Hamas"
Washington Post Foreign Service
May 18, 2007; A01
http://snipurl.com/1l3pa

JERUSALEM, May 17 -- Israel this week allowed the Palestinian party Fatah to
bring into the Gaza Strip as many as 500 fresh troops trained under a
U.S.-coordinated program to counter Hamas, the radical Islamic movement that
won Palestinian parliamentary elections last year. Fighting between Hamas
and Fatah has left about 45 Palestinians dead since Sunday.

The forces belong to units loyal to the elected Palestinian Authority
president, Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate Fatah leader whom the Bush
administration and Israel have sought to strengthen militarily and
politically. A spokeswoman for the European Union Border Assistance Mission
at Rafah, where the fighters crossed into Gaza from Egypt, said their entry
Tuesday was approved by Israel.

The troops' deployment illustrates the increasingly partisan role that
Israel and the Bush administration are taking in the volatile Palestinian
political situation. The effort to fortify the armed opposition to Hamas,
which the United States and Israel categorize as a terrorist organization,
follows attempts to isolate the radical Islamic movement internationally and
cut off its sources of financial aid.

Israel on Thursday also carried out a series of airstrikes against Hamas
targets across Gaza, killing at least six gunmen. [Additional airstrikes
early Friday killed four people, doctors in Gaza told the Associated Press.]

Fatah, the movement formerly led by Yasser Arafat, has recognized Israel, in
contrast to Hamas, whose charter calls for the creation of a future Islamic
state across territory that now includes the Jewish state. The two
Palestinian parties -- one secular, one Islamic -- have been fighting for
control of various security services and, by extension, political power and
patronage since Hamas won democratic elections in January 2006.

Hamas's militant brand of Islam has given it dominant political standing in
impoverished Gaza, where many of its leaders were born or arrived as
refugees, while Fatah remains strong in the wealthier and more secular West
Bank.

The Bush administration recently approved $40 million to train the
Palestinian Presidential Guard, a force of about 4,000 troops under Abbas's
direct control, but both Israel and the United States, each deeply unpopular
among Arabs in the region, have been trying to avoid the perception of
taking sides in a conflict that this week in Gaza has resembled a nascent
civil war. Many within Fatah are avowed opponents of Israel, and any
alliance with the Jewish state against the militant movement could damage
Fatah's standing among Palestinians.

"We're not the ones giving these forces operational orders. That will be up
to Abbas," said Ephraim Sneh, Israel's deputy defense minister, asserting
that Hamas's arms smuggling from the Sinai and military training in Iran
have given the movement a battlefield advantage. "The idea is to change the
balance, which has been in favor of Hamas and against Fatah. With these
well-trained forces, it will help right that imbalance."

As Palestinian rocket fire into Israel continued Thursday, the Israeli air
force conducted a series of strikes across Gaza, from which Israel withdrew
in 2005 after a nearly four-decade presence.

The airstrikes killed at least six Hamas gunmen that Israeli officials said
were involved in rocket assaults on Israeli towns near Gaza. Among those
killed was Imad Shabanah, a Hamas military leader who Hamas officials
acknowledged had taken part in manufacturing rockets. His car was hit as it
traveled through Gaza City.

"All options for our response are open," said Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas
spokesman in Gaza. Some Hamas military leaders said specifically that
"martyrdom operations," or suicide bombings, could be used in retaliation
for the Israeli airstrikes.

Israeli military officials said Palestinian gunmen fired at least 17 rockets
Thursday from Gaza, bringing the three-day total to more than 80. At least
seven fell Thursday in the border town of Sderot, wounding several Israelis
and damaging a synagogue, a high school and a building inside an industrial
park, military officials said. One Israeli woman was seriously wounded by
rocket fire earlier this week, and dozens of others have suffered light to
moderate injuries or have been treated for shock.

A small number of Israeli tanks also pushed just inside northern Gaza, the
first ground operation there this year, and an artillery battery took up
position on the border. Israeli military officials called both deployments
defensive measures.

Israel has used shelling and limited ground operations in the past to stop
Palestinian rocket fire. But the results have never been decisive against a
weapon that is cheap, highly mobile and difficult to detect until it has
been fired. The Israeli tactics have also resulted in many Palestinian
civilian deaths.

