The People's Record

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BREAKING: US-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt has been found guilty of genocide for overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in the country’s Mayan region when he took power in 1982 during the height of Guatemala’s civil war. 

He was sentenced to 50 years in prison for genocide & an additional 30 years for crimes against humanity. 

More than 200,000 lives were lost during the 36-year civil war which ended in 1996. 

I’m guessing the U.S. Government is a really bad judge in character

Correct.

The Efrain Rios Montt genocide conviction was annulled by Guatemala’s constitutional court yesterday.

1,500 rally for Mark Carson in NYC - It was New York City’s largest LGBT rally in years, according to organizers. On Monday at least 1,500 people showed up to honor the life of Mark Carson and make a stand against the hate that led to his death. Carson was an openly gay 32-year-old black man who was shot and killed over the weekend in what authorities are investigating as an anti-gay hate crime.

The randomness of Carson’s death has shocked the city’s LGBT community. “Mark is not going to die in vain. We are not going to get beat up in vain,” one rally participant told Mother Jones. “Gay rights, we’re still fighting for them, and the fight is not over. We need to protect each other.”

TW: Hate crime - Friends remember Mark Carson, black gay man shot & killed in NYC, as a ‘beautiful, fabulous gay man’
May 20, 2013

More than 100 people attended a candlelight vigil for Mark Carson, a 32-year-old gay black man who was shot and killed in Greenwich Village over the weekend. Carson’s death is being investigated by police as a hate crime after he was allegedly chased out of a restaurant by a man brandishing a gun and yelling homophobic slurs.

Carson’s friends and family shared their grief with the local press.

“I thought that kind of hate stuff was gone, but I see that it’s not,” the victim’s father, Mark Carson Sr., told the New York Post. “It’s simply ridiculous. People are what people are. They do what they do. You can’t knock down who people are.”

Carson’s brother, Michael Bumpars, told the New York Daily News described him as “a beautiful person…he was our foundation.”

Kay Allen, a friend of Carson’s for more than a decade,told the New York Times: “He was a proud gay man. A fabulous gay man.” She added that he loved going to the Village: “His spirit was too big for this city. He didn’t have a negative bone in his body.”

Carson’s violent death has come as a shock for many in New York City’s iconic West Village. The area was home to the infamous Stonewall riots, the event largely credited with sparking the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970’s. Blogger Joe.My.God. reported from last weekend’s rally and has photos from the event.

Thirty-three year old Elliot Morales has been arrested as a suspect in the crime.

Gothamist reports that Carson’s death was the fourth hate crime targeting a gay man in the last two weeks in Manhattan, and the 22nd anti-gay attack so far in New York City this year.

Source

How the US turned three pacifists into ‘multiple felony saboteurs’
May 20, 2013

In just ten months, the United States managed to transform an 82 year-old Catholic nun and two pacifists from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protesters accused of misdemeanor trespassing into federal felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism.  Now in jail awaiting sentencing for their acts at an Oak Ridge, TN nuclear weapons production facility, their story should chill every person concerned about dissent in the US.

Here is how it happened.

In the early morning hours of Saturday June 28, 2012, long-time peace activists Sr. Megan Rice, 82, Greg Boertje-Obed, 57, and Michael Walli, 63, cut through the chain link fence surrounding the Oak Ridge Y-12 nuclear weapons production facility and trespassed onto the property.  Y-12, called the Fort Knox of the nuclear weapons industry, stores hundreds of metric tons of highly enriched uranium and works on every single one of the thousands of nuclear weapons maintained by the U.S.

Describing themselves as the Transform Now Plowshares, the three came as non-violent protestors to symbolically disarm the weapons. They carried bibles, written statements, peace banners, spray paint, flower, candles, small baby bottles of blood, bread, hammers with biblical verses on them and wire cutters. Their intent was to follow the words of Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

Sr. Megan Rice has been a Catholic sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus for over sixty years.  Greg Boertje-Obed, a married carpenter who has a college age daughter, is an Army veteran and lives at a Catholic Worker house in Duluth Minnesota.  Michael Walli, a two-term Vietnam veteran turned peacemaker, lives at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker house in Washington DC.

In the dark, the three activists cut through a boundary fence which had signs stating “No Trespassing.”  The signs indicate that unauthorized entry, a misdemeanor, is punishable by up to 1 year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

No security arrived to confront them.

