Liberia's Taylor Captured

From the Washington Post:

Fugitive former Liberian president Charles Taylor landed here Wednesday afternoon after Nigerian authorities took him into custody early this morning in a border town with Cameroon and repatriated him.
Taylor, 58, who had vanished from a guarded government compound in southeastern Nigeria Tuesday, landed here in a three-engine Nigerian presidential jet aircraft in a driving rain as U.N. peacekeepers were preparing to arrest and transport him to Sierra Leone, where he faces war crimes and other charges before a United Nations-backed tribunal.

Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

Charles Taylor Said To Vanish In Nigeria

As an update to a previous post here is some bizarre news from the Washington Post:

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor has vanished from a guarded government compound in southeastern Nigeria, authorities reported Tuesday, just days after an announcement by officials here opened the way for his transfer to an international war crimes tribunal.

The whereabouts of Taylor, 58, who had lived in exile in Nigeria for 2 1/2 years, remained unknown by the end of the day. But it was clear his disappearance had scuttled plans for a quick turnover to a U.N.-backed tribunal in Sierra Leone. The court there has indicted him for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including mass rape and murder, stemming from a civil war in Sierra Leone that many blame him for fomenting.

Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

Nigeria Ready to Surrender Ex-Liberian Ruler for War Crimes Trial

From the Washington Post:

Nigeria announced Saturday that it was ready to hand over former Liberian president Charles Taylor to a U.N. tribunal, a move that would make him the first former African head of state to stand trial for crimes against humanity.
The tribunal has accused Taylor of instigating wars that devastated two West African countries, killed 1.2 million people and left millions homeless and maimed. He also allegedly harbored al-Qaeda suicide bombers who attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Taylor has been living in exile in the southern Nigerian city of Calabar since he was forced from power under a 2003 accord that ended a rebel assault on Liberia's capital. But Nigeria had resisted extraditing him, arguing he was given refuge under an internationally brokered peace deal.

Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

Report Finds China Uses Psychiatric Prisons to Silence Dissent, Report Finds

From the New York Times:

March 17, 2006
Sane Chinese Put in Asylum, Doctors Find
By JOSEPH KAHN
BEIJING, March 16 — Dutch psychiatrists have determined that a prominent Chinese dissident who spent 13 years in a police-run psychiatric institution in Beijing did not have mental problems that would justify his incarceration, two human rights groups said Thursday.

The psychiatrists spent two days testing the dissident, Wang Wanxing, in Germany five months after China released him and sent him abroad. They said in a statement that their examination "did not reveal any form of mental disorder."

The report could add fuel to charges that the Chinese police use a network of psychiatric prisons to silence political dissidents, often without trial or right of appeal.

Mr. Wang, now 56, was confined to the psychiatric center after he was detained in 1992 for unfurling a banner that criticized the Communist Party.
The authorities determined that he had "delusions of grandeur, litigation mania and conspicuously enhanced pathological will," which Western human rights groups say are diagnoses that officials have used to lock up troublesome dissidents who have not broken any laws.

After his release in 2005, Mr. Wang described widespread abuses in the mental asylum, known as the Beijing Ankang. He said he had lived in cells with psychotically disturbed inmates convicted of murder and was forced to swallow drugs to blunt his will. He also said the staff members had used electrified acupuncture needles to punish patients while other inmates were made to watch.

The two Dutch doctors, B. C. M. Raes, a professor of forensic psychiatry at the Free University
of Amsterdam, and B. B. van der Meer, also a forensic psychiatrist, examined Mr. Wang in January. Their findings were released Thursday by the Global Initiative of Psychiatry and Human Rights Watch, two human rights groups that have been critical of China's use of psychiatric prisons.

"There was no reason that Mr. Wang had to be locked up in a special forensic psychiatric hospital or to be admitted to a psychiatric facility," Dr. Raes and Dr. van der Meer said in a statement. "He was not suffering from any mental disorder that could justify his admission."

Their diagnosis contrasts sharply with one made by doctors at the Beijing Ankang, who said when Mr. Wang was released last August that he had not been cured. "His systematic delusions have shown no conspicuous improvement since he was first admitted to the hospital," the Beijing examiners said, adding that Mr. Wang should be kept under "strict guardianship" in Germany.

