Brown Men, Women and Children

As Koreans Pour In, a Town Is Remade

2010-12-16T11:38:00.000-08:00

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: December 15, 2010
The New York Times

PALISADES PARK, N.J. — Two decades ago, the police here sometimes roused Jason Kim in the wee hours, but not because he was in trouble. There were few Koreans in town, and few of them spoke English, so whenever one was arrested, the police needed Mr. Kim to translate the Miranda warning.

It is hard to imagine such a scene today, as Mr. Kim, now an elected borough councilman, strolls along Broad Avenue, this town’s bustling commercial spine, past storefront signs that are mostly in Korean, chatting in Korean and English with business owners and shoppers. A generation of Korean-Americans has grown up here, many people switch readily between languages, and the police force has three Korean-American officers.

Since the 1980s, the towns of eastern Bergen County — Edgewater, Englewood Cliffs, Leonia, Fort Lee and others — seem to have exerted a magnetic pull on Asian immigrants, particularly Koreans. But none more so than Palisades Park, whose population is now 54 percent Asian-American and 44 percent Korean-American, the Census Bureau reported this week.

Major population centers like Queens and Los Angeles have more Koreans, but Palisades Park, with fewer than 20,000 people, is, proportionally, the most heavily Korean municipality in the country, according to Pyong Gap Min, a distinguished professor of sociology at Queens College.

A striking 66 percent of the town’s population is foreign-born, including many Guatemalans and smaller numbers from several other countries.

The Korean presence is growing fast; the 2000 census found that 31 percent of Palisades Park residents were Korean-American. The 44 percent figure came from surveys taken from 2005 to 2009, and local Korean leaders predict that the figure will be higher when 2010 census numbers are released next year.

“When I came here, only two stores were Korean; there were no Korean churches,” said Mr. Kim, 54, who teaches math and computer science at Bronx Community College and also has a business preparing students to take the SAT. “It is hard to believe how much it has changed.”

Palisades Park has not endured the kind of violent clashes that sometimes accompany ethnic transitions, but neither has its transformation been trouble-free.

Andy Nam recalled that after he opened Grand Furniture on Broad Avenue in 1989, “We had some young kids, troublemakers, who broke the windows, write ‘Go home kimchi,’ that kind of thing.”

Korean restaurants and bars fought for years — unsuccessfully — for permission to stay open around the clock. White residents complained of shops that had signs only in Korean, until nearly all the new merchants voluntarily added English translations.

The first-generation Korean-Americans faced a huge language barrier. For years, they relied heavily on people like Mr. Nam, now 70, who spoke English, and on those like Mr. Kim who called themselves generation 1.5 — born in South Korea, but educated here.

Until the 1980s, the town was overwhelmingly white, a mix of blue-collar workers and professionals whose families had come predominantly from Italy, Croatia, Germany and Greece. Its houses were inexpensive, and it had a number of vacant shops and offices.

A pattern had started to emerge by then, of Asian immigrants moving from New York City to Bergen County. They were drawn by the area’s relative safety and highly regarded schools, and by its proximity to the George Washington Bridge, for commuting to jobs in the city.

“At first everybody went to Fort Lee, but I couldn’t afford Fort Lee,” said Mr. Kim, who moved from South Korea to the Bronx as a teenager, then to Palisades Park in 1986. “The real estate agents told people to try Palisades Park.”

The influx made the town more prosperous, as Korean businesses moved in, renovating buildings and erecting new ones. But for the old-timers, it made the place alien, and property more expensive. Today, 39 percent of the population is white, but few businesses are white-owned.

“In the beginning, some of the old businesses shut down because the Koreans would not patronize them,” said George Mahsoud, whose family has run a shoe-repair shop here for 35 years. “You really had to make an effort — like I put a Korean sign in the window and I smiled and talked to them. Koreans are all about reputation — they have to hear good things about you from their friends, and that took awhile.”

Two white women emerging from a bank, who asked not to be named for fear of offending their newer neighbors, said they lived in Palisades Park, but shopped elsewhere. The Korean shops cater mostly to Koreans, they said — a fact that used to bother them, but that now just peacefully propels them elsewhere.

The Koreans’ numbers have been slow to translate into clout; only about one-quarter of the voters are Korean. Mr. Kim was the first Asian-American elected to a seat on the school board, in 1995 — his third try — and the first to win a seat on the council, in 2004. A second Korean immigrant, Jong Chul Lee, was elected to the council last year, and two others sit on the school board.

“I knew from the start I couldn’t win with just Korean votes,” Mr. Kim said. “I still can’t. We have to work with everybody.”

A version of this article appeared in print on December 16, 2010, on page A32 of the New York edition.

Iraq’s Troubles Drive Out Refugees Who Came Back

2010-11-28T14:36:00.000-08:00

By JOHN LELAND
Published: November 26, 2010
The New York Times

BAGHDAD — A second exodus has begun here, of Iraqis who returned after fleeing the carnage of the height of the war, but now find that violence and the nation’s severe lack of jobs are pulling them away from home once again.

Since the American invasion in 2003, refugees have been a measure of the country’s precarious condition, flooding outward during periods of violence and trickling back as Iraq seemed to stabilize. This new migration shows how far the nation remains from being stable and secure.

Abu Maream left Iraq after a mortar round killed his brother-in-law in 2005. Amar al-Obeidi left when insurgents threatened to kill him and raided his shops. Hazim Hadi Mohammed al-Tameemi left because the doctors who treated his wife’s ovarian cancer had fled the country.

All three joined the flow of refugees who returned as violence here ebbed. But now they want to leave again.

“The only thing that’s stopping me is I don’t have the money,” said Mr. Maream, who gave only a partial name — literally, father of Maream — because he feared reprisal from extremists in his neighborhood. “We are Iraqis in name only.”

Nearly 100,000 refugees have returned since 2008, out of more than two million who left since the invasion, according to the Iraqi government and the United Nations high commissioner for refugees.

But as they return, pulled by improved security in Iraq or pushed by a lack of work abroad, many are finding that their homeland is still not ready — their houses are gone or occupied, their neighborhoods unsafe, their opportunities minimal.

In a recent survey by the United Nations refugee office, 61 percent of those who returned to Baghdad said they regretted coming back, most saying they did not feel safe. The majority, 87 percent, said they could not make enough money here to support their families. Applications for asylum in Syria have risen more than 50 percent since May.

As Iraq struggles toward a return to stability, these returnees risk becoming people without a country, displaced both at home and abroad. And though departures have ebbed since 2008, a wave of recent attacks on Christians has prompted a new exodus.

Mr. Obeidi, who used his tribe’s name instead of his father’s name as a surname, left for Syria in 2006 after an improvised bomb exploded near his nephew, terrifying the boy, and insurgents threatened to kill Mr. Obeidi. On a recent evening in Baghdad, he had trouble controlling his breathing as he talked about the daily blasts in his neighborhood.

“There’s no security here,” he said, ticking off his close encounters with guns and bombs. “I was near a female suicide bomber a couple months ago. Then I was in my brother’s truck when insurgents opened fire on a bridge. My friend was killed in front of me with a knife. I’ve been destroyed. My mother needs an operation for her eyes, and I don’t have money. We need someone to help us.”

“Feel my stomach,” he said. “It’s like a rock. It’s going to blow out.”
Before insurgents robbed his tool shops in 2006, he said, he earned about $1,000 a month and was planning to marry. But during several trips abroad he was unable to find work. Since returning to Baghdad he has struggled to find day labor, earning about $6 a day. The woman he had intended to marry is now with another man.

He has twice paid smugglers, to take him to Austria on one occasion and to Italy on another, but each time the men took his money without helping him.

“Life was better in Syria, but I can’t work there,” said Mr. Obeidi, who is a Sunni. “Jordan was the same. Turkey was the same. And it was expensive to live there. That’s why I had to come back. But our country is not our country. It’s Iran’s country. We need someone to help us.”

The United Nations provides some transportation costs and a small stipend for families that come back, but fewer than 4 percent of returnees take advantage of the program. Most either do not know about it or think they may still want to return to their asylum country and will want the agency to help them as refugees, not as returnees.

Duraid Adnan contributed reporting.

(To read the rest of this article, please click on the link in this blog post's title above it.)

A version of this article appeared in print on November 27, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

The Power of the Hispanic Voter

2010-11-24T17:39:00.000-08:00

Published: November 22, 2010
Editorial, The New York Times

Democrats were hurt in the midterm election by low turnouts or faltering support from voters who were young, black or female. But overwhelming support from Hispanic voters appears to have helped elect Democratic senators in Nevada, California, Colorado and possibly Washington State. Hispanic voters may have kept the Senate in Democratic hands.

Several Hispanic Republicans were also elected, including two governors, Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Susana Martinez of New Mexico, and a senator, Marco Rubio of Florida. But, over all, Hispanics voted at a rate of 2 to 1 for Democrats, according to several polls, and many were stirred to action by viciously anti-immigrant ads or comments made by Republican candidates.
Eligible Hispanic voters represent about 9 percent of the national electorate, a slight increase over previous years, but the percentages are much higher in the West, climbing to 22 percent in California. They are less predictably partisan than other ethnic groups and the two major parties have long contested for their votes. Early polls had suggested that many were disappointed in both parties for failing to act on immigration reform, and it appeared that they might sit out the midterms.

Then came a series of ads by Republican candidates like Sharron Angle, who was running for the United States Senate in Nevada. One of hers depicted Hispanics sneaking over the border, carrying weapons and appearing in police mug shots. Tom Tancredo, whose anti-immigrant sentiment was already known, ran for governor of Colorado by telling workers that their jobs were threatened by illegal immigration. Meg Whitman, the Republican candidate for governor of California, pandered to the same sentiment by saying her former housekeeper, an illegal immigrant, should have been deported.

Now Hispanic political activists had galvanizing issues. Groups like Mi Familia Vota, La Raza and Lulac spent the last weeks of the campaign organizing voters against these diatribes. A tracking poll conducted by Latino Decisions, a polling organization, found that the number of very enthusiastic Hispanic voters shot up to 58 percent on Oct. 25 from 40 percent a month earlier.

As the Hispanic electorate continues to grow faster than the overall population in the years ahead, the 2010 election should be a useful lesson. Anti-immigrant demagoguery occasionally works, as it did in a number of Republican victories in Arizona this year. But more often it will produce an angry reaction among a growing group of committed voters.

A version of this editorial appeared in print on November 23, 2010, on page A32 of the New York edition.

Are we all God’s children, or aren’t we?

2010-11-02T17:56:00.000-07:00

By Joe Olvera ©, 2010

What is happening to our beautiful city’s compassion? El Paso was once known as a city that accepted all people, gave refuge to the weakest members of our society, and proclaimed a love for even those who were left out of the mainstream. But, no more. This time, religious people – those who should have more love for humanity than anyone else – are becoming unhinged from reality because they who proclaim a love for God, are, themselves, exhibiting hate and viciousness against those who don’t believe as they do.

They say that they are only concerned with pushing and promoting what they call “family values,” and want to deny health and medical benefits to gay people who work for the city and who may be in a relationship with a same-sex person, or who may not be legally married. This from a group that should be loving and understanding and following the example of Jesus Christ? After all, wasn’t it He, who said that he who is without sin to cast the first stone. I guess Tom Brown and others of his ilk are sin-free, and, thus, able to pronounce doom and damnation. It’s not fair, you see, but, fairness be damned?

These holier-than-thou individuals have placed on this year’s ballot an ordinance that, if passed, endorses family values by making health benefits available only to city employees if they are legally married, and, of course, to their dependent children. I can’t understand it, really, I can’t. Aren’t gay people children of God? Didn’t God create gay people also? I say, vote against this Ordinance, as I did on October 18th. Who is Tom Brown and his Church to tell us how to vote? For all his teachings and pontifications, and best-selling books, he is showing hatred against certain, legitimate, members of society.

He espouses “family values,” and I wonder just what he means by that? The State of Florida recently struck down a law that prevented gay people from adopting children. Florida had allowed gays to be foster parents, but, adoption was forbidden. That has changed. The State of Florida, the final bastion of this unfortunate law, has finally accepted that “gay people and heterosexuals make equally good parents.” Isn’t loving and caring for children part of “family values?” If it is, then why is Pastor Brown so opposed to it? Family values is as family values does, and I’ve heard of many so-called married religious parents who abuse their children. Is this okay with Tom Brown?

The Florida law that branded gays as unfit parents was based on “junk science that is being disproved nationwide.” So, where’s the difference in gay and heterosexual parents in expressing love and compassion? They both are expressing the same mantra – that is, that love, unconditional love is what Jesus Christ teaches, whether it is the love between a man and a woman, or any combination thereof. So, there’s no need to be confused by the Ordinance. Vote against it. Remember, Separation of Church and State.

On another note: If ever there was a year to vote against Republicans, this is it. To be honest, as an Independent voter, I have cast votes for Republicans, but, not this year. This year, I’m totally Democrat and have voted accordingly. But, why should you not vote for Republicans? It’s so obvious that I’m surprised you asked. This year I’m saying: Help us turn the Party of No! into the Party of No More!

Why? Here’s a few examples:

*NO – because they reject any notion of government-run Universal Health Care because “they” have seen evidence that govt. run health care leads to inefficiencies, long waiting periods, and, often substandard health care;

*NO – on Social Security, the Party of NO wants for working Americans to be able to invest their social security taxes on their own. Yeah, as if everyone is educated enough to be able to follow guidelines that might make them poor in their own age;

*NO – on Immigration Reform. The Party of NO doesn’t want amnesty because it encourages illegal immigration and rewards those who have broken our laws;

*NO – the Party of NO wants to eliminate the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that if a child is born here of undocumented parents, that child automatically becomes a U.S. citizen – how cruel and despotic is their stance;

*NO – on more food stamps for poor Americans – in effect, demonizing the poor;

*NO – on supporting and increasing the minimum wage from $7.50 to $10 per hour, even though 70 percent of Americans support it.

Of course, to me, there are many more reasons why we shouldn’t vote Republican this election year. But, I’ll leave it to your conscience to vote for the Party or Person of your choice. If you’re Hispanic, I’d suggest you think deeply about where your heart is, and vote accordingly.

Orale!

Sin Fin!

In Northern Vietnam, a Region of Beauty and Ethnic Traditions

2010-10-30T14:20:00.000-07:00

By JENNIFER BLEYER
Published: October 27, 2010
The New York Times

MY first glimpse of the place that some call Vietnam’s Shangri-La came on a brisk spring afternoon as we were careening along a narrow road hemmed in by sheer limestone walls. Our driver made a hairpin turn and all at once the landscape erupted into a sweep of dazzling slopes, serrated ridges and hanging valleys. In the pocket of a mountain pass called Heaven’s Gate, Hoang Tuan Anh, who also served as our guide, stopped his pickup truck so we could gaze at the vista of radiant sky that had opened up before us. This was only the beginning, Mr. Anh said, as we resumed our upward drive. “We will go as high as the clouds!”

My husband, my daughter and I had been in Vietnam nearly a month before we visited Ha Giang province in the northern reaches of the country. It was a place I had never heard of, but Vietnamese acquaintances talked about the region as if it were the Land of Oz, their eyes widening as they incanted its name (pronounced Ha ZAHNG). Worldly young Hanoians said that one could not truly consider oneself Vietnamese until having been there. Expatriate friends implored us not to squander any opportunity to experience this holy grail, far from the country’s deeply trodden tourist track.

Such reverence, we soon learned, was warranted, and it wasn’t just because of the region’s spectacular landscape. In an ever-shrinking world, Ha Giang, with its uniquely preserved tribal culture (nearly 90 percent of the population is ethnic minorities), is one of those rare places that hasn’t been corralled by modernity or prepackaged for visitors. At least, not yet. During the past two decades, as Vietnam’s lowlands and urban centers have teetered on tracks of globalization and economic development, much of this distant 5,000-square-mile province has remained detached and frozen in the past.

That isolation has been reinforced by strained politics, but in recent years, border tensions stemming from a 1979 Chinese invasion have thawed, the government has poured money into improving the province’s roads and other infrastructure, and new, albeit modest, hotels have arrived. Middle-class Vietnamese already appear in throngs, and foreign visitors have begun trickling in as well — last year some 3,500 foreign tourists visited the region. That figure seems poised to grow since the Dong Van plateau, at the province’s northernmost edge, was named the country’s first Unesco-designated Global Geopark earlier this month, a status that the organization bestows on places of significant geological and cultural heritage. The 900-square-mile plateau is studded with ethereal karst formations, evidence of tectonic events that started molding the area over 400 million years ago.

It was that plateau that beckoned to us, as it does to most travelers who venture to the region.

The overnight train from Hanoi deposited us at dawn in Lao Cai, a blustery northern city about 70 miles west of Ha Giang. There we boarded a crammed local bus that chugged for eight hours through misty hills. We spent part of the afternoon lodged in a mudslide, only to be rescued by a hydraulic backhoe doubling as a tow truck. Our 11-month-old daughter craned her head and stared quizzically through it all, as if we were toting her through some particularly mountainous corner of the Upper West Side.

In Ha Giang’s sleepy provincial capital, the city of Ha Giang, we were met by Mr. Anh, our guide of Tay ethnicity with whom we had arranged a three-day tour — first to Dong Van, a town that was less than two miles from the Chinese border, and then along a mountain road to the town of Meo Vac. Mr. Anh escorted us to the concrete headquarters of the immigration police to procure $10 permits from an unsmiling official. Although the requirement was abolished in most of the country in 1993, foreigners are still expected to obtain permits to tour Ha Giang, a Communist rite of the rubber-stamping variety so seldom experienced by travelers in modern Vietnam as to seem almost quaint.

Later, as we barreled past the limits of Ha Giang city into the area’s remarkable landscape, Mr. Anh, a garrulous man in his late 30s who had studied in England and lived in Hanoi before returning to his native Ha Giang, recounted how his parents would spend days during their youth walking the winding route to Dong Van before there were paved roads. Our trip, he said, would take a mere six hours.

