Philippine ex-president Aquino dead at 76
Former Philippine President Corazon Aquino, whose “People Power” movement pushed out longtime strongman Ferdinand Marcos less than three years after her husband’s assassination, has died at age 76, her family announced Saturday.
Video: Afghan Presidential Elections
Soldiers in Task Force Yukon’s pre-election surge attempt to stop insurgent activity and encourage participation in the upcoming presidential elections in Afghanistan. Mandy Clark reports.
Video: Health Reform Support Wanes
According to a new poll, only 46 percent of the American public approves of the way President Barack Obama is handling health care reform. Katie Couric talks to John Dickerson about what went wrong.
Corazon Aquino, restored democracy to Philippines
The charismatic widow of assassinated opposition leader drove dictator from office, but the head of the ‘people power’ movement left a mixed legacy of political and natural disasters.
Corazon C. Aquino, the unassuming housewife who toppled a dictator and restored democracy to the Philippines as its 11th president, has died. She was 76.
Tracy Jarrett: When “Abstinence” Is Overrated
I am a young person who knows how it feels to be in love. That means I
also know what it is like to be stuck between rational thought and the
urgencies of desire.
I was only five when I lost my mom to HIV/AIDS. Half orphaned as a
result of risky sexual behavior, I should be a number-one advocate for
abstinence-only education. Yet, I am stopped in my tracks by
statistics that show purity contracts and pledges of
no-sex-until-marriage are often forgotten in a few months or years.
Of course I have seen the reports of runaway teen pregnancy rates and
the inability of contraception to protect people from sexually
transmitted diseases — and of course I want to protect myself.
But I also have emotions and in a world that does not always seem fair
or rational, I need to be able to protect myself from the consequences
of irrational decisions.
Abstinence only education campaigns have shifted from religious scare
tactics to pop culture subliminal messages. Every day, my younger
sister, age 9, and her friends are bombarded with images of purity
rings, virginity pledges, and the importance of having wholesome
values-and that’s just while they are watching the Disney Channel.
But will these messages work? For some they will. Everything works for
someone, but what do we do for those who will fall victim to hopeless
love?
While no one can agree on what the answer to that question is, popular
consensus seems to agree that abstinence only education is not it.
Statistics are screaming that telling youth to simply not have sex is
neither constructive nor realistic.
In a survey published in the January 2009 issue of Pediatrics, the
official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Professor
Janet Rosenbaum found that “purity pledges” were no more effective
than their advocates make out contraceptives to be. Her five-year
study of two teen groups with similar religious views found that most
of the abstinence pledgers were not less sexually active than
non-pledgers — but they were less likely to use condoms.
Last week the House voted to enact President Obama’s request to
replace funding for abstinence-only education with money for
comprehensive “evidence-based” pregnancy and STD prevention programs.
Obama plans to shift federal spending to conventional comprehensive
sex education programs, community programs, and new innovative
programs. That’s wise. Recent studies show the United States leads all
other industrialized nations except for some in the former Soviet
Union. Teen birth rates spiked up again in 2006 and 2007, a new
federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study
reports, after 14 years of decline.
Pregnancy reduction has “stalled, and may even have reversed among
certain groups of teens,” according to a report by Columbia University
and the Guttmacher Institute, not because rates of teen sexual
activity have increased, but because the use of contraceptives
declined.
Why has the “abstinence-only” flame fizzled so quickly? Advocates say
we need to give it even more of a chance. But I don’t hold out much
hope. It is not that teaching abstinence is a bad thing. One of the
most accurate messages we learn in school is that “the only safe sex
is no sex.” But young people want choices. We need to be able to make
informed choices.
In theory, abstinence-only education is an ideal; in practice,
emotions are real. In a tug-of-war of sexual tension, emotions often
win. When they do, it is better for us to be able to comprehend the
risks we are taking and to minimize the harms.
It is not fair that my mom was taken from me before either of our
lives could truly begin. She contracted HIV before she was married.
She made a decision. I don’t want my life to follow that path, nor do
I want that for my sister or my peers. But I understand the desire,
the pleasure, and the pain that come along with sex, and ignoring
those realities is not protecting me from anything.