So the three climbed up a hill through heavy brush, crossed a road, and kept going until they saw the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility (HEUMF) surrounded by three fences, lit up by blazing lights.

Still no security.

So they cut through the three fences, hung up their peace banners, and spray-painted peace slogans on the HEUMF.  Still no security arrived.  They began praying and sang songs like “Down by the Riverside” and “Peace is Flowing Like a River.”

When security finally arrived at about 4:30 am, the three surrendered peacefully, were arrested, and jailed.

The next Monday July 30, Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli were arraigned and charged with federal trespassing, a misdemeanor charge which carries a penalty of up to one year in jail.  Frank Munger, an award-winning journalist with the Knoxville News Sentinel, was the first to publicly wonder, “If unarmed protesters dressed in dark clothing could reach the plant’s core during the cover of dark, it raised questions about the plant’s security against more menacing intruders.”

On Wednesday August 1, all nuclear operations at Y-12 were ordered to be put on hold in order for the plant to focus on security.  The “security stand-down” was ordered by security contractor in charge of Y-12, B&W Y-12 (a joint venture of the Babcock and Wilcox Company and Bechtel National Inc.) and supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration.

On Thursday August 2, Rice, Boertje-Obed, and Walli appeared in court for a pretrial bail hearing.  The government asked that all three be detained.  One prosecutor called them a potential “danger to the community” and asked that all three be kept in jail until their trial.  The US Magistrate allowed them to be released.

Sr. Megan Rice walked out of the jail and promptly admitted to gathered media that the three had indeed gone onto the property and taken action in protest of nuclear weapons.  “But we had to — we were doing it because we had to reveal the truth of the criminality which is there, that’s our obligation,” Rice said. She also challenged the entire nuclear weapons industry: “We have the power, and the love, and the strength and the courage to end it and transform the whole project, for which has been expended more than 7.2 trillion dollars,” she said “The truth will heal us and heal our planet, heal our diseases, which result from the disharmony of our planet caused by the worst weapons in the history of mankind, which should not exist.  For this we give our lives — for the truth about the terrible existence of these weapons.”

Full story

‘Global Capitalism: A Monthly Update’ published on May 15, 2013

Economics Professor Richard Wolff publishes these monthly updates on developments relevant to capitalism around the world. His analysis is really on point. It’s long but it’s worth watching, listening to & learning from. 

• Professor Wolff’s website
• Professor Wolff’s podcast
• Democracy at Work (an organization co-founded by Richard Wolff)

President Obama prosecutes more whistle-blowers than all previous administrations combined.

Obama student loan policy reaping… wait for it… $51 billion profit
May 14, 2013

The Obama administration is forecast to turn a record $51 billion profit this year from student loan borrowers, a sum greater than the earnings of the nation’s most profitable companies and roughly equal to the combined net income of the four largest U.S. banks by assets.

Figures made public Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office show that the nonpartisan agency increased its 2013 fiscal year profit forecast for the Department of Education by 43 percent to $50.6 billion from its February estimate of $35.5 billion.

Exxon Mobil Corp., the nation’s most profitable company, reported $44.9 billion in net income last year. Apple Inc. recorded a $41.7 billion profit in its 2012 fiscal year, which ended in September, while Chevron Corp. reported $26.2 billion in earnings last year. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo reported a combined $51.9 billion in profit last year.

The estimated increase in the Education Department’s earnings from student borrowers and their families may cause a political firestorm in Washington, where members of Congress and Obama administration officials thus far have appeared content to allow students to line government coffers.

The Education Department has generated nearly $120 billion in profit off student borrowers over the last five fiscal years, budget documents show, thanks to record relative interest rates on loans as well as the agency’s aggressive efforts to collect defaulted debt. A spokesman from the Education Department did not respond to a request for comment. A Congressional Budget Office spokesman could not be reached for comment after normal business hours.

The new profit prediction comes as Washington policymakers increasingly focus on soaring student debt levels and the record relative interest rates that borrowers pay as a potential impediment to economic growth. Regulators and officials at agencies that include the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Reserve Bank of New York have all warned that student borrowing may dampen consumption, depress the economy, limit credit creation or pose a threat to financial stability.