THE story of Ha Giang is in many ways the story of the proud and independent Hmong who, following the Tay and other ethnic groups, began migrating there in the late 18th century, fleeing unrest in southern China. In Ha Giang, they found the high altitudes they were accustomed to, and alkaline soil in which their opium poppy crops would flourish.

Buffeted by the political winds that blew through Vietnam in the past century, the Hmong and other minorities occasionally rebelled but mostly cooperated with the French colonists and, subsequently, with the ruling Viet Minh, who promised them a degree of autonomy in exchange for their support. (They ultimately reneged on that promise.) The overriding desire to remain free and secure was challenged during the 1979 Chinese invasion; border flare-ups persisted for years, but by 1991, relations were normalized between the two countries, and negotiations led to a final decision last year about where the 800-mile border would be. Although one of the poorest provinces in Vietnam, with little industry besides mining and agriculture, Ha Giang was once again safe for the Hmong and others, and visitors began to show up.

(For the rest of this article, click on the link in this blog post's title above.)

A version of this article appeared in print on October 31, 2010, on page TR1 of the New York edition..

Coming Out Illegal

2010-10-25T15:45:00.000-07:00

By MAGGIE JONES
Published: October 21, 2010
The New York Times

Leslie, a history major at the University of California at Los Angeles and an aspiring marathon runner with three part-time jobs and plans for grad school, keeps a neatly folded dark blue T-shirt in her closet among her jeans and her U.C.L.A. Bruins sweatshirt. Like an intimate detail, she reveals it cautiously, wearing it to campus events but not on the streets of Orange County; to a rally with a group of friends, but not alone on a crosstown bus. A senior at U.C.L.A. and the only child of a single working mother, Leslie is brave but not reckless: in the wrong place under the wrong circumstances, the T-shirt’s two words across the chest — “I’m Undocumented” — are provocative enough to upend her life.

For most of her 22 years, Leslie — whose only memory of coming to the United States with her mother when she was 6 is of the bright lights along the L.A. freeway — kept her immigration status secret from even close friends. She knew that certain life experiences and rites of passage were out of her reach: visiting her grandparents in Mexico; voting; getting a driver’s license.

Even though she was an advanced-placement student, she feared college also might not be possible. During her senior year of high school, when she confided her immigration status to a guidance counselor — the first adult outside her family she told — the counselor admonished Leslie that not only was she ineligible for college, but had she known Leslie was illegal she never would have placed her in AP classes.

I met Leslie, who asked that I use only her first name, in August at her mother’s house in Pasadena. It was a rare summer day off from her jobs cleaning an apartment building, waitressing, helping her mother with her six-days-a-week housekeeping jobs along Pasadena’s “Millionaire’s Row.” Leslie greeted me at the front door, dressed in a pressed denim shirt cinched at the waist with a wide belt, shorts and strappy sandals. She showed me around the small two-bedroom house, a step up from the one-bedroom converted garage she and her mother lived in previously. The secondhand TV in the living room, along with Leslie’s bed and desk, were all gifts from families whose houses her mother cleans, as was the Chanel blush on her desk. “I would never buy Chanel for myself,” Leslie said, laughing at the extravagance.

Initially shy and sometimes self-deprecating, Leslie is also warm, charmingly frank and girlish, with cheeks that easily flush and bangs that she brushes from her forehead as she talks. She is also, by necessity and by experience, resourceful and intrepid.

Later in her senior year of high school, Leslie learned that, in fact, she could go to college and that California law AB 540 allows undocumented California students to pay in-state rather than out-of-state tuition; California is one of 11 states with such a law. (Earlier this month, Georgia banned undocumented immigrants from its most selective public colleges.)

In Leslie’s case it cuts an unthinkable $33,000 a year down to a daunting but within-the-realm-of-possibility tuition of roughly $10,000. But because she is undocumented, she is not eligible for the myriad federal and state aid programs that make college feasible for many working- and middle-class families. No Pell grants, no work-study programs.

Leslie’s “Undocumented” T-shirt, along with the rallies she attends and the lobbying she has done in Washington and Sacramento, is part of an effort to change her and other undocumented students’ lives through what’s known as the Dream Act. The federal bill, a version of which was introduced in Congress in 2001, would create a pathway to legal residency for immigrants who arrived in this country as children, have been in the United States for at least five years and have graduated from a U.S. high school or obtained a G.E.D. To gain status, they would have to finish two years of college or military service. Supporters argue that the legislation benefits ambitious, academically successful students who will go on to professional careers. Without the Dream Act, many of those same young people will be stuck, much like their parents, in the underground economy.

Some 825,000 immigrants are likely to become legal residents if the Dream Act passes, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a research group. But Steven A. Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors strict enforcement of immigration laws and opposes the Dream Act, argues that the legislation would create another avenue for immigration fraud and added incentive for immigrants to come to the United States. He noted that it rewards illegal behavior and takes college spots and financial aid from students who are legal residents.

Nonetheless, the Dream Act has some bipartisan support, and in this political climate, it’s one of the only immigration bills with any shot of passing. Last month, Senator Richard J. Durbin, the Illinois Democrat and chief sponsor of the bill, planned to attach the Dream Act as an amendment to the defense authorization bill, which included the controversial repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The package stalled when supporters were unable to muster the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Among Dream Act opponents is Senator John McCain, who co-sponsored a version of the Dream Act in 2007. This year, during which he faced a tough-on-immigration candidate in the primaries, he said he would not support the Dream Act without tighter border controls. Meanwhile, Durbin plans to push it as a stand-alone bill, either in the coming lame-duck session or next year.

In the midst of the political wrangling, the Dream Act advocates — most of them in their early to mid-20s — have become the most outspoken and daring wing of the immigration movement. Borrowing tactics from the civil rights and gay rights movements, in the last year they have orchestrated dozens of demonstrations, hunger strikes, “coming out” events — publicly revealing their undocumented status — and sit-ins in federal offices, risking both arrest and deportation.

(To read the rest of this article, please click on the link in this blog post's title above.)

Toiling Far From Home for Philippine Dreams

2010-09-19T18:12:00.000-07:00

Absence makes the homes grow grander in Mabini thanks to money earned overseas by Filipinos.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: September 18, 2010
The New York Times

MABINI, the Philippines — Mediterranean-inspired, pastel-colored houses dot the coast and hills of this rural town in the Philippines, dwarfing their traditional counterparts made of unpainted concrete blocks under roofs of corrugated zinc. The larger houses, barely inhabited, many of them empty, belong to overseas workers who plan to return here one day.

Despite their absence, the workers have contributed money to help build roads, schools, water grids and other infrastructure usually handled by local governments. They pay for annual fiestas that were traditionally financed by municipalities, churches and local businesses. Thanks to their help, Mabini became a “first class” municipality last year in a government ranking of towns nationwide, leaping from “third class.”

In one village nicknamed Little Italy, where a quarter of the 1,200 residents are working in Italy, the overseas workers paid 20 percent of the cost to construct a public hall.

“We couldn’t have finished it without the O.F.W.’s,” the village head, Raymundo Magsino, 64, said in an interview inside the building, referring to “overseas Filipino workers.”

Remittances, which the government says have been rising sharply — from $7.6 billion in 2003 to $17.3 billion in 2009 — now account for more than 10 percent of the Philippines’ gross domestic product. The payments are also the main factor driving the country’s recent economic growth, which would have otherwise remained stagnant.

But critics, including many overseas workers, say the government has developed an unhealthy dependence on the remittances, turning a blind eye to their social costs, especially divided families and the reliance on them to pay for services while failing to build a sound economy that produces good jobs at home.

About 15 percent of the 42,000 residents of Mabini, about 80 miles south of Manila, live overseas — typically working as maids, nurses or service workers — compared with an estimated national average of 10 percent.

One recent morning, Jocelyn Santia, 40, was packing her bags after two months of vacation here to return to her job as a housekeeper in Milan. She and her husband, who died six years ago, began working in Italy 20 years ago after being recruited by an employment agency.

Her grandparents and a brother raised her four children here, though the two eldest now attend college in Italy. Her sacrifice, she hoped, would yield good, white-collar jobs for her children. But with her departure — and yet another separation from her two younger children — looming before her, she expressed bitterness about having to leave her family.

“The economy is bad here, salaries are low,” she said. “It’s the fault of the government that so many Filipinos have to go abroad. If there were good jobs here, why would we ever think of going abroad?”

Nilo Villanueva, the mayor of Mabini, said he had often heard this criticism from overseas workers. Mr. Villanueva was elected in 2007 by campaigning in Italy and championing the interests of overseas workers. The mayor connected Little Italy to the water grid last year.

Yet, even as Mr. Villanueva has sought overseas workers’ investments in a feed mill and other projects, he said he worried about the town and country’s reliance on remittances. “Many people have become lazy now because they are overdependent on remittances,” he said.

He said the municipality not only counted on investment from its overseas workers, but also had become dependent on their earnings in less direct ways. Most overseas workers here, for example, send their children to private elementary schools, which have smaller class sizes and offer richer educational and extracurricular programs.

“They are helping the municipal government because we are spending less on public schools,” Mr. Villanueva said.

At the private Santa Fe Integrated School, which charges an annual tuition of $370, 80 percent of the 250 students are children of overseas workers. About half have both parents overseas and are being raised by relatives or housekeepers, said Louella D. de Leon, the principal.

(For the rest of this article, please click on the link in this posting's title above.)

North Korea Wants to Make a Deal

2010-09-17T13:43:00.000-07:00

By JIMMY CARTER
Op-Ed Columnist
Published: September 15, 2010
The New York Times

DURING my recent travels to North Korea and China, I received clear, strong signals that Pyongyang wants to restart negotiations on a comprehensive peace treaty with the United States and South Korea and on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

The components of such an agreement have been fairly constant over the past 16 years, first confirmed in 1994 by the United States and Kim Il-sung, then the North Korean leader, and repeated by a multilateral agreement negotiated in September 2005.

The basic provisions hold that North Korea’s old graphite-moderated nuclear energy reactor, which can easily produce weapons-grade plutonium, and all related facilities and products should be disabled under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency; that while the reactor is shut down, the United States should provide fuel oil or electric power to North Korea until new power plants are built; that the United States should provide assurances against the threat of nuclear attack or other military actions against North Korea; that the United States and North Korea should move toward the normalization of political and economic relations and a peace treaty covering the peninsula; that better relations should be pursued by North Korea, South Korea and Japan; and that all parties should strengthen their economic cooperation on energy, trade and investment.

The comprehensive agreement reached by the Clinton administration was disavowed in 2002 by President George W. Bush. Nevertheless, although North Korea reprocessed fuel rods into plutonium and tested nuclear explosives in 2006, good progress was made in its talks with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia.

But conditions have since deteriorated: the talks stopped in 2009, and that same year the United Nations imposed sanctions on Pyongyang after it conducted a second nuclear test and launched a long-range missile. North Korea also prohibited reunions between North and South Korean families.

Tensions grew still higher this year when North Korea detained an American, Aijalon Gomes, whom it accused of crossing into its territory, in January and a South Korean fishing crew in August.

However, there are now clear signals of eagerness from Pyongyang to resume negotiations and accept the basic provisions of the denuclearization and peace efforts.

In July, North Korean officials invited me to come to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, and other officials to secure the release of Mr. Gomes. Those who invited me said that no one else’s request for the prisoner’s release would be honored. They wanted me to come in the hope that I might help resurrect the agreements on denuclearization and peace that were the last official acts of Kim Il-sung before his death in 1994.

I notified the White House of this invitation, and approval for my visit was given in mid-August, after North Korea announced that Mr. Gomes would soon be transferred from his hospital back to prison and that Kim Jong-il was no longer available to meet with me. (I later learned that he would be in China.)

In Pyongyang I requested Mr. Gomes’s freedom, then had to wait 36 hours for his retrial, pardon and release. During this time I met with Kim Yong-nam, president of the presidium of the North’s Parliament, and Kim Kye-gwan, the vice foreign minister and chief negotiator for North Korea in the six-party nuclear talks. Both of them had participated in my previous negotiations with Kim Il-sung.

They understood that I had no official status and could not speak for the American government, so I listened to their proposals, asked questions and, when I returned to the United States, delivered their message to Washington.

They told me they wanted to expand on the good relationships that had developed earlier in the decade with South Korea’s president at the time, Kim Dae-jung, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan.

They expressed concern about several recent American actions, including unwarranted sanctions, ostentatious inclusion of North Korea among nations subject to nuclear attack and provocative military maneuvers with South Korea.

Still, they said, they were ready to demonstrate their desire for peace and denuclearization. They referred to the six-party talks as being “sentenced to death but not yet executed.”

The following week I traveled to Beijing, where Chinese leaders informed me that Mr. Kim had delivered the same points to them while I was in Pyongyang, and that he later released the South Korean fishing crew and suggested the resumption of family reunions. Seeing this as a clear sign of North Korean interest, the Chinese are actively promoting the resumption of the six-party talks.

A settlement on the Korean Peninsula is crucial to peace and stability in Asia, and it is long overdue. These positive messages from North Korea should be pursued aggressively and without delay, with each step in the process carefully and thoroughly confirmed.

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, is the founder of the Carter Center and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on September 16, 2010, on page A33 of the New York edition..

A Boy and a Bicycle(s)

2010-09-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: September 15, 2010
The New York Times
Op-Ed column

Early this year I wrote a column from Zimbabwe that focused on five orphans who moved in together and survive alone in a hut.

The eldest, Abel, a scrawny and malnourished 17-year-old, would rise at 4 o’clock each morning and set off barefoot on a three-hour hike to high school. At nightfall, Abel would return to function as surrogate father: cajoling the younger orphans to finish their homework by firelight, comforting them when sick and spanking them when naughty.

When I asked Abel what he dreamed of, he said “a bicycle” — so that he could cut the six hours he spent walking to and from school and, thus, take better care of the younger orphans. Last week, Abel got his wish. A Chicago-based aid organization, World Bicycle Relief, distributed 200 bicycles to students in Abel’s area who need them to get to school. One went to Abel.

The initiative is a pilot. If it succeeds and finds financing, tens of thousands of other children in Zimbabwe could also get bicycles to help them attend school.

“I’m happy,” Abel told me shyly — his voice beaming through the phone line — when I spoke to him after he got his hands on his bicycle.

Before, he said, he wasn’t sure that he would pass high school graduation exams because he had no time to study. Now he is confident that he will pass.

The bicycle project is the brainchild of a Chicago businessman, Frederick K.W. Day, who read about Abel and decided to make him and his classmates a test of a large-scale bicycles-for-education program in Zimbabwe.

Mr. Day is a senior executive of the SRAM Corporation, the largest bicycle parts company in the United States. He formed World Bicycle Relief in 2005 in the belief that bicycles could help provide cheap transportation for students and health workers in poor countries.

At first, his plan was to ship used bicycles from the United States, but after visits to the field he decided that they would break down. “When we got out there, it was clear that no bike made in the U.S. would survive in that environment,” he said.

After consulting with local people and looking at the spare parts available in remote areas, Mr. Day’s engineering staff designed a 55-pound one-speed bicycle that needed little pampering. One notorious problem with aid groups is that they introduce new technologies that can’t always be sustained; the developing world is full of expensive wells that don’t work because the pumps have broken and there is no one to repair them.

So World Bicycle Relief trains one mechanic — equipped with basic spare parts and tools — for every 50 bicycles distributed, thus nurturing small businesses as well. Abel was one of those trained as a mechanic this time.

In the world of aid, nothing goes quite as planned, and it’s far too early to know whether this program will succeed. World Bicycle Relief tried to get around potential problems by spending months recruiting village elders to oversee the program (it helps that the elders receive bicycles, which they get to keep after two years if they provide solid oversight). Elders will ensure that fathers and older brothers do not confiscate bicycles from girls on the grounds that females are too insignificant to merit something so valuable.

Parents sometimes try to save daughters the risk of walking several hours each way to school by lodging them in town. But the result is sometimes sexual extortion; if a girl wishes to continue her education by staying in cheap lodgings, the price is repeated rape. With bicycles, those girls will now be able to stay at home.

World Bicycle Relief has given out more than 70,000 bicycles so far, nearly 70 percent to women and girls. It expects to hand out 20,000 bicycles this year. And if all goes well, Abel may be the first of tens of thousands of Zimbabwean students to get a bike.

So, for Abel, this is something of a fairy-tale ending. But one of my challenges as a journalist is that many donors want to help any specific individual I write about, while few want to support countless others in the same position.

One obstacle is donor fatigue and weariness with African corruption and repeated aid failures. Those are legitimate concerns. But this column isn’t just a story about a boy and a bike. Rather, it’s an example of an aid intervention that puts a system in place, one that is sustainable and has local buy-in, in hopes of promoting education, jobs and a virtuous cycle out of poverty. It’s a reminder that there are ways to help people help themselves, and that problems can have solutions — but we need to multiply them. Just ask Abel.

•

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on September 16, 2010, on page A33 of the New York edition..

My Nine Years as a Middle-Eastern American

2010-09-13T15:44:00.000-07:00

By POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR
Published: September 11, 2010
The New York Times

IN the late ’90s and early ’00s, I used to frequent a boutique in the East Village called Michael and Hushi. Hushi Mortezaie, an impish club kid born in Iran and raised in the Bay Area, made outlandish, psychedelic, robot-chic clothing and was getting the coolest of the East Village cool kids to wear his strategically slashed and torn Farsi-graffitied shirts, though none of them had any idea that in some cases they were bearing post-Iranian Revolution political slogans.

I — born in Iran, raised in the Los Angeles area — used to go to downtown parties in a skimpy halter top that featured newsprint-emblazoned mujahideen women brandishing machine guns, their bullets bedazzled in gold next to the words “Long Live Iran.” It was the first time I had worn anything having to do with my homeland; I loved that feeling of for once being able to both be Iranian and a play on it.

In one of the last days of August 2001, I remember being at the boutique again, and Hushi was giddy preparing for Fashion Week. His store windows were freshly adorned with his “Persian collection,” a new line of hijab-and-harem-pant Iranophilia. “Girl, get ready!” he said, “Iran is going to be the new black.”