Paul Slansky: This Preposterous Week in Review
Barrett, Justin
• placement of on administrative leave by the Boston Police Department leads to assertion by that “I am not a racist. I did not intend any racial bigotry, harm or prejudice,” leaving observers to ponder the actual intention of when mass e-mail was sent by describing Henry Louis Gates Jr. as a “banana-eating jungle monkey” — a phrase acknowledged by as a “poor choice of words”
• pondering by observers can stop, as attorney for explains that intention of was not “to malign [Gates] racially” but was merely “a characterization of the actions of that man”
Beck, Glenn
• Obama is doltishly called a “racist” with “a deep-seated hatred for white people” by
beer
• much ado about
Berens, Ricky
• exposed butt of
birthers
• description of by Stephen Colbert as “decent, old-fashioned Americans who just want to overturn a democratic election”
• desperate need of to cast Obama presidency as illegitimate
• imbecility of is so blatant that even the far right is denouncing
Borowitz, Andy
• America is deemed “less safe” by now that Palin is “no longer keeping an eye on Russia”
Cohen, Richard
• self-pitying column by is appropriately savaged
Cunningham, Merce
• death of
Daniels, Stormy
• campaign by for adulterer David Vitter’s Senate seat suffers setback with arrest of for battering husband after becoming “upset because the way the laundry had been done”
Denny’s
• excessively salt-laden meals served by result in lawsuit against
Dobbs, Lou
• disingenuous defense of by CNN president Jonathan Klein
Foxx, Rep. Virginia
• debunking of claims by that Obama’s health care plan will “put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government”
For Madonna’s scary arms, Michael Jackson’s scarier nose, Sarah Palin’s even scarier brain, and a guy who likes this one horse maybe a little too much, click here.
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Andy Worthington: As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantanamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat
On Thursday, in a long-anticipated ruling (PDF), Judge Ellen Segan Huvelle granted the habeas corpus petition of Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan teenager seized after a grenade attack on a jeep containing two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan translator in December 2002, and ordered the government to transfer him to the custody of the Afghan authorities, who have already stated that he will be released on arrival.
Even if the government accepts Judge Huvelle’s ruling, Jawad will not be released immediately, because, under the terms of legislation recently forced on the government by Congress, the administration will have to provide lawmakers with “an assessment of any risk to the national security” posed by Jawad before he can be freed, which, it said, would take 22 days.
However, even as Judge Huvelle delivered her ruling, the government announced that it has not entirely given up on Jawad’s case. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ian Gershengorn told the court that the government was still deciding whether to pursue a criminal case against Jawad, meaning that he could, conceivably, be transferred to the U.S. mainland to stand trial in a federal court.
At Thursday’s ruling, Judge Huvelle acknowledged that the government had the right to file a criminal case, and gave lawyers three weeks to do so, but she urged them not to take this course of action. “After this horrible, long, tortured history, I hope the government will succeed in getting him back home,” she said. “Enough has been imposed on this young man to date.”
These may seem like harsh words, but they are nothing compared to the sustained scorn that Judge Huvelle poured on the government’s case in a hearing two weeks ago, and for those who have studied Jawad’s case in any detail, they are entirely appropriate, as the case against Jawad first collapsed nine months ago. It would not be an exaggeration to state that, if the Justice Department and the Defense Department decide to proceed with a criminal prosecution, it will demonstrate not only that they have, collectively, taken leave of their senses, but also that no one in a position of responsibility — President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder or defense secretary Robert Gates — has either the courage or the awareness to step in to prevent a clear message being sent out to the world that, far from addressing the excesses of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” the Obama administration is, instead, pursuing exactly the kind of cruel, unjust and incompetent policies that would bring a smile to the lips of former Vice President Dick Cheney.
To understand the significance of the decision facing the government, it is important to understand that the case against Jawad was always tenuous, as I reported in October 2007, when he was first put forward for a trial by Military Commission (the “terror trials” introduced by Dick Cheney in November 2001, and revived by Congress in 2006, after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal), and that it unraveled spectacularly last September, when the prosecutor in his proposed trial, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, resigned.
