Evening Edition

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

Now with 41 Top Stories.

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Afghan suicide blast kills nine troops

by Samoon Miakhail, AFP

Sat Apr 16, 8:56 am ET

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (AFP) – A Taliban suicide bomber wearing an army uniform killed five foreign troops and four Afghan soldiers on Saturday in a brazen attack at the Afghan army’s eastern headquarters.

It was the deadliest single incident this year against foreign forces in war-torn Afghanistan and comes amid a wave of suicide attacks on security targets, three months before foreign forces start a limited pullback.

The latest strike was at an army base in the Gambiri desert area in Laghman province, near Jalalabad city, the de facto capital of Afghanistan’s east.

AFP

2 Nigeria bids for history in crucial presidential election

by M.J. Smith, AFP

31 mins ago

LAGOS (AFP) – Millions of Nigerians voted Saturday in a crucial presidential election as Africa’s most populous nation sought to make history by holding its cleanest polls for head of state in nearly two decades.

Voting was generally calm in most of the country, though two explosions hit the northeastern city of Maiduguri, with no casualties reported. Rioting also broke out in the northern town of Misau that led to buildings being burnt.

President Goodluck Jonathan was favoured to win and results from a handful of areas Saturday evening showed him ahead, but it was far too early to draw any conclusions. The electoral commission has said it expects to release full results within 48 hours of the end of voting.

3 Libya denies using cluster bombs as blasts rock Misrata

by Phil Moore, AFP

55 mins ago

MISRATA, Libya (AFP) – Libya categorically denied claims on Saturday by a rights watchdog that Moamer Kadhafi’s forces were using illegal cluster bombs against rebels in Misrata, as the long-besieged town came under heavy fire once again.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said a new UN resolution to push the Libyan leader into quitting was unnecessary, and German Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle suggested frozen Libyan funds be diverted to the United Nations to pay for aid to victims of the conflict.

US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said its researchers reported the use of internationally banned cluster munitions against Misrata, the rebels’ last major bastion in western Libya.

4 Blasts rock Misrata as Libya rebels push in east

by Phil Moore, AFP

Sat Apr 16, 5:53 am ET

MISRATA, Libya (AFP) – Loud explosions rocked the besieged rebel-held western Libyan city of Misrata where the death toll mounted Saturday as a rights watchdog charged Moamer Kadhafi’s forces are using cluster bombs.

In the east, shelling was heard as rebel fighters bolstered by NATO air strikes pushed on from the crossroads town of Ajdabiya toward the strategic oil town of Brega.

The blasts in Misrata were accompanied by bursts of gunfire heard coming from the city centre, after NATO flyovers and possible air raids were followed by a lull in shelling and shooting, an AFP correspondent said.

5 Syria’s emergency law to end, says Assad

AFP

51 mins ago

DAMASCUS (AFP) – President Bashar al-Assad said on Saturday the emergency law in force in Syria for nearly 50 years will be abolished within a week, and expressed his sadness at the deaths of protesters.

“The juridical commission on the emergency law has prepared a series of proposals for new legislation, and these proposals will be submitted to the government, which will issue a new law within a week at the most,” he said.

Emergency law in force since 1963 restricts public gatherings and movement, authorises the interrogation of any individual and the monitoring of private communications and imposes media censorship.

6 ‘Arab Spring’ holds IMF, World Bank, amid financial woes

by Hugues Honore, AFP

2 hrs 26 mins ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Global finance chiefs sought ways to help Arab economies flourish amid pro-democracy revolts erupting across the region as the IMF and World Bank met in Washington Saturday.

While the Arab Spring that has seen dictators in Egypt and Tunisia fall since January has captivated the two key global institutions in their spring meetings, looming in the background were destabilizing “imbalances” in the world’s most powerful economies.

International Monetary Fund and World Bank policy makers made support for Arab countries a key priority, highlighting the social-political impact of skyrocketing food prices and joblessness around the world and especially in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region.

7 Vettel storms to pole in China Grand Prix

by Gordon Howard, AFP

Sat Apr 16, 8:10 am ET

SHANGHAI (AFP) – World championship leader Sebastian Vettel underlined his superiority by storming to pole position for Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix with the fastest lap ever recorded at the Shanghai circuit.

The 23-year-old’s Red Bull clocked a time of one minute 33.706 seconds, seven-tenths of a second quicker than the McLaren of Britain’s Jenson Button, sending a strong message to rivals that the German remains the man to beat.

By taking pole, defending world champion Vettel became the first Formula One driver since Michael Schumacher in 2004 to start at the front of the grid in the opening three races of the season.

8 Top G20 economies face scrutiny over imbalances

by Paul Handley, AFP

Sat Apr 16, 6:47 am ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Seven of the world’s leading economies including China and the United States faced deep scrutiny over fiscal and financial imbalances on Saturday as the G20 group announced a new framework for assessing potential risks to the global economy.

A Group of 20 delegation member told AFP the seven “included the G5” — the United States, France, Britain, Japan and Germany — and “two big emerging countries,” suggesting China and India.

The move would boost fraternal scrutiny in the elite G20 club, underscoring the growing worry over how structural problems in one large economy can spill across the world and pull others down — as became apparent in the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Reuters

9 Changes may spur Middle East growth if populism set aside

By Missy Ryan, Reuters

1 hr 21 mins ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The changes that have swept across the Arab world could usher in a new era of economic growth after years of inequality and joblessness, economists say, if leaders can resist pressure from the very protesters whose rage has reshaped the region.

“The problem is how do you in short run satisfy the economic demands of the people who were in the streets protesting?” said Mohsin Khan, the International Monetary Fund’s former director for the Middle East who is now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“My worry in the short run is the return to populist policy, back-tracking and undoing reforms,” he said.

You see, if we just ignore the people’s welfare and do what the elites want everything will be just fine.

10 World finance chiefs chastise U.S. on budget gap

By Lesley Wroughton, Reuters

27 mins ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – World finance leaders on Saturday chastised the United States for not doing enough to shrink its massive overspending and warned that budget strains in rich nations threaten the global recovery.

Finance ministers in Washington for semi-annual talks took sharper aim than in previous years at the United States’ $14 trillion debt.

While most of the criticism came from emerging market economies, some advanced nations joined the chorus.

11 Rich nations’ policies merit oversight: IMF members

By Lesley Wroughton and Isabel Versiani, Reuters

1 hr 9 mins ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – IMF member nations, acknowledging resistance from emerging markets to limits on capital controls, said rich nations’ policies that spur large capital outflows that could harm other economies also need oversight.

The steering committee of the International Monetary Fund, comprised of finance officials from around the world, addressed the increasingly contentious issue as emerging markets grapple with an inflationary inflow of “hot money” that they blame on low interest rates in the United States and other advanced economies.

“Giving due regard to country-specific circumstances and the benefits of financial integration, such an approach should encompass recommendations for both policies that give rise to outward capital flows and the management of inflows,” the panel of IMF member nations said in a communiqué.

12 Libyan rebels make renewed push for oil port Brega

By Michael Georgy, Reuters

17 mins ago

AJDABIYAH, Libya (Reuters) – Libyan rebels made a renewed effort to push toward the oil port of Brega on Saturday while Muammar Gaddafi’s forces pounded besieged Misrata to the west with rockets and mortars, a rebel spokesman said.

Underlining the difficulties faced by the rebels, six were killed and 16 wounded when Gaddafi loyalists fired rockets at a group of insurgents driving along the exposed coastal’ highway from the town of Ajdabiyah west toward Brega.

The rebels’ attempt to fight their way into western Libya — which would eventually allow them to link up with comrades in Misrata — has ground to a halt along the eastern coastal stretch from Ajdabiyah to Brega, despite NATO air strikes.

13 Rebels say Gaddafi forces target Misrata dairy plant

By Mariam Karouny, Reuters

58 mins ago

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Rebels said Muammar Gaddafi’s forces targeted food industry plants in renewed bombardment of Misrata on Saturday, a day after a Western rights group accused his loyalists of using cluster bombs in the besieged city.