Days later, there we were, two Middle Eastern 20-somethings who now had some explaining to do. Friends started speaking in roundabout inquiries: What exactly was the status of my green card? How were my father and brother faring? Were they Muslim, by the way?

Hushi’s stylists, meanwhile, were calling him to ask how he was — and when he was going to be getting rid of that window display. But somehow we really were fine, even under the heavy air of everyone’s condescending concern.

Little did we know that it would take almost a full decade for the proverbial 9/11 fallout to fall out, for anti-Muslim xenophobia to emerge, fully formed and fever-pitched, ostensibly over plans to build an interfaith cultural center near ground zero. Even in New York, stronghold of progressive ethics and cultural diversity, my former home of 12 years, August 2010 became the evil twin of that still-innocent August 2001.

In addition to the mosque, of course, there was the Florida pastor who wanted to burn Korans on the Sept. 11 anniversary, and who has yes-no-maybe-so reconsidered, after a hearty load of negative press and a dab of executive-branch headshaking. And, hey, what do you get when you put a drunk white college student, who had actually been to Afghanistan, into the cab of a Bangladeshi Muslim? The wrong answer and a stabbing, allegedly.

It’s one test I would have passed. For the record: I am not Muslim. My immediate family ultimately kept us as agnostic as possible; religion went only as far as my mother praying to the American concept of a guardian angel and my dad “studying” Zoroastrianism. But most of the extended Khakpours are Muslim and, culturally, it’s a part of me insofar as I am a Middle Easterner.

I am also a New Yorker, a deal that was sealed forever nine years ago. I had just moved from Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan to shack up with a boyfriend. The studio was 25 floors up, with a nearly all-glass wall that framed a perfect view of the World Trade Center.

Now, when I look back on ages 23 to 32, every aspect of my life is shadowed by what I saw through the glass that blue-and-gold Tuesday morning: two towers, each gashed and stunningly hazed in the glitter of exploding windows, falling, one after the other, over and over again. But what was once simple apprehension and mortification and trepidation has become increasingly entangled with feelings of exhaustion and marginalization and even indignation.

•

A deep dark admission: lately — and by lately I mean this era I worked so hard for, when a liberal person of color, a man who resembles my own father, would be our president — I’ve found myself thinking secretly, were certain things better in the George W. Bush era? Was it easier to be Middle Eastern then?

Just six days after 9/11, at the Islamic Center of Washington, President Bush said, “Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind.” He added: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” Did that assurance mean more to white Americans coming from someone who looked like them?

Xenophobia and racism still abounded, but the lid stayed on the pot. Perhaps when Republicans held both the White House and Congress, conservatives weren’t sweating a thing; for them, people of color, along with all our white liberal friends, were lumped together in one misery-loves-company fringe. But now that the tables have turned, conservatives have positioned themselves as aggrieved victims. (I recall the advice of an older female relative: Always let men you’re in relationships with have all the power; it’s when they lose power and get insecure that your problems start.)

Porochista Khakpour, the author of the novel “Sons and Other Flammable Objects,” is a professor of literature at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?

2010-09-07T18:02:00.000-07:00

Dr. Ferhan Asghar at a Muslim center in West Chester, Ohio, with his wife, Pakeeza, and daughters Zara, left, and Emaan.

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: September 5, 2010
The New York Times

For nine years after the attacks of Sept. 11, many American Muslims made concerted efforts to build relationships with non-Muslims, to make it clear they abhor terrorism, to educate people about Islam and to participate in interfaith service projects. They took satisfaction in the observations by many scholars that Muslims in America were more successful and assimilated than Muslims in Europe.

Now, many of those same Muslims say that all of those years of work are being rapidly undone by the fierce opposition to a Muslim cultural center near ground zero that has unleashed a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiments and a spate of vandalism. The knifing of a Muslim cab driver in New York City has also alarmed many American Muslims.

“We worry: Will we ever be really completely accepted in American society?” said Dr. Ferhan Asghar, an orthopedic spine surgeon in Cincinnati and the father of two young girls. “In no other country could we have such freedoms — that’s why so many Muslims choose to make this country their own. But we do wonder whether it will get to the point where people don’t want Muslims here anymore.”

Eboo Patel, a founder and director of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based community service program that tries to reduce religious conflict, said, “I am more scared than I’ve ever been — more scared than I was after Sept. 11.”

That was a refrain echoed by many American Muslims in interviews last week. They said they were scared not as much for their safety as to learn that the suspicion, ignorance and even hatred of Muslims is so widespread. This is not the trajectory toward integration and acceptance that Muslims thought they were on.

Some American Muslims said they were especially on edge as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches. The pastor of a small church in Florida has promised to burn a pile of Korans that day. Muslim leaders are telling their followers that the stunt has been widely condemned by Christian and other religious groups and should be ignored. But they said some young American Muslims were questioning how they could simply sit by and watch the promised desecration.

They liken their situation to that of other scapegoats in American history: Irish Roman Catholics before the nativist riots in the 1800s, the Japanese before they were put in internment camps during World War II.

Muslims sit in their living rooms, aghast as pundits assert over and over that Islam is not a religion at all but a political cult, that Muslims cannot be good Americans and that mosques are fronts for extremist jihadis. To address what it calls a “growing tide of fear and intolerance,” the Islamic Society of North America plans to convene a summit of Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders in Washington on Tuesday.

Young American Muslims who are trying to figure out their place and their goals in life are particularly troubled, said Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University.

“People are discussing what is the alternative if we don’t belong here,” he said. “There are jokes: When are we moving to Canada, when are we moving to Sydney? Nobody will go anywhere, but there is hopelessness, there is helplessness, there is real grief.”

Mr. Antepli just returned from a trip last month with a rabbi and other American Muslim leaders to Poland and Germany, where they studied the Holocaust and the events that led up to it (the group issued a denunciation of Holocaust denial on its return).

“Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,” he said. “It’s really scary.”

American Muslims were anticipating a particularly joyful Ramadan this year. For the first time in decades, the monthlong holiday fell mostly during summer vacation, allowing children to stay up late each night for the celebratory iftar dinner, breaking the fast, with family and friends.

But the season turned sour.

The great mosque debate seems to have unleashed a flurry of vandalism and harassment directed at mosques: construction equipment set afire at a mosque site in Murfreesboro, Tenn; a plastic pig with graffiti thrown into a mosque in Madera, Calif.; teenagers shooting outside a mosque in upstate New York during Ramadan prayers. It is too soon to tell whether hate crimes against Muslims are rising or are on pace with previous years, experts said. But it is possible that other episodes are going unreported right now.

“Victims are reluctant to go public with these kinds of hate incidents because they fear further harassment or attack,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “They’re hoping all this will just blow over.”

Some Muslims said their situation felt more precarious now — under a president who is perceived as not only friendly to Muslims but is wrongly believed by many Americans to be Muslim himself — than it was under President George W. Bush.

Mr. Patel explained, “After Sept. 11, we had a Republican president who had the confidence and trust of red America, who went to a mosque and said, ‘Islam means peace,’ and who said ‘Muslims are our neighbors and friends,’ and who distinguished between terrorism and Islam.”

Now, unlike Mr. Bush then, the politicians with sway in red state America are the ones whipping up fear and hatred of Muslims, Mr. Patel said.

“There is simply the desire to paint an entire religion as the enemy,” he said. Referring to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the founder of the proposed Muslim center near ground zero, “What they did to Imam Feisal was highly strategic. The signal was, we can Swift Boat your most moderate leaders.”

Several American Muslims said in interviews that they were stunned that what provoked the anti-Muslim backlash was not even another terrorist attack but a plan by an imam known for his work with leaders of other faiths to build a Muslim community center.

This year, Sept. 11 coincides with the celebration of Eid, the finale to Ramadan, which usually lasts three days (most Muslims will begin observing Eid this year on Sept. 10). But Muslim leaders, in this climate, said they wanted to avoid appearing to be celebrating on the anniversary of 9/11. Several major Muslim organizations have urged mosques to use the day to participate in commemoration events and community service.

Ingrid Mattson, the president of the Islamic Society of North America, said many American Muslims were still hoping to salvage the spirit of Ramadan.

“In Ramadan, you’re really not supposed to be focused on yourself,” she said. “It’s about looking out for the suffering of other people. Somehow it feels bad to be so worried about our own situation and our own security, when it should be about empathy towards others.”

A version of this article appeared in print on September 6, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Iranian Woman Said to Be Lashed Over Photo

2010-09-07T17:59:00.001-07:00

By RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: September 5, 2010
The New York Times

LONDON — A mix-up over a photograph led to a sentence of 99 lashes for the Iranian woman whose earlier death sentence by stoning from Iranian authorities caused an international outcry, a lawyer for the woman said Sunday.

The lashing of the woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, 43, was carried out in the northern Iran prison where she is being held, according to the lawyer, Javid Kian. But another lawyer for Ms. Ashtiani disputed that account.

In a telephone interview from Iran, Mr. Kian said that he had not had contact with Ms. Ashtiani since Aug. 11, when she gave what he called a false and coerced videotaped statement that she was involved in the murder of her husband. The statement was broadcast on Iranian state television in an apparent effort to deflect criticism from around the world of the Iranian government’s sentence that Ms. Ashtiani be executed by stoning for a 2006 adultery conviction. The authorities lifted the stoning sentence, but there have been signs that Ms. Ashtiani, who is being held in Tabriz prison in northern Iran, would be hanged instead.

The latest episode began on Aug. 28, when The Times of London published a photograph on its front page of a dark-haired woman wearing earrings and what appeared to be pink lipstick, which can be seen because the woman is not wearing the chador, or traditional Islamic veil. The headline with the photograph said, “Revealed: true face of the woman Iran wants to stone.” Inside, an editorial urged continued pressure on Tehran not to execute Ms. Ashtiani.

Five days later, The Times published an apology, saying the photograph “was not of Ms. Ashtiani, but of Susan Hejrat, an Iranian exile who lives in Sweden.” It blamed the mistake on confusion among journalists; another of Ms. Ashtiani’s lawyers, Mohammed Mostafaei; and her son Sajad Ghaderzadeh, 22.

But Mr. Kian said that one of two women who had been held with Ms. Ashtiani in the Tabriz prison and recently released “told me that Ashtiani said she had received 99 lashes” for “indecency” after the photograph appeared.

Mrs. Hejrat, 48, interviewed by telephone at her home in Sweden, confirmed that the photograph was of her. She said that she had used it with articles she had written about Ms. Ashtiani as a campaigner for women’s rights in Iran. “It could have been mixed up in e-mail,” she said, adding, “I am very upset that she got another punishment because the Iranian government saw a picture of me.”

Iranian authorities are using the image, Mr. Kian said, as “an excuse to put pressure on her and those around her.” He said that after her statement about her husband’s murder, Ms. Ashtiani had been subjected to a mock hanging. The lashing sentence was intended to “impact her family and journalists who may report about her case,” he added. “It is to spread fear so they don’t talk, and to keep the family’s mouths shut.”

An editor at The Times of London, Simon Pearson, said that the newspaper was still looking into the confusion over the image. “But if what we’re hearing is correct,” he said, referring to the lashing sentence, “you’d have to draw the conclusion that they are sending a message to the Western media that Ashtiani will suffer if we cover her story.”

Mr. Ghaderzadeh, Ms. Ashtiani’s son, could not be reached on Sunday. But in an open letter published Saturday by the International Committee Against Execution, an organization run by Iranian exiles, he denied being the source of the photograph, which he said “has given the prison authorities an excuse to increase their harassment of our mother.” He blamed Mr. Mostafaei and said the lawyer no longer represented his mother.

In an e-mail on Sunday, Mr. Mostafaei, who fled Iran under government pressure and now lives in Norway, said that he continues to work for Ms. Ashtiani and that the photograph had been “sent to me by Sajad via e-mail from an internet cafe.” He also said that his sources in the Tabriz district court denied that Ms. Ashtiani had been lashed.

Mr. Kian said he did not know how the photograph of Mrs. Hejrat came to appear in The Times. But, he said, “I’m sorry it got to them.”

Azadeh Ensha contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on September 6, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.

"Godfather of Latino Movement" Passes Away

2010-08-25T15:02:00.000-07:00

Posted by: Natasha G.
Care2 News
August 24, 2010

Civil rights pioneer Mario Guerra Obledo passed away on August 18 in Sacramento at the age of 78.

Known as the "godfather of the Latino movement," he dedicated his life to securing the rights of Latinos and making sure they were represented in society. Despite being born into a life of poverty, he pursued an education, eventually earning a law degree. In 1968 he co-founded the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the leading Latino civil rights organization. MALDEF has been successful in getting businesses to take down signs barring Mexicans from entering, as well as lobbying for school desegregation and reform in jury selection.

In 1974 Obledo became the first Latino chief of a California state agency when he was appointed Secretary of Health and Welfare. He also co-founded the Hispanic National Bar Association and the National Coalition of Hispanic Organizations, and served as leader of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, League of United Latin American Citizens and the National Rainbow Coalition.

He continued his activism in the nineties as he lead a boycott against Taco Bell for its use of a chihuahua with a stereotypical Mexican accent in its ads, in addition to protesting cutbacks in bilingual education. In 1998 President Clinton awarded Obledo the Presidential Medal of Freedom, describing him as having "created a powerful chorus for justice and equality."

Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF President and General Counsel, issued a statement in honor of Obledo's death. "Every Latino living in this country owes Mario Obledo a tremendous debt of gratitude. The loss of an icon like Mario Obledo is always poignant, and its effects are long-lasting. Even more long-lasting is the legacy of a leader like Mario Obledo, whose causes live on, reinforced and immeasurably strengthened by his tremendous life of activism."

Memorials are set for this week in Sacramento, with a funeral Mass on Friday. Obledo is survived by his wife Keda Alcala-Obledo, six children and four granddaughters.

1 dead in Mexico shootout on border with El Paso

2010-08-23T16:28:00.000-07:00

08/21/2010
By OLIVIA TORRES and ALICIA A. CALDWELL Associated Press Writers

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - A gunbattle erupted between Mexican police and gunmen near the Rio Grande on Saturday, killing one person and prompting U.S. authorities to close a highway that runs along the border in El Paso, Texas.

There were no reports of bullets crossing into the U.S. side, El Paso police Detective Mike Baranyay said.

The gunmen attacked a municipal police patrol on a boulevard in Ciudad Juarez next to the border river, said Ramon Salinas, a spokesman for Mexico's federal police.

The fighting escalated when federal police rushed to help, he said. One gunman was killed and three municipal police officers were wounded.

El Paso police closed that city's border highway for about 30 minutes because of the shooting. City police said the U.S. Border Patrol asked for the shutdown.

Doug Mosier, a spokesman for the Border Patrol, said Paisano Street was closed "in the interest of public safety." He said that to his knowledge, it was the first time a street in El Paso has been shut down because of a shooting in Mexico.

Traffic was halted on a stretch running from downtown El Paso to the city's northwest, passing the University of Texas-El Paso, which overlooks the border.

The fighting occurred in the same area where a deadly shootout between gunmen and Mexican police sent seven bullets across the border and into the El Paso City Hall on June 29.

Ciudad Juarez has become one of the deadliest cities in the world amid a territorial war between the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels. More than 1,860 people have been killed this year in the city of 1.3 million people.

Despite concerns of spillover violence, El Paso remains one of the safest cities in the United States. The city has recorded just three homicides so far this year.

Still, the violence has at times raised tensions between the U.S. and Mexico.

After the bullets hit El Paso City Hall, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott wrote President Barack Obama to warn that the state "is under constant assault from illegal activity threatening a porous border."

That same month, a 15-year-old Mexican boy was fatally shot by a U.S. Border Patrol agent who was trying to arrest illegal immigrants crossing the Rio Grande. Some witnesses said a group of people on the Mexican side threw rocks at the agents.

Obama ordered thousands of National Guard troops to the border.

Elsewhere in Mexico on Saturday, authorities said the bodies of two security guards for Mexican bottling company FEMSA were found dead a day after a shootout in Santa Catalina, a suburb of the northeastern industrial city of Monterrey.

FEMSA said in a statement that four other guards who disappeared after Friday's shooting were located unharmed.

Police says the two slain guards were found Saturday in the trunk of a car. Three other guards were wounded Friday.

The company said the guards were on standard patrols when gunmen attacked outside a school. Police have not determined a motive, but the region is one of Mexico's most violent cartel battlegrounds.
Associated Press writers Olivia Torres reported this story from Ciudad Juarez and Alicia A. Caldwell reported from El Paso, Texas.

When Is a Muslim Not a Muslim?

2010-08-23T15:05:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Opinionator
Monday, August 23, 2010
By TOBIN HARSHAW

Do you think Barack Obama is a Muslim? According to the Pew Center, many Americans do. According to Politico’s Josh Gerstein, Time magazine’s pollsters found that a majority of Republicans do. But here’s another question: How many of the Americans who say they think Barack Obama is a Muslim actually believe that he is one? That’s not as obtuse a query as it might appear, as some of the blogosphere’s better minds have argued in recent days.

But before we get to that far remove, let’s look at the raw poll data. The Pew survey, which was taken before the president’s seeming endorsement of the mosque near ground zero last Friday and subsequent backpedaling last weekend, found that “nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009. Only about one-third of adults (34%) say Obama is a Christian, down sharply from 48% in 2009. Fully 43% say they do not know what Obama’s religion is.”

Time’s poll dealt with Islam more broadly:

Twenty-eight percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nearly one-third of the country thinks adherents of Islam should be barred from running for President — a slightly higher percentage than the 24% who mistakenly believe the current occupant of the Oval Office is himself a Muslim. In all, just 47% of respondents believe Obama is a Christian; 24% declined to respond to the question or said they were unsure, and 5% believe he is neither Christian nor Muslim.

The news led the whole gang at NBC News’s First Read to climb on the same high horse: “These results don’t many anyone look good — Obama’s political opponents (who have helped spread false information about the president’s religion and birthplace), the press (which obviously hasn’t done its job here, thanks to some outlets even serving as a megaphone by running false equivalency debates), and the American populace (which should be embarrassed).”

Polls show Americans increasingly question Obama’s religious faith. But is this really just the emergence of another political code word?