Stating that he had once been a “true believer,” but had ended up feeling “truly deceived,” Lt. Col. Vandeveld explained, as I described it in an article two months ago, that he had come to regard the Commissions as “a dysfunctional system, which, both through accident and design, prevented the disclosure of evidence essential to the defense, thereby ensuring that no fair trial was possible.” He also “described how evidence proving that Jawad was a juvenile at the time of his capture, that he was tricked into joining an insurgent group and was drugged before the attack, and that two other men had confessed to the crime, had been deliberately suppressed.”
If a shred of credibility remained in the case, this dissolved in October and November, when, on two separate occasions, Jawad’s military judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, ruled that the crux of the government’s case against Jawad — two “confessions” made on the day of his capture, the first in Afghan custody, and the second, just hours later, in U.S. custody — were inadmissible because they had been obtained through treatment that constituted torture.
As I explained in my article two months ago,
On October 28 … [Col.] Henley found that there was “reason to believe Jawad was under the influence of drugs at the time of his capture and forced confession,” and also “accepted the accused’s account of how he was threatened, while armed senior Afghan officials allied with U.S. forces watched his interrogation.” He stated that he believed Jawad’s account of an interrogator telling him, “You will be killed if you do not confess to the grenade attack. We will arrest your family and kill them if you do not confess.” He also made a point of stating that he was accepting Jawad’s account because the government had failed to provide “timely disclosure of evidence” for his trial, which was scheduled to begin on January 5, 2009. [...]
Three weeks later, Col. Henley dealt another blow to the prosecution’s case by ruling that a second confession, made in U.S. custody the day after his Afghan confession, was also inadmissible, because “the U.S. interrogator used techniques to maintain ‘the shock and fearful state’ associated with his arrest by Afghan police, including blindfolding him and placing a hood over his head.” As Col. Henley explained in his ruling, “The military commission concludes the effect of the death threats which produced the accused’s first confession to the Afghan police had not dissipated by the second confession to the U.S. In other words, the subsequent confession was itself the product of the preceding death threats.”
When Col. Henley excluded Jawad’s first confession, Lt. Col. Vandeveld responded by stating that it was “among the most important evidence for his upcoming war crimes trial,” and adding, “To me, the case is not only eviscerated, it is now impossible to prosecute with any credibility.”
This really should have been the end of the whole sordid story, and Jawad should have been put on a plane and sent back to Afghanistan, but this didn’t happen, and, although Barack Obama suspended the Military Commissions for four months on his arrival in the White House on January 20, 2009, Jawad’s habeas corpus petition — one of hundreds allowed to proceed after a momentous Supreme Court ruling last June — reached a U.S. District Court around the same time, accompanied by an even more scathing statement by Lt. Col. Vandeveld.
In an unparalleled dissection of the failures of the Military Commission system — and, in a wider sense, of the gathering of evidence in connection with the cases of all the Guantánamo prisoners — Lt. Col. Vandeveld described at length the “chaotic” state of the Prosecutors’ Office, and explained how he had discovered previously hidden evidence relating to Jawad’s abuse at Bagram and in Guantánamo, where he was subjected to a sleep deprivation program, which involved moving prisoners from cell to cell every few hours (over a two-week period, in Jawad’s case) and was known, euphemistically, as the “frequent flier program.” He also noted that Jawad’s continued detention was “something beyond a travesty,” and stated that he “should be released to resume his life in civil society, for his sake, and for our own sense of justice and perhaps to restore a measure of our basic humanity.”
Given the glacial pace of most of the habeas reviews — primarily because of obstruction by the Justice Department, where officials have been behaving as though George W. Bush was still in power and Dick Cheney was still breathing down their necks — it took until June for Jawad’s case to reach a point where Judge Huvelle could finally confront the shattered remnants of the government’s supposed evidence. On that occasion, she indicated that the government would be in for a bumpy ride, declaring, “This case has been so thoroughly examined that it may be the one and only case not to be so difficult. This case is ready to go.”
However, few observers were prepared for the torrent of derision that Judge Huvelle subjected the government to just two weeks ago. In a 30-minute hearing on July 16 (PDF), Judge Huvelle’s patience was stretched to breaking point when the government responded to her ruling that every other confession made by Jawad at Guantánamo would also be excluded not by contesting the ruling (or, as would have made sense, by dropping the case outright), but by pleading that it needed more time to decide whether it could still build a case for a possible trial in federal court, or in a new Military Commission, based on what it described as new inculpatory evidence unearthed during a search of records.