An insurgent spokesman, Saadoun al Misrati, said three civilians and three rebels were killed in Saturday’s clashes and a total of 48 wounded, in a third day of heavy shelling of the rebels’ last major stronghold in the west of the country.

Another rebel spokesman, Gemal Salem, said about Gaddafi:

14 Syria’s Assad vows to lift emergency law by next week

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis, Reuters

2 hrs 2 mins ago

AMMAN (Reuters) – President Bashar al-Assad said on Saturday emergency law in place for almost 50 years in Syria would be lifted by next week but ignored popular demands to curb the security apparatus and dismantle its authoritarian system.

Assad, facing unprecedented pressure for democratic reform, had earlier pledged to replace the repressive emergency law with anti-terrorism legislation, but opposition figures said this was likely to preserve tough restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly in Syria, under monolithic Baath Party rule since 1963.

“Next week is the maximum (time) limit for completion of these laws regarding the lifting of the state of emergency,” Assad said in a speech to a new cabinet he named last week broadcast by Syrian state television.

15 Egypt court dissolves Mubarak’s former ruling party

By Shaimaa Fayed and Patrick Werr, Reuters

Sat Apr 16, 12:25 pm ET

CAIRO (Reuters) – An Egyptian court on Saturday ordered the dissolution of former President Hosni Mubarak’s political party, meeting a demand of the pro-democracy movement whose protests ended his 30-year authoritarian rule.

The disbanding of the National Democratic Party (NDP) was likely to further appease protesters who had called off fresh demonstrations after the military council that now rules Egypt earlier this week ordered Mubarak detained for questioning about corruption allegations.

The NDP had dominated Egyptian politics since it was founded by Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat, in 1978. For many in Egypt, it epitomized the graft and abuse of power that helped ignite the protests which forced Mubarak to quit in February.

16 Big Pharma backs deal to boost flu pandemic readiness

By Stephanie Nebehay, Reuters

Sat Apr 16, 10:42 am ET

GENEVA (Reuters) – Virus samples will be shared globally in exchange for vaccines produced from them under a landmark deal to improve preparedness for a flu pandemic, diplomats at the World Health Organization said on Saturday.

In a statement to Reuters, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, which represents 26 research-based drugmakers, welcomed the plan and confirmed the commitments its members had undertaken as part of it.

Negotiators ended an all-night session with a draft agreement accepted by all countries, including the United States, the last to join the consensus, diplomats said.

17 Fastest growing U.S. metro area hit hard by recession

By Colleen Jenkins, Reuters

Sat Apr 16, 11:17 am ET

PALM COAST, Fla (Reuters) – As snow blanketed the northern United States this winter, city leaders in Palm Coast, Florida, sent postcards to thousands of out-of-state landowners who have not yet built homes on their piece of paradise.

“It’s sunny and 76 degrees in Palm Coast,” the mailers read. “What’s the temperature where you live?”

The postcards highlighted the scenic trails and uncrowded beaches that helped make this coastal community between Daytona Beach and St. Augustine the nation’s fastest growing metro area in the past decade, according to new U.S. Census Bureau data.

18 Nigerians out in force for presidential vote

By Nick Tattersall, Reuters

53 mins ago

ABUJA (Reuters) – Tens of millions of Nigerians voted on Saturday in the most credible presidential election for decades, with early results pointing to a close race between President Goodluck Jonathan and rival Muhammadu Buhari.

From the tin-roofed shacks of the Niger Delta, where Jonathan cast his vote, to the dusty alleyways of Daura, the northern home village of ex-military ruler Buhari, voters came out en masse.

“The politicians should know if they don’t perform they are going to be voted out,” said businessman Ahibuogwu Brian among the populous lagoon-side shanties of Makoko in the sprawling commercial hub of Lagos. “The electorate now know we have the power to chose our leaders.”

19 China central bank chief: tightening to continue with yuan

By Zhou Xin and Ben Blanchard, Reuters

Sat Apr 16, 11:24 am ET

BOAO, China (Reuters) – China’s monetary policy tightening will continue for some time as inflation remains higher than the government is comfortable with, and the yuan will be one of the tools used to fight it, the central bank governor said on Saturday.

Zhou Xiaochuan, head of the People’s Bank of China, said China was using the yuan as a tool in fighting inflation and will make the currency more flexible over time.

“The shift from a moderately loose monetary stance to a prudent one means tightening, and this stance will continue for a while,” Zhou told a press briefing on the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia on the tropical Chinese island of Hainan.

20 Suicide attack kills 5 foreign soldiers in Afghanistan

By Rafiq Sherzad, Reuters

Sat Apr 16, 6:30 am ET

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) – A suicide bomber in an Afghan army uniform killed five foreign and four Afghan soldiers on Saturday at a sprawling desert base in the east of the country, the highest toll on NATO-led troops in a single attack for several months.

Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense said it was investigating whether the attacker was an insurgent disguised in a fake uniform, or the latest in a string of “rogue” members of the Afghan security forces who have turned on their colleagues and mentors.

On Friday, a suicide bomber in police uniform evaded tight security in police Headquarters in Kandahar city and killed Khan Mohammad Mujahid, provincial police chief of Kandahar.

21 Republicans set 2012 budget battle with Obama

By Richard Cowan and David Alexander, Reuters

Fri Apr 15, 6:06 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republicans in the House of Representatives united on Friday behind a 2012 budget plan slashing trillions of dollars in government spending while cutting taxes — two achievements conservatives say are necessary ingredients for a deal to raise the U.S. debt limit.

The vote effectively serves as the Republicans’ opening gambit in what are likely to be contentious negotiations with President Barack Obama and his Democrats over debt and deficits in the coming months. The Congress must decide within weeks on raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.

By a vote of 235-193, the House passed the plan written by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan for the 2012 fiscal year beginning October 1.

22 G20 backs early-warning plan against future crises

By Daniel Flynn and Wanfeng Zhou, Reuters

Fri Apr 15, 10:40 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Leading world economies agreed on Friday to put the policies of seven major nations under a microscope as part of a plan to prevent a repeat of the global financial crisis.

The pact was agreed by the Group of 20 nations after months of wrangling highlighted by China’s fears that its policy of limiting its currency’s rise was being targeted.

Under the deal, the International Monetary Fund will look at national levels of debt, budget deficits and trade balances to determine if a nation’s policies are putting the global economy at risk and should be changed.

AP

23 AP Exclusive: al-Qaida in Yemen adapts to evade US

By MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN, Associated Press

Sat Apr 16, 11:05 am ET

WASHINGTON – On Christmas Eve in 2009, intelligence officials anxiously monitored dozens of al-Qaida members as they gathered for a meeting in southern Yemen. The U.S. and Yemen had stepped up airstrikes and raids the week before, and al-Qaida was regrouping under one roof to figure out how to retaliate.

With the right timing and a little luck, the U.S. could kill the group’s leadership in a single blow.

The predawn missile strike killed scores of suspected terrorists but missed Naser Al-Wahishi, the country’s top al-Qaida leader, as well as his deputy, Saeed Al-Shihri, and the radical U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

“Everyone knows shooting from behind rocks and trees isn’t sporting.”- Lord Cornwallis

24 More shelling in rebel-held city in western Libyan

By SEBASTIAN ABBOT, Associated Press

40 mins ago

AJDABIYA, Libya – Moammar Gadhafi’s forces poured rocket fire after dawn Saturday into Misrata, the only western city still in rebel hands, and weary residents who have endured more than a month of fighting angrily lashed out at NATO for failing to halt the deadly assault.

Five civilians were killed in a 30-minute barrage of shelling that heavily damaged a factory for dairy products and sent up a thick column of black smoke, a doctor said. A human rights group has accused the Gadhafi regime of using cluster bombs in Misrata – munitions that can cause indiscriminate casualties and have been banned by most countries. The Libyan government and military denied the charge.

In eastern Libya, fierce fighting left seven rebels dead, 27 wounded and four missing as the anti-Gadhafi forces sought to push toward the strategic oil town of Brega, according to Mohammed Idris, a hospital supervisor in the nearby city of Ajdabiya. The battle took place on a road halfway between Ajdabiya and Brega.