(For the rest of this article, please click on the link in the blog post's title above.)

Activists Take Fight on Immigration to Border

2010-08-16T17:49:00.000-07:00

Tea Party activists gathered at the border fence in Hereford, Ariz.

By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
Published: August 15, 2010

HEREFORD, Ariz. — No migrant would have dared cross from Mexico into this particular stretch of Arizona on Sunday.

Hundreds of Tea Party activists converged on the border fence here in what is typically a desolate area popular with traffickers to rally for conservative political candidates and to denounce what they called lax federal enforcement of immigration laws. The rally brought a significant law enforcement presence as well as numerous private patrols by advocates of a more secure border.

But rallies, even daylong ones, are no way to seal the border. The Obama administration insists that its statistics show that significant financing increases in the federal Border Patrol have helped bring down crime at the border and make the smuggling of immigrants and drugs harder than ever.

But the activists who gathered Sunday had a decidedly different take. The border, in their view, is still far too easy to get across and has become so dangerous that some of them brought their sidearms for protection. Organizers urged participants to leave rifles in their cars.

“Instead of finding bugs in our beds, we’re finding home invaders,” said Tony Venuti, a Tucson radio host who attached a huge sign to the fence that told immigrants to head to Los Angeles, where they will be more welcome, and even offered directions for getting there.

Addressing the crowd, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who conducts controversial sweeps in immigrant neighborhoods in Phoenix and other parts of Maricopa County, said the problem could be solved if the Border Patrol was given permission to track down migrants on the Mexican side before they crossed.

“If I had all the national TV here, I’d probably climb the fence to show you how easy it is,” Sheriff Arpaio said from the rally’s stage, a flag with the words “Don’t Tread on Me” flapping behind him.

Also among the speakers was Russell Pearce, the state senator who sponsored Arizona’s controversial immigration law known as 1070, part of which was blocked by a federal judge last month.

The event was monitored on the Mexican side. A rally participant spotted a group of people in the rugged terrain in Mexico and alerted Border Patrol officers, who identified them with binoculars as members of Grupo Beta, a Mexican agency that aids migrants in distress.

Sheriff Larry A. Dever of Cochise County, where the event was held, said the area was a hotspot for traffickers.

“We’re right at the point of the spear where human and dope smuggling takes place,” Sheriff Dever said. “These mountains are a beehive of activity.”

He said he had no doubt that migrants and drug smugglers were using lookouts to keep track of the rally.

“They know this rally is going on,” he said. “They are not fools. They’re experts. They probably know more about this than we do standing here.”

J. D. Hayworth, who is challenging Senator John McCain in the Republican primary to be held later this month, used the event to question Mr. McCain’s commitment to fighting illegal immigration. Trying to outflank Mr. Hayworth, Mr. McCain has made several stops in the border region recently.

The Obama administration has similarly started a defense of its border policies in recent days.

“Is there more work to be done? Absolutely. Is the problem a significant one, a challenging one for the nation? Absolutely,” John T. Morton, director of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in Phoenix last week, vowing that his agency was committed to securing the border.

The rally was held on private land, not far from where a popular Arizona rancher died in late March in a killing that helped fuel the immigration debate in the state.

Cindy Kolb, a border activist who lives nearby, yelled out through the thick metal slates in the border fence, which had been decorated on the American side with tiny flags, “Hey, don’t come over here anymore.”

She added: “We don’t like illegals hiding under bushes when our kids wait for the school bus. This border needs to be secure.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 16, 2010, on page A9 of the New York edition..

Checks are coming: Obama signs unemployment bill

2010-07-22T19:58:00.001-07:00

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer Andrew Taylor, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 37 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Federal checks could begin flowing again as early as next week to millions of jobless people who lost up to seven weeks of unemployment benefits in a congressional standoff.

President Barack Obama on Thursday signed into law a restoration of benefits for people who have been out of work for six months or more. Congress approved the measure earlier in the day. The move ended an interruption that cut off payments averaging about $300 a week to 2 1/2 million people who have been unable to find work in the aftermath of the nation's long and deep recession.

At stake are up to 73 weeks of federally financed benefits for people who have exhausted their 26 weeks of state jobless benefits. About half of the approximately 5 million people in the program have had their benefits cut off since its authorization expired June 2.

They are eligible for lump-sum retroactive payments that are typically delivered directly to their bank accounts or credited to state-issued debit cards. Many states have encouraged beneficiaries to keep updating their paperwork in hopes of speeding payments once the program was restored.

In states like Pennsylvania and New York, the back payments should go out next week, officials said. In others, like Nevada and North Carolina, it may take a few weeks for all of those eligible to receive benefits.

Thursday's 272-152 House vote sent the bill to the White House.

" Americans who are fighting to find a good job and support their families will finally get the support they need to get back on their feet during these tough economic times," Obama said in a statement issued after signing the measure.

The House action came less than 24 hours after a mostly party-line Senate vote Wednesday on the measure, which is just one piece of a larger Democratic jobs agenda that has otherwise mostly collapsed after months of battles with Republicans.

The measure is what remains of a Democratic effort launched in February to renew elements of last year's economic stimulus bill. But GOP opposition forced Democrats to drop $24 billion to help state governments avoid layoffs and higher taxes, as well as a package of expired tax cuts and a health insurance subsidy for the unemployed.

Wrangling over the larger measure consumed about four months. The jobless benefits portion picked up enough GOP support in the Senate — Maine moderates Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe — only after it was broken off as a stand-alone bill. It would have passed last month were it not for the death of Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.; Byrd's replacement, Democrat Carte Goodwin, cast the key 60th vote Tuesday to defeat a GOP filibuster.

Most Republicans opposed the measure because it would add $34 billion to a national debt that has hit $13 trillion, arguing that it should have been paid for with cuts to other programs, such as unspent money from last year's economic stimulus bill, which is earning mixed grades at best from voters as unemployment stands at 9.5 percent nationwide.

Thirty-one House Republicans, about one in six, voted for the measure Thursday, while 10 Democrats opposed it.

"The other side says that these unemployment benefits stretching to almost two years are needed and must be added to the $13 trillion debt, even as they claim their trillion-dollar stimulus plan has been a success at creating millions of jobs," said Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La. "It makes you wonder if they're looking at the same jobs data as the rest of us."

Opposition marked a change of heart for many Republicans who had voted for deficit-financed unemployment benefits in the past, including twice during George W. Bush's administration. Earlier this year, Republicans twice allowed temporary unemployment measures to pass without asking for a roll call vote.

Opinion polls show that deficits and debt are of increasing concern to voters, especially Republicans' core conservative supporters and the tea party activists whose support the GOP is courting in hopes of retaking control of Congress.

Republicans winced in February when Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., blocked a temporary benefits measure for several days, only to relent amid a wave of bad publicity. But just a few weeks later, all but a handful of Republicans were opposed to renewing benefits unless they were paid for with cuts elsewhere in the $3.7 trillion federal budget.

Democrats countered that many economists say unemployment benefits boost the economy since most beneficiaries spend them immediately. But any such effects are likely to be modest when measured against a $14.6 trillion economy.

"Unemployment benefits protect those who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own but would lead to more jobs, higher wages and a stronger economy for all Americans," said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "The money will be spent immediately on necessity, injecting demand into the economy, creating jobs."

The program is being renewed through the end of November. The White House signaled earlier this week that another extension may be sought if the jobless rate remains high, as many expect.

Follow Yahoo! News on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook

El Paso was once what Phoenix is today: Racist

2010-07-06T06:57:00.000-07:00

With everything that’s happening in Arizona regarding undocumented immigrants, it reminds me of my days growing up in a barrio in South-Central El Paso – a barrio much like other barrios in the1950s – where the Border Patrol - aka la migra - was a constant thorn on our side.

This hatred of undocumented people in Arizona is nothing new because I grew up with la migra chasing our tails at every opportunity. Profiling? There was no such word in those days. Every dark-skinned Mexican was suspect, no matter that we had been born and raised in El Paso – you know, the USA? In those early days of pure hatred against us, la migra had all the power in the world. They would kick down doors to get at illegals and nobody would complain because, quite frankly, it wouldn’t do any good.

When we were kids, and we would see la migra enter our barrio, we instinctively would run like rabbits. But, you see, we also had a rhyme and a reason for doing so. By running away, la migra would give chase. We ran as far and as fast as our little legs could carry us. Meanwhile, back on the farm, those who were really here illegally had a chance to run and hide from the bulldogs who were after them.

We stopped running when we felt sure that we had given some people the chance to get away. La migra would curse us vehemently, but, we didn’t care. In those days most if not all Border Patrol agents were Anglo – not a Mexican to be seen. So, there was no compassion, no understanding, no opportunity to be allowed safe passage. Not that today’s Chicano/Chicana migra is much better, but, we choose to believe that it does, in fact, matter. But, does it really? To my way of thinking, la migra is la migra is la migra, ad nauseum.

Also, there was constant harassment, because la migra was everywhere. I’d be walking down Rivera Avenue, for example, and la migra would sidle up to me. “Donde nacio?” one would ask in a heavy accent. “Speak to me in English,” I would demand. They would do so, and, once they were convinced that I was legal, they would let me go.

But, no sooner did I walk to the next block, then another migra would be waiting for me to ask me the same question – the same question over and over and over, perhaps five or six times a day. I once suggested in my column that what the BP should do is that once they’ve determined that we were legal, they should pin some sort of cardboard star on our shirt – you know, the way the Nazis would do to Jewish people during the Holocaust?

Of course, la migra didn’t like my inference and my editor had to take all the guff from the BP chief at that time because I was, as usual, blasting la migra. One migra guy in Fort Hancock even had the temerity to ask one of my co-workers - in fact, Charlie Edgren - to tell me to stay out of Fort Hancock. I was incensed. I called the guy and asked him if he thought he was Wyatt Earp. “I was just joking, Joe,” la migra guy said. “If you really want me to stay out of Fort Hancock,” I challenged, “Why don’t you come to El Paso and tell me yourself.” Of course, he never did.

But, you see, what’s happening in Phoenix and other Arizona cities, already happened in El Paso. We won that battle, because you hardly see migra in El Paso demanding to see your papers anymore. Although, I’m sure there are isolated incidents, it’s nowhere near what it used to be. Oh, they tried. Remember when late-Sheriff Leo Samaniego wanted to do the same thing here? Well, it didn’t work either.

See, we know all about profiling – we’ve been there, done that. Those poor folks in Phoenix are feeling the same terror and angst we used to feel whenever we spotted a migra vehicle. But, you know, it’s really those Republicans in Arizona who are causing all the commotion. And, they want for us Mexicans to support their racist party? Fat chance.

Sin Fin
JoeOlvera2003@yahoo.com

Reform Immigration for America

2010-07-02T14:17:00.000-07:00

This is straight from our Humble President, Barack Obama.

I am DEFINITELY voting for that dude again.

Vote your conscience.

Dear Immigration Reformers,

The big news this week was President’s Obama address yesterday at American University. In the speech, the President called for bipartisan leadership for a comprehensive fix to our broken immigration system. In a meeting with the President earlier in the week, advocates laid out ways that the President can show greater leadership for comprehensive reform, including enforcement reform, greater pressure on congress for legislative solutions and administrative relief. He responded to some of these demands in his speech; we're pleased that the President is engaged and we hope that we'll see strong and relentless leadership from the President going forward. For this to pass, the administration should make concrete commitments and engage in this debate the way they did in health care and financial regulatory reform.

Powerful Voices for Reform:
Law Enforcement and Conservative leaders have been incredibly active over the last week. Last Friday in Illinois, a discussion on the impact of our broken immigration system on local enforcement took place between Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart and Kane County Sheriff Pat Perez, along with other sheriff’s departments and police. Further exploring these issues is a report being released today by the Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative, “Law Enforcement Leaders Agree: Federal Government is Responsible for Enforcing, and Reforming, Immigration Law.” The report examines the work done by enforcement leaders across the country calling on federal immigration reform for the good of local enforcement and the safety of our communities. Announcing the report today on a press telephonic were Chief Art Acevedo, Austin (TX) Police Department and National President and National Latino Peace Officers Association (NLPOA), Chief George Gascón, San Francisco (CA) Police Department and Art Venegas (Moderator), Retired Chief of Police, Sacramento, CA and Project Director, Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative (LEEI). The campaign applauds these brave leaders for speaking out for the safety of our communities.

Conservatives for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CfCIR), a group of prominent conservative leaders including several major Evangelical pastors, was also very vocal this week. Several members of CFCIR spoke at a press conference at American University following the President’s address, including Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Dr. Richard Land, President, Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Southern Baptist Conference and Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. Leith Anderson told the audience, “the reality is that we need to move toward bipartisan support and that we need to move toward specific legislation and that we need to join hands together to do that which I believe is biblical and right and in the best interests of the United States of America.” Next week, CfCIR will be holding its 6th national telephonic call in Miami discussing the way forward for conservatives for reform.

Some of these same members of the faith community took part in an unprecedented coalition of African American and Latino pastors at an event in Washington, DC. Their goal was to show the diverse support and unity for immigration reform. Derrick Harkins, senior pastor of the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and co-convener of the coalition said, “We have come together to dispel the ugly myths about a black and brown divide on immigration reform…Throughout our history, immigrants have strengthened our country with their hard work and commitment to core American values.” Everyday, the support for reform becomes broader and more diverse, and it is alliances like these that have never been seen before and that will lead us to a better future.

Move the Game:
Right after President Obama’s speech, an official campaign to move the 2011 MLB All-Star Game out of Phoenix, AZ was launched by the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and other partners. Ellie Klerlein, Associate Director of national campaigns at NCLR kicked off the campaign with a letter to supporters stating, “Arizona's new anti-immigrant law essentially sanctions racial profiling and makes Latinos and others suspect based on their skin color or accents. Yet this is where the 2011 All-Star Game is scheduled to take place, even though many of the players themselves would be subject to profiling under the law. This is unacceptable.” It is unacceptable and we encourage you to act now to tell Bud Selig to move the game in 2011!

Comprehensive Reform and the Deficit:
On Wednesday we heard how comprehensive immigration reform could positively affect our economy in a public hearing held by the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (i.e. the fiscal commission) in an effort to gather testimony on ideas and proposals that could be used to shrink the federal deficit. Grisella Martinez, of the National Immigration Forum, explained that we must, “reform our immigration laws to raise wages, increase consumption, create jobs, and generate additional tax revenue AND we must engage in targeted, efficient and accountable spending of discretionary funds dedicated to immigration and border enforcement.” She went on to discuss examples of wasteful and uncontrolled spending at the Department of Homeland Security. To read more about the hearing and how immigration reform can shrink our federal deficit, click here.

Comprehensive Reform and the Border:
Earlier this week, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a new report, “Brick by Brick,” examining border security measures taken over the last five years and their effects on security and communities in general. According to the report, the border security bench marks that were discussed in the last round of the congressional debate on immigration reform have been largely met, but the fixation on border security to the exclusion of comprehensive immigration reform persists. Some of these policies, the report contends, are well intentioned and effective, but others are poorly executed, lead to the violation of human rights and actually make communities less safe. In the report, CAP suggests strategies for improving enforcement strategies for a safer border while arguing that only comprehensive reform will lead to real solutions.

You Can Help in AZ:
Finally, we'd like to introduce Promise Arizona (PAZ). It is a new membership organization that has been built after a year of organizing in AZ, whose mission is to recruit, train and support a new generation of leaders from across the state to build a new Arizona, one that allows all residents to achieve their full potential.

PAZ is looking for summer fellows to join the fight in AZ. As a Promise Arizona (PAZ) Fellow, you will help to make this a reality by working with local organizers to increase civic engagement of African Americans, Latinos and young people and build lasting relationships in the community. Together, we can ensure that our elected officials represent all of the people of Arizona. Over half a million Latinos are unregistered and we need your help to create the Arizona, and the America, that includes everyone in our democratic process. To apply, click here.

Thank you for all of your work this week. Let’s keep it up!

Rich Stolz and Nora Feely, Reform Immigration FOR America

Foes and Supporters of New Immigration Law Gather in Arizona

2010-05-31T13:49:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: May 29, 2010

Thousands of people marched through the streets of Phoenix on Saturday to protest a state law taking effect July 29 that will allow the police in Arizona to check the immigration status of people they have stopped for another reason.

PHOENIX — Two sides of the immigration debate converged here Saturday: a throng of several thousand marching for five miles opposed to Arizona’s new immigration law, and several thousand nearly filling a nearby stadium in the evening in support of it.

Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, top, pulled Attorney General Terry Goddard, above, from defending an immigration law, calling his Friday meeting with a federal team a “curious coordination.”

Organizers said the timing was coincidental, with both sides taking advantage of a holiday weekend to bring out the masses. But the gatherings encapsulated in a single day the passions surrounding the national immigration debate, recharged by the new law, which will expand the state’s role in immigration enforcement.

Both demonstrations made a point of waving a large number of American flags and issuing pleas for a national overhaul of immigration law, but they offered a jarring study in how polarized the debate has become here.

The demonstrators against the law were mostly Latino, with young people and families making up a large share. They played drums, whistled and chanted and gave speeches in Spanish and English denouncing the perceived racism behind the law. Many carried posters or wore T-shirts with the message: “Do I look illegal?”

At the rally in favor of the law, which began with the pledge of allegiance and the national anthem, any mention of Mexico or supporters of the law brought lusty boos — a video clip of President Felipe Calderón of Mexico especially fired up the crowd, which was mostly white and middle-aged or older. Placards like “Illegals out of the U.S.A.” were typical, though speaker after speaker ridiculed the idea that the crowd was racist.

Far more attended the earlier rally opposed to the law, which included a five-mile march to the Capitol in withering heat. It was one of the largest since Gov. Jan Brewer signed the law April 23.

Some were citizens, like Armando Diaz, 33, a mechanic born and raised here who believes the law has helped spread anti-Latino fervor in the state.

“This is not what Arizona is about, hate,” Mr. Diaz said as he neared the capitol, where people fled for what little shade they could find. “But that is what this law is about.”