Judge Huvelle’s criticisms were so sustained, and so damning of the government’s inability to recognize that it had no case, that I’m reproducing detailed excerpts in a separate article, but to pick out a few highlights, she repeatedly stressed that the government did not have a single reliable witness, and that the case was “lousy,” “in trouble,” “unbelievable,” and “riddled with holes.”
She also insisted that the government should have known that it had no case when Jawad’s proposed trial by Military Commission effectively collapsed last November, and repeatedly expressed her fears that the administration was planning some kind of underhand treachery to prevent her from granting Jawad’s habeas petition, stating, at one point, “I’m not going to wait to grant a habeas until you gear up a military commission. That’s what I’m afraid of. Let him out. Send him back to Afghanistan.” On another occasion, she stated, “If they [the government] think for one minute that I am going to delay this thing so they can come up with some other alternative to going forward with the habeas and pull this rug from under the Court at the last minute by saying, oh, he is going to the Southern District of New York, don’t bother — or whatever idea you come up with.”
To my mind, the very fact that a judge in a U.S. District Court can, genuinely, fear that the government will attempt to usurp her authority spells out, succinctly, the dangers of the place in which the Obama administration finds itself, as it attempts to clear up the mess inherited from George W. Bush. I still have no firm idea why Obama and Holder have allowed the Justice Department to pursue unjustifiable and unwinnable cases in the habeas litigation, resulting, over the last few months, in humiliation after humiliation, first in the case of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, then in the case of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, a young Syrian who was tortured by al-Qaeda, and now in the case of Mohamed Jawad.
However, it’s conceivable that, in its desire to fully comprehend the cases — and to “own” them, if you like — the administration has poured all its energies into the inter-departmental Task Force that is currently halfway through reviewing all the Guantánamo prisoners’ cases. This is, perhaps, understandable, but by neglecting to cast a genuinely critical eye on the habeas litigation, senior officials are committing three unforgivable errors:
firstly, they are treating the judiciary with scorn, even though the habeas litigation began five years ago on the orders of the Supreme Court, and the District Courts are, moreover, the only genuinely open forum for discussion of the Guantánamo cases;
secondly, they are demonstrating that, whatever fine words they may utter, they are, in practice, cleaving to the Bush administration’s insanely broad detention policies regarding “enemy combatants,” and are effectively failing to distinguish between genuine terrorist suspects (al-Qaeda) and low-level fighters in an inter-Muslim civil war that preceded 9/11 and had nothing to do with it (recruits for the Taliban);
and thirdly, by failing to understand how little “evidence” is actually credible, because it is the product of the dubious interrogations of other prisoners, or of intelligence procedures, designed to produce a “mosaic” of intelligence, which, in reality, cannot stand up to independent scrutiny, they are repeatedly pursuing cases that only end up embarrassing or humiliating the government, and are, yet again, reinforcing notions that they are essentially happy with the Bush administration’s unprecedented and unforgivable decision to create a category of prisoner that is neither a prisoner of war nor a criminal suspect.
The response to these errors is the same as it should have been on Day One of the Obama administration, when many of us thought that real change was coming: speed up the habeas cases; focus solely on issues relating to acts of terrorism or genuine support for terrorism; abandon every other case, especially those that look dubious or unwinnable; and prepare federal court trials for those regarded as genuinely dangerous, in the knowledge that federal courts have a proven track record of successful terrorist prosecutions, and that no jury will fail to convict if any real evidence is presented.
In addition, the administration needs to swear that, in future, anyone seized in wartime or in connection with terrorism will be treated either as a prisoner of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, or as a criminal suspect, to be prosecuted in a federal court, so that “lousy” and “unbelievable” cases like that of Mohamed Jawad become a thing of the past, consigned to history as securely as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and all the other architects of the unprecedented flight from the law that was initiated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and maintains a blog here.
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Gary Hirshberg: UK Study Misleads Public by Ignoring Documented Health and Environmental Benefits of Organic Food
As Stonyfield Farm President and CE-Yo, I believe that a new study dismissing the health benefits of organics does in fact mislead an increasingly savvy public by ignoring documented health and environmental benefits of organic.