At $1.1 trillion, student debt eclipses all other forms of household debt, except for home mortgages. It’s also the only kind of consumer debt that has increased since the onset of the financial crisis, according to the New York Fed. Officials in Washington are worried that overly indebted student borrowers are unable to save enough to purchase a home, take out loans for new cars, start a business or save enough for their retirement.

Policymakers also are worried about the effect that high interest rates on outstanding student debt may have on the broader economy. Congress sets interest rates on federal student loans, with rates fixed on the majority of loans at 6.8 and 7.9 percent.

But as the Federal Reserve attempts to lower borrowing costs for everyone from households and small businesses to large corporations and Wall Street banks, student borrowers have not been able to benefit.

Compared to a benchmark interest rate — what the U.S. government pays to borrow for 10 years — student borrowers have never paid more, increasing the burden of their student debt as wage increases and yields on investments and bank accounts fail to keep up with the relative increase in student loan interest payments.

President Barack Obama recently asked Congress to tie federal student loan interest rates to the U.S. government’s borrowing costs. In a possible sign of congressional intent, leading Democratic senators on Tuesday proposed legislation that would keep existing interest rates on some student loans for the neediest households fixed at 3.4 percent, rather than allowing them to revert back to their original 6.8 percent rate.

The legislation, dubbed the “Student Loan Affordability Act” and proposed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), aims to help a small subset of future student borrowers who take out loans over the next two years. The bill does nothing for existing student debtors.

“Today’s figures from the CBO underscore the urgent need for Congress to prevent the July 1 interest rate hike and address the crushing debt placed on students,” said Tiffany Edwards, spokeswoman for Democrats on the House Education and Workforce Committee.

Rohit Chopra, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official overseeing the regulator’s student debt efforts, has warned policymakers to not focus solely on future borrowers.

“The whole student loan problem is a problem that should be of deep concern to this body,” said Richard Cordray, CFPB director, during testimony last month before the Senate Banking Committee. “These are young people that we should care a great deal about.”

“They’re the ones with the ambition, aspirations and dreams, and they’re getting saddled with debt that they don’t understand,” Cordray said of student borrowers. “It’s holding them back and it’s making them unable to rise and succeed and become leaders in our society.”

He added: “It’s a significant problem and we’re going to be doing everything that we can to address it at the bureau.”

The CFPB has been focusing on helping existing borrowers refinance high-rate debt or modify the terms of their loans. In a report earlier this month, the CFPB lamented that borrowers are unable to refinance their obligations after they have graduated from college and secured well-paying jobs.

“Corporate entities, homeowners, and many others have been able to refinance debt at quite low rates, and student loan borrowers are wondering why they can’t do the same,” Chopra said.

The CFPB suggests that increased concentration in the student loan market may inhibit refinancings and debt workouts. Lenders and the Education Department profit when borrowers pay higher rates than they otherwise would in a normally-functioning market.

Unlike traditional lenders, though, the Education Department’s profits are barely dented by loan defaults. For loans made in 2013 that eventually default, the department estimates it will recover between 76 cents and 82 cents on the dollar. Bankruptcy rarely discharges student debt.

The Education Department’s collection efforts are aided by loan default specialists, including NCO Group Inc., a company owned by JPMorgan.

Source

Walmart opts out of Bangladesh safety agreement
May 15, 2013

Walmart has confirmed it will not sign up to a legally binding agreement on worker safety and building regulations in Bangladesh supported by retailers including H&M, Zara, Primark, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer, Next, C&A and several others.

However, the US retail giant has created its own agreement, which it claims goes beyond the current accord that was drafted by labour groups and campaigners.

The company, which also owns the UK’s third biggest supermarket, Asda, said the deal signed by its rivals was “unnecessary to achieve fire and safety goals” and questioned the “governance and dispute-resolution mechanisms”.

Instead, Walmart has agreed its own deal to inspect all 279 factories it uses in Bangladesh within six months, and has promised to publish the findings immediately.

Bosses claim this goes beyond the UNI Global Union and IndustriALL deal, pointing out the agreement requires 65% of inspections instead of 100% inspections taking place and argue its own deal means results are published straight away rather than within 45 days.

However, the Walmart deal is not legally binding, does not require the company to offer financial support for fire and safety regulations and blacklist factories unwilling to comply.