The later rally, at sundown, was organized by Tea Party groups from St. Louis and Dallas who said they decided to take the lead and support the state against a wave of boycotts protesting the law, some by cities like San Francisco and Seattle.

“We are doing this to crush any boycott against the free market,” said Tina Loudon, a Tea Party member from St. Louis who helped organize the rally. “Arizona has a sovereign right to enforce immigration laws on the books.”

The law — barring any successful legal challenges — will take effect July 29. It would allow the police to check the immigration status of people they suspect are illegal immigrants when they have been stopped for another reason. It also makes it a state crime, not just a federal one, to not carry immigration papers.

Advocates see it as a tool for law enforcement to weed out illegal immigrants, while five lawsuits filed against it call it an infringement on federal authority and suggest that Latino citizens and legal residents will be swept up for questioning.

On another front, the governor and attorney general are disputing who will defend the state against the legal challenges and possible litigation by the United States Justice Department.

Ms. Brewer, a Republican, said Friday she had removed the state’s attorney general, a Democrat and vocal opponent of the law, from defending it, accusing him of colluding with the Justice Department as it nears a decision on whether to challenge the law in court.

But the matter remained in dispute on Saturday, as the attorney general, Terry Goddard, a Democrat and potential challenger in her re-election bid, said in an e-mail message that he was “definitely defending the state” in legal challenges to the law.

Ms. Brewer said she took action after Mr. Goddard met Friday with Justice Department lawyers, who then met with her legal advisers.

Justice Department officials said they routinely meet with a state’s attorney general and governor when considering legal action against their state.

“We continue to have concerns that the law drives a wedge between law enforcement and the communities they serve, and are examining it to see what options are available to the federal government,” said Tracy Schmaler, a department spokeswoman.

The United States attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., has said he worries that the law may intrude on federal authority and lead to racial profiling.

Protest rallies were also held Saturday at the state capitols in Texas and Oregon, as well as in San Francisco, according to The Associated Press.

At the Arizona demonstrations, opinions could not be further apart.

Mireya Chavez Cerna, 43, an illegal immigrant who works as a maid, marched with her 9-year-old son, who was born in the United States and wore a shirt reading “Made in America.”

She denounced the climate of fear in the state and said immigrants like her could not abide the wait of a decade or more for a legal visa while their families grow hungry.

“Do you think we would risk losing our lives crossing the border if we didn’t have a need to come here for a better life?” she said. Supporters of the law “don’t know,” she added. “They don’t understand. They don’t live in Mexico. They don’t know how it is.”

But Ann Hyde, a radiological technologist from Chandler, said she grew frustrated at supporters being tarred as prejudiced or worse.

“We are not racists,” she said. “This law is about respecting the laws of the nation and the economic impact of illegal immigration, which is enormous. My state is broke and they cost us with spending on schools, hospitals and other services.”

Though violent crime is declining in Arizona, as in most other states, and illegal immigration is down at the border, speakers played up crimes that illegal immigrants have been charged with over the years, including shooting of police officers.

“One is too many,” said Mark Spencer, the chairman of a union representing rank-and-file police officers in Phoenix.

Ana Facio Contreras contributed from Phoenix.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 30, 2010, on page A14 of the New York edition.

Phoenix Sheriff Joe Arpaio for Arizona Governor?

2010-05-28T18:35:00.000-07:00

By Joe Olvera
Former columnist/reporter for the El Paso Times

As if the nightmare in Arizona wasn’t insidious enough for undocumented immigrants, now comes the even more nightmarish rumor that racist Phoenix Sheriff Joe Arpaio is thinking of running for Governor. Of course, it’s just a rumor, but some people are adamant about fleeing the state before this horrendous thing happens - if it does.

“150 people have already left Arizona, and, more are waiting for the right time to leave,” said Mercedes, a woman who has lived in Phoenix for 12 years. She too is thinking of booking from that desert city that has turned its anger at the economy, the political morass, and the mass of undocumented people into a hatred that is hard to dismiss. She refused to state her real name, or that of her husband or children.

“Can you imagine what would happen if Arpaio does run for Governor and wins? Poor us! I’m thinking also of packing up my family, my husband and two children, and moving somewhere else,” Mercedes said. “But, really, where can we go? It seems that other states are thinking of passing the same law and then, where will that leave us? I’m scared, as are many others. To leave here, after so many years, will be traumatic.”

Mercedes and her husband, Orlando, think that Arizona will suffer too because it will be difficult to replace the money that they feed into the Phoenix kitty. “The way I see it, with what we pay for rent, groceries, utilities, clothing, and other expenses, the state will lose about $2,000 per month. Now, multiply that by the hundreds and even the thousands of people like us who will leave Arizona, and where will that leave the state?”

Apparently, however, those who are responsible for passing the strict law, SB 1070, which criminalizes undocumented people and will allow police officers and other law enforcement officials to question anyone they stop and whom they think are in the U.S. illegally. These officers will now be able to challenge anyone’s status, check for legalization papers, and, if the person, or persons, is here illegally, they will be deported.
Protesters across the nation, however, are demanding that the law be rescinded, or they will fight back through boycotts and other means to stop the racist, anti-immigrant law from being enacted. Already, thousands upon thousands of protesters across the nation are marching in protest, challenging the new law. And, already, overzealous officers are beginning to arrest people for not having papers.

“You can see the difference already,” Mercedes said. “The stores used to be packed with people, many of them illegal, but, now, the stores are empty. You don’t see the same traffic you used to see. I can already imagine the changes that are coming.” Mercedes said that if she and her family leave Arizona, they might go to Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, or some other place where the hatred against undocumented people isn’t so intense. “But, can you imagine? We’ll have to start anew. We’ll lose everything we’ve worked so hard to accumulate, and all because of the racists.”

Gregorio, another illegal who has lived in Phoenix more than ten years, said he wouldn’t leave because he has already applied for legal residency. “I have already been approved for temporary residency, and now I must apply for permanent residency,” Gregorio said. “But, even then, if I’m stopped by immigration, will they honor the fact that my temporary residency has already been approved? Will they honor that piece of paper? I don’t know what to do, but, I’ve got to tough it out and, maybe, just maybe, I can continue living here. It’s all in the hands of God.”

Obama to Send Up to 1,200 Troops to Border

2010-05-26T18:37:00.000-07:00

The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: May 25, 2010

LOS ANGELES — President Obama will send up to 1,200 National Guard troops to the Southwest border and seek increased spending on law enforcement there to combat drug smuggling after demands from Republican and Democratic lawmakers that border security be tightened.

The decision was disclosed by a Democratic lawmaker and confirmed by administration officials after Mr. Obama met on Tuesday with Republican senators, several of whom have demanded that troops be placed at the border. The lawmakers learned of the plan after the meeting.

But the move also reflected political pressure in the president’s own party with midterm election campaigns under way and with what is expected to be a tumultuous debate on overhauling immigration law coming up on Capitol Hill.

The issue has pushed Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, into something of a corner. As governor of Arizona, she demanded that Guard troops be put on the border. But since joining the Obama administration, she has remained noncommittal about the idea, saying as recently as a month ago that other efforts by Mr. Obama had made the border “as secure now as it has ever been.”

The troops will be stationed in the four border states for a year, White House officials said. It is not certain when they will arrive, the officials said.

The troops will join a few hundred members of the Guard already assigned there to help the police hunt for drug smugglers. The additional troops will provide support to law enforcement officers by helping observe and monitor traffic between official border crossings. They will also help analyze trafficking patterns in the hope of intercepting illegal drug shipments.

Initial word of the deployment came not in a formal announcement from the White House — indeed, it was left to administration officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to fill in some details — but from a Democratic member of the House from southern Arizona who is running in what is expected to be a competitive race for re-election.

“The White House is doing the right thing,” the congresswoman, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, said in a statement announcing the decision. “Arizonans know that more boots on the ground means a safer and more secure border. Washington heard our message.”

Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican whose opponent in a coming primary has relentlessly criticized him on immigration, said Tuesday that he welcomed Mr. Obama’s move but that it was “simply not enough.”

Mr. McCain called for the introduction of 6,000 National Guard troops to police the Southwestern border, with 3,000 for Arizona alone. In a letter to Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, two Obama administration officials said that the proposal infringed on his role as commander in chief and overlooked gains in border security.

Calls for sending the Guard to the border grew after the shooting death of an Arizona rancher in March that the police suspect was carried out by someone involved in smuggling. Advocates of the controversial Arizona state law giving the police a greater role in immigration enforcement played up what they described as a failure to secure the border as a reason to pass the law.

Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, a Republican who is running for a full term, has requested Guard troops at the border but decided not to use her authority to do it herself, citing the state’s tattered finances. The governors of New Mexico and Texas also pleaded for troops.

From 2006 to 2008, President George W. Bush made a larger deployment of Guard troops under a program called Operation Jump Start. At its peak, 6,000 Guard troops at the border helped build roads and fences in addition to backing up law enforcement officers.

Those Guard troops contributed to the arrest of more than 162,000 illegal immigrants, the rescue of 100 people stranded in the desert and the seizure of $69,000 in cash and 305,000 pounds of illicit drugs.

The soldiers will not directly make arrests of border crossers and smugglers, something they are not trained to do.

Rick Nelson, a senior fellow who studies domestic security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that the additional spending could improve security over the long term but that the National Guard deployment was not sufficient for “an overwhelming change that will change the dynamics on the border.”

“This is a symbolic gesture,” he said. “At the end of the day, the face of border security is still going to be Customs and Border Protection, the law enforcement community. It’s not going to be the National Guard.”

Democrats and Republicans who agreed with the move rushed to take credit for it, including Ms. Brewer, who said her signing of the new Arizona law had pushed the administration.

“I am pleased that President Obama has now, apparently, agreed that our nation must secure the border to address rampant border violence and illegal immigration without other preconditions, such as passage of ‘comprehensive immigration reform,’ ” she said.

Terry Goddard, the Arizona attorney general and a Democrat running for governor, released a statement with the headline “Goddard Secures Administration Commitment for $500 million for National Guard, Border Security.” In an interview, Mr. Goddard said, “I think it is a good indication that the administration is taking us seriously.”

But some Democrats were skeptical.

Representative Harry E. Mitchell of Arizona, a Democrat facing re-election in a Republican-leaning district, said it was “going to take much more to secure the border.” He proposed a minimum of 3,000 troops.

Some Republicans said the deployment of the troops should not overshadow the need for a comprehensive approach to the illegal immigration problem.

“Arizona and other border states are grateful for the additional resources at the border,” said Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona. “But I hope that this is merely the first step in a process that culminates in Congress passing comprehensive immigration reform.”

Obama administration officials had resisted sending Guard troops to the border but had never ruled it out. They pointed to a variety of improvements at the border, including a record seizure of drug-related cash and guns, falling or flat rates of violent crime in border towns, and record lows in the flow of illegal immigrants across the border. Analysts give the dismal economy much of the credit for that.

In his meeting with lawmakers on Tuesday, Mr. Obama said improving border security alone would not reduce illegal immigration and reiterated that a reworking of the immigration system could not be achieved without more Republican support.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 26, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in Mideast

2010-05-25T13:41:00.001-07:00

The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: May 24, 2010

WASHINGTON — The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents.

The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces. Officials said the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate.

While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term, officials said. Its goals are to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to “prepare the environment” for future attacks by American or local military forces, the document said. The order, however, does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries.

In broadening its secret activities, the United States military has also sought in recent years to break its dependence on the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies for information in countries without a significant American troop presence.

General Petraeus’s order is meant for small teams of American troops to fill intelligence gaps about terror organizations and other threats in the Middle East and beyond, especially emerging groups plotting attacks against the United States.

But some Pentagon officials worry that the expanded role carries risks. The authorized activities could strain relationships with friendly governments like Saudi Arabia or Yemen — which might allow the operations but be loath to acknowledge their cooperation — or incite the anger of hostile nations like Iran and Syria. Many in the military are also concerned that as American troops assume roles far from traditional combat, they would be at risk of being treated as spies if captured and denied the Geneva Convention protections afforded military detainees.

The precise operations that the directive authorizes are unclear, and what the military has done to follow through on the order is uncertain. The document, a copy of which was viewed by The New York Times, provides few details about continuing missions or intelligence-gathering operations.

Several government officials who described the impetus for the order would speak only on condition of anonymity because the document is classified. Spokesmen for the White House and the Pentagon declined to comment for this article. The Times, responding to concerns about troop safety raised by an official at United States Central Command, the military headquarters run by General Petraeus, withheld some details about how troops could be deployed in certain countries.

The seven-page directive appears to authorize specific operations in Iran, most likely to gather intelligence about the country’s nuclear program or identify dissident groups that might be useful for a future military offensive. The Obama administration insists that for the moment, it is committed to penalizing Iran for its nuclear activities only with diplomatic and economic sanctions. Nevertheless, the Pentagon has to draw up detailed war plans to be prepared in advance, in the event that President Obama ever authorizes a strike.

“The Defense Department can’t be caught flat-footed,” said one Pentagon official with knowledge of General Petraeus’s order.

The directive, the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order, signed Sept. 30, may also have helped lay a foundation for the surge of American military activity in Yemen that began three months later.

Special Operations troops began working with Yemen’s military to try to dismantle Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate of Osama bin Laden’s terror network based in Yemen. The Pentagon has also carried out missile strikes from Navy ships into suspected militant hideouts and plans to spend more than $155 million equipping Yemeni troops with armored vehicles, helicopters and small arms.

Officials said that many top commanders, General Petraeus among them, have advocated an expansive interpretation of the military’s role around the world, arguing that troops need to operate beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to better fight militant groups.

The order, which an official said was drafted in close coordination with Adm. Eric T. Olson, the officer in charge of the United States Special Operations Command, calls for clandestine activities that “cannot or will not be accomplished” by conventional military operations or “interagency activities,” a reference to American spy agencies.

While the C.I.A. and the Pentagon have often been at odds over expansion of clandestine military activity, most recently over intelligence gathering by Pentagon contractors in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there does not appear to have been a significant dispute over the September order.

A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to confirm the existence of General Petraeus’s order, but said that the spy agency and the Pentagon had a “close relationship” and generally coordinate operations in the field.

“There’s more than enough work to go around,” said the spokesman, Paul Gimigliano. “The real key is coordination. That typically works well, and if problems arise, they get settled.”

During the Bush administration, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld endorsed clandestine military operations, arguing that Special Operations troops could be as effective as traditional spies, if not more so.

Unlike covert actions undertaken by the C.I.A., such clandestine activity does not require the president’s approval or regular reports to Congress, although Pentagon officials have said that any significant ventures are cleared through the National Security Council. Special Operations troops have already been sent into a number of countries to carry out reconnaissance missions, including operations to gather intelligence about airstrips and bridges.

Some of Mr. Rumsfeld’s initiatives were controversial, and met with resistance by some at the State Department and C.I.A. who saw the troops as a backdoor attempt by the Pentagon to assert influence outside of war zones. In 2004, one of the first groups sent overseas was pulled out of Paraguay after killing a pistol-waving robber who had attacked them as they stepped out of a taxi.

A Pentagon order that year gave the military authority for offensive strikes in more than a dozen countries, and Special Operations troops carried them out in Syria, Pakistan and Somalia.

In contrast, General Petraeus’s September order is focused on intelligence gathering — by American troops, foreign businesspeople, academics or others — to identify militants and provide “persistent situational awareness,” while forging ties to local indigenous groups.

(Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.)

A version of this article appeared in print on May 25, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Mexicans in the U.S. Illegally Love our Nation too!

2010-05-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

By Joe Olvera
Member of Rainbow Writing, Inc. Outsource Team
Former columnist and reporter for the El Paso Times

You could see it in her eyes. The fear. The frustration. The confusion. She is one of millions of people who are in the United States illegally. Having lived here for years, she is afraid of what the future holds for her, her husband, and their two children – a boy, 14, and a girl, 9. The children were born here in the United States, so Mexico, to them, would be a foreign country. They barely speak Spanish.

This woman, who has struggled to maintain her family in the best of all possible circumstances, understands what is happening around her. She bitterly blames President Barack Obama because, she says, he promised to fix the immigration situation so that she and her family could live without the fear that they will be deported. Even explaining that it’s not up to Obama alone to fix the problem, she is adamant about her anger.

“He promised he would make it possible for us to stay here legally, without worrying about our future, but, only worrying about making the best life possible for my children,” the woman, who shall remain nameless, complained. “Why did he make that promise if he didn’t intend to keep it? He’s just like any other politician who only brags about what he’s going to do, but, never does it.”

All the more bitter is this poor woman, whose struggles are never-ending. You see, she, and her family live in Phoenix, AZ – one of the worst places for people like her. In Arizona, the anger and fear against illegals is unprecedented. The entire state, it seems, is totally against illegal immigration, to the point that the state is considering a law that would allow police officers and other law enforcement personnel to check for immigration status, for immigration papers, even though this is not their job. Tired of waiting for the feds to act, Arizonans are taking the law into their own hands.

Here, in Arizona, the infamous murderous Sheriff, Joe Arpaio, is on a vendetta. He hates Mexicans and hates what he thinks is happening to his sun-burnt state. He declares himself a tough sheriff, who will do anything to rid his community of what he considers interlopers, vagrants, law-breakers; you name it, if it’s negative, it’s got to be Mexican.

No one who isn’t here illegally can ever understand what that feels like; to be persecuted, to be hounded; to be constantly on the look-out for those green-colored jeeps, trucks, and other Border Patrol vehicles is not a pleasant existence. Yet, these unfortunates take tremendous risks because they want to work to provide for their families. They want nothing more than to be able to live in peace in what, to them, is a peaceful nation. They want to send their children to a school where they can go beyond the 9th grade, where they can attend college on scholarship, where they can reach for the highest star, and grab ahold of it. Yes, this nation affords everybody who wants it, the opportunity to excel, to live in relative peace and harmony with their neighbors.

No one who isn’t here illegally can even begin to understand what living in the shadows consists of; can never understand that they’re not all here to create mayhem, but, they are here because they also love the United States. Would they be here if they didn’t love our nation? But, to Joe Arpaio and his ilk, these illegals violated the law by jumping the border and by daring to live among legal residents and citizens.