25 Syrian president vows to lift emergency law

By ZEINA KARAM, Associated Press

1 hr 48 mins ago

BEIRUT – Bowing to pressure from a popular uprising, Syria’s president promised Saturday to end nearly 50 years of emergency rule this coming week but coupled his concession with a stern warning – that further unrest will be considered sabotage.

The protest movement has been steadily growing over the past four weeks, posing a serious challenge to the 40-year ruling dynasty of President Bashar Assad and his father before him. A British-trained eye doctor who inherited power 11 years ago, Assad acknowledged Saturday that Syrians have legitimate grievances.

But he warned there will no longer be “an excuse” for organizing protests once Syria lifts emergency rule and implements a spate of reforms, which he said will include a new law allowing the formation of political parties.

26 Taliban sleeper agent kills 9 at Afghan base

By SOLOMON MOORE, Associated Press

1 hr 55 mins ago

KABUL, Afghanistan – Like hundreds of thousands of Afghan men, he volunteered in the national army, ran drills in the mud, carried an automatic rifle, and worked alongside coalition mentors struggling against a hardcore insurgency.

But he was not one of them.

On Saturday, he walked into a meeting of NATO trainers and Afghan troops at Forward Operating Base Gamberi in the eastern province of Laghman and detonated a vest of explosives hidden underneath his uniform.

27 Another air controller naps; new schedules coming

By JOAN LOWY, Associated Press

9 mins ago

WASHINGTON – The Federal Aviation Administration changed air traffic control work schedules Saturday, acknowledging it has a widespread problem with fatigue after another controller fell asleep on duty – this time in Miami.

“We are taking important steps today that will make a real difference in fighting air traffic controller fatigue. But we know we will need to do more. This is just the beginning,” FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said in a statement.

On Monday, Babbitt and Paul Rinaldi, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, will begin visiting air traffic control facilities to hear what controllers have to say and to remind them that sleeping on the job won’t be tolerated. Their first stop is Atlanta, home of the world’s busiest airport.

28 Odd work schedules pose risk to health

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer

Sat Apr 16, 2:24 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Reports of sleeping air traffic controllers highlight a long-known and often ignored hazard: Workers on night shifts can have trouble concentrating and even staying awake.

“Government officials haven’t recognized that people routinely fall asleep at night when they’re doing shift work,” said Dr. Charles Czeisler, chief of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Czeisler said studies show that 30 percent to 50 percent of night-shift workers report falling asleep at least once a week while on the job.

29 Hall of Fame voters wait their turn to judge Bonds

By RONALD BLUM, AP Sports Writer

Sat Apr 16, 1:52 pm ET

SAN FRANCISCO – While eight women and four men sat in the jury box preparing to judge Barry Bonds, another group that will evaluate the home run king was watching and listening in the federal courtroom, sitting on the wooden benches in the last five rows. Their votes will not be cast for 20 more months.

Several members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America attended the trial, myself among them. I was joined on nearly all the trial days by Gwen Knapp of the San Francisco Chronicle, Mark Purdy of the San Jose Mercury News, T.J. Quinn of ESPN.com and Michael Martinez of Foxsportswest.com. Shortly after Thanksgiving 2012, we and the other 10-year veterans of the BBWAA will receive Hall of Fame ballots in the mail that for the first time will have Bonds’ name with a small box next to it.

The jurors’ evaluation was limited to the three weeks of testimony, and they had to decide whether Bonds was guilty of making false statements to a grand jury about his use of performance-enhancing drugs and whether he obstructed justice. They debated their decision with each other over four days, and unanimity was required. The standard they were required to use was “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and they were given 14 pages of instructions. Ultimately, they convicted baseball’s all-time home runs leader of obstruction and deadlocked on the other counts.

30 Radioactivity rises in sea off Japan nuclear plant

By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press

Sat Apr 16, 8:45 am ET

TOKYO – Levels of radioactivity have risen sharply in seawater near a tsunami-crippled nuclear plant in northern Japan, signaling the possibility of new leaks at the facility, the government said Saturday.

The announcement came after a magnitude-5.9 earthquake jolted Japan on Saturday morning, hours after the country’s nuclear safety agency ordered plant operators to beef up their quake preparedness systems to prevent a recurrence of the nuclear crisis.

There were no reports of damage from the earthquake, and there was no risk of a tsunami similar to the one that struck the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant March 11 after a magnitude-9.0 earthquake, causing Japan’s worst-ever nuclear plant disaster.

31 Obama assesses GOP budget: ‘Wrong for America’

By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press

Sat Apr 16, 9:23 am ET

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama is promoting his new deficit-reduction plan by drawing sharp contrasts with a House Republican budget that he says offers a vision that “is wrong for America.”

In his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday, Obama contended that Republicans want to dismantle venerable safety net programs and cut taxes for the wealthy at the expense of students paying for college and older adults relying on Medicare.

“To restore fiscal responsibility, we all need to share in the sacrifice – but we don’t have to sacrifice the America we believe in,” Obama said.

32 Water wars? Thirsty, energy-short China stirs fear

By DENIS D. GRAY, Associated Press

Sat Apr 16, 10:44 am ET

BAHIR JONAI, India – The wall of water raced through narrow Himalayan gorges in northeast India, gathering speed as it raked the banks of towering trees and boulders. When the torrent struck their island in the Brahmaputra river, the villagers remember, it took only moments to obliterate their houses, possessions and livestock.

No one knows exactly how the disaster happened, but everyone knows whom to blame: neighboring China.

“We don’t trust the Chinese,” says fisherman Akshay Sarkar at the resettlement site where he has lived since the 2000 flood. “They gave us no warning. They may do it again.”

33 Ariz. plows controversial ground with birther bill

By JACQUES BILLEAUD, Associated Press

Sat Apr 16, 7:47 am ET

PHOENIX – Arizona, a state that has shown little reluctance in bucking the federal government, is again plowing controversial political ground, this time as its Legislature passed a bill to require President Barack Obama and other presidential candidates to prove their U.S. citizenship before their names can appear on the state’s ballot.

If Gov. Jan Brewer signs the proposal into law, Arizona would be the first state to pass such a requirement – potentially forcing a court to decide whether the president’s birth certificate is enough to prove he can legally run for re-election. Hawaii officials have certified Obama was born in that state, but so-called “birthers” have demanded more proof.

Opponents say Arizona’s bill gives the state another black eye after lawmakers approved a controversial immigration enforcement law last year, considered legislation asserting state rights, and made it illegal to create “human-animal” hybrids by fertilizing human eggs with nonhuman sperm and vice versa.

34 IMF pledges new efforts against economic threats

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER and HARRY DUNPHY, Associated Press

8 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Soaring oil prices that threaten to worsen unemployment and poverty added a sense of urgency to talks Saturday among global financial leaders.

They wrapped up three days of talks with pledges of closer cooperation and better surveillance of the global economy. However, it was uncertain just how far countries would be willing to go in reforming their domestic policies in response to international pressures.

The United States, which is facing plenty of criticism for its soaring federal budget deficits, campaigned to get the International Monetary Fund more heavily involved in monitoring currency rates.

35 Daniel Sedin scores twice, Canucks beat Blackhawks

Sat Apr 16, 7:49 am ET

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – The Vancouver Canucks have spent the entire week telling everyone they aren’t the same team that was knocked out of the playoffs by the Chicago Blackhawks the last two seasons.

Not the same team that won Game 1 both times only to blow momentum-killing leads in Game 2 and go on to lose the series. Not the same team that couldn’t beat the Blackhawks on home ice.

The Canucks backed up all that talk Friday night, but not before a few flashback moments.

36 Obama: Congress will compromise, raise debt limit

By BEN FELLER, AP White House Correspondent

Sat Apr 16, 3:31 am ET

CHICAGO – President Barack Obama, insisting a politically divided government will not risk tanking the world economy, says Congress will once again raise the amount of debt the country can pile up to ensure it has money to pay its bills. For the first time, though, he signaled that he will have to go along with more spending cuts to ensure a deal with Republicans.