The agreement has been criticised by campaigners as a “business as usual” approach, which fails to address the core problems that led to the Rana Plaza factory collapse.

Sam Maher from Labour Behind the Label, said: “Walmart’s so-called new programme is simply more of the same ineffective auditing that failed to prevent the Rana Plaza disaster, or the deaths of 112 workers at Tazreen, who were producing Walmart goods.

“The changes demanded by the IndustriALL accord, include ensuring that factories are provided with the incentives and investment needed to actually make factories safe and are essential for any real change to occur. What Walmart are demanding is business as usual: a business that has cost lives of over 1,300 workers in the last six months alone.”

Walmart has also refused to clarify whether it sourced clothes from the Rana Plaza building, saying only that it had no “authorised” production at the site.

A statement from Walmart said: “The company, like a number of other retailers, is not in a position to sign the IndustriALL accord at this time.

“While we agree with much of the proposal, the IndustriALL plan also introduces requirements, including governance and dispute resolution mechanisms, on supply chain matters that are appropriately left to retailers, suppliers and government, and are unnecessary to achieve fire and safety goals.”

Several major UK retailers have declined to sign the agreement, including Arcadia group, the company behind brands including Topshop, Bhs and Dorothy Perkins; Debenhams; River Island; Matalan and Peacocks.

However, late on Tuesday night Next, the UK’s second biggest clothing retailer, did agree to sign.

Walmart’s decision leaves George at Asda, the supermarket’s clothing brand, at odds with its own position as a founding member of the Ethical Trading Initiative.

The ETI, the UK’s biggest alliance of businesses, trade unions and voluntary organisations, has recommended its members sign up to the accord.

Source

Once more: “What Walmart are demanding is business as usual: a business that has cost lives of over 1,300 workers in the last six months alone.”

Mexico: Ground Zero in the fight against Monsanto for the future of maize
May 13, 2013

In the 2011 action-thriller “Unknown”, scientists are persecuted by the biotech industry because they plan the open release of a drought- and pest-resistant strain of maize that could help eradicate world hunger.

There are certain parallels with the situation today in Mexico, the birthplace of maize, which is at the centre of the global fight to protect the crop’s diversity from the onslaught of genetically modified varieties.

“It’s the first time in history that one of the most important harvests in the world is threatened in its centre of diversity,” Pat Mooney, the head of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group), an international NGO, told IPS.

“If we let the companies win, there will be no chance to defend them in other parts. What is happening here is of key importance for the rest of the world.”

Civil society organisations are raising their guard against the possibility that the government of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) may approve commercial cultivation of transgenic maize, a move widely condemned by environmentalists and other activists, academics, and small and medium producers due to the risks it poses.

In September, the U.S. corporations Monsanto, Pioneer and Dow Agrosciences presented six applications for commercial plantations of transgenic maize on more than two million hectares in the northwestern state of Sinaloa and the northeastern state of Tamaulipas.

Moreover, in January these companies and Syngenta presented 11 applications for pilot and experimental plots to grow transgenic corn on 622 hectares in the northern states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Sinaloa and Baja California. And Monsanto has applied for an additional plantation in an unspecified area in the north of the country.

Since 2009, the Mexican government has issued 177 permits for experimental plots of transgenic maize covering an area of 2,664 hectares, according to the latest figures provided by the authorities.

But large-scale commercial release of GM maize has not yet been authorised.

“They are going to serve up transgenic maize on every table in spite of the fact that food sovereignty depends on growing native corn,” said Evangelina Robles, a member of Red en Defensa del Maíz (Maize Defence Network) which campaigns against GM corn. “As a result, we have to demand its prohibition by the state,” she told IPS.

Mexico produces 22 million tonnes of maize a year, and imports 10 million tonnes, according to the agriculture ministry. The country purchased about two million tonnes of GM maize from South Africa over the last two years, and is set to import another 150,000 tonnes.

Three million maize farmers cultivate about eight million hectares in Mexico, two million of which are devoted to family farming. White maize is the main crop for human consumption, while yellow maize, for animal feed, is largely imported.

The National Council for the Evaluation of Social Policy (CONEVAL) estimates the country’s annual consumption of maize at 123 kg per person, compared to a world average of 16.8 kg.