"Hamas has essentially gone back to what we always knew they were -- a
terrorist organization acting as a government," said Miri Eisin, spokeswoman
for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. "What they are trying to do is drag
Israel back into Gaza after we left every inch of it. We do not want to rule
Gaza."

The factional fighting cooled Thursday in the shadow of Israel's stepped-up
military operations. But Fatah gunmen ambushed a Hamas funeral procession in
Gaza, killing two men in the crowd.

Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not
authorized to discuss the subject, said the decision to allow Fatah troops
into Gaza this week was based on trying to help Abbas take control of
northern Gaza. That area is the prime launching ground for the erratic if
lethal rockets known as Qassams.

"If you look at exit scenarios for what's going on there now, you could have
a force loyal to Abbas in northern Gaza that could be highly useful to
Israel," one Israeli official said. "But within the larger crisis you have
to be careful. We don't want to be a part of this conflict, so this is a
balancing act."

The troops were trained by Egyptian authorities under a program coordinated
by Lt. Gen. Keith W. Dayton, a special U.S. envoy to the region who has been
working to improve security in Gaza and the West Bank in order to foster
Israeli-Palestinian economic alliances in the short term and peace prospects
over time.

A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Dayton
had not yet begun his phase of training Fatah forces because the funding was
only recently approved. He said none of the troops who arrived in Gaza this
week were trained with U.S. funds.

Although it is under Abbas's authority, the Presidential Guard is run by
Mohammed Dahlan, a Fatah lawmaker who has worked closely with several U.S.
administrations. Abbas named Dahlan his national security adviser after
Hamas and Fatah agreed in February to establish a power-sharing government.

The appointment infuriated Hamas leaders, who despise Dahlan for the
crackdown he carried out against them as head of the Preventive Security
branch following the 1993 Oslo accords. Hamas opposed the agreement, which
created the Palestinian Authority.

"This is a complex situation, and we clearly hear Abbas say he wants to stop
terrorism," a second Israeli official said. "But he has not been able to
extend his authority over all of Gaza."

Israeli officials said the forces, whom one Israeli Defense Ministry
official called "Dayton's guys," were trained in Egypt and numbered between
400 and 500 men.

Although Israel handed the Rafah crossing over to Palestinian and Egyptian
control after evacuating Gaza, it maintains the ability to deny entry to
anyone it does not want to pass through the terminal. It frequently employs
this prerogative to prevent known members of armed Palestinian groups from
entering the strip.

Maria Telleria, spokeswoman for the E.U. Border Assistance Mission deployed
at Rafah as part of the turnover agreement, said the men arrived in several
buses. "We had been informed they were arriving," Telleria said. "But this
was coordinated between Israel and the Palestinian government. All we did
was monitor the crossing."

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12) Union Cuts Help Delphi As Salaried Cuts Lag
by David Barkholz/The Automotive News
http://futureoftheunion.com/?p=4549

Massive U.S. labor cuts are starting to benefit Delphi
Corp.'s bottom line, with the bulk of salaried cuts
still to come.

Delphi, which is trying to emerge from Chapter 11
reorganization, narrowed its U.S.
operating loss to just $11 million in March.

In the first quarter, Delphi's global net loss also
narrowed to $300 million, excluding $233 million of
one-time charges. In the year-earlier quarter, the
net loss was $363 million.

A group of private equity firms led by Appaloosa
Management LP is insisting on lower labor costs
before completing a tentative deal to buy Delphi
for up to $3.4 billion.

Delphi hourly workers are noting the improvement
as well. UAW dissident Gregg Shotwell
questions why union workers should make additional
concessions demanded by Delphi when the supplier's
hourly work force has been cut by nearly 40 percent
since the Chapter 11 filing in October 2005.

"All of the sacrifices are being made on one end,"
said Shotwell, a leader of the dissident group Soldiers
of Solidarity. He is a former Delphi employee who
transferred to General Motors.

Work force restructuring

Plant closings and a GM-financed early retirement
program cut Delphi's unionized U.S. work force
from 33,100 in December 2005 to 20,000 today.