Human Rights Watch says it has documented 3,000 cases of psychiatric punishment of political dissidents since the early 1980's. The group contends that the use of penal mental asylums to confine dissidents has increased in recent years as the police have sought ways to punish followers of banned religious sects, political dissidents and persistent petitioners without channeling them through the court system.
Robin Munro, an expert on the Chinese psychiatric system with Human Rights Watch, said Mr. Wang's examination by the Dutch psychiatrists was the first opportunity for Western specialists to directly test a diagnosis by doctors in one of China's psychiatric prisons. He said the Chinese doctors "clearly got a failing mark."

"The Chinese diagnosis of Mr. Wang was based on disreputable theories inherited from the Soviet Union that claim that certain types of dissident thinking and behavior can be attributed to severe mental pathology," Mr. Munro said. "This is completely at variance with international standards today."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

--JB

Doctors Less Likely to See Poor Patients, Study Shows

From the LA Times:

American doctors, short of time and squeezed by hard-bargaining health plans, are less likely to see patients who can't pay than they were a decade ago, according to a study to be released today.

A survey by the national Center for Studying Health System Change found that about two-thirds of U.S. doctors provided "charity care" — down from three-fourths in 1996. The trend is alarming, the study authors said, because it comes as the number of uninsured or underinsured Americans is on the rise. The study also found that charity care received by people without insurance declined by nearly one-fifth over the decade.

"Here is more evidence that there is fraying in parts of the safety net," said Peter Cunningham, senior health researcher at the center and the study's lead author.

The decrease in charity care — service offered free or at reduced rates — was seen across all regions and specialties, the study said.

Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

World Bank Study Predicts Dire Future for Palestinians

Excertps from an article by Steven Erlanger of the New York Times:

JERUSALEM, March 15 — If Israel withholds revenues from a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority and donor countries reduce aid, the Palestinian areas will be thrown into a deep depression, with personal incomes dropping 30 percent this year alone, according to a new World Bank study.

The study says the Palestinian economy would shrink by 27 percent in 2006 — a one-year contraction that compares to the Depression in the United States. Unemployment would nearly double, to 39.6 percent, and two-thirds of the population would be living below the poverty level.

The World Bank study looked at four hypotheses.
Israel's policy — withholding $55 million a month in taxes that it collects for the Palestinian Authority and restricting trade and access to Israel by Palestinian workers — is the largest factor.
The next largest is the expected cut in budget support to a Hamas-run Palestinian Authority. The main cash donors are Saudi Arabia and the European Union, and while the bank assumes that Muslim donations will continue unchanged, Western support is expected to drop at least $50 million this year.
The first hypothesis assumes that nothing much will change; the second that Israel alone holds back revenues and further reduces border trade and access; the third that only foreign aid is reduced; and the fourth, which the report considers most realistic, that Israel continues its restrictions and that foreign aid is also reduced.

The consequences of this last assumption are dire even this year. Real gross domestic product per capita would fall 49.4 percent from 1999, before the second intifada began, when the Palestinian Authority ran a small budget surplus.
In 2007 unemployment would rise to 44.3 percent and the poverty level to 72 percent, the bank estimates, with another 4-point drop in the size of the economy, compared with 1999.

Israeli restrictions on trade and movement, including the construction of part of the separation barrier, have already cost the Palestinian economy an estimated 5 percent a year in real economic growth.

Click here to read the full article.

--JB

Sanctions for Belarus?

From the Washington Post:

The White House accused the authoritarian president of Belarus yesterday of being "among the most corrupt leaders in the world," and administration officials said they will consider new sanctions assuming tomorrow's elections are manipulated as expected.
In a report sent to Congress on Thursday night and posted on the Web yesterday, the White House alleged that President Alexander Lukashenko "has created a repressive dictatorship on the doorstep of the European Union," sold arms to rogue states and enriched himself at the expense of his people. The release of the report just two days before presidential elections in the former Soviet republic was intended as a sharp repudiation of a man often called Europe's last dictator amid a pre-vote crackdown on dissent. Authorities in Belarus, where the KGB retains its Soviet name, have shut down newspapers, raided civil society organizations, stifled anti-government rallies, and beaten and arrested opposition figures, including a candidate running against Lukashenko.