The historical link with pre-Columbian indigenous cultures gives maize a strong symbolic and cultural significance throughout Mesoamerica, the area comprising southern Mexico and Central America, where it was domesticated, producing 59 landraces or native strains and 209 varieties.

In the state of Mexico, adjacent to the capital city’s Federal District, small farmers have found their native maize to be contaminated with GM maize, according to tests carried out by students at the state Autonomous Metropolitan University.

“We swapped seeds and decided to do some tests. Now we are more careful when exchanging, and over who participates in the fair, although we still have to carry out confirmation tests,” activist Sara López, of the Red Origen Volcanes (Volcanoes Origins Network), an association of small farmers that has been organising producers’ fairs since 2010, told IPS.

Environmental, scientific and small farmers’ organisations have discovered GM contamination of native maize in Chihuahua, Hidalgo, Puebla and Oaxaca.

Contamination is “a carefully and perversely planned strategy,” according to Camila Montecinos, from the Chile office of GRAIN, an international NGO that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.

Transnational food companies “chose maize, soy and canola because of their enormous potential for contamination (by wind-pollination),” said Montecinos, one of the experts participating in the preliminary hearing on transgenic contamination of native maize at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, an international opinion tribunal which opened its Mexican chapter in 2012 and will conclude with a non-binding ruling in 2014.

“When contamination spreads, the companies claim that the presence of transgenic crops must be recognised and legalised,” in order to pave the way for marketing the GM seeds, to which they own the patents, she said.

Mexico’s environment minister, Juan Guerra, has said that all available scientific information will be examined before a decision is made.

But that will not be easy. The National Confederation of Campesinos (Small Farmers), one of the main internal movements in the ruling PRI, has had an agreement with Monsanto since 2007 under which the company is to “conserve” native varieties.

Meanwhile, the Peña Nieto government still has not approved regulations for the format and contents of reports on the results of releasing GM organisms, and the possible threats to the environment, biodiversity, and the health of animals, plants and fish.

“For 18 years, corporations have been unsuccessful in convincing the people that their products are good. Maize is being used as a means of political and economic control. People need maize to be alive,” the ETC Group’s Mooney said.

The transgenic seeds on the market are herbicide-resistant Roundup Ready and Bt (for the Bacillus thuringiensis gene they carry for pest resistance) versions of cotton, maize, soy and canola. While they are legally grown in Canada, the United States, Argentina, Brazil and Spain, they are banned for example in China, Russia and the majority of the EU countries.

Recent studies published in the United States show that transgenic crops do not significantly increase yield per hectare, do not reduce herbicide use, and do not increase resistance to pests, in contrast to biotech industry claims.

“We are analysing what legal action to take against the new applications (to plant GM maize),” said Robles, of the Maize Defence Network.

Sister Assata -  This is what American history looks like 
By Alice Walker

I don’t know why, given where we are with dronefare, but I didn’t expect the man making the announcement about Assata Shakur being the first woman “terrorist” to appear on the FBI’s most wanted list to be black. That was a blow. I was reminded of the world of “trackers” we sometimes get glimpses of in history books and old movies on TV. In Australia the tracker who hunts down other aboriginals who have, because of the rape and murder, genocide and enslavement of the indigenous (aboriginal) people, run away into the outback. He shows up again in cowboy and Indian films: jogging along in the hot sun, way ahead of the white men on horseback, bending on his knees to get a better look at a bruised leaf or a bent twig, while they curse and spit and complain about how long he’s taking to come up with a clue. And then there were the “trackers” who helped the pattyrollers during our four hundred years of enslavement. When pattyrollers (or patrols) caught run-away slaves in those days they frequently beat them to death. I’ve often thought of the black men whose expertise at tracking fugitives helped bring these terrors, humiliations and deaths about. When I was younger I would have been in a rage against them; not understanding the reality of invisible coercion, and mind and spirit control, that I do now. Today, only a few years older than Assata Shakur, and marveling at the unenviable state of humanity’s character worldwide, I find I can only pray for all of us. That we should be sinking even below the abysmal standard early “trackers” have set for us: that the US government can now offer two million dollars for the capture of a very small, not young, black woman who was brutally abused, even shot, over three decades ago, as if we don’t need that money to buy people food, clothes, medicine, and decent places to live.