What's more, the new hires who replaced the 20,000
members who took a buyout or early retirement earn
a starting wage of $14 an hour with minimal benefits,
compared with $28 an hour with full benefits for veterans.

The savings are substantial. In the first quarter
alone, the Delphi Steering unit saved $28 million
from having a lower-paid work force, the company
revealed in its first-quarter financial filing
this week.

The unit represents just 10 percent of the $6.7 billion
in Delphi sales posted in the first quarter. So the
companywide savings would have been much greater in
the quarter. Delphi spokeswoman Claudia Piccinin
declined to provide total savings.

Analyst Kirk Ludtke said Delphi's first-quarter results
show "clear evidence of a turnaround in the company's
financial performance." That is especially so in light
of declining North American sales at GM, Delphi's
largest customer, said Ludtke, who works for CRT Capital
Group LLC in Stamford, Conn.

Meanwhile, announced salaried cuts have been slow in
coming. More than a year ago, Delphi said it was cutting
8,500 salaried jobs worldwide. But the company has reduced
its salaried work force by just 1,000, to 36,500 --
or 2.7 percent. If an additional 7,500 salaried workers
had been cut, Delphi would have saved an additional
$562.5 million, assuming a $75,000 per person cost.

Most of Delphi's U.S. salaried workers also have avoided
the ax. While the hourly ranks have fallen 39.6 percent,
or 13,100, since the Chapter 11 filing, Delphi's U.S.
salaried work force has dipped to 13,000 from 14,500,
or 10.3 percent.

Equality of sacrifice?

Shotwell said Delphi's U.S. operations might have been
profitable if the company had made salaried staff cuts
that were equivalent to the sacrifices made by the union.

"How do you justify keeping such a high proportion of
salaried employees to hourly workers?" Shotwell asked.
"You have more than one salaried worker in the U.S. for
every two hourly workers. That's an awfully top-heavy
organization."

Delphi's Piccinin said the company has thinned and
added to the salaried ranks based on the skills required.

The prospective buyers of Delphi want more wage and
benefit cuts. A Delphi proposal to the UAW in late
March asked for wages $1 an hour lower than the $14
starting wage. It also sought to slow raises over the
course of a supplemental UAW contract with Delphi that
expires in 2011. UAW President Ron Gettelfinger vehemently
rejected the contract bid and threatened to strike Delphi
if the company tries to void current labor contracts
through the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York.

The UAW is preparing a counteroffer for Delphi later
this month. Delphi wants to emerge from Chapter 11 this
year, but a deal requires a new labor contract for the
potential buyers.

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13) Fear of Eating
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
May 21, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/opinion/21krugman.html?hp

Yesterday I did something risky: I ate a salad.

These are anxious days at the lunch table. For all you know,
there may be E. coli on your spinach, salmonella in your
peanut butter and melamine in your pet’s food and, because
it was in the feed, in your chicken sandwich.

Who’s responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame
globalization; some blame food-producing corporations;
some blame the Bush administration. But I blame
Milton Friedman.

Now, those who blame globalization do have a point.
U.S. officials can’t inspect overseas food-processing
plants without the permission of foreign governments —
and since the Food and Drug Administration has limited
funds and manpower, it can inspect only a small percentage
of imports. This leaves American consumers effectively
dependent on the quality of foreign food-safety enforcement.
And that’s not a healthy place to be, especially when
it comes to imports from China, where the state of food
safety is roughly what it was in this country before
the Progressive movement.

The Washington Post, reviewing F.D.A. documents, found
that last month the agency detained shipments from China
that included dried apples treated with carcinogenic
chemicals and seafood “coated with putrefying bacteria.”
You can be sure that a lot of similarly unsafe and
disgusting food ends up in American stomachs.

Those who blame corporations also have a point. In 2005,
the F.D.A. suspected that peanut butter produced by ConAgra,
which sells the product under multiple brand names, might
be contaminated with salmonella. According to The New York
Times, “when agency inspectors went to the plant that made
the peanut butter, the company acknowledged it had destroyed
some product but declined to say why,” and refused to let
the inspectors examine its records without a written
authorization.

According to the company, the agency never followed through.
This brings us to our third villain, the Bush administration.