In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, the president also spoke in his most confident terms yet that voters will reward him with another four years in the White House for his work to turn around the economy. Speaking from his hometown and the site of his newly launched re-election bid, Obama said he thinks voters will determine he is the best prepared person “to finish the job.”

On America’s wars, he said that a significant number of troops would begin coming home from Afghanistan in July despite many expectations that the withdrawal would be modest. He said the U.S. would not expand its military role to end a bloody stalemate in Libya but insisted that Moammar Gadhafi would, in time, be forced from power.

37 Palin: Wis. gov doing the right thing with unions

By TODD RICHMOND, Associated Press

24 mins ago

MADISON, Wis. – Sarah Palin defended Wisconsin’s governor at a tea party tax day rally Saturday, telling hundreds of supporters that his polarizing union rights law is designed to save public jobs.

Braving snow showers and a frigid wind outside the state Capitol building, the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate told tea partyers she’s glad to stand with Gov. Scott Walker. Hundreds of labor supporters surrounded the rally, trying to drown Palin out with chants of “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Scott Walker has got to go!” and “Recall Walker!”

“Hey, folks! He’s trying to save your jobs and your pensions!” Palin yelled into the microphone. “Your governor did the right thing and you won! Your beautiful state won! And people still have their jobs!”

38 Exhibit chronicles lives of workers at Chernobyl

By ULA ILNYTZKY, Associated Press

26 mins ago

NEW YORK – Families walk their children to school. Teenage girls smile backstage before a concert. Couples work out at a gym not far from villages where subsistence farmers draw well water and raise crops.

Welcome to the present-day Chernobyl region.

A quarter-century before a tsunami triggered a nuclear crisis in Japan, the world’s attention was riveted by the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant as it spewed radioactive material across much of the Northern Hemisphere. A generation later, thousands of people live in the region – and even still work at the disabled plant.

39 Along Gulf, spill still defines state of mind

By ADAM GELLER, AP National Writer

Sat Apr 16, 11:45 am ET

ALONG THE GULF COAST – In the small brick church just across the road from the chocolate waters of Bayou Lafourche, the Rev. Joseph Anthony Pereira unbuttons his collar as the last parishioners pull out of the lot. Tonight, nearly a year after the BP oil spill began, he’s asked his congregation of shrimpers and oil industry workers to think about lessons learned when survival is in jeopardy.

But Pereira doubts that many from the 5 p.m. Mass are ready to take his Lenten message to heart.

“You speak about this to them because they forget what they went through,” says Pereira, who pastors at St. Joseph’s Church in Galliano, La., a community that ties its fortunes to the Gulf of Mexico. “Because BP has spoiled them, given them all this money, they’ve gone back to the old ways. They give them big bucks and they forget.”

40 Do public employees get a better deal? It depends

By MICHAEL HILL, Associated Press

Sat Apr 16, 12:07 pm ET

ALBANY, N.Y. – A prosecutor in California collects $118,000 in unused sick days. A police officer in New York rings up $125,000 in overtime the year before retiring and “spikes” his pension payments. An Ohio school superintendent is hired for the same job from which he just retired and takes in more than $100,000 annually in salary and pension.

The headlines feed a stereotype of fat-cat public workers with the kind of cushy benefits that most private-sector workers can only dream about. With the economy still wobbly, governors are looking hard at employee pay and benefits, and taxpayers are asking whether state and local governments can remain so generous to public workers.

The issue has risen to national prominence as Republican governors in Wisconsin and Ohio have sought not only to make public employees pay more for their benefits but also prohibit many aspects of collective bargaining for the unions that represent them.

41 House passes huge GOP budget cuts, opposing Obama

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press

Fri Apr 15, 11:40 pm ET

WASHINGTON – In a prelude to a summer showdown with President Barack Obama, Republicans controlling the House pushed to passage on Friday a bold but politically dangerous budget blueprint to slash social safety net programs like food stamps and Medicaid and fundamentally restructure Medicare health care for the elderly.

The nonbinding plan lays out a fiscal vision cutting $6.2 trillion from yearly federal deficits over the coming decade and calls for transforming Medicare from a program in which the government directly pays medical bills into a voucher-like system that subsidizes purchases of private insurance plans

The GOP budget passed 235-193 with every Democrat voting “no.” Obama said in an Associated Press interview that it would “make Medicare into a voucher program. That’s something that we strongly object to.”

Random Japan

Photobucket

AND NOW FOR SOME GOOD NEWS

A jobless man from Shinjuku was arrested for breaking into the Daini Nuclear power plant in Fukushima and driving around “for about ten minutes.”

Yasushi Nishiwaki, the biophysicist who examined crewmembers of a Japanese fishing boat who were exposed to radiation during a US hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll in 1954, died of pneumoniain Osaka at age 94.

Japan’s unemployment rate of 4.6 percent is the lowest it’s been in two years.

Meanwhile, industrial production in February surged 0.4 percent from the previous month.

At the same time, retail sales rose 0.1 percent from a year earlier, which was a lot better than the 0.5 percent drop that many economists had predicted.

Stats

¥1 billion

Total revenue the TMG is hoping to raise via a “reconstruction lottery” later in the year, according to the Daily Yomiuri

1 million

Cases of mineral water that Coca Cola Japan said was planning to import from South Korea to meet increasing domestic demand

30 percent

Portion of their monthly salaries that Diet members have agreed to sacrifice for the next six months

¥2 billion

Amount of money that the pay cut will raise for quake relief efforts

OH, THAT EXPLAINS IT

An English professor at Kagawa University who beat up a woman on a train said he did it because she “stood on my foot and didn’t apologize.”

The Grand Prince Hotel Akasaka, originally built in 1954 and renovated in 1983 by famed architect Kenzo Tange, will be demolished to make way for an office complex.

An experimental “black box” aboard the Kounotori 2 spacecraft, which helped resupply the International Space Station, not only was able to record data as the satellite reentered the earth’s atmosphere, but survived impact in the Pacific Ocean “and continued to transmit data for hours as it bobbed… between Chile and New Zealand.”

It was reported that Toyota’s 4,900m2 pavilion at this week’s Shanghai International Auto Show will include “60 sets of technology demonstration vehicles and objects.”

The Supreme Court said that three death row inmates who murdered four men in Osaka, Aichi and Gifu prefectures in 1994 should face the gallows even though they were minors at the time of the killings.

An Idiot Yells

Does Anyone Care?    

The Tax Man Came

For The  Ferrari  

Yakuza Boss  Checks Out Of

The Gray Bar Hotel  

Government considering plan to dismantle TEPCO

2011/04/16

BY YASUAKI OSHIKA ASAHI SHIMBUN WEEKLY AERA

A secret plan to dismantle Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), the operator of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, is circulating within the government.

The proposal, which is associated with a faction of bureaucrats who have long supported liberalization of Japan’s power industry, envisages the passing of a special measures law that would put the company under close government supervision before eventually bankrupting it and completely restructuring its remnants.

There are also proposals to smash the company’s powerful influence on politicians and the mass media and force executives to give all their pay and severance settlements to victims of the earthquake.

Health and Fitness News

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

Brown Rice, but Better

Photobucket

I had never heard od sprouted graind except for beans sprouts and neither had the author of the NYT’s blog, Martha Rose Shulman, the source of these articles:

   Until recently I’d never heard of sprouted brown rice. These sprouts aren’t like the ones you put on a sandwich. Sprouted brown rice looks and feels like regular brown rice, and it must be cooked for the same amount of time. But once cooked, it’s sweeter and more delicate than ordinary brown rice, and a little less chewy.

   Sprouting any grain increases its nutritional value by making its nutrients more bio-available, among them calcium. But it’s the flavor and texture of this new sprout that have gotten me hooked. If you’ve been hard pressed to get your family to embrace brown rice, this may be the way to go.

Sprouted brown rice is a packaged product that you can find in natural foods stores with other packaged grains. The grains are sprouted, then dried. It looks and cooks like regular brown rice.