What is most distressing about the times we live in, in my view, is our ever accelerating tolerance for cruelty. Prisoners held indefinitely in orange suits, hooded, chained and on their knees. Like the hunger strikers of Guantanamo, I would certainly prefer death to this. People shot and bombed from planes they never see until it is too late to get up from the table or place the baby under the bed. Poor people terrorized daily, driven insane really, from fear. People on the streets with no food and no place to sleep. People under bridges everywhere you go, holding out their desperate signs: a recent one held by a very young man, perhaps a veteran, under my local bridge: I Want To Live. But nothing seems as cruel to me as this: that our big, muscular, macho country would go after so tiny a woman as Assata who is given sanctuary in a country smaller than many of our states.

The first time I met Assata Shakur we talked for a long time. We were in Havana, where I had gone with a delegation to offer humanitarian aid during Cuba’s “special period” of hunger and despair, and I’d wanted to hear her side of the story from her. She described the incident with the New Jersey Highway Patrol, and assured me she was shot up so badly that even if she’d wanted to, she would not have been able to fire a gun. Though shot in the back (with her arms raised), she managed to live through two years of solitary confinement, in a men’s prison, chained to her bed. Then, in what must surely have been a miraculous coming together of people of courageous compassion, she was helped to escape and to find refuge in Cuba. One of the people who helped Assata escape, a white radical named Marilyn Buck, was kept in prison for thirty years and released only one month before her death from uterine cancer. She was a poet, and I have been reading her book, Inside/Out, Selected Poems, which a friend gave me just last week. There is also a remarkable video of her, shot in prison, that I highly recommend.

This is what solidarity can look like.

The second time I saw Assata, years later, I was in Havana for the Havana Book Fair. Cuba has a very high literacy rate, thanks to the Cuban revolution, and my novel, Meridian, had recently been translated and published there. However, this time we did not talk about the past. We talked about meditation. Seeing her interest, and that of Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly, and others, I decided to offer a class. There under a large tree off a quiet street in Havana, I demonstrated my own practice of meditation to some of the most attentive students I have ever encountered. The mantra: Breathing in: “In,” breathing out: “Peace.”

I believe Assata Shakur to be a good and decent, a kind and compassionate person. True revolutionaries often are. Physically she is beautiful, and her spirit is also. She appears to hold the respect, love and friendship of all the people who surround her. Like Marilyn Buck they have risked much for her freedom, and appear to believe her version of the story as I do.

That she did not wish to live as an imprisoned creature and a slave is understood.

What to do? Since we are not, in fact, helpless. Nor are we ever alone.

I call on the Ancestors 
by whose blood 
and DNA 
we exist 
to accompany us 
as always 
through this lengthening 
sorrow.
And to bear witness 
within us 
to all that we are 
aware.

BREAKING: US-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt has been found guilty of genocide for overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in the country’s Mayan region when he took power in 1982 during the height of Guatemala’s civil war. 

He was sentenced to 50 years in prison for genocide & an additional 30 years for crimes against humanity. 

More than 200,000 lives were lost during the 36-year civil war which ended in 1996. 

Rescuers in Bangladesh have found a survivor in the rubble of a clothing factory that collapsed 17 days ago
May 10, 2013

Bangladeshi television channels broadcast live footage of emergency service workers pulling the woman out from the debris, as onlookers burst into cheers.

The woman, called Reshma, was discovered on the second floor of the eight-storey Rana Plaza building in the capital Dhaka, where crews had been focusing on recovering bodies, not rescuing survivors, for much of the past two weeks. She told a TV company from her hospital bed:

“I heard voices of the rescue workers for the past several days. I kept hitting the wreckage with sticks and rods just to attract their attention. No one heard me. It was so bad for me. I never dreamed I’d see the daylight again. There was some dried food around me. I ate the dried food for 15 days. The last two days I had nothing but water. I used to drink only a limited quantity of water to save it. I had some bottles of water around me.”

She was discovered in the wreckage of a Muslim prayer room in the building and army officials immediately ordered the cranes and bulldozers to stop work. Once Reshma finally got their attention, the crews ordered the cranes and bulldozers to immediately stop work and used handsaws and welding and drilling equipment to cut through the iron rod and debris still trapping her.