Without question, America’s food safety system has degenerated
over the past six years. We don’t know how many times concerns
raised by F.D.A. employees were ignored or soft-pedaled
by their superiors. What we do know is that since 2001 the
F.D.A. has introduced no significant new food safety
regulations except those mandated by Congress.

This isn’t simply a matter of caving in to industry pressure.
The Bush administration won’t issue food safety regulations
even when the private sector wants them. The president of the
United Fresh Produce Association says that the industry’s
problems “can’t be solved without strong mandatory federal
regulations”: without such regulations, scrupulous growers
and processors risk being undercut by competitors more willing
to cut corners on food safety. Yet the administration refuses
to do more than issue nonbinding guidelines.

Why would the administration refuse to regulate an industry
that actually wants to be regulated? Officials may fear that
they would create a precedent for public-interest regulation
of other industries. But they are also influenced by an
ideology that says business should never be regulated,
no matter what.

The economic case for having the government enforce rules
on food safety seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way
of knowing whether the food they eat is contaminated, and
in this case what you don’t know can hurt or even kill you.
But there are some people who refuse to accept that case,
because it’s ideologically inconvenient.

That’s why I blame the food safety crisis on Milton Friedman,
who called for the abolition of both the food and the drug
sides of the F.D.A. What would protect the public from
dangerous or ineffective drugs? “It’s in the self-interest
of pharmaceutical companies not to have these bad things,”
he insisted in a 1999 interview. He would presumably have
applied the same logic to food safety (as he did to airline
safety): regardless of circumstances, you can always trust
the private sector to police itself.

O.K., I’m not saying that Mr. Friedman directly caused tainted
spinach and poisonous peanut butter. But he did help to make
our food less safe, by legitimizing what the historian Rick
Perlstein calls “E. coli conservatives”: ideologues who won’t
accept even the most compelling case for government regulation.

Earlier this month the administration named, you guessed it,
a “food safety czar.” But the food safety crisis isn’t caused
by the arrangement of the boxes on the organization chart.
It’s caused by the dominance within our government of
a literally sickening ideology.

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14) Will Gentrification Spoil the Birthplace of Hip-Hop?
By DAVID GONZALEZ
May 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/nyregion/21citywide.html?ref=nyregion

Hip-hop was born in the west Bronx. Not the South Bronx,
not Harlem and most definitely not Queens. Just ask anybody
at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue — an otherwise unremarkable high-rise
just north of the Cross Bronx and hard along the Major Deegan.

“This is where it came from,” said Clive Campbell, pointing
to the building’s first-floor community room. “This is it.
The culture started here and went around the world. But this
is where it came from. Not anyplace else.”

O.K., Mr. Campbell is not just anybody — he is the alpha D.J.
of hip-hop. As D.J. Kool Herc, he presided over the turntables
at parties in that community room in 1973 that spilled into
nearby parks before turning into a global assault. Playing
snippets of the choicest beats from James Brown, Jimmy Castor,
Babe Ruth and anything else that piqued his considerable musical
curiosity, he provided the soundtrack savored by loose-limbed
b-boys (a term he takes credit for creating, too).

Mr. Campbell thinks the building should be declared a landmark
in recognition of its role in American popular culture. Its
residents agree, but for more practical reasons. They want
to have the building placed on the National Register of Historic
Places so that it might be protected from any change that
would affect its character — in this case, a building for
poor and working-class families.

Throughout the city, housing advocates said, buildings like
1520 Sedgwick are becoming harder to find as owners opt out
of subsidy programs so they can eventually charge higher
rents on the open market.

The Sedgwick building is part of the state’s Mitchell-Lama
program, in which private landlords who receive tax breaks
and subsidized mortgages agree to limit their return on
equity and rent to people who meet modest income limits.
The contracts allow owners to leave the program and prepay
their mortgage loan after 20 years. Rent regulations can
protect tenants from increases, but not always.

While Mitchell-Lama buildings in parts of Manhattan, like
the Lower East Side, were among the first to leave the
program, housing experts say that the trend has spread
far beyond, from the Rockaways to the west Bronx.

Tom Waters, a housing policy analyst at the Community
Service Society of New York, said there are about 40,000
Mitchell-Lama units in the city, down from 66,000 in 1990.
The rate of buildings leaving the program has accelerated
since 2001, he said, as landlords find they can do better
on the open market.