Sprouted Brown Rice Bowl With Carrot and Hijiki


As per Ms Shulman, “Julienne carrots with hijiki seaweed is a traditional Japanese combination. . . . Hijiki is an excellent source of iodine, vitamin K, folate and magnesium; the seaweed is soaked and simmered before cooking with the carrot and aromatics.

Rice Bowl With Spinach and Smoked Trout

Thai-Style Sprouted Rice and Herb Salad

Shrimp and Brown Rice Soup

Stir-Fried Bean Sprouts With Sprouted Brown Rice

General Medicine/Family Medical

Statin Drugs May Cut Risk of Kidney Trouble After Surgery

By Brenda Goodman

Study: Older Adults Taking the Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs Had Lower Odds of Post-Surgical Kidney Failure

April 14, 2011 — Statin medications, which are prescribed to lower cholesterol, may have an added benefit — protecting the kidneys from shutting down soon after surgery, a new study shows.

For reasons doctors don’t completely understand, this complication, which is called acute kidney injury (AKI) or acute renal failure, is on the rise, and it dramatically increases a patient’s risk of dying during recovery.

Lower Stroke Death Risk in Close-Knit Neighborhoods

By Bill Hendrick

Study Suggests Health Benefits for People Who Have Supportive Neighbors

April 14, 2011 — Seniors who live in supportive neighborhoods in which they have frequent opportunities to interact with friends and neighbors may have a reduced risk of dying from a stroke compared to those who live in less sociable neighborhoods, new research suggests.

New Drug May Help Control Epilepsy Seizures

By Denise Mann

Study Shows Perampanel May Be Effective in Hard-to-Treat Epilepsy Patients

April 13, 2011 — An experimental epilepsy drug may help reduce seizures in as many as one-third of people with epilepsy who either don’t tolerate or don’t respond adequately to existing seizure drugs.

The finding is slated to be presented at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Honolulu.

‘Artificial Pancreas’ May Treat Type 1 Diabetes

By Salynn Boyle

Study Shows Computer-Assisted Device Improves Blood Sugar Control

April 14, 2011 — New research raises hopes that a so-called “artificial pancreas” can help patients with type 1 diabetes better control their disease.

Adults with type 1 diabetes in a newly published study showed improvements in overnight blood sugar control when an experimental computer-assisted device was used, with fewer episodes of levels dropping to dangerously low levels.

New Drug May Slow MS Progression

By Salynn Boyle

Study Shows Oral Drug Laquinimod Is Safe and Effective

April 12, 2011 — The experimental oral multiple sclerosis (MS) drug laquinimod delayed disease progression, reduced relapse rates, and was safe and well tolerated by patients in a two-year study.

Genital Herpes’ Silent Spread

by Daniel J. DeNoon

Even Without Sores, Genital Herpes Carriers Infectious 10% of the Time

April 12, 2011 — Even if they don’t show any sign of infection, people carrying the genital herpes virus can infect a sex partner 10% of the time.

The finding comes from a large study that collected daily genital swabs from nearly 500 people infected with herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2), the genital herpes virus. Many (18%) thought they were uninfected, but found out they were herpes carriers when they underwent blood tests.

Warnings/Alerts/Guidelines

Johnson & Johnson Recalls Topamax Due to Odor

By Bill Hendrick

57,000 Bottles Possibly Containated by Chemical Called TBA

April 14, 2011 — Drugmaker Johnson & Johnson has issued a voluntary recall of 57,000 bottles of its Topamax epilepsy and migraine drug due to complaints of an “uncharacteristic odor” associated with the tablets.

The announcement came from Ortho-McNeil Neurologics, a division of Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals, which is a Johnson & Johnson company based in Titusville, N.J.

Study: Drug-Resistant Bacteria in U.S. Meat

By Brenda Goodman

Researchers Find Superbugs in Raw Turkey, Pork, Beef, and Chicken Sold in Grocery Stores

April 15, 2011 — There’s a new reason to be careful when handling raw meat at mealtimes.

Researchers testing raw turkey, pork, beef, and chicken purchased at grocery stores in five different cities across the U.S. say that roughly one in four of those samples tested positive for a multidrug antibiotic-resistant “superbug” bacterium.

Group Calls on FDA to Pull Alli, Xenical

By Denice Mann

Weight Loss Drugs Linked to Liver, Kidney, and Pancreas Damage

April 15, 2011 — The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen is urging the FDA to immediately pull two weight loss drugs, Xenical and Alli, from the market. The group says the drugs’ risk for liver, pancreas, and kidney damage greatly outweighs any potential weight loss benefits.

Xenical and Alli are different strengths of the drug orlistat. Prescription-strength Xenical is manufactured by Roche. Alli is available over the counter, and is one-half the strength of Xenical. These drugs block the absorption of fat in the gastrointestinal tract. Alli manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline announced plans to sell  the rights to the over-the-counter drug Alli.

Seasonal Flu/Other Epidemics/Disasters

FDA OKs Test for Dengue Fever

By Bill Hendrick

Blood Test Will Check for Antibodies in People Who Have Symptoms of Dengue Fever

April 13, 2011 — The FDA has approved a test to diagnose people with dengue fever, a sometimes deadly viral illness spread by mosquitoes.

The virus is transmitted by an infected mosquito. Most cases in the continental U.S. can be traced to people returning from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, the FDA says in a statement.

About 100 million people are infected by the virus each year worldwide, according to the CDC.

The disease is common in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, but outbreaks have also have been reported in Florida, Texas, and Hawaii.

Dengue Fever is the disease declared “neglected by the UN. Glenn Greenwald of Salon was recently hospitalized with Dengue. I wrote a diary describing the disease, its transmission and treatment, The Most Common Mosquito-Borne Virus: Dengue

Women’s Health

 Fat Injection for Breast Enlargement May Hinder Mammogram

By Salynn Boyles

Latest Study Contradicts Earlier Findings

April 14, 2011 — Breast augmentation involving injections of fat taken from other parts of the body is an increasingly popular alternative to breast implants and traditional lifts. But there are new concerns that the procedure may interfere with mammogram readings.

Omega-3s May Cut Risk of Postpartum Depression

By Denice Mann

Study Shows Eating Fatty Fish May Be Helpful in Preventing Symptoms of Postpartum Depression

April 11, 2011 — Eating fatty fish or other foods rich in healthy omega-3 fatty acids during pregnancy may help lower your risk of developing symptoms commonly seen in postpartum depression, a small study suggests.

The findings are slated for presentation at the Experimental Biology 2011 meeting in Washington, D.C.

Late Doses of HPV Vaccine May Still Be Effective

By Brenda Goodman

Study: Girls Still Get Protection When Shots Are Given Months Later Than Recommended

April 12, 2011 — Delaying doses of a vaccine that protects against cervical cancer doesn’t appear to make it any less safe or effective, a new study shows.

The vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV) is given in three shots over a period of six months.

Braids, Weaves Raise Risk of Hair Loss

By Denise Mann

Hairstyles May Lead to Scarring Hair Loss; African-American Women Hardest Hit

April 11, 2011 — Some hairstyles, including tight braids and weaves, may increase the risk of developing an irreversible form of scarring hair loss, according to a new study in the Archives of Dermatology.

Seen predominately in African-American women, this type of hair loss, central centrifugal cicatricial alopecia, centers on the vertex (crown) of the scalp and spreads peripherally.

Vitamin D Levels May Affect Macular Degeneration Risk

By Bill Hendrick

Women With High Vitamin D Levels May Have Decreased Risk of Age-Related Macular Degeneration, Study Finds

April 11, 2011 — Women younger than 75 who get sufficient vitamin D in their diets appear to have a reduced risk of a leading cause of blindness, new research indicates.

In the study, researchers say women under 75 who got the most vitamin D had a 59% decreased risk of developing age-related macular degeneration, compared to women with the lowest vitamin D intake.

Pediatric Health

Most Young Kids Don’t Get Enough Exercise

By Bill Hendrcik

Survey Shows Children Aren’t Following Recommendations for Daily Physical Activity

April 14, 2011 — About three out of four children ages 5 to 10 get less than one hour of physical activity daily, according to a new survey.

The survey of more than 1,600 U.S. parents was conducted by the YMCA of the USA, also known as Y-USA.