They gave her water, oxygen and saline as they worked to free her, using handsaws to cut through the rubble, as hundreds of people who had been engaged in the grim job of removing decomposing bodies from the site, raised their hands together in prayer.

“Allah, you are the greatest, you can do anything. Please allow us all to rescue the survivor just found,” said a man on a loudspeaker leading the prayers. “We seek apology for our sins. Please pardon us, pardon the person found alive.”

Abdur Razzak, a warrant officer with the military’s engineering department who first spotted her in the wreckage, said she was in a remarkably good condition and could even walk.

Reshma told her rescuers there were no more survivors in her area. Workers began tearing through the nearby rubble anyway, hoping to find another person alive.

Source

How a few Philly high school students organized themselves into a few hundred in four days
May 9, 2013

It began, not surprisingly perhaps, with a modest online message.

About two weeks ago, school district officials had announced, once again, a serious hole in the District’s budget and had laid out, once again, severe cuts that would be implemented if a roughly $300 million hole wasn’t filled — this time invoking layoffs and cuts to programs, especially arts and extracurricular.

And as students pondered cuts to their favorite programs, the irony that last Friday would mark “Teacher Appreciation Day,” was not lost upon them.

Before news of the proposed cuts reached them, says Teyin Tseng (upper right), a member of the student council at the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, “Our plan was to see how much money we had and see if we could buy flowers for every teacher.”

“But then the budget [was unveiled] — and we decided to do this.”

So, on Friday, another CAPA student, Maureen Smith (lower center), created a new Facebook page: Silenced Students March — announcing a plan by her and some of her classmates to protest the threatened cuts. She opened with something of a rallying call:

“As students we are fed up and want to be heard. Its OUR education and WE should have a say in it. TUESDAY May 7th is teachers appreciation day, we are organizing a march to 440 North Broad Street, which is the school district building. Depending on your school’s location you can choose a meeting area and then proceed to march to 440.We will all be meeting there by 4:30. There is strength in numbers.”

The response — recorded online in blow-by-blow Facebook posts — was immediate, enthusiastic, and complex as any overnight organizing effort.

Talking points were discussed; a deliberate effort to attract media and control the message was conceived.

And there was, as there is in any organizing effort, vigorous debate over tactics and message: When some students announced a planned walkout; other students objected, worried the organized disobedience would undermine their credibility as a group — a debate which continues as some students contemplate a walkout tomorrow.

A system was worked out: each school’s protest contingent should nominate  a representative to contact.

“We have a huge network,” explained Tseng outside the building. “We all called each other, and we got a lot of schools to join.”

“I was contacted by Teyin over here,” said Belal Shami (lower left), “and he told me he needed my help. My role was to gather people from Franklin Learning Center and get them to the protest. … I brought roughly 35 people.”

In a stretch of years in which there has been no shortage of protests outside 440 N. Broad, yesterday nonetheless marked the first time many of these students had ever done anything of the sort. And their motivations often went beyond their personal welfare.

“People are saying, ‘You’re a Senior,’ why are you here?’ Well, I have friends that I’ve made this year in lower grades,” said Kelechi Ekwerike (upper left), for whom this protest was his first. “For their education to be cut short, truncated, I will not stand for that. And if this carries on next year, if nothing is done, they [the School District] will not hear the end of it.”

“The sense in my class is a little bit like we’re the last survivors on the Titanic,” is how Samantha Ho (upper center), a junior at Masterman High School, put it. “We survived. But I have a cousin who’s going to be first year at Masterman —  I can’t really imagine that place without extracurricular activities. That’s where people connect.”

“My little brother, my sister — I don’t care about myself,” said Spencer Nguyen (lower right) from the Palumbo Academy of Art. “This is for future generations.”

About two hours after the protest had started, a small knot of these students remained outside school headquarters, huddled as they debriefed and planned for whatever comes next.

“I’m more than happy with the turnout,” acknowledged Facebook event creator Maureen Smith. “It really does speak volumes, that young people can make a difference.”

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From the Philadelphia Student Union: Today, hundreds of students walked-out of school and took to the streets. We rallied at City Hall to tell City Council that we need funding for our public schools. We have had enough budget cuts. We marched down Broad St. to 440. Students are ready to fight back against budget cut backs. Get ready to see a lot more of us next time.