Yes, you can see it in her eyes. They radiate a fear - a nervousness - about going even to the corner grocery store. Yet, at the once, her eyes radiate a hope, a never-ending wish that, someday, they too may walk among the populace; their children need never fear that their parents will be deported; they live with hope – albeit, there doesn’t seem to be too much of that.

But, she is here with her family, and here she’ll stay until life improves for her and her brood, or until worse comes to worse and she and her husband are deported. “If only President Obama would help us,” she muses, “life would be much better for us and for everyone like us. Please, Mr. President, keep your promise!”

Sin Fin

JoeOlvera2003@yahoo.com

Lawyer questions police version of raid that killed girl

2010-05-18T20:41:00.000-07:00

By the CNN Wire Staff
May 17, 2010
CNN Justice

(CNN) -- An attorney representing the family of a 7-year-old girl shot to death Sunday in a police raid is accusing the Detroit Police Department of misrepresenting the incident.

In an interview with CNN affiliate WDIV on Monday, Michigan attorney Geoffrey Fieger said he obtained video footage of the incident captured by a crew filming for the A&E network show, "The First 48."

Fieger, who didn't say how he received the tape, said it shows officers rushing the home and throwing a flash grenade through a window before one officer fires into the home from the front porch.

However, according to Assistant Police Chief Ralph Godbee, preliminary information indicates that members of the Detroit Police Special Response Team approached the house and announced themselves as police. Godbee cited the officers involved and at least one independent witness.

Godbee said officers used a "flash bang" device, entered the home and encountered a 46-year-old female inside the front room.

"Exactly what happened next is a matter still under investigation, but it appears the officer and the woman had some level of physical contact," Godbee said in a statement Sunday. "At about this time, the officer's weapon discharged one round which, tragically, struck 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley Jones in the neck/head area."

Police were executing a search warrant in the search for the suspect in a shooting Friday that killed a high school student.

Godbee said the 34-year-old suspect was found and arrested at the home where the girl was shot. In addition, a vehicle and a moped matching the descriptions of those involved in the shooting of 17-year-old Jarean Blake were also found, he said.

Fieger called the explanation from police "entirely false."

"Of course, I have seen the videotape and the videotape vividly portrays the fact that a percussion grenade device was thrown through the front window and a shot was fired immediately from the outside from the porch," he said.

"No murder suspect was found in Aiyana's house," Fieger said in Monday's interview. "In fact, there's an upstairs apartment next door which the police did not have a search warrant for and that is where he surrendered, they went into that house too. But he was not in Aiyana's house."

Aiyana's father, Charles Jones, also has denied that the suspect was in his home.

Detroit police spokesman Phillip Cook told reporters Monday that he was not aware of the video and declined to comment. The investigation, he said, has been taken over by state police to preserve the "community's trust."

A source at A&E, who asked not to be identified citing company policy, confirmed that a crew was on the scene and that the footage was confiscated by police. He would not comment on what the crew had captured on video.

Another police spokesman said the department would not identify the suspect in Blake's shooting death until he has been formally charged by prosecutors. The suspect remains in custody.

Godbee, in his statement Sunday, said he wished to "express to the family of Aiyana Jones the profound sorrow that we feel within the Detroit Police Department and throughout this community. We know that no words can do anything to take away the pain you are feeling at this time."

Police obtained the "high-risk search warrant" based on intelligence, and it was approved by the prosecutor and a magistrate, Godbee said. "Because of the ruthless and violent nature of the suspect in this case, it was determined that it would be in the best interest of public safety to execute the search warrant as soon as possible and detain the suspect...while we sought a murder warrant."

El Pasoans Helping Other El Pasoans Fight Diabetes, the Scourge

2010-05-12T21:06:00.000-07:00

By Joe Olvera © 2010
Book author/former columnist for The El Paso Times

Diabetes is such an insidious disease that it can strike anyone, anytime, regardless of color, creed, national origin, or race. I know, because it struck me and left me hobbling. Actually, I can, more or less walk again, but, it’s only through the use of such tools as a walker, crutches, or canes. I’ve got all those tools to help me get around, but, it’s tough either way you look at it. If you haven’t figured it out, I’m using, also, a pair of prosthetic legs that give me some semblance of normality. But, of course, it’s not normal.

In El Paso, there are over 100,000 people who are battling the deadly disease – a silent killer that strikes at your most vital organs and at your most vulnerable extremities – i.e., your feet. If you don’t take care of your illness, and if you don’t manage it well, you will suffer complications. As it is, even if you do take care of it, sometimes complications can strike when you least expect.

Now, if I could walk better, without tiring so easily and quickly, I would have joined the 2010 Diabetes Walk, which happened on Saturday, May 8, 2010. The Walk, a long-time tradition in El Paso, was created to help raise money for The El Paso Diabetes Assn., Inc. Through various sponsorships, the Walk is meant to raise money to help those of us with Diabetes to better control that which afflicts us.

Companies and individuals were being encouraged to participate through various sponsorships, including the top - $10,000 for a Pioneer sponsorship; for $5,000 you or your company can be a Trail Blazer; $2,500 makes you a Hot-Stepper, and for $300, you could have been an exhibitor. However, just because you couldn’t make it to the event, doesn’t mean you have to stop giving. On the contrary, we need you more than ever.

The money garnered from this famous Walk will help the agency to help people with diabetes by empowering, promoting, and detecting the disease. Since 1968, the El Paso Diabetes Assn. has hosted camps and programs for children, helping them deal with their illness. They also provide Blood Glucose Screenings to determine if a person is afflicted with Diabetes.

While I appreciate this aspect of what the agency is doing, I differ in the way it’s handled. For example, if a person tests positive for diabetes, he/she is advised to see a doctor for further tests. My concern is, however, that if the person has no health insurance – which is the case in many situations – that person is basically given a death sentence. Yes, they are tested, but, what if they don’t have insurance or the money to seek further treatment? For one thing, diabetes supplies are extremely expensive.

For instance, just buying the medication can be a mind-blower, let alone the fact that the individual has the necessity of purchasing testing supplies, such as test strips – which can cost as much as $60 for 40 test strips. If the doctor recommends that you test your sugar level four to five times a day, those 40 strips won’t last very long.

Also, the afflicted individual must purchase the machine that measures his or her blood glucose level, and, if a person is using insulin, that medication can cost as much as $50 to $60, depending on the brand and the size of the vial. Presently, I’m using Novolin 70-30 – a small vial of this insulin costs me $25. That’s not exactly what the doctor ordered for me, but, it’s what I can currently afford. BTW: It only lasts me about 15 days, which is not a very long time.

That’s why this Diabetes Walk 2010 is so vital, important, and a life-saver. Without sponsorships, and without financial assistance from other sources, some people will never be able to afford their medications, or their testing supplies. One thing the El Paso Diabetes Assn. does, which I admire, is to provide the necessary supplies for someone who can’t afford them, albeit, the agency does this on a limited basis because of the lack of funds.

So, even if you weren’t able to come and support some of the neediest people in our beautiful city of El Paso, you can still become a sponsor. Help diabetics by making available the funds to help those who can’t afford to help themselves. Step up to the plate on any day of the year – don’t wait for a special day to do this. Grab the opportunity to donate. Remember, we need your help. One more thing – you never know when you might need this assistance for yourself or for a family member – especially a child.

It’s tough being a diabetic - believe me, it’s tough.

.

Sin Fin

Bloody Urban Landscapes

2010-05-09T21:23:00.000-07:00

By BOB HERBERT
Op-Ed columnist
The New York Times
Published: May 7, 2010

CHICAGO - Driving through some of this city’s neighborhoods is like driving through an alternate, horrifying universe, a place where no one thinks it’s safe to be a child.

You follow a map in which the coordinates are laid out in blood. Over there, in front of that convenience store, is where Fred Couch, 16, was shot to death last December. The Couch boy went to the same school, Christian Fenger Academy, as Derrion Albert, an honor student who was beaten with wooden planks and kicked to death three months earlier in a broad daylight attack that was recorded on a cellphone by an onlooker.

Right there, on South Manistee Avenue, is where a 7-year-old girl riding her scooter was shot in the head and critically injured a few weeks ago.

And here, on East 92nd Street, is where a toddler, just 20 months old, was shot in the head and killed in the back seat of her father’s car.

During a meeting with about a dozen men and boys on Thursday, some of them violence outreach workers on the South Side, I asked for a show of hands. “How many of you have been shot?” I asked. Five raised their hands.

When I asked how many knew someone who had been shot and killed, they all raised their hands.

The crazed, almost apocalyptic violence that is destroying the lives of so many young men, women and children here and in other major cities across the country is a crisis crying out for national attention. But, so far, it’s been met mostly with a shrug.

Dozens of children school-aged and younger are murdered in Chicago every year. More than 150 have been shot (but not all of them killed) during the current school year.

This is occurring in a city that, in terms of its murder rate, is not even near the top of the list of most violent American cities. (In 2008, for example, Orlando, Fla., home of Disney World, had more murders per capita than Chicago.)

That we tolerate this incredible carnage, that there is not even much of a national outcry against it, is a measure of how sick our society has become.

“It’s so different now,” said Ester Stroud, a hospital worker who lives in Northwest Chicago. “When I was young, if a child was murdered, it was a big deal. Now, I’m sorry to say, it’s somewhat routine.”

Mrs. Stroud’s son, Isiah, a 16-year-old who dreamed of dancing professionally, was stabbed to death a few days before Christmas in 2008. He had just won a dance contest and was planning to use the prize money to buy presents. He never made it home from the contest.

I talked for a long time with Mrs. Stroud, 46, and her husband, Eugene, 51, in a room at the school that Isiah had attended, Prologue Early College High. Their grief, after nearly a year and a half, seemed still to be weighing on them like a cloak of lead that cannot be lifted.

Mr. Stroud, his eyes red, recalled playing chess with his son and teaching him to swim, and watching old “Godzilla” movies with him on television. “Thinking about that last day is so hard,” he said. “He gave me the most beautiful smile that last moment that I saw him, when I dropped him off.”

He fingered a picture of his son as he talked.

Mrs. Stroud said, “His classmates are graduating this year. Maybe this is just a mother talking, but I think the world is a little different without him.”

It can be tough to acknowledge just how bizarrely violent some big-city neighborhoods have become. There are places in Chicago and many other cities where the norms of civilized behavior have been driven all but completely underground.

“I would characterize parts of this city as under siege,” said the Rev. Autry Phillips, who is the point person for a number of local antiviolence efforts. “It’s sad when people are afraid to come out of their homes to walk the dog or wash the car because they feel they might get shot.

“We’ve got young people pulling out guns at 12 o’clock in the afternoon and shooting all over the place, no matter who’s around. So we’ve got to do something about that.

“These kids did not come from the suburbs. They did not get dropped off of some spaceship. These are our kids. And we’ve got to take responsibility for them. A lot of them are angry because their daddy’s not around and their mama’s on crack.

“Who was there to teach them how to behave? We have to deal with this. We have to change this behavior. This is not what we were supposed to be.”

Driving through some of this city’s neighborhoods is like driving through an alternate, horrifying universe, a place where no one thinks it’s safe to be a child.

You follow a map in which the coordinates are laid out in blood. Over there, in front of that convenience store, is where Fred Couch, 16, was shot to death last December. The Couch boy went to the same school, Christian Fenger Academy, as Derrion Albert, an honor student who was beaten with wooden planks and kicked to death three months earlier in a broad daylight attack that was recorded on a cellphone by an onlooker.

Right there, on South Manistee Avenue, is where a 7-year-old girl riding her scooter was shot in the head and critically injured a few weeks ago.

And here, on East 92nd Street, is where a toddler, just 20 months old, was shot in the head and killed in the back seat of her father’s car.

During a meeting with about a dozen men and boys on Thursday, some of them violence outreach workers on the South Side, I asked for a show of hands. “How many of you have been shot?” I asked. Five raised their hands.

When I asked how many knew someone who had been shot and killed, they all raised their hands.

The crazed, almost apocalyptic violence that is destroying the lives of so many young men, women and children here and in other major cities across the country is a crisis crying out for national attention. But, so far, it’s been met mostly with a shrug.

Dozens of children school-aged and younger are murdered in Chicago every year. More than 150 have been shot (but not all of them killed) during the current school year.

This is occurring in a city that, in terms of its murder rate, is not even near the top of the list of most violent American cities. (In 2008, for example, Orlando, Fla., home of Disney World, had more murders per capita than Chicago.)

That we tolerate this incredible carnage, that there is not even much of a national outcry against it, is a measure of how sick our society has become.

“It’s so different now,” said Ester Stroud, a hospital worker who lives in Northwest Chicago. “When I was young, if a child was murdered, it was a big deal. Now, I’m sorry to say, it’s somewhat routine.”

Mrs. Stroud’s son, Isiah, a 16-year-old who dreamed of dancing professionally, was stabbed to death a few days before Christmas in 2008. He had just won a dance contest and was planning to use the prize money to buy presents. He never made it home from the contest.

I talked for a long time with Mrs. Stroud, 46, and her husband, Eugene, 51, in a room at the school that Isiah had attended, Prologue Early College High. Their grief, after nearly a year and a half, seemed still to be weighing on them like a cloak of lead that cannot be lifted.

Mr. Stroud, his eyes red, recalled playing chess with his son and teaching him to swim, and watching old “Godzilla” movies with him on television. “Thinking about that last day is so hard,” he said. “He gave me the most beautiful smile that last moment that I saw him, when I dropped him off.”

He fingered a picture of his son as he talked.

Mrs. Stroud said, “His classmates are graduating this year. Maybe this is just a mother talking, but I think the world is a little different without him.”

It can be tough to acknowledge just how bizarrely violent some big-city neighborhoods have become. There are places in Chicago and many other cities where the norms of civilized behavior have been driven all but completely underground.

“I would characterize parts of this city as under siege,” said the Rev. Autry Phillips, who is the point person for a number of local antiviolence efforts. “It’s sad when people are afraid to come out of their homes to walk the dog or wash the car because they feel they might get shot.

“We’ve got young people pulling out guns at 12 o’clock in the afternoon and shooting all over the place, no matter who’s around. So we’ve got to do something about that.

“These kids did not come from the suburbs. They did not get dropped off of some spaceship. These are our kids. And we’ve got to take responsibility for them. A lot of them are angry because their daddy’s not around and their mama’s on crack.

“Who was there to teach them how to behave? We have to deal with this. We have to change this behavior. This is not what we were supposed to be.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 8, 2010, on page A21 of the New York edition.

Protesters of Arizona's new immigration law try to focus boycotts

2010-04-30T20:00:00.000-07:00

By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 30, 2010

Remember Public Enemy's "By the Time I Get to Arizona?" It was released in 1991, when the state was at the center of another racial debate. The song -- part social commentary, part threat -- captured the collective will behind an effective boycott of Arizona in the early 1990s that groups opposed to the state's harsh new immigration law would like to repeat.

That boycott began in 1987 when then-Gov. Evan Mecham rescinded a newly created holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr., just a week before its inaugural celebration. But it was not until 1992 that the state's voters -- after rejecting a ballot measure to create the holiday two years earlier -- approved it and joined the every other state in recognizing the day.

In those five intervening years, Arizona was the subject of a series of convention and sports boycotts.

What made the boycott for the King holiday work was the broad support it received from a wide range of groups, and its focus on big-money industries. The final push came from the NFL Player's Association, which urged the league's owners to pull the 1993 Super Bowl from the state when it failed to approve the holiday. In that five-year period, Arizona lost more than 100 conventions and hundreds of millions of dollars, according to news reports.

The calls this week for new boycotts of Arizona, which has given the police broad power to stop people on suspicion of being in the state illegally, so far have been disparate and unorganized.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome has directed city employees to avoid business travel to the state, and city officials are contemplating ending all contracts with Arizona-based companies. The Mexican state of Sonora canceled a cross-border meeting that was to be held in Phoenix in June. A group of independent truckers from California have launched a five-day boycott of the state and refused to transport goods in or out. The National Black Caucus of State Legislators and the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators said Thursday that they are pulling out of a conference they had planned to hold in Scottsdale.

"We want to send a message," San Francisco Supervisor David Campos told supporters at a rally there Monday. "There are consequences when you target a whole people."

The question remains: Who are boycotters targeting? Politicians? Business owners?

So far the biggest civil rights groups, including the National Council of La Raza -- which have been working hard though not successfully to lobby President Obama and Congress on the issue of immigration reform -- have not weighed in. They are busy making important calculations. Boycotts, while effective (see: the 1960s civil rights movement), can be difficult to pull off and have the secondary effect of laying down broad economic pain.

Responding to calls for a boycott, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer told a call-in radio show in Tempe this week that she can't understand why boycott supporters would "want to hurt the legal citizens." The pullout of conventions will hit Arizona's bottom line hard, but it will also affect workers in the tourism industry.

Arizona is home to more than 2 million Hispanics -- about 30 percent of its population -- and an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Nearly 20 percent of its workforce is foreign-born, according to 2007 American Community Survey, including one in four workers in tourism-related industries.

"We do not take this lightly. We are being very thoughtful about it," said Clarissa Martinez De Castro, the director of immigration and national campaigns at La Raza. "We are trying to figure out if there is a way to be surgical about this. But the general response so far has been that this crosses the line in a major way and some response is necessary."

(To read the rest of this article, please click on the link in the blog post title above.)

Uganda's 'Kill the Gays' Bill on the Backburner?

2010-04-12T14:55:00.000-07:00

Care2 Action Network
Posted by: Steve Williams
April 10 2010

According to the AFP, members of a Ugandan parliamentary panel stated on Friday that, while backing for Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 still exists, support has wained and focus has turned elsewhere to matters of economic and electoral reform. Also indicated was the fact that no date has been set for when the bill should go before Uganda's lawmakers for a formal vote, and nor will it be in the near future.

From the AFP:

"I think it is useless and will not achieve what it intends to achieve," said Alex Ndeezi, a member of the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee tasked with reviewing the bill before it can be presented to the house...

The panel's chairman Stephen Tashyoba said the draft law was not a priority.