It showed that that 74% of children between the ages of 5 and 10 do not get enough exercise on a daily basis, based on the 60 minutes of daily physical activity recommended in the government’s Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.

Wrist Size May Predict Future Heart Risk in Kids

By Salynn Boyle

Study: Simple Test More Sensitive Than Measuring BMI

April 11, 2011 — Measuring an overweight child’s wrist size appears to be a better predictor of diabetes and heart risk than calculating body mass index, new research suggests.

Wrist size was strongly correlated with insulin resistance in overweight children in the study conducted by researchers at Italy’s Sapienza University of Rome.

Aging

Brain Shrinkage May Help Predict Alzheimer’s

By Denise Mann

Researchers Say Brain Shrinkage May Be Seen on MRIs a Decade Before Alzheimer’s Diagnosis

April 13, 2011 — Brain shrinkage seen on MRI imaging may actually occur up to 10 years before Alzheimer’s disease is diagnosed, finds a new study in Neurology.

Treating High Blood Pressure May Delay Alzheimer’s

By Kathleen Doheny

Treatment Reduced Risk of Progression to Alzheimer’s by 39% in Study

April 13, 2011 — Treating high blood pressure and other so-called vascular risk factors in people who have mild cognitive impairment may reduce their risk of progressing to Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study.

Multitasking Gets Harder With Age

By Jennifer Warner

Aging Makes It More Difficult for Brain to Stop and Start New Tasks, Researchers Say

April 11, 2011 — Is multitasking getting harder with age? A new study suggests that older brains behave differently when it comes to switching between two tasks.

Researchers found that older people have a more difficult time multitasking not because they have to devote more attention to a secondary task, but because their brains have a harder time disengaging from the secondary task and going back to the original one.

Elderly Sleep Problems May Be Tied to Hormones

By Jennifer Warner

Sleep Disruptions Associated With Hormonal Changes With Aging May Be Treatable

April 11, 2011 — Elderly people’s reputation as early birds may have a biological and potentially treatable cause.

A new study suggests that sleep problems associated with aging, such as going to bed and waking early, may be caused by hormonal changes.

Researchers say if further studies confirm these results, some sleep problems among the elderly may eventually be treatable with drugs.

Mental Health

Suicides Go Up When Economy Goes Down

By Bill Hendrick

Since the Great Depression, Hard Economic Times Have Driven Up Suicide Rates, Study Finds

April 14, 2011 — The suicide rate in the United States rises when the economy slumps, and falls when economic times improve. And this has been the case at least since the Great Depression, which started with the stock market crash of 1929, the CDC says in a new study.

Nutrition/Diet/Fitness

Apples Good for Your Heart

By Brenda Goodman

Eating Apples Daily Lowers Cholesterol, Inflammation, Study Finds

April 12, 2011 — Eating an apple or two each day may reduce heart disease risk factors, a new study shows.

The study, which is the latest to polish the apple’s heart-healthy reputation, found that eating apples daily appeared to lower levels of cholesterol and two other markers associated with plaques and inflammation in artery walls.

Treadmill Walking Improves Parkinson’s Symptoms

By Bill Hendrick

Low-Intensity Treadmill Training Helps Parkinson’s Patients’ Gait, Mobility

April 12, 2011 — People with Parkinson’s disease who walk on a treadmill at a comfortable, low-intensity speed may be able to improve their gait and mobility, new research indicates.

Such exercise may be better than walking at faster speeds for a shorter period of time or resistance training that includes leg-press repetitions, curls, and extensions, according to researchers from the University of Maryland.

Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”

Paul Krugman: Who’s Serious Now?

Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, sounds upset. And you can see why: President Obama, to the great relief of progressives, has called his bluff.

Last week, Mr. Ryan unveiled his budget proposal, and the initial reaction of much of the punditocracy was best summed up (sarcastically) by the blogger John Cole: “The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious?”

Then people who actually understand budget numbers went to work, and it became clear that the proposal wasn’t serious at all. In fact, it was a sick joke. The only real things in it were savage cuts in aid to the needy and the uninsured, huge tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and Medicare privatization. All the alleged cost savings were pure fantasy.

Charles M. Blow: The Pirates of Capitol Hill

Corporations are roaring. Wall Street is rolling in cash. C.E.O. bonuses are going gangbusters. It’s a really good time to be rich!

If you’re poor, not so much. The pall of the recession is suffocating. The unemployment rate is still unbearably high. The Census Bureau reported in September that the poverty rate for 2009 was 14.3 percent, higher than it has been since 1994, and the number of uninsured reached a record high. And the Department of Agriculture has reported record “prevalence of food insecurity.”

So in a civil society, which of these groups should be expected to sacrifice a bit for the benefit of the other and the overall health and prosperity of the nation at a time of great uncertainty? The poor, of course. At least that seems to be the Republican answer.

Glen Greenwald : The Two-Tiered Justice System: An Illustration

Of all the topics on which I’ve focused, I’ve likely written most about America’s two-tiered justice system — the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system. That full-scale destruction of the rule of law is also the topic of my forthcoming book. But The New York Times this morning has a long article so perfectly illustrating what I mean by “two-tiered justice system” — and the way in which it obliterates the core covenant of the American Founding: equality before the law — that it’s impossible for me not to highlight it.

The article’s headline tells most of the story: “In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures.” It asks: “why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?” And it recounts that not only have no high-level culprits been indicted (or even subjected to meaningful criminal investigations), but few have suffered any financial repercussions in the form of civil enforcements or other lawsuits. The evidence of rampant criminality that led to the 2008 financial crisis is overwhelming, but perhaps the clearest and most compelling such evidence comes from long-time Wall-Street-servant Alan Greenspan; even he was forced to acknowledge that much of the precipitating conduct was “certainly illegal and clearly criminal” and that “a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud.”

Michael Moore: This Tax Day, Make THEM Pay

Friends,

Do you wonder (like I do) what the tax accountants and executives are doing over at GE this weekend? Frantically rushing to fill out their IRS returns like the rest of us?

Hardly. They’re taking the weekend off to throw themselves a big party and have a hearty laugh at all of us. It must really crack them up to see us like suckers scurrying around to make sure we report everything to Uncle Sam — and even send him a check, if necessary.

The joke’s on us, folks. GE and tons of other corporations will have a tax bill for 2010 of ZERO. GE had $14.2 billion in profits in 2010. Yet they will contribute NOTHING to the federal government while every last dime is soaked from us.

Angi Becker Stevens: The Hypocrisy of “Informed Consent” Abortion Laws

Like most people, I don’t spend much time going through my state’s legislative website, reading the actual language of our state laws. When researching the recently proposed abortion restrictions here in Michigan, though, I felt compelled to read the actual abortion regulations as they currently stand-not just a summary, but the actual word of the law. I expected something cold and formal; legal language offering at least a surface-level impression of impartiality. So I was surprised to find, instead, that even the word of the law is actually dripping with rhetoric-and specifically, that it’s nauseatingly constructed on the premise of being “pro-woman.”

Sean Palfrey: How patients can help doctors practice better, less costly medicine

The past few decades have been exciting for the practice of medicine. We have made many dramatic scientific advances and developed many tests, medications and therapies. In pediatrics, we have been blessed with breakthroughs such as vaccines that eliminate deadly infant diseases and vastly improved asthma and diabetes medications.

Doctors, always eager to take advantage of discoveries, are now often ordering expensive tests and therapies without considering how essential they might be for their patients. In the process, we are bankrupting our nation’s health system and depriving millions of people of any health care at all. Ironically, however, the United States has fallen behind in many categories of child health outcomes compared with other developed countries, including higher rates of infant mortality and teen pregnancy, more serious accidents, and more obesity and diabetes.

Paul McGeough: Hospitals Show Ugly Truth about Bahrain, as US Looks the Other Way

Tiny Bahrain, a vital American ally in the Gulf region, is reimaging itself as a classic Cold War police state in the aftermath of the democracy uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa.