Labor groups and housing advocates have called for safeguards
on moderate-income housing, which they said was essential
for the city’s economic health. While the groups have lauded
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for his commitment to building
such housing, they said the State Legislature should address
policies that affect the city’s housing market.

“There is no single solution,” said Ed Ott, executive director
of the New York City Central Labor Council. “Preservation
of currently affordable housing is something we need to
look at. Working people are going to have no place to go.”

In February, tenants of the Sedgwick Avenue building, which
has 100 units, were told that the owners planned to leave
the Mitchell-Lama program. The building’s owners did not
respond to several requests for comment for this article.

Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New
York, said landlords were entitled by contract to opt out
after a set period. He said that if there were concerns
about keeping the buildings in the program, the government
should consider better incentives.

“Contracts should still mean something,” Mr. Spinola said.
“Affordable housing is clearly a problem in the city. I do
not believe the social concerns for citizens of the city
of New York should fall on the backs of one particular
owner when it is a citywide problem.”

The problem has been widespread enough to keep Dina Levy
of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board looking for new
strategies to slow it down. The group, a nonprofit housing
advocacy organization, is advising the Sedgwick tenants.

“The market is so out of control in every corner of every
borough,” said Ms. Levy, director of organizing and policy
for the group. “We have run out of land, so anywhere in
the boroughs can be the next hot real estate market.
That’s why we’re scrambling to find preservation
opportunities to keep them affordable.”

That usually involves seeing if there are mortgage
requirements or land covenants that mandate the property
be used for moderate-income housing, she said. But when
tenants of 1520 Sedgwick came to her group in February,
organizers stumbled on an interesting fact when they searched
for the address online.

“The first hundred hits said ‘birthplace of hip-hop,’ ” said
Dan DeSloover, an organizer for the group. “Kool Herc had
lived there. That was a great coincidence to have this
building be part of that history.”

The idea to have the building declared a landmark as a way
of keeping it affordable for moderate-income families
developed slowly, as organizers discussed it with tenants
and elected officials’ staff members.

Preservationists doubted it would stop the building’s owners
from leaving the subsidy program, since the landmark distinction
would apply to the structure and not necessarily its use.
And there is another obstacle: to be eligible for the National
Register, a building normally has to be at least 50 years old.
The Sedgwick building falls short of that by 12 years.
Exceptions are made for extraordinary cultural significance.

“It is complicated when you try to preserve some other feature
of a building besides its architecture,” said Lisa Kersavage,
a preservationist at the Municipal Art Society of New York.
“But this is a very important cultural touchstone for New York,
and awareness should be raised.”

Cindy Campbell, who promoted the first party where her brother
spun the tunes, is intent on doing at least that. She hopes
that by highlighting the history of the building, where her
family lived for nine years, she might be able to enlist big-
name rappers to Mayor Bloomberg in her campaign to help the
tenants.

She still recalls the first party — on Aug. 11, 1973, she says
— which she dreamed up as a way for her to get some extra money
for back-to-school clothes.

“I didn’t want to go to Fordham Road to buy clothes because
you’d go to school and see everybody with the same thing on,”
she said. “I wanted to go to Delancey Street and get
something unusual.”

Her brother wound up giving the neighborhood something
unusual, too, inside the packed and sweaty community room.
Drawing on his wide-ranging musical tastes, he combined
sounds and in time those sounds were combined in new ways
as he extended the beats to the delight of the dancers.

“It wasn’t a black thing, it was a we thing,” said
Mr. Campbell, now 52. “We played everything. Gary Glitter?
We rocked that. We schooled people about music.”

Since leaving 1520 Sedgwick, Mr. Campbell has moved to Long
Island and has continued spinning tunes. (On Sunday, he was
the D.J. for the city’s first Dance Parade, which traveled
from Midtown to Lower Manhattan.)

Some old-timers rushed up to him last week when he and
his sister visited the building. They told him — to his
dismay — that the community room has been closed for
renovations since last year.

“All of it came from here,” he said. “From this building.
It should be respected.”