The supreme irony is that this study is getting an enormous amount of media attention in part because of heightened consumer awareness of where our food comes from, thanks to the popularity of the documentary “Food, Inc.” and the discussion it’s triggering across the country. “Food, Inc.” lays bare just how bankrupt and dangerous our current food system really is, and what we are allowed to know about it. The result is that consumers are looking more critically than ever at studies like this.
I agree with the Organic Center (TOC), a non-profit industry think tank, that the authors of the United Kingdom’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) study used old data and flawed logic in reaching the conclusion that organic food is no healthier than conventional. TOC alleges that the UK study actually downplayed the positive findings which favored organic food and did not measure important nutrients such as antioxidants.
There are compelling studies that have shown organic foods higher in beneficial antioxidants, substances or nutrients in our foods known to slow or prevent heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer. A 2007 Newcastle University (UK) study concluded organic fruit and vegetables contained up to 40% more antioxidants than non-organic varieties; organic milk contained more than 60% more antioxidants and healthy fatty acids than conventional. A 2007 study by the University of California found organic tomatoes had elevated levels of up to 97% of two types of antioxidants.
Of greater concern to me is the fact the FSA ignores the environmental and related health benefits of an organic farming system that avoids the use of millions of pounds of toxic persistent pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer and other chemicals that leach into soil, water and air.
The man leading the FSA review actually stated the differences in nutrient content found between organic and conventionally produced food were “unlikely to be of any public health relevance.” Tell that to the people who suffer a variety of health issues shown to be linked to pesticide use. Public health is exactly what’s at stake here.
I believe studies like the FSA report need to look beyond the dinner plate and recognize that organic farming’s avoidance of chemicals offers health benefits beyond nutrition.
People choose organic foods not only for their well-documented nutritional superiority, but also because those foods come from a system of sustainable agriculture that avoids the use of toxic, persistent pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers that pollute our soil, water and air, as well as our food.
According to USDA organic standards, no artificial hormones or antibiotics are allowed for use on organic dairy farms. Organic regulations also prohibit the use of toxic and persistent chemicals for growing and maintaining pasture and in the production of grain and forage-based feeds. Energy intensive synthetic chemical nitrogen fertilizer is also prohibited in organic farming.
There are about 120,000 milking cows on organic dairy farms in the US, and these farms avoid the use of an estimated 40 million pounds of fertilizer and 758,000 pounds of pesticides on the 761,000 acres of farmland now used to grow organic feed or organic pasture.
That means millions of pounds of chemicals NOT leaching into our soil, air and water. Chemicals that have been linked in study after study to health concerns ranging from premature births to the onset of Parkinson’s Disease.
I believe that consumers are savvy enough now to be taking in all of this information as they are making informed, educated decisions about their own health, their family’s health, and the health of the planet.
These UK findings will be challenged by consumers who more than ever are educating themselves on how food is grown and processed.
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Woot! Amazon Buys Zappos
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Blockbuster Online retailer Amazon.com (AMZN) said on July 22nd that it is buying Zappos.com, the online retailer of shoes and apparel, for $807 million in common stock and $40 million in cash and restricted stock.
In the press release Amazon said it will buy Zappos in exchange for 10 million shares of Amazon stock. Amazon.com will also give Zappos employees $40 million in cash and restricted stock. Boy, do I wish I was one of those employees.
Zappos has really made a name for themselves as online retailer of shoes and clothing, and this is why I believe Zappos as a business was attractive to Amazon. I am an avid shopper of Zappos, mostly because of their apparel selection and their customer service. I am also an avid Amazon shopper and I have never failed to find what I was looking for there.
I am absolutely thrilled that my 2 favorite online companies are now bound together in holy matrimony.
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Liberal Democrats threaten to reject House healthcare compromise
Dozens say they’ll vote against a plan that includes concessions to Blue Dogs. The dispute could jeopardize a long-held goal of the left.
After months of marching in line as senior Democrats worked with the White House to develop healthcare legislation, liberal lawmakers from solidly Democratic districts are threatening a revolt that could doom President Obama’s bid to sign a major bill this year.