"As far as I am concerned, we really have more urgent matters to discuss like electoral reforms, which are already behind schedule," he said.

The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, dubbed the "Kill the Gays Bill", would create the offense of "aggravated homosexuality" which, under certain circumstances, could mean the death penalty for repeat offenders and any sexually active gay person with HIV/AIDS.

Among other penalties, it would also demand a jail term for intent to commit homosexuality, and would call for the extradition of gay Ugandans so that they might be charged under the law. It would also make it an offense to know someone that is gay but to not inform the police about that person's sexuality, and would render HIV/AIDS relief efforts and education programs practically untenable. To read the full text of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, please click here.

The bill has received widespread condemnation from the international community since it was introduced by MP David Bahati last year, with countries such as Switzerland and the U.S. warning that passage of the bill might have serious implications for the financial aid that Uganda receives.

Last week, 120 British MPs signed an Early Day Motion condemning the bill and requesting that the British Government and the European Union press Ugandan lawmakers to abandon the proposed law and to decriminalize homosexuality altogether. While an Early Day Motion is rarely debated in the House of Commons, such motions are often used to declare an MP's personal views on a topic, or to draw attention to a specific cause or issue.

It is widely thought that the creation of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was influenced by certain American evangelicals that, in March of last year, attended a conference in Uganda entitled "A Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda." You can find more information on the possible American ties to this bill by going here.

While there are still strong forces pushing for the bill to be passed, perhaps chief among them Ugandan Ethics Minister James Nsaba Buturo who rather infamously told gay and lesbian Ugandans to "forget about human rights" and to get out of the country, it is known that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, has said that, due to the fact that this has now become a matter of international relations, parliament should go slow and carefully weigh the legislation. He has even suggested that the more stringent aspects of the bill, including the death penalty, should be dropped, and has indicated that he would be inclined to veto the bill if this was not done.

It is known that there are several Ugandan legislators who also oppose the bill, many of whom feel that existing laws that criminalize homosexuality in the country are strict enough.

A formal vote on the bill was expected after Uganda's parliament returned from recess in February, but that vote never materialized, and, as signaled above, this does not seem to be a priority in the near future.

However, it would be premature to call the bill dead in the water, as the legislative process in Uganda is often tumultuous and unpredictable. Rather, this latest statement perhaps signals the slow abandonment of a bill that once looked certain to become law.

Thanks to international pressure, whether from world leaders like President Obama who labeled the bill "odious" and called for it to be scrapped, to the many religious quarters that also came out against the bill such as the leader of the Anglican church, Rowan Williams, who said that the bill was completely at odds with the Anglican ethos, and all this teamed with considerable opposition from within Uganda itself, the bill has now been marked as an unfavorable battleground for Museveni and Uganda's lawmakers and is likely to be seen as just too damaging on all sides to be allowed to pass, at least in its current form.

While this most recent news seems somewhat encouraging, it is imperative that we continue to apply pressure until the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 is firmly abandoned and not just watered down.

Care2 Action:
Urge President Museveni to veto the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Sign the Care2 petition today.

"Saving" Brown Women from Brown Men: Who Cares?

2010-03-19T19:40:00.000-07:00

Published March 17, 2010
By Asher Kade
Associated Content: Society

For example, a discriminatory Sh'ia law passed last year permits husbands to deny food and sustenance to their wives, if they refuse to obey their husbands' sexual demands. The law also grants guardianship of children
exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. In addition, an electoral law amendment attempted to reduce the representation of women in parliament.

Why does it matter to us? It's simple. If we want to understand why radical Islamists want to destroy our country, we must first understand our enemy. We need to understand the foundation of their belief systems, their home lives, and how they differ from us. In the same way that their countries seem odd and outdated, so does our country seem odd and outdated to them. In all likelihood they don't respect our freedoms and permission to allow our American women hold public offices, have an education, and pursue personal interests outside of the home. These clashes between cultures spark more "jihads" and attacks. It doesn't make it right, but it does explain a little about what is going on and why.

Just consider the alarming fact that every 30 minutes one woman in Afghanistan dies from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Severe food shortages have resulted in chronic malnourishment among children, and 48 percent of Afghan women are iron-deficient. Just 12 percent of women 15 years and older can read and write, compared to 39 percent of men. The overall literacy rate for women between the ages of 15 and 24 stands at 24 percent, compared to 53 percent for men in Afghanistan. You can see why this country is in distress and why people there resort to desperate measures to survive!

Sources:

http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/health/High-Maternal-Death-Rate-Overshadows-International-Womens-Day-in-Afghanistan-86759682.html

http://www.rferl.org/content/Struggle_And_Success_For_Afghan_Women/1977529.html

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/afghan-women-human-rights-defenders-tell-intimidation-and-attacks-2010-03-08

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/11/suraya-pakzad-and-the-long-tough-fight-for-afghan-women/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7BxDEetRGU

HPV one of most common sexual infections

2010-03-12T21:42:00.000-08:00

By Jami Custer
Staff Writer
Cherokee Phoenix Weekly
March 12 2010

TULSA, Okla. – The genital human papillomavirus, also known as HPV, is considered one of most common sexually transmitted infections, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC states that more than 40 different kinds of HPV can infect the genitals, mouths and throats of males and females. The difficult part about the infection is that many who have it do not know they are infected, which is why it’s rapidly spreading.

The infection is spread through genital contact and intercourse. It can however, also be passed through oral sex.

The virus infects 6 million people each year and nearly 20 million Americans are already infected with it. Fifty percent of sexually active people will at some point contract the virus in their lifetime.

On March 3, during the Cherokee Nation Cancer Summit in Tulsa, Dr. Greggory Jon Woitte, director of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Cherokee Nation W.W. Hastings Hospital, spoke about HPV during a presentation on cancer and overall health.

“HPV is responsible for 100 percent of cervical cancers, 40 percent of vulvar cancers, 40 percent of vaginal cancers, 40 percent of penile cancers, 90 percent of anal cancers and 15 to 25 percent of oropharyngeal cancers,” Woitte said.

According to the CDC, 12,000 women annually get cervical cancer in the U.S. Other cancers caused by this infection are less common, but are still out there.

There are ways to lessen the chance of contracting the virus. Using condoms lowers the risk of contracting HPV by 70 percent, but Woitte said the virus can infect areas that are not covered by a condom, which is why they don’t completely protect someone.

However, there are vaccines that protect both male and females against the more common kinds of HPV.

The vaccinations are given in sets of three and are considered to be more effective if given prior to one’s first sexual act. There are two vaccines to protect girls and women – Cervariz and Gardasil. They both protect against the strain of HPV that causes most cervical cancers. Gardasil also helps prevent most genital warts and can protect boys and men against the virus.

The cost of the vaccines can be expensive. Woitte suggested two organizations to seek financial assistance for the vaccines – Merck Vaccine Patient Assistance Program and Bridges to Access. There is a qualification process with both organizations.

Reach Staff Writer Jami Custer at (918) 453-5560 or jami-custer@cherokee.org

Additional Note
Dr. Woitte informed me that children ages 11-13 are the optimal age for taking the HPV vaccine. "Native American children under the age of 18 are covered for the vaccine under the Vaccines for Children program. This means that all Native American children can receive the vaccine for free during the target age group of 11-13," Woitte said.

Muslims turning to home schooling in increasing numbers

2010-02-22T11:37:00.000-08:00

By Tara Bahrampour
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 21, 2010

On a chilly afternoon in western Loudoun County, a group of children used tweezers to extract rodent bones from a regurgitated owl pellet. A boy built a Lego launcher. A girl practiced her penmanship. On the wall, placards read, "I fast in Ramadan," "I pay zakat" and "I will go on hajj."

Welcome to Priscilla Martinez's home -- and her children's school, where Martinez is teacher, principal and guidance counselor, and where the credo "Allah created everything" is taught alongside math, grammar and science.

Martinez and her six children, ages 2 to 12, are part of a growing number of Muslims who home-school. In the Washington area, Martinez says, she has seen the number of home-schoolers explode in the past five years.

Although three-quarters of the nation's estimated 2 million home-schoolers identify themselves as Christian, the number of Muslims is expanding "relatively quickly," compared with other groups, said Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute.

They do so, he said, for the same reasons as non-Muslims: "Stronger academics, more family time, they want to guide social interaction, provide a safe place to learn and . . . teach them [their] values, beliefs and worldview."

Parents say it is an attractive alternative to public schools, with whose traditions and values they are not always comfortable, and Islamic schools, which might be too far away, cost too much or lack academic rigor.

If Muslims have come to embrace home schooling later than others, it might be in part because so many Muslims in the United States are immigrants who might not be aware of the option. In fact, for many immigrants, the idea of home schooling runs counter to their reasons for coming to America, which frequently include better educational opportunities. And public school has long been seen as a key portal to assimilation.

When Sanober Yacoob arrived from Pakistan 13 years ago and began to home-school her three children, she was the only immigrant she knew of who was doing so. Others from Muslim countries "thought I was weird," she said. "One of them said to me, 'I hope you're not going to destroy yourself, and they will grow up ignorant.' "

Now, more are following in her footsteps, and many use the highly regarded Calvert curriculum for home-schoolers.

Maqsood and Zakia Khan of Sterling, who emigrated from Pakistan two decades ago, say home schooling has allowed them to enhance and internationalize their children's curriculum. Now, in addition to the standard subjects, their children, ages 15, 14 and 9, study the Koran for a half an hour a day, one-on-one, with a woman who teaches them online from Pakistan.

"If they were going to school, we could never do that," Maqsood Khan said. "You spend any number of hours at school, you're tired, your brain is full and you don't want to spend hours with Islamic studies. But now it's part of their curriculum; we made it part of their time."

The food incident

The Khans decided to home-school four years ago after a kindergarten teacher, unaware of the religious issues, told their son that he could not refuse school food in favor of the Islamic-sanctioned food he had brought from home. The food incident was small, but it highlighted the issues many Muslims say their children face every day as minorities who don't celebrate Christmas, Halloween or birthday parties, who don't eat pork and who fast during Ramadan.

The family did not consider Islamic schools, Zakia Khan said, because "they learn more at home than they learn at school."

By contrast, Abdul Rashid Abdullah of Herndon said he would have considered an Islamic school for his 11-year-old son, who was struggling in public school, if it weren't for the cost.

"My children are extremely aware that they are Muslim, and they are extremely aware that other people aren't," said Abdullah, whose wife, a Malaysian immigrant, started to home-school their son last fall. Two of the couple's younger children, ages 10 and 6, remain in public school; their fourth child is 3. "There is a mainstream culture, and my kids aren't a part of that mainstream culture . . . and to hear, 'We don't do this, we don't do that,' how are they feeling when they're sitting in that chair? Home schooling really takes the pressure off."

Martinez, a convert to Islam who is of Mexican descent and grew up in Texas, said that despite stereotypes of home-schoolers seeking to shut out the world, the point is not to restrict children from mainstream culture so much as to make sure they don't get lost in the shuffle.

"We don't isolate ourselves from the rest of the world and sit here at home just not being attuned to our community and our identity as Americans," she said. "But we're also not sending them to school where generally speaking they would have to leave most of their identity at the door."

There are also religious reasons. "We definitely do learn from a different worldview," she said. "Everything has God as its center. We don't just study the bee, but we study what the Koran says about the bee and the many blessings and the honey. . . . We get religious studies out of it, we get biology out of it and chemistry."

Former naysayers

The idea of teaching kids at home has found more acceptance in the Muslim community since Yacoob started doing it. Now, she said, former naysayers congratulate her on her children, who are pursuing college degrees. Her son Saad, now 21 and an English major at George Mason University, managed to memorize the Koran while being home-schooled. "The same person [who once criticized her] stopped me, and he told me, 'We are so proud of Saad!' "

As with home-schoolers of any affiliation, questions arise about socialization. Abdul-Malik Ahmad, a 34-year-old Web developer, was home-schooled in Beltsville in the 1980s and '90s. While he said overall it was a positive experience (he now home-schools his daughter), it had drawbacks.

"There were very few Muslims, and we were very scattered, and the community wasn't as developed as it is now," he said. "So we didn't have a chance to socialize as much as we could have now. It took a while for me to adjust once I got to college."

To ease that transition, some home-schoolers say they plan to send their children to public high school once their characters are more fully formed. "It's not that you don't want them to know the world," said Norlidah Zainal Abidin, Abdullah's wife, "but you want to instill certain values in them first."

Maqsood Khan said his children connect with the outside world through Islamic scouting troops and visits to the mall. "They're typical teens; they listen to the music full blast, but they listen to Islamic music."

His daughter Meena, 15, who attended Sterling Middle School until she completed sixth grade four years ago, was at home recently in a Redskins sweatshirt and black headscarf. She said there were things she missed about public school, including the Harry Potter club.

"I liked going. I got good grades," she said. "But we didn't get enough Islamic studies."

Many home-schoolers seek out social interaction in outside classes or group field trips. On a recent afternoon at the Cascades Library in Sterling, mothers in headscarves dropped off their children at a resource room where Jean McTigue was teaching art to Muslim home-schooled children. As the boys and girls looked at reproductions of Dalis and Goyas, McTigue, whose own children were in the class, said there had not been similar opportunities for her oldest, 15. "When Yusef was 6 years old he would have loved to do something like this, but there was really nothing."

Downstairs, among the waiting mothers, Ayesha Khan said that five years ago her friends and family back in Pakistan had criticized her decision to home-school her children, now 10 and 8. But when they see the children, they are impressed.

"Over there, it's like, 'Wow, your kids are going to American schools,' " she said. "I say, 'Yeah, we are giving our kids an American education.' "

Roslyn M. Brock named NAACP chairman, marking a generational shift

2010-02-22T11:32:00.001-08:00

The Washington Post
By Krissah Thompson
Sunday, February 21, 2010

The NAACP selected health-care administrator Roslyn M. Brock as its chairman on Saturday, marking the culmination of a generational shift for the historic civil rights organization. For the first time in the NAACP's history, both its president and chairman are too young to have personally experienced legalized segregation.

Brock, 44, takes the helm from civil rights pioneer Julian Bond. She will guide the association along with Benjamin Jealous, who, at 37, is the youngest president in the NAACP's history.

The shift comes as the association seeks to regain the influence of its heyday during the civil rights movement, and Brock said her goal is to expand the NAACP's base beyond its stagnant chapter membership and narrow its focus on a few specific civil rights issues: education, health care, economic empowerment, criminal justice and civic engagement.

"As we move forward, our greatest challenge really is to hone our message to make it relevant," said Brock, who joined the NAACP as a freshman in college. "We have to recognize and to own that we can't be all things to all people, and that there are new players in the space that we operate in who may be able to do some things better than we can."

Brock and Jealous, who was named president two years ago, are tasked with finding a way to reignite what they call the association's "front-line" activism. Jealous said both see their mission as no less pressing than the struggles faced by African Americans in other eras.

"We are the so-called children of the dream," Jealous said. "We were told that everything was fair and all we had to do was work hard. That worked well for many of us, but all of us realize that we are a part of a generation that is both the most murdered in the country and the most incarcerated on the planet."

Both Brock and Jealous said they want to see the NAACP catch up with technological advancements in social activism. Smaller, younger groups have built robust online activism networks. Jealous began last year to increase the NAACP's online presence, with live streaming of video and online campaigns in support of health-care reform and other issues.

"The jury is still out on the relevance of the NAACP, but this is definitely a step in the right direction," said Andra Gillespie, a professor of political science at Emory University. "The biggest structural challenge [facing the NAACP] is in an era where there is codified equality and you have a black president, you have to figure out what a civil rights agenda looks like. No one has figured that out."

Although it had been a force in winning major civil rights battles for decades, the NAACP has been criticized in recent years for not remaining relevant. The average age of its 64-member board of directors is 58.

But the NAACP is fiscally solid and has proved its staying power, having recovered from crippling scandals and layoffs in the 1990s. It is increasing its staff and raising money, Bond said.

Brock immediately takes over the chairmanship from Bond, who is a supporter of both Jealous and Brock. Bond had announced he would step down after the association's centennial celebration, ending a 12-year run. He has been the modern face of the organization and will continue helping the NAACP raise money.

Brock, who lives in Elkridge and is director of advocacy at Bon Secours Health System, has served as vice chair since 2001, and was the first woman to hold that position. She had been groomed for the top position by NAACP elders -- including Bond and former chairman Myrlie Evers-Williams.

"You must nurture your leaders for tomorrow and at some point let them move forward," said Evers-Williams, widow of slain NAACP leader Medgar Evers. "I just don't want to now see those of us who have been the foundation dismissed as though we didn't exist."

Former boy soldier, youngest Guantanamo detainee, heads toward military tribunal

2010-02-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Omar Khadr, the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was 15 when he allegedly threw a grenade that killed a U.S. Special Forces medic in Afghanistan. Now, more than seven years later, Khadr is drawing the Obama administration into a fierce debate over the propriety of putting a child soldier on trial.

The struggle against al-Qaeda has thrown up few detainees with as baleful and unlikely a background as Khadr's -- a father who moved his family to Afghanistan and inside Osama bin Laden's circle of intimates when Omar was 10; a mother and sister who said the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were deserved; and a brother, the black sheep of the clan, who said he became a CIA asset after his capture in Afghanistan.

This background has convinced U.N. officials, human rights advocates and defense lawyers that Khadr, a Canadian citizen, was an indoctrinated child soldier and, in line with international practice in other conflicts, should be rehabilitated, not prosecuted.

"The U.N. position is that children should not be prosecuted for war crimes," said Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. special representative for children and armed conflict, after meeting administration officials in October.

But U.S. government officials said they expect to go to trial at Guantanamo Bay in July and will put Khadr before a jury of military officers on multiple war crimes charges, including murder. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has said that the Khadr prosecution is one of six detainee cases assigned to a military commission rather than federal court.

Holder's decision initially drew little notice amid the clamor that followed the simultaneous announcement that Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other alleged conspirators in the Sept. 11 attacks would be tried in New York.

But the Khadr case could prove to be another lightning rod in the debate over the administration's detention and prosecution decisions, sparking the kind of international scrutiny that few other military tribunals will generate.