The island’s Sunni hereditary monarchy, which presents itself to the world as a ”constitutional monarchy”, was ahead of the reform curve that erupted in Tunisia in January – three months earlier it set about repressing political parties and arresting majority Shiite activists by the hundreds.

But in the aftermath of declaring a state of emergency, still being enforced by troops from neighbouring Saudi Arabia, it is the kingdom’s hospitals through which the world can see the uglier side of a regime which, compared with those in Libya and Syria, has earned only the mildest of rebukes from the Obama administration.

Karen Hansen-Kuhn : The US-Colombia Trade Agreement: A Volatile Agenda on Agriculture

The new Obama trade policy, as embodied in its free-trade agreement with Colombia, sadly resembles the old Bush trade policy: promoting growth in exports and investment at the expense of local economies and resilient food systems. This is unfortunate, not only because it fails to deliver Obama’s promised “21st-century” trade agenda, but also because it ignores some of the key lessons from NAFTA and the 2008 food-price crisis. Globalization has tied our economies together so that price changes in one country transmit around the world, increasing hunger and undermining efforts to rebuild rural communities and resilient food systems.

For decades, the primary problem for agriculture had been low prices, stimulated by U.S. and European agricultural policies that compelled farmers to continue to produce more and more to make up in volume what was lost in falling prices, and to seek ever expanding markets, whether at home or abroad. Cheap imports flooded the markets of developing countries, devastating small-scale farmers in poor countries while failing to stabilize farm incomes in the U.S. and Europe.

This Week In The Dream Antilles

Your bloguero’s muse seems to have gone on vacation.  Or at the very least has decided not to take his calls.  He dials, asking for inspiration, and what does he get?  He gets to leave his message after the beep.

His muse, however, isn’t the only one who has ostensibly cut your bloguero off.  That would be too simple.  No.  There are also 537 politicians in Washington who are unwilling to address your bloguero’s concerns.  More important, they also categorically refuse to demonstrate that they have souls.  Evidently proof of the capacity for compassion is far less important in the Nation’s Capital than spurious questions about documents showing live birth.  And what one does to the least of my brethren, the poor, the elderly, the sick, is apparently far less important than cozying up to plutocrats.  There’s nothing new about this.  Not really.  But your bloguero senses that among those who wish to speak truth to Power, exhaustion stalks their every step, and frustration, their every thought.  To no one’s surprise, the politicians curry favor with those fat cats who pay for their almost eternal tenure, not with those pajama wearing DFHs like your bloguero who chide them, heckle their bloviation, and insist on pointing out their stupidity.   They will show us: just you wait.

The Dream Machine is something your bloguero picked up at the Market of Dreams.  You can find in it the influence of Eduardo Galeano, whose trilogy, your bloguero has completed.  “Memory of Fire” is essential reading.  Your bloguero wonders why so few people have heard of Galeano and why so few in the US have read him.

Your bloguero’s muse delivered two very nice Haiku before leaving for Ibiza or Tulum or wherever muses frolic when they’re not working.

A Plague of Forgetting is a history lesson.  It begins with bananas and will change the way you your supermarket’s banana selection.

Your bloguero notes that this Digest is a weekly feature of the Port Writers Alliance and is now posted Saturday morning.   Your bloguero will see you next week, if his muse shows up for work.

Arizona to the President: Show Us Your Papers

(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Constitutional law professor, Jonathan Turley was a guest on Lawrence O’Donnell’s “Last Word” to discuss the constitutionality of the law passed by the Republican controlled Arizona state legislature, HB 2177. The bill would require every Presidential candidate to provide a so-called “long form” birth certificate. In the absence of a “long form” birth certificate that includes at least the date and place of birth, the names of the candidate’s mother and father, including information sufficient to determine the citizenship of both parents, the names of the hospital and the attending physician, if applicable, and signatures of any witnesses in attendance. The state would accept such things as a combination of baptismal or circumcision records, hospital birth files, postpartum medical records or other documents that are evidentiary of someone’s birth in the United States. If there continues to be a dispute, it will be up to the Arizona Secretary of State to make the call.

In other words, it rejects the “Certificate of Live Birth” issued by Hawaii to all its citizens born there and any other state that issues a COLB which may very well be unconstitutional under a number of clauses, amendments and court rulings. Under Article IV, section one of the US constitution, known as the Full Faith and Credit Clause, states are required to give full faith and credit to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. This includes accepting as genuine records from a sister state that have been officially certified under seal from the appropriate record keeper. The Arizona law is a clear violation of that clause.

Then there are a couple of Amendments, namely the 12th and 20th which would preempt any state law  on this subject:

The 12th Amendment states:

The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following [changed to January 20th by 20th Amendment], then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.

And the 20th Amendment which says:

If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.

The implication of this is that the issue of Presidential qualification is one that solely belongs to the Electoral College and Congress. The states play no role at all.

The US Supreme Court has also put limitations on what the states can make a ballot qualification when it comes to Federal offices. In U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton

the states cannot impose requirements for federal office holders beyond those set forth in the Constitution. This would include the requirement that a candidate provide proof of his eligibility beyond the affidavit which every state requires a candidate or his representative to sign.

Despite all the denials that this bill is not about President Obama, it is fairly clear that the bill is precisely aimed at the ridiculous claims made about Obama’s place of birth.

On This Day In History April 16

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

April 16 is the 106th day of the year (107th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 259 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pens his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama for protesting against segregation.

King wrote the letter from the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was confined after being arrested for his part in the Birmingham campaign, a planned non-violent protest conducted by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference against racial segregation by Birmingham’s city government and downtown retailers.

King’s letter is a response to a statement made by eight white Alabama clergymen on April 12, 1963, titled “A Call For Unity”. The clergymen agreed that social injustices existed but argued that the battle against racial segregation should be fought solely in the courts, not in the streets. King responded that without nonviolent forceful direct actions such as his, true civil rights could never be achieved. As he put it, “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.'” He asserted that not only was civil disobedience justified in the face of unjust laws, but that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

Extensive excerpts from the letter were published, without King’s consent, on May 19, 1963 in the New York Post Sunday Magazine. The letter was first published as “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in the June, 1963 issue of Liberation the June 12, 1963, edition of The Christian Century, and in the June 24, 1963, issue of The New Leader. It was reprinted shortly thereafter in The Atlantic Monthly.  King included the full text in his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait.

The letter includes the famous statement “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” as well as the words attributed to William Ewart Gladstone quoted by King: “[J]ustice too long delayed is justice denied.”

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL

April 16, 1963

MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here In Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all of these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants — for example, to remove the stores humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.

As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves : “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic withdrawal program would be the by-product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoralty election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run-off we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run-off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken .in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor. will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may want to ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression ‘of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to ace the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this ‘hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At fist I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best-known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do-nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.

If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble-rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides–and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.

But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some—such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle—have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as “dirty nigger lovers.” Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes to combat the disease of segregation.

Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a non segregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative .critics who can always find. something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of Rio shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leader era; an too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious. irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, on Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? l am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide. and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Par from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it vi lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ecclesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom, They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jai with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham, ham and all over the nation, because the goal of America k freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation-and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handing the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather “nonviolently” in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. There will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. There will be the old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” There will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

Martin Luther King, Jr.

 1178 BC – The calculated date of the Greek king Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan War.

73 – Masada, a Jewish fortress, falls to the Romans after several months of siege, ending the Jewish Revolt.

1346 – The Serbian Empire is proclaimed in Skopje by Dusan Silni, occupying much of the Balkans.

1521 – Martin Luther’s first appearance before the Diet of Worms to be examined by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the other estates of the empire.

1582 – Spanish conquistador Hernando de Lerma founds the settlement of Salta, Argentina.

1746 – The Battle of Culloden is fought between the French-supported Jacobites and the British Hanoverian forces commanded by William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland.

1780 – The University of Münster in Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany is founded.

1799 – Napoleonic Wars: The Battle of Mount Tabor – Napoleon drives Ottoman Turks across the River Jordan near Acre.

1818 – The United States Senate ratified the Rush-Bagot Treaty, establishing the border with Canada.

1847 – The accidental shooting of a Maori by an English sailor results in the opening of the Wanganui Campaign of the New Zealand land wars.