Curtis Brown, who was a teenager living a few blocks away
during Kool Herc’s heyday, agreed. Mr. Brown went from
being a fan to becoming Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush
Brothers, an early and influential rap group.

“That place means everything,” he said. “You can look at
it objectively and say it could have happened somewhere
else. Maybe. But this is where it did happen.”

To him it is already a landmark.

“As far as government and what they consider important,
who knows?” he said. “But for something that saturated
the world culture, that went from one building to the world,
I would want to hold on to the historical significance
of that building.”

Related:

Mitchell-Lama Housing Program
http://www.dhcr.state.ny.us/ohm/progs/mitchlam/ohmprgmi.htm

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15) Honduran Diplomat Assails Police
in Shooting of Unarmed Bronx Man
By THOMAS J. LUECK and TANZINA VEGA
May 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/nyregion/21shoot.html?ref=nyregion

Appearing at a sidewalk memorial for an unarmed driver shot
dead by an off-duty officer in the Bronx, the senior Honduran
diplomat in New York criticized the police yesterday, saying,
“We are not going to let this go by unnoticed.”

“The police cannot shoot crazily or indiscriminately,” said
Javier Hernández, the consul general, who said he had been
living in New York for 19 years. “Before, there was courtesy,
now there is intimidation, and I think it should be the other
way around,” Mr. Hernández said. Like the driver, Fermin Arzu,
many residents of the Longwood neighborhood, where the shooting
occurred, are Honduran immigrants.

The Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau continued
its investigation yesterday into the death of Mr. Arzu, 41,
on Friday night. The Bronx district attorney’s office was
also reviewing the case.

Mr. Arzu was shot by Officer Raphael Lora, 37, who had
confronted Mr. Arzu after he crashed his minivan into
another car near Officer Lora’s home near midnight.

“The consul general can be assured there will be a complete
investigation,” said the chief police spokesman, Paul J. Browne.
“It is already under way.”

The shooting comes during a difficult period for the police.
Weeks of public protest were touched off on Nov. 25, when
five officers shot 50 bullets into a car in Queens, killing
its driver, Sean Bell, and wounding two of his friends.
Two officers were indicted on manslaughter charges and
one was charged with reckless endangerment.

Relatives of Mr. Arzu, a building porter and musician,
described him yesterday as a responsible, hard-working man
who had never tangled with the police, and who was under
the emotional stress of caring for his fiancée,
a cancer patient.

The fiancée, Thomasa Sabio, 46, said in an interview that
less than five hours before he was shot, Mr. Arzu had
driven her home to the apartment they shared on Westchester
Avenue. Ms. Sabio had undergone a mastectomy, and had
been discharged from Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center.

After helping her change clothes and making her comfortable
in the apartment, she said, Mr. Arzu said he needed some
air and left at 7:30 p.m. She never heard from him again.
Relatives said they did not know where he went after that.

“He was such a good man, he supported me through my illness,”
she said, fighting back sobs in the public housing apartment
she shared with Mr. Arzu and her 10-year-old son. “Now that
he is not with me, I feel the pain eating from inside.”

By late yesterday, reaction to the shooting had settled
into familiar contours. Dozens of people stopped by
a memorial of candles and plastic flowers yesterday underneath
the elevated tracks at Westchester Avenue and Hewitt Place,
where Mr. Arzu’s minivan crashed after he was shot.

Kirsten Foy, a special assistant to the Rev. Al Sharpton,
appeared there with a daughter of Mr. Arzu, Katherine Arzu,
20, and a woman who described herself as a family spokeswoman,
at a news conference near the site of the shooting.

“I have no words,” Ms. Arzu said. “The cop shot my father
and he needs to pay for all of this.”

Mr. Foy, while saying that he did “not have all the facts,”
told reporters, “Mr. Arzu lost his life as a result of an
impromptu, impetuous and in our estimation, unnecessary
action by an off-duty police officer.”

But the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which has
offered to provide legal representation for Officer Lora,
cautioned yesterday against jumping to conclusions.
“Law enforcement has a legal obligation to conduct
a full and thorough investigation of the facts before
coming to any conclusion,” its president, Patrick J.
Lynch, said.