Click here to read the full article.

Click here to read pasts posts on Belurus.

--Tom Hayes

Federal Appeals Court Says Changes By EPA Violated Clean Air Act

From the Washington Post:

A federal appeals court blocked the Bush administration's four-year effort to loosen emission rules for aging coal-fired power plants, unanimously ruling yesterday that the changes violated the Clean Air Act and that only Congress could authorize such revisions.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with officials from 14 states, including New York, California and Maryland, who contended that the rule changes -- allowing older power plants, refineries and factories to upgrade their facilities without having to install the most advanced pollution controls -- were illegal and could increase the amount of health-threatening pollution in the atmosphere.


Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

U.N. Votes To Replace Rights Panel

From the Washington Post:

The U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to create a human rights agency to monitor and expose abuses by governments, replacing a discredited body despite objections by the United States that nations with a history of human rights violations could still join the new panel. The assembly's action will effectively abolish the United Nations' main human rights body, which has been derided in recent years for allowing some of the world's worst rights abusers to participate. It will be replaced in June by a new Human Rights Council, which advocates and most nations hope will exclude brutal dictatorships and do a better job of confronting governments that abuse their own people.The measure creating the 43-member rights body was passed by a vote of 170 to 4, with the United States, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands voting against it. Belarus, Iran and Venezuela abstained, citing a concern that the council would become a tool for powerful Western countries to punish poor nations.

Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

FBI Documents Raise New Questions about Extent of Surveillance

From the Knight Ridder news service via Common Dreams News Center:

An FBI counterterrorism unit monitored - and apparently infiltrated - a peace group in Pittsburgh that opposed the invasion of Iraq, according to internal agency documents released on Tuesday.

The disclosure raised new questions about the extent to which federal authorities have been conducting surveillance operations against Americans since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Previous revelations include FBI monitoring of environmental and animal rights organizations, scrutiny of anti-war organizations by a top-secret Pentagon program and eavesdropping by the National Security Agency on domestic communications without court authorization.

Federal officials insist that the efforts are legal, although the Pentagon has admitted that the top-secret TALON program mistakenly retained in its database reports on scores of anti-war protests and individuals as part of an effort to identify terrorist threats against defense facilities and personnel.

The documents released on Tuesday were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act. They showed that the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the FBI's Pittsburgh office conducted a secret investigation into the activities of the Thomas Merton Center beginning as early as Nov. 29, 2002, and continuing as late as March 2005.

Click here to read the full article.

--Tom Hayes

Government Secrecy and Historical Documents

From the Washington Post, a good op-ed by a reporter for the paper who is writing a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the opinion piece, Michael Dobbs writes about the Reclassification Program that is taking documents once opened to researchers are now being kept as classified. Dobbs writes, "It turns out that most government documents on the missile crisis -- including the principal Pentagon and State Department records collections -- are still classified. Hundreds of documents released to researchers a decade ago have since been withdrawn as part of a controversial -- itself secret -- reclassification program. And the backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests to the National Archives has grown to two, three or even five years."

Click here to read the op-ed.

--Tom Hayes

Feingold Seeks Senate Censure of President Over NSA Wiretapping

From the Washington Post:

A liberal Democrat and potential White House contender is proposing that the Senate censure President Bush for authorizing domestic eavesdropping, saying the White House misled Americans about its legality....A censure resolution, which simply would scold the president, has been used just once -- against Andrew Jackson in 1834 over a dispute about banking.

Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

Stealing Babies for Adoption in China

From the Washington Post, an article about infants are abducted and sold to adoption agencies in China. From the article:

For generations, girls in rural China have been left to die in the cold or abandoned on doorsteps while families devote their scant resources to nourishing boys. But over the past decade, a wave of foreigners, mostly Americans, has poured into China with dollars in hand to adopt Chinese babies, 95 percent of them girls.
Last year, the United States issued nearly 8,000 visas to Chinese-born children adopted by American parents. More than 50,000 children have left China for the United States since 1992. And more than 10,000 children have landed in other countries, according to Chinese reports. The foreign adoption program has matched Chinese babies with foreign families eager for them, while delivering crucial funding to orphanages in this country. But it has also spawned a tragic irony, transforming once-unwanted Chinese girls into valuable commodities worth stealing...The prevalence of the problem has become clearer in recent weeks with the prosecution of a child-trafficking ring in the neighboring province of Hunan. Last November, police arrested 27 members of a ring that since 2002 had abducted or purchased as many as 1,000 children here in Guangdong province and sold them to orphanages in Hunan for $400 to $538, according to reports in Chinese state media and interviews with sources familiar with the case, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because provincial officials have ordered a media blackout. The orphanages placed most of those children in homes with unwitting foreign families, many of them Americans, in exchange for mandatory contributions of $3,000 per baby -- a sum nearly twice the average annual Chinese income -- according to sources familiar with the prosecution.

Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

Slobodan Milosevic Found Dead in Cell

From the Washington Post:

Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader who presided over the Balkan wars of the 1990s, was found dead Saturday in his cell at a United Nations prison near The Hague where he was on trial for war crimes, among them genocide in the form of "ethnic cleansing."
The 65-year-old Milosevic "was found lifeless on his bed in his cell," according to a statement issued by war crimes tribunal. Officials said Milosevic, who had been in poor health and whose trial has been interrupted often because of his chronic heart condition, appeared to have died of natural causes.

Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

House Votes to Dump State Food Safety Laws

From the San Francisco Chronicle via the Common Dreams News Center:

The House approved a bill Wednesday night that would wipe out state laws on safety labeling of food, overriding tough rules passed by California voters two decades ago that require food producers to warn consumers about cancer-causing ingredients.
The vote was a victory for the food industry, which has lobbied for years for national standards for food labeling and contributed millions of dollars to lawmakers' campaigns. But consumer groups and state regulators warned that the bill would undo more than 200 state laws, including California's landmark Proposition 65, that protect public health.
"The purpose of this legislation is to keep the public from knowing about the harm they may be exposed to in food," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, a chief critic of the measure.
Several critics argued that the bill was rushed through the House without complete hearings as a favor to a specific industry -- at the same time that members are talking about the evils of lobbying and proposing stricter ethical rules.
Under the bill, any state that wanted to keep its own tougher standards for food labeling would have to ask for approval from the Food and Drug Administration, which has been criticized by food safety groups as slow to issue consumer warnings

Click here to read the full article.

--Tom Hayes

More on Domestic Spying

There has been a lot of articles about recent developments with the NSA eavesdropping issue. Just within the past couple of days, a deal has been brokered between Senate Republicans and the Bush administration, which would allow the program to continue with a longer time period allowed for warrantless wiretaps. From what I have read, the program basically remains the same, but gives the President a longer time period before getting a warrant. It still seems to me that the issue over the extent of Presidential authority remains unresolved, but maybe that will be for the courts to decide. Here's a description of the Republican proposal from a recent New York Times article:

The Republican proposal would give Congressional approval to the eavesdropping program much as it was secretly authorized by Mr. Bush after the 2001 terrorist attacks, with limited notification to a handful of Congressional leaders. The N.S.A. would be permitted to intercept the international phone calls and e-mail messages of people in the United States if there was "probable cause to believe that one party to the communication is a member, affiliate, or working in support of a terrorist group or organization," according to a written summary of the proposal issued by its Republican sponsors. The finding of probable cause would not be reviewed by any court. But after 45 days, the attorney general would be required to drop the eavesdropping on that target, seek a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or explain under oath to two new Congressional oversight subcommittees why he could not seek a warrant.

Below are some more articles on the same subject, all of which are worth reading:

G.O.P. Plan Would Allow Spying Without Warrants from the New York Times.

Ex-Justice Lawyer Rips Case for Spying from the Washington Post.

Rights Groups Ask Courts to End Domestic Spying from Reuters.

--Tom Hayes

President Signs New Version of Patriot Act into Law

From the Washington Post:

President Bush today signed the new version of the USA Patriot Act, the broad anti-terrorism law that gave the FBI expanded powers after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Bush's signature followed a 280-138 House vote Tuesday night and 89-10 Senate vote March 2 in favor of the Patriot Act. The congressional approval came after an often emotional 2 1/2 -month debate over whether the law tramples on civil liberties.
Yesterday, a report on the Patriot Act by the Justice Department's inspector general said the FBI has reported more than 100 possible violations to an intelligence oversight board during the past two years, including cases in which agents tapped the wrong telephone, intercepted the wrong e-mails or continued to listen to conversations after a warrant had expired.

Click here to read the article.

For more information on the Patriot Act, click here.

--Tom Hayes

Violence in Darfur Spreads to Chad

In yesterday's edition of the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed about his observations of the violence that has spilled over from the Darfur region into the neighboring country Chad. As he writes:

For more than two years, the world has pretty much ignored the genocide unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan, just as it turned away from the slaughter of Armenians, Jews, Cambodians and Rwandans in earlier decades.
And now, apparently encouraged by the world's acquiescence, Sudan is sending its proxy forces to invade neighboring Chad and kill and rape members of the same African tribes that have already been ethnically cleansed in Darfur itself.
I've spent the last three days along the Chad-Sudan border, where this brutal war is unfolding. But "war" doesn't feel like the right term, for that implies combat between armies.
What is happening here is more like what happens in a stockyard. Militias backed by Sudan race on camels and pickup trucks into Chadian villages and use machine guns to mow down farming families, whose only offense is that they belong to the wrong tribes and have black skin.

Click here to read the op-ed.

--Tom Hayes

Amnesty Report Finds Prisoner Abuse Continues in Iraq

From the New York Times:

Amnesty International accused the United States and its allies on Monday of committing widespread abuses in Iraq, including torture and the continued detention of thousands of prisoners without charge or trial. The accusations could fuel the debate over the treatment of detainees that flared after the publication of graphic photographs showing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad being mistreated by American guards. More recently, British forces in Iraq have been criticized after videotapes showed British soldiers beating Iraqi youths after demonstrations in southern Iraq.
In its report, "Beyond Abu Ghraib: Detention and Torture in Iraq," Amnesty International also said the level of abuse by Iraqi forces since the transfer of power in June 2004 was increasing.

Click here to read the full article.

--Tom Hayes

Former Enron CFO Implicates Old Bosses

Forme CFO of Enron Andrew Fastow testified today in the Enron trial and had some pretty damning testimony against Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay. As the Washington Post reports:

Andrew S. Fastow, the government's star witness in the Enron Corp. trial, took the stand Tuesday and testified that he concocted a massive fraud in face-to-face meetings with the company's former chief executive, who both sanctioned the deals and asked him to "get me as much juice as you can." Fastow, in a nervous but steady voice, spent most of his first six hours on the stand describing quid pro quo deals he arranged with Jeffrey K. Skilling, the company's former chief executive. He said Skilling was so obsessed with making the company look good for Wall Street that Skilling approved of sham deals that helped the company meet its earnings targets while Fastow personally skimmed millions of dollars off the transactions.


Click here to read the article.

Click here to read an earlier post on the same subject.

--Tom Hayes

Parental Consent Laws and Abortion

An interesting article from the New York Times about the effectiveness of parental consent laws in various states. According to the article, these laws do little to stop or even lower the abortion rate among teens, which is one of the major aims of the laws. As the article reports:

The analysis, which looked at six states that introduced parental involvement laws in the last decade and is believed to be the first study to include data from years after 1999, found instead a scattering of divergent trends.
For instance, in Tennessee, the abortion rate went down when a federal court suspended a parental consent requirement, then rose when the law went back into effect. In Texas, the rate fell after a notification law went into effect, but not as fast as it did in the years before the law. In Virginia, the rate barely moved when the state introduced a notification law in 1998, but fell after the requirement was changed to parental consent in 2003.


Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

Rumsfeld Says Media Exaggerating Iraqi Civilian Deaths

From the Washington Post:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld today presented an upbeat report of the conflict in Iraq and said he agrees with the commander of the U.S.-led coalition, Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., that the news media has exaggerated the number of civilian casualties in the conflict.
Rumsfeld said that while insurgents are "obviously trying to ignite a civil war," Iraqi security forces have "taken the lead in controlling the situation" and the Iraqi government has taken "a number of key steps that have had a calming effect in the situation." But the news media in the United States and abroad has misreported the number of Iraqi civilians that have been killed and the number of mosques that have come under attack, Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference. This misreporting, Rumsfeld said, has swayed American public opinion. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll reported yesterday that 80 percent of Americans believe that fighting between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq will lead to civil war.

I'd like to know what people think about this. I rarely see the American media even talking about Iraqi civilian deaths, so I can't see how they would be able to exaggerate in their reporting. Rumsfeld's assertion that this has swayed public opinion against our involvement in Iraq is ridiculous as I think if you asked the average person on the street to give a ball park number of civilian casualties in Iraq they would not even come close. I do see more reporting of Iraqi civilian casualties in the foreign press however, as well as more coverage of what actually happens to these civilians with pictures that you never see in the American media. Whether they over-exaggerate or not I don't know. I'd appreciate any comments, even if you disagree.

Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

House and Senate Approve Patriot Act Renewal

From the Washington Post:

The Senate on Thursday gave its blessing to the renewal of the USA Patriot Act after adding new privacy protections designed to strike a better balance between civil liberties and the government's power to root out terrorists.
The 89-10 vote marked a bright spot in President Bush's troubled second term as his approval ratings dipped over the war in Iraq and his administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. Renewing the act, Bush and congressional Republicans said, was key to preventing more terror attacks in the United States.

Here's what Russ Fiengold (the leading critic of the Patriot Act) had to say about the renewal:
"Americans want to defeat terrorism and they want the basic character of this country to survive and prosper," he said. "They want both security and liberty, and unless we give them both _ and we can if we try _ we have failed."

9 Democrats voted against the bill, with Jim Jeffords (Independent from Vermont) joining the no vote. The following is a list of Dems voting against:

Daniel Akaka, Jeff Bingaman, Robert Byrd, Russell Feingold, Tom Harkin, Patrick Leahy, Carl Levin, Patty Murray, Ron Wyden


Click here to read the article.

Click here to read an article about the House passing the renewal from the Rocky Mountain News.

Also read a related article Patriot Act Includes Crackdown on Meth Use from the Washington Post.

--Tom Hayes

Bush to ask Congress for line-item veto power

From Reuters:

President George W. Bush will soon make a formal request to Congress for a line-item veto -- authority that would give him power to cancel specific spending items in budget bills, an administration official said on Sunday. Many presidents have sought such authority on the argument it would help cut down on wasteful spending in the budget. In a rare yielding of some of its powers of the purse strings, Congress passed legislation granting a line-item veto to President Bill Clinton. The Supreme Court struck down the law in 1998, ruling by a vote of 6-3 that Congress did not have the authority under the Constitution to give the president that power.

I think there are good arguments on both sides as to why the President should or should not have line item veto power. On one hand, it may limit spending, but at the same time, what type of programs that get cut depend entirely on the President, which gives the Executive branch more power. I don't see how Congress can give the President this authority anyway, since the Supreme Court already struck down a similar law, but we'll see what happens.


Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

Chinese Sweep Targets Activists Before Parliament Begins

From the Washington Post:

China has launched a tough crackdown on political activity ahead of this month's session of the national parliament, with at least two dozen participants in a nationwide hunger strike against government abuses confirmed missing or detained in the past two weeks, according to friends and relatives.
Hundreds of petitioners who had traveled to Beijing with grievances against local officials have also been forced to leave the capital in recent days, several of them said in interviews, and others have been blocked from entering the city.
The Communist Party routinely tightens security before the annual meeting of the rubber-stamp National People's Congress, but it appears to be taking special precautions ahead of this year's session, which begins Sunday, in response to rising social unrest in the countryside and an increasingly assertive campaign by civil rights activists in several cities.

Click here to read the article.

--Tom Hayes

Video Shows Bush Being Warned on Katrina

There have been even more disturbing articles recently about the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. The most recent are news stories and the video of the President being briefed on the potential impact of the coming hurricane (click here to view the tape).

Another article is about how FEMA is struggling to fill vacancies, with only 3 months to hurricane season. In past posts I have commented on the government's response to the hurricane and it remains troubling how each level of government failed to react adequately to the situation. In addition, it seems that those same leaders are ignoring one of the biggest problems that was there before the storm--the absolute poverty that so many people had to deal with everyday, which largely prevented many of them from leaving before the storm hit.

Click here to read the article from the Washington Post about Bush being briefed on the coming hurricane.

--Tom Hayes

Fighting AIDS in Brazil

The Washington Post has a good article about the differences between Brazil and the United States when it comes their approaches to fighting AIDS and outlooks on prostitution. The article explains that in Brazil, condoms are supplied by the government to prostitutes and are also given out freely to many other people. This is clearly a different approach to that in the United States, where many people don't even want condom machines in high school bathrooms. In my last post I referred to an article about how states are cutting health care programs aimed at preventing unwanted pregnancies, which is just the latest example of how many in the U.S. work to prevent funding for contraceptives and other birth control measures. As the WaPo article points out, the Brazilian government has one of the most liberal methods of fighting AIDS, and one of the clearest examples is when they give prostitutes free condoms and health classes. As the article points out, Brazil's methods have brought with them strong objections from America:

...the U.S. government strongly disapproves of such unorthodox methods. Two weeks ago, Brazil received a letter from USAID declaring the country ineligible for a renewal of a $48 million AIDS prevention grant. The United States requires all countries receiving AIDS funding help to formally state that prostitution is dehumanizing and degrading, and Brazil last year -- alone among AIDS aid recipients -- was unwilling to do that.
A working partnership with prostitutes, health officials here say, is a key reason that the country's AIDS prevention and treatment programs are considered by the United Nations to be the most successful in the developing world. There are at least 600,000 people infected with HIV in Brazil -- but that is only half the number predicted by the World Bank a decade ago.

Click here to read the full article.

--Tom Hayes

Unwanted Pregnancies and State Health Programs

From the Washington Post an article about how in many states is it now more difficult to obtain medical services to prevent unwanted pregnancies. From the article:

At a time when policymakers have made reducing unintended pregnancies a national priority, 33 states have made it more difficult or more expensive for poor women and teenagers to obtain contraceptives and related medical services, according to an analysis released yesterday by the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute.
From 1994 to 2001, many states cut funds for family planning, enacted laws restricting access to birth control and placed tight controls on sex education, said the institute, a privately funded research group that focuses on sexual health and family issues.
The statewide trends help explain why more than half of the 6 million pregnancies in the United States each year are unintended and offer clues for tackling problems associated with teenage pregnancy and abortion, said researchers who specialize in the field.

Click here to read the full article.

Click here to visit the Guttmacher Institute, which is cited in the article.

Click here to see how Colorado ranks in access to access to contraception and others means of preventing unwanted pregnancies.

--Tom Hayes

Veterans Report Details Mental Distress for Returning Iraq Veterans

From the Washington Post an article about post-traumatic stress disorder and returning Iraq War veterans. From the article:

More than one in three soldiers and Marines who have served in Iraq later sought help for mental health problems, according to a comprehensive snapshot by Army experts of the psyches of men and women returning from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places.
The accounts of more than 300,000 soldiers and Marines returning from several theaters paint an unusually detailed picture of the psychological impact of the various conflicts. Those returning from Iraq consistently reported more psychic distress than those returning from Afghanistan and other conflicts, such as those in Bosnia or Kosovo. Iraq veterans are far more likely to have witnessed people getting wounded or killed, to have experienced combat, and to have had aggressive or suicidal thoughts, the Army report said. Nearly twice as many of those returning from Iraq reported having a mental health problem -- or were hospitalized for a psychiatric disorder -- compared with troops returning from Afghanistan.

Click here to read the article.

Click here to read previous posts on this subject.

--Tom Hayes