Culture

Civil Rights, Security, and One Man’s Solution

By |

Even as President George W. Bush authorized a controversial plan to centralize government powers in the White House following any large-scale national disaster, a closed group of government officials and scholars studied “contingencies” for dealing with nuclear terrorism in the United States. “The Day After,” a meeting hosted by the Preventive Defense Project, was staged behind closed doors in Washington, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The group addressed a variety of issues, including health and shelter concerns, as well as the imposition of martial law and the eventual restoration of civil liberties. Terrorism fears turned inward in Alabama, where the state’s Homeland Security office was found to host a Web site that listed anti-war and gay rights activist groups among possible terror suspects. The site was taken down following protests.

Culture

Newspapers Sell the Farm, Give up the Goat

By |

Across the country, falling newspaper circulation and the flight of ad dollars to the Web have caused publishers to fire employees, sell their buildings and outsource their ad and subscription departments to India. The San Jose Mercury News is the latest to do so; it follows other newspapers across the country, including the Columbus Dispatch and the Los Angeles Times. Ad production isn’t the only job papers are outsourcing. Columnists and reporters across the country were shocked when a news site in Pasadena hired two reporters to cover the news from their computers in India. But the editor says it’s the start of a new trend and a way to save money.

Culture

Iran: Vice Squad Targets Women on Bicycles

By |

Thousands of women have been cited and hundreds will stand trial for not complying with the Iranian government’s new rules on stricter Islamic dress, listening to Western music and even walking a dog in public, which officials consider impure. Activists are circulating photos of a woman they say was beaten bloody by police during a confrontation over her clothing and veil, provoking an uproar among Iranian bloggers. The new restrictions, introduced for “the country’s moral health,” also include a ban on satellite dishes, co-ed Internet cafes, and any public establishment with darkened windows that prevent officials from peering in, according to ADNKronos. Iranian clergy are also designing a new bicycle for women that has a cabin to cover half of a woman’s body. Officials consider women’s body movements on a bicycle to be “provocative” to men, as are female athletes — who must compete wearing scarves and gowns.

Culture

Little Progress for Gun Opponents

By |

Lawmakers raced to propose tougher gun control laws following the Virginia Tech and Montreal school shootings, but each has drawn criticism — and not just from the usual suspects. New rules in Virginia forestall people who have been referred for mental health counseling from buying a gun. The rules are meant to close a “loophole” in the law that let Seung-Hui Cho buy his weapons. But mental health advocates worry it stigmatizes all mentally ill people as violent instead of dealing with a lack of state- run mental health treatment programs.
Pennsylvania lawmakers are looking at tightening state gun laws but aren’t likely to pass restrictions like Virginia’s. An aide to the governor points out that the man who killed five girls in an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County last year had no history of mental illness, and the state could not have stopped him from buying a gun.

Culture

Domestic Spying Expansion Would Exonerate AT&T

By |

The Justice Department wants to further loosen domestic spying laws under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to permit the monitoring of U.S. residents suspected of receiving terrorist communications. The FISA “update” would also grant legal immunity to telecom companies that cooperate with the government — such as AT&T, which faces five major civil liberties suits for opening its networks to the National Security Agency. The ACLU said proposed immunity for telecom companies (which would be retroactive to September 11, 2001) amounts to a “get out of jail free card,” according to CSMonitor.com. Democrats shot down the proposal, noting that the White House refuses to release details about the NSA program or issue a document proving the surveillance is legal. The FBI also refuses to reveal how many “national security letters” it issued in 2006 and 2007 to access personal data.

Culture

For Palestinians, There’s No Place Like Home

By |

Underfunded, living in illegal camps and turned away from Arab and Israeli borders — the lot of the Palestinian grows ever more dire. In the Palestinian territories, a Western aid boycott against the Hamas government has led to a strike last week by tens of thousands of government workers who haven’t been fully paid since the Islamists came to power. In Syria, Palestinians refugees from Iraq have been held at the border in a camp with only one doctor, and little shelter from winter floods and summer heat. Other refugees from Iraq are permitted free entry to Syria, but the U.N. news service reports that Syrians feel they already have “enough” Palestinians. In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees make up some 10 percent of the population, and about a quarter-million live in unregistered camps.

Culture

Packed Into Prisons, With No Relief in Sight

By |

Crowded jails from the Mexican border to North Carolina have prisoners packed into cells, sleeping in day rooms and struggling with overflowing sewers and waste water. There’s plenty of money in Arizona for boosted border patrols, which capture more illegal immigrants who are then charged with felonies. But the Christian Science Monitor reports that funding is in short supply for overwhelmed courts and jails along the border. The federal caseload in Arizona increased 94 percent between 1996 and 2006 — so many new cases that attorneys are forced to spend less time on each suspect. In the Navajo Nation, most lawbreakers never do time in local jails, which are overcrowded and plagued by sewage overflows.

Culture

Affirmative Action Foe Has New Targets

By |

The man who led a successful 1996 ballot-initiative campaign to ban affirmative action in California is turning his attention to Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, Arizona, Utah and South Dakota. Ward Connerly and his group, the American Civil Rights Institute, hope all these states will follow California in November 2008. Connerly and his supporters contend that affirmative action helps perpetuate discrimination instead of preventing it. The proposed ban would affect hiring at state-run agencies and recruiting at public universities. State agencies and university spokesmen say they don’t use quotas or race-based hiring and enrollment practices — but also admit to “tacit” practices of admitting athletes with lower academic qualifications, the Denver Post reports.

Culture

Between America and Mexico, a Broken Border

By |

A heavy crackdown in immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border has resulted in more arrests, but has not deterred Mexicans from trying to cross, or from dying along the way. Immigrants attempting to cross the desert in the hot summer months have only a 50 percent chance of survival. Border agents near Yuma, Arizona, are working with their Mexican counterparts to add rescue beacons to the desert and paramedics to save lives on enforcement missions. Meanwhile, more Mexican immigrants are drowning in the Rio Grande than in the winter months. Border agents found another body there last week.

Culture

The EPA Under Pressure

By |

The Environmental Protection Agency has come under fire from activists and state officials for not enforcing laws to protect the public from harmful chemicals and emissions, even as it considers controversial budget cuts that will reduce its enforcement staff. California has threatened to sue the EPA within six months if it does not issue a waiver allowing the state to enforce its own vehicle emissions standards. The state has been waiting for the waiver since 2005, and the EPA now wants to continue the delay until it completes an analysis of whether greenhouse gases are linked to human health. Activists also say the EPA’s new rule on power plant emissions is in conflict with a recent Supreme Court ruling that overturned a lower courts support of regulating emissions based on an hourly standard, rather than an annual standard preferred by environmental activists. And House lawmakers have questions for the EPA’s Acting Inspector General, who was given a $150,000 bonus even as he prepares to lay off 60 employees in anticipation of a $5.1 million budget cut.