Details of what happened when Officer Lora confronted
Mr. Arzu remained unclear yesterday, and accounts varied
among people who described themselves as witnesses.
But the police said it started when Mr. Arzu drove
his red Nissan Quest into a parked car on Hewitt Place
around 11:40 p.m.

Officer Lora, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans
and armed with his handgun, ran from his home and
confronted Mr. Arzu, who may have been trying to leave
the scene of the accident. One witness said Officer Lora
displayed his badge to others who gathered around the
minivan, but not to Mr. Arzu; others said the badge
was fully visible to all.

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said yesterday that
witnesses described Officer Lora standing by the driver’s
side of the minivan, with the driver’s door open.

The two men were then heard yelling at each other, and
Officer Lora fired his first shot after the minivan
lurched forward, witnesses said.

The police said Officer Lora fired his 9-millimeter
Glock handgun five times, and the medical examiner ruled
on Saturday that Mr. Arzu was killed by a single shot
to his heart and a lung. The police said four bullets
from Officer Lora’s gun were found lodged in the vehicle’s
door frame, rear back panel and a panel over a taillight.

The minivan kept going for two blocks, eventually slamming
into a church and bursting into flames.

No one answered a knock at Officer Lora’s door yesterday
afternoon.

According to a person close to the investigation and
familiar with Officer Lora’s account, the officer said
he saw Mr. Arzu reaching for the glove compartment. But
no weapon was found in the car.

As is standard procedure in such cases, Officer Lora’s
gun was taken away and he was placed on “nonenforcement”
duty. Mr. Browne said yesterday that no one in the department
had interviewed Officer Lora because the police had to wait
for the district attorney to decide whether to present
the case to a grand jury.

Stephen Reed, a spokesman for the district attorney,
declined to comment on the case.

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16) Buyout to Form Big Company to Train and Treat Prisoners
By KEN BELSON
May 21, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/nyregion/21prison.html

A company based in New Jersey that provides training and
treatment programs to prison inmates is announcing today
that it has bought a similar Massachusetts company,
creating one of the largest correctional services
companies in the country.

The two companies — Community Education Centers of Roseland,
N.J., and CiviGenics of Marlborough, Mass. — are trying to
capitalize on the growing number of inmates and tight financing
for new prisons that have led federal, state and local
governments to contract out more of their operations
to private businesses.

States have also addressed the shortage of prison space
by trying to reduce recidivism with more training and
treatment programs for inmates. About 70 percent of
those released from prison return within three years,
according to some studies.

“There’s a tremendous focus on the re-entry of inmates,”
said John J. Clancy, chief executive of Community
Education Centers. “If people are going to continue
to get out of prison, the question is how they get out.”

The two privately held companies, which together are
expected to employ about 3,500 people in 22 states and
have close to $240 million in revenue next year, did
not disclose the financial terms of the agreement.
However, people with knowledge of the transaction said
Community Education Centers paid more than $100 million
for CiviGenics.

Currently, Community Education specializes in operating
halfway houses for prisoners awaiting release, whether
it is in helping them find jobs or overcoming substance
abuse and other hurdles. CiviGenics focuses on providing
substance abuse treatment to inmates and managing prisons
on behalf of county governments, one of the most profitable
segments of the industry.

In announcing the sale, Mr. Clancy said that by combining
their two specialties, the companies would be better
positioned to win contracts and expand operations. The
combined companies will, however, remain far smaller
than the industry’s three largest companies, which are
publicly held — Corrections Corporation of America, the
GEO Group and Cornell Companies.

Community Education Centers has six assessment and treatment
centers in New Jersey, including three in Newark, which
house up to 2,700 residents, or about half of its capacity
nationally.

New Jersey does more than most states to train inmates
before their release. The state spent $61.5 million last
year on residential community release programs, for which
Community Education Centers is the largest contractor.

Inmates leave with a “discharge plan” that includes the
addresses of doctors and clinics near their homes,
information on where to get Social Security cards and
social services, as well as other necessary information,
according to Deirdre Fedkenheuer, a spokeswoman for
the New Jersey Department of Corrections. Inmates also
go through a 12-week re-entry program before they are
released.

While the amount spent on these programs in New Jersey
is only about 6 percent of the budget of its Department
o