Khadr's fate seems increasingly certain. Last month, Canada's Supreme Court ruled unanimously that it would not compel the Canadian government to seek his repatriation, as it had been previously ordered to do. Now, Khadr's case will probably be the first full military commission trial under President Obama.

Grenades from the rubble

On July 27, 2002, U.S. Special Forces working with Afghan troops surrounded a compound in a village in eastern Afghanistan. When those inside refused to surrender -- and opened fire, killing two Afghan soldiers -- Apache attack helicopters, A-10 Warthog fighter jets and, finally, two F-18 jets unleashed their arsenals, reducing the hideout to rubble.

When the dust settled, American forces approached the ruined compound, only to be blasted by a grenade thrown by someone inside. Delta Force 1st Sgt. Christopher Speer, a father of two, would die more than a week later at a military hospital in Germany. Another Special Forces soldier, Sgt. Layne Morris, was blinded in one eye by another grenade.

Inside the compound was one survivor, Khadr, who had been shot twice in the chest.

Military prosecutors, who charge that Khadr threw the deadly grenade, said the Canadian's age does not excuse his actions. They note that a military judge in 2008 rejected a defense motion that the commissions did not have jurisdiction over the crimes of a child soldier.

"His age, family background, the culture he grew up in are all going to be part of a trial, and they are all going to be factors that the members can consider," said Navy Capt. John F. Murphy, the chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, referring to the military term for jurors. "We're not hiding from the fact that he was 15 years old. . . . Even in our traditional court system, we try 15-years-olds, and we try them as adults."

There is no strict international prohibition against prosecuting child soldiers, but there is a general consensus on the issue. The U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, for example -- which was set up to try people accused of grave human rights violations -- allowed the prosecution of people 15 and older, but no minors were put on trial.

"I could have prosecuted anyone under the age of 18 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but I chose not to," said David M. Crane, the former chief prosecutor for the Sierra Leone court and a law professor at Syracuse University. "I didn't think any person under that age had the requisite mens rea, the evil-thinking mind, to commit a war crime. It's a rare thing, almost unheard of, that we prosecute children."

But Michael A. Newton, a former State Department official who helped set up the Sierra Leone court, said Crane's exercise of prosecutorial discretion carries no weight in other legal settings.

"The key issue is: Does international law prohibit the prosecution of people below the age of 18? And the answer is no," said Newton, a professor of law at Vanderbilt University. "It's disfavored but not prohibited. Remedial training and rehabilitation is the norm. Prosecution is the exception, but prosecution is not prohibited."

Murphy also pointed out "a historic basis to charging minors and prosecuting them in commissions." He noted that the United States and Britain prosecuted Nazi minors in military tribunals after World War II, and that some were imprisoned.

American attorneys for Khadr, now 23, said they will continue to press the argument that their client, as an alleged juvenile offender, should not be tried in a military tribunal.

"Omar Khadr is not in Afghanistan but for his father," said Kobie Flowers, one of Khadr's attorneys. "He conscripted the boy -- and what choice did Omar have?"

Living with al-Qaeda

Khadr's father, Ahmed Said Khadr, immigrated to Canada from Egypt as a young man, and his mother, Maha Elsamnah, a Palestinian raised in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, moved to Canada with her family when she was 17. Drawn first to the anti-Soviet jihad, Ahmed Said and his kin shuttled back and forth between Canada and Pakistan, where the family patriarch worked for an Islamic charity. In 1995, the father was detained in connection with a bomb attack on the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, but the charges were eventually dropped.

The following year, Omar Khadr moved to Afghanistan, and he and his family briefly lived inside bin Laden's compound outside Jalalabad and were frequent visitors to another, outside Kandahar. Khadr's older brothers attended al-Qaeda training camps, according to Canadian reports.

The family was in Kabul when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, and fled into Pakistan. But the father sent Khadr back into Afghanistan with an al-Qaeda operative, Abu Laith al-Libi. The Pentagon alleges that Khadr received military training and, just before his capture, joined an al-Qaeda unit making improvised explosive devices to attack U.S. forces.

Khadr's father remained in Pakistan, where he was killed in a shootout with Pakistani forces in October 2003. One of his sons, Kareem, was shot and paralyzed in the firefight. Another son, Abdurahman, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that he cooperated with the CIA after his capture in Afghanistan and was inserted into the prison at Guantanamo Bay to gather intelligence. He said he eventually broke off the relationship with the agency after it sent him to Bosnia, where he was supposed to infiltrate extremist groups. The CIA declined to comment.

Omar's mother, while still in Pakistan, outraged the Canadian public and dismayed Khadr's attorneys when she said of the Sept. 11 attacks in a CBC documentary: "Let them have it." Added his sister, Zaynab, only her eyes visible behind a black head cover, "You don't want to feel happy, but you just sort of think, well, they deserve it."

The Canadian government has shown little interest in getting Khadr back, and antipathy in Ottawa is driven in significant part because of public disdain for his family. They are known by some as "Canada's first family of terrorism."

Questions of evidence

Defense lawyers said Holder's assignment of the Khadr case to the military illustrates the Obama administration's acceptance of a two-tier system of justice in which flawed evidence that would be disallowed in federal court can be admitted in a tribunal.

The government defends its decision.

"The forum decision in the Khadr case was made after a careful assessment of all the factors identified" in a protocol developed by the Justice and Defense departments, said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. "Although we cannot discuss how all the protocol factors were applied to the Khadr case or other specific cases, we note that this case involves a grenade attack on U.S. soldiers in a war zone, that the defendant was apprehended in a war zone in the context of active hostilities, and that the case was initially investigated and evidence gathered by military personnel."

Flowers, Khadr's attorney, said government lawyers indicated at a meeting in early November that they would introduce statements in a military commission that they would not use if the case went to federal court. A Pentagon spokeswoman declined to discuss any meeting with the defense.

Khadr's attorneys said the government's case is riddled with problems.

They said that their client was tortured in military custody and that all statements, even if given later and seemingly voluntarily to FBI agents, are contaminated by the alleged earlier abuse, which, they said, included threats of rape, stress positions and the use of snarling dogs.

Flowers also challenged the government's contention that Khadr threw the grenade that killed Speer. "The evidence," he said, "is extremely problematic."

But soldiers involved in the firefight that led to Speer's death and Khadr's capture have no such doubts. Morris, the blinded Special Forces soldier, who lives in Utah, said Khadr should remain in U.S. custody.

"Mr. Khadr is where he needs to be, and he needs to stay there for a long time," Morris said.

Scientists Find Gene That Makes People Brown or White

2010-02-03T19:45:00.000-08:00

Newly Found Gene First Located in Fish Sheds Light on Complex Trait of Skin Color

Good Morning America
By AMANDA ONION
Dec. 14, 2005

In a discovery that begins to shed light on what makes one person brown and another white, scientists have identified a gene that appears to be a key player in human pigmentation.

People share 99.9 percent of the same genes, yet pinpointing the very minor genetic variations that cause skin-color differences long has been a mystery to scientists. This discovery, published in the journal Science, marks a significant step toward understanding what's behind the panoply of human skin tones.

"The gene we found seems to modulate the number, size and density of cellular packets that contain brown pigment," said Keith Cheng, a geneticist at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, Pa.

Cheng's team found that people with the normal form of the gene SLC24A5 had brown skin, while fair people of European descent carried a modified form of the gene that led to having fewer and smaller pigment packets, known as melanosomes.

Skin-Tone Genes May Help in Understanding Obesity, Blood Pressure
Understanding what causes differences in skin color may seem like a straightforward task, but in fact it's much more complex than understanding variations such as eye color. This is because skin pigmentation is a continuous trait -- people aren't simply brown or white, but many shades in between.

Finding the genes behind skin variations could help scientists find new cures for skin cancers and possibly even identify safer ways of tanning than lying in the sun, but more importantly it might help in understanding other critical health conditions. Health factors such as blood pressure, obesity and dementia are all considered to be continuous traits and may be caused by a similar concert of genes.

"Something like gestational diabetes -- it's not whether you have it or not -- it's how serious it is," explained Gregory Barsh, a geneticist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, Calif. "Part of understanding pigmentation is understanding how genes interact to create a trait. Pigmentation is one trait where we can begin to understand how this works."

The Hunt: From Fish to People
Cheng and his colleagues stumbled upon SLC24A5 by accident -- while searching for a cancer-causing gene within a common aquarium pet, the zebrafish.

The researchers were looking at the genetics of different versions of the fish to locate genes possibly involved in cancer. It turns out people and zebrafish share many genes, including those that code for pigment. Cheng's team found that a kind of zebrafish called "golden" had fewer, smaller, and less heavily pigmented melanosomes than normal fish. This suggested the same gene may be at play among golden zebrafish and fair-skinned people.

To locate a similar gene in people, Cheng turned to colleague Mark Shriver of Pennsylvania State University to scout through new resource the HapMap. This free database lists genetic variations in the human genome as they're discovered. Shriver zeroed in on SLC24A5 when he found that the same slight variation in the gene was carried by fair people in European populations.

While this gene may cause skin-color differences between West Africans and Europeans, it doesn't seem to play a role in determining the fairer skin tones of Asian people. Cheng, who is ethnic Chinese, says he's now scouting for that gene.

"I have a personal interest," he said, since it would explain his own skin color.

'Race Is Not Skin Color'
Shriver argues that because this newly found gene doesn't explain Asians' fairer skin color, there is a lot yet to learn about skin-color genetics.

"The fact that Europeans and East Asians are similar [in] skin color for different reasons tells us that we still don't know much," he said. "There are more genes to locate."

Finding a gene behind skin pigmentation may be a big step in science, but researchers caution it has no implications for understanding race. Skin color may lie near the root of much controversy and unrest -- such as the recent violence in Sydney, Australia, where white youths attacked people they believed to be of Middle Eastern descent. Still, Barsh of Stanford cautions this work is just about deciphering pigmentation.

"Skin color is not race," Barsh said. "Race is a much more complicated concept that involves culture, religion and where your parents are from. It's an important part of society, but it's not about pigment alone."

Join the Army, Kill Brown People & Kill Yourself

2010-02-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

By DON EMMERICH
Conspiracy Planet
Jan 18 2010

(January 18, 2010) With 160 active-duty soldiers killing themselves last year, the US Army set a new record for suicides.

As Jason Ditz reports, "This surpassed the previous record of 140 in 2008, and the previous record before that was 115 in 2007. The Army has been keeping track of suicides since 1980, with the level suddenly rising to epidemic levels in recent years."

First released by the AP on Friday, this story has been almost completely ignored by the mainstream media. Part of the reason, I imagine, is that it was a fairly busy news weekend, what with the president throwing a surprise birthday party for the first lady and all. But I suspect there's more to it than that. I suspect part of the reason is that the MSM (and I include Fox News here) realizes that people just don't want to hear it.

The American people, those loveable idiots who drive around with Support Our Troops ribbons on the backs of their cars, just don't want to hear bad things about our troops.

NAACP: 'We Will Stop All-White Basketball Team'

2010-01-24T13:41:00.000-08:00

Tough Questions For League Founder

CBSAtlanta.com
Jan 22 and 23 2010

ATLANTA -- An Atlanta man plans to start a professional basketball league for only white players and white coaches.

NBA great Charles Barkley has never been one to hold his tongue. He had a lot to say about the proposed All-American Basketball Alliance for whites only.

"It's just blatantly racist because if you look at the cold words he used, trying to say we're carrying guns, fighting people in the stands, things like that," Barkley said.

Don "Moose" Lewis is the man behind the AABA.

Lewis said he's not a racist, he's a sports promoter.

"I think Charles is a great character, he's amazing and what he says, and he's a little off the wall too, but he has his opinion," said Lewis.

Lewis' background is in boxing. He even tried to start a conventional minor basketball league in the past that failed.

CBS Atlanta asked Lewis if the league is racist.

"No," replied Lewis.

Lewis said white players are being shut out of the NBA.

In order to play in the AABA league, players must be born in America, both parents must be white and the players must keep their tattoos to a minimum.

Lewis said, "It's not going to be the street-type ball mentality and show, it's going to be different."

Sir Charles said he isn't buying it.

"It lets you know, as a black man, there are people out there who don't like you," said Barkley.

Lewis said you don't have to be white to own a team in the AABA, but you do have to be white to play and to coach.

The NAACP in Atlanta is vowing to do all it can to stop the all-white basketball team.

The group says it's a major step backwards in the fight for civil rights and it may take legal action.

"My general reaction is it’s ridiculous,” said Rev. R.L. White, president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP.

Ridiculous maybe, but White admits he is worried. He fears a plan to form an all-white pro basketball league may set off racial tensions.

“We're going to be watching this very closely because it attempts to set back what we've been trying to do for 100 years,” said White.

Lewis says he's not a racist, but believes white basketball players don't have the natural talent that blacks do. He said his new league will allow teams to be more evenly matched.

“If it quack likes a duck, walks like a duck, looks like a duck, it probably is a duck. If he is not racist, he's appealing to racist tendencies in others,” said White.

Lewis admits he is looking for publicity and has drawn a lot of attention in the last 24 hours or so. But he's serious about the new league, one he says middle white America can relate to.

“If we can do anything to stop it, we will,” said White.

Copyright 2010 by cbsatlanta.com. All rights reserved.

Saudi Arabia: Rape victim now faces 100 lashes for the "crime" of being raped

2010-01-23T16:10:00.000-08:00

Jihad Watch
Jan 23, 2010

Recently someone forwarded me a pseudo-scholarly piece by a smooth Islamic apologist purporting to prove that I was wrong, wrong, wrong (and therefore evil as well, of course) about Islamic rules of evidence for crimes of zina (adultery, fornication, and other sexual offenses), and claiming that rape victims in the Islamic world are never punished for being raped. The slick liar who penned that piece ought to get 100 lashes instead of "Camille" for his obfuscation and enabling of this kind of torture of women.

An OFW is an Overseas Filipino Worker.

"Gov't urged to aid raped OFW in Saudi," from abs-cbnNEWS.com, January 21 (thanks to Jen):

MANILA, Philippines -An alliance of Filipino migrant organizations on Thursday blamed the government for its alleged inaction on the case of an OFW who was a victim of rape in Dammam, Saudi Arabia.

In a press statement, Migrante International said the OFW's family fears that Saudi authorities would soon carry out the 100 lashes penalty before releasing Camille (not her real name).

Camille got pregnant as a result of the rape. However, she lost the baby on her fourth month of pregnancy.

The group learned from Camille's relatives that the OFW had a miscarriage last December 2009 while detained at the Hafer Al Baten jail....

The Filipina was working as a janitress at a dental clinic for about 3 months when she was attacked by a co-worker, a Bangladeshi national only identified as a certain Mr. Mammon, last year.

Out of fear of the suspect, the victim decided to remain silent. She only revealed her ordeal when she found out she was pregnant....

Posted by Robert on January 22, 2010

Black Woman, White Skin

2010-01-21T17:19:00.000-08:00

Her parents were black, but she looks white. Kenosha Robinson on trying to figure out where she fits in.

By Casey Parks

Growing up in Jackson, MS, I gravitated toward white people. It felt natural, I suppose, because I looked like them. While my cousins got black baby dolls for Christmas, mine were always peaches and cream. Once, during playtime in elementary school, one of the black girls told me I couldn't join her group. My doll, she said, was the wrong color.

Later, I understood what she meant was that I was the wrong color. Like my doll, I was blonde and green-eyed-the only one in a mass of brown skin. I am African-American, born with a genetic abnormality called albinism, meaning I've got little to no pigment in my skin. Albinism is a recessive trait, so both parents must carry the gene in order to conceive a child with it. It's more common than you'd think-one in 17,000 children is born with albinism.

My mom was only 16 when I was born. She did her best to protect me, but I knew early on that I was different. Everywhere we went-the mall, the grocery store-people stared at me. You could see the question on their faces: "Is she really yours?"

My dad died from pneumonia when I was 7. Mostly what I remember about him is the way he stood up for me. One day I asked him, "Why do people always look at me?" He said, "It's because you're so beautiful."

But some of my extended family were less charitable. Most of my relatives are from the Mississippi Delta, where blacks and whites still live separately. The notion of forming a friendship with a white person is foreign to my relatives, so how were they supposed to treat me? The only way, it seemed, was by singling me out and teasing me. "White girl!" they'd call me. I felt like I was a betrayal to my race.

My mom had more practical fears, like whether I'd get sun damage if she let me go outside. The complete absence of melanin in my skin means I don't tan-I just burn, baby, burn. Any time I went to a family reunion or church picnic, she'd slather me with sunscreen and make me wear a hat. During recess, I had to sit in the shade. When I was in fourth grade, my mom wrote a note to excuse me from field day, but I didn't give it to my teacher. Instead, I played all day under the hot sun. When I got in the car after school, my mother noticed that my face was red. I tried to lie my way through it, but my face kept getting redder, and my body started blistering. I didn't go to school for a week because I was so sick.

My health issues pretty much guaranteed I'd never be one of the cool kids. I hated having to wear a hat. And more than anything, I hated the questions I got about my eyes. When someone is born with albinism, they are usually declared legally blind. Though I can see, I have nystagmus, which causes my eyes to shift rapidly from side to side in order to find a focal point. Whenever I meet someone new, I count the minutes before they ask, "What's wrong with your eyes?"

But health issues can't compare with the struggles I've faced with my self-esteem. As a teenager, while classmates were griping about acne and getting their periods, I was facing a different kind of crisis: Who was I? Was I a white girl with black parents? Or a black girl living inside a white girl's body?

Mississippi, of course, has a tense racial past. Though the KKK is no longer in full force, white supremacist Jim Giles ran for Congress with a vocal (if unsuccessful) anti-black campaign in 2004 and 2006. Blacks and whites rarely mix. In a weird way, I felt I was the uncomfortable meeting point between these two groups. In high school, I earned the respect of my white friends for my smarts and quick wit. They elected me class president. But they also excluded me socially. When I'd ask, "What are you doing this weekend?" they'd brush me off, coming up with some bogus errand they had to do. Other times, they were openly rude, making plans for weekend