1853 – The first passenger rail opens in India, from Bori Bunder, Bombay to Thane.

1858 – The Wernerian Natural History Society, a former Scottish learned society, is wound up.

1862 – American Civil War: The Battle at Lee’s Mills in Virginia.

1862 – American Civil War: A bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia becomes law.

1863 – American Civil War: The Siege of Vicksburg – ships led by Union Admiral David Dixon Porter move through heavy Confederate artillery fire on approach to Vicksburg, Mississippi.

1881 – In Dodge City, Kansas, Bat Masterson fights his last gun battle.

1908 – Natural Bridges National Monument was established in Utah.

1912 – Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly an airplane across the English Channel.

1917 – Lenin returns to Petrograd from exile in Switzerland.

1919 – Gandhi organizes a day of “prayer and fasting” in response to the killing of Indian protesters in the Amritsar Massacre by the British.

1919 – Polish-Soviet War: The Polish army launches the Vilna offensive to capture Vilnius in modern Lithuania.

1922 – The Treaty of Rapallo, pursuant to which Germany and the Soviet Union re-establish diplomatic relations, is signed.

1925 – During the Communist St Nedelya Church assault in Sofia, 150 are killed and 500 are wounded.

1941 – World War II: The Italian convoy Duisburg, directed to Tunisia, is attacked and destroyed by British ships.

1941 – Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians throws the only Opening Day no-hitter in the history of Major League Baseball, beating the Chicago White Sox 1-0.

1943 – Dr. Albert Hofmann discovers the psychedelic effects of LSD.

1944 – Allied forces started bombing of Belgrade,killing about 1,100 people. This bombing fell on the Orthodox Christian Easter.

1945 – The Red Army begins the final assault on German forces around Berlin, with nearly one million troops fighting in the Battle of the Seelow Heights.

1945 – The United States Army liberates Nazi Sonderlager (high security) prisoner-of-war camp Oflag IV-C (better known as Colditz).

1945 – More than 7,000 die when the German refugee ship Goya is sunk by a Soviet submarine torpedo.

1947 – Texas City Disaster: An explosion on board a freighter in port causes the city of Texas City, Texas, to catch fire, killing almost 600.

1947 – Bernard Baruch coins the term “Cold War” to describe the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union.

1953 – Queen Elizabeth II launches the Royal Yacht HMY Britannia.

1962 – Walter Cronkite takes over as the lead news anchor of the CBS Evening News, during which time he would become “the most trusted man in America”.

1963 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pens his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama for protesting against segregation.

1972 – Apollo program: The launch of Apollo 16 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

1990 – The “Doctor of Death”, Jack Kevorkian, participates in his first assisted suicide.

1992 – The Katina P. runs aground off of Maputo, Mozambique and 60,000 tons of crude oil spill into the ocean.

2001 – India and Bangladesh begin a five-day border conflict, but are unable to resolve the disputes about their border.

2003 – The Treaty of Accession is signed in Athens admitting 10 new member states to the European Union.

2007 – Virginia Tech massacre: The deadliest spree killing in modern American history. Seung-Hui Cho, kills 32 and injures 23 before committing suicide.

2007 – President of Cote d’Ivoire Laurent Gbagbo declares the First Ivorian Civil War to be over.

Holidays and observances

   * Birthday of Queen Margrethe II (Denmark)

   * Christian Feast Day:

       Benedict Joseph Labre

       Bernadette Soubirous

       Drogo

       Fructuosus of Braga

       Martyrs of Zaragoza

       Turibius of Astorga

       April 16 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)

   * Emancipation Day (Washington, D.C.)

Six In The Morning

Libya conflict: Gaddafi ‘cluster bombing Misrata’

Abdullah, a doctor in Misrata, told the BBC he had seen evidence of the use of cluster bombs

The BBc

Human Rights Watch said one of its photographers had seen three mortar-launched projectiles explode over a residential area of Misrata.

A Libyan government spokesman denied the allegation.

Government troops have intensified their siege of Misrata, the only west Libyan city still in rebel hands.

The BBC’s Orla Guerin reports from inside the battle-scarred city that local residents fear a massacre without greater action by Nato air forces to break the siege.

Aftershocks worsen Japan’s quake trauma



April 16, 2011 – 1:58PM

Hundreds of aftershocks have rocked the ground and frayed nerves in the five weeks since Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami, forcing survivors to relive the terror almost daily.

The incessant rumbling of the Earth’s stressed crust has held back relief work, imperilled already dangerous operations to contain a nuclear crisis and fuelled fears far beyond the coast that was devastated by the giant wave.

Nigerians pick president in crucial election

 

Apr 16, 2011 8:42 AM | By Reuters  

The election pits President Goodluck Jonathan, the first head of state from the southern, oil-producing Niger Delta, against Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler with a reputation as a disciplinarian from the mostly-Muslim north.

Other candidates include former anti-corruption chief Nuhu Ribadu and Kano state governor Ibrahim Shekarau, although they are seen as rank outsiders.

Eurosceptic party set for big poll gain in Finland

The Irish Times – Saturday, April 16, 2011

DEREK SCALLY in Helsinki

FINLAND VOTES tomorrow in a tight general election likely to see large gains for a populist EU- critical party opposed to Portugal’s euro zone bailout.

On the back of popular opposition to the Greek and Irish assistance, the nationalist, anti-immigrant True Finns party has doubled its support within a year to challenge decades of consensus rule between Finland’s three main parties.

After winning 4 per cent in the 2007 election, the True Finns under leader Timo Soini may win about 17 per cent, a public television poll showed. The ruling Centre Party of outgoing prime minister Mari Kiviniemi has suffered a popularity dip after a political fundraising scandal forced her predecessor’s resignation last year

Assassinated Kandahar police chief was optimistic about security

A Taliban suicide bomber on Friday killed the Kandahar police chief, who recently noted to the Monitor gains in creating a ‘safe and secure environment’ in the restive province.  

By Tom A. Peter, Correspondent / April 15, 2011  

Kandahar City, Afghanistan

A Taliban suicide bomber killed the police chief of Afghanistan’s critical and long restive southern province of Kandahar on Friday, just days after the chief had expressed optimism about security gains.

“I am hopeful that we will have a safe and secure environment in our city,” Gen. Khan Mohammad Mujahid said in a Monday interview with the Monitor. “We have destroyed and eradicated [militants’] safe havens, so they don’t have bases to plan their attacks and operations.”

Four days later, a man dressed in police clothing approached General Mujahid in the courtyard of the heavily guarded police headquarters in Kandahar City, hugged him, and detonated himself.

Oil companies’ new Gulf drilling plans called inadequate



By Renee Schoof and Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – Oil companies recently turned in their first plans for exploratory drilling in deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including new information the government has required since last year’s BP blowout about how they’d try to prevent and cope with another oil disaster.

The oil companies that want to explore the seabed below the deep water say they’ve learned from last year’s accident and have better plans in place than they did a year ago, when an explosion at an oil rig set off the nation’s worst oil accident.

F1: Shanghai Qualifying

Once again I have unfortunately skipped the meaningless except for gossip Practice so I have little to report except for the scurrilous rumor (as always impeccably sourced) that Hamilton is dissatisfied with the McLaren hardware which as far as I can see is ahead of last season’s Red Bull chase that he almost won except for software (brain fart) failures by McLaren race management.  If he’s really decided to be a diva he’s lost my allegiance, does he expect Red Bull to dump Webber?  Nobody else is close.

Vettel dominated as predicted.

So we don’t know anything we didn’t already and the Shanghai circuit is equally a mystery except that the sinking has evidently passed inspection.

Tomorrow’s race at 2:30 am will not be preceded by anything special and will not be repeated until noon on Monday so Richard will just have to wait until then to read though I’m sure Grandma’s nurse will call him long before that to spoil it anyway.

I’ll spare you my insights from Sepang since they haven’t changed much, nor do I expect many surprises but if there are any I’ll document them below.

DocuDharma Digest

Regular Features-

Featured Essays for April 15, 2011-

DocuDharma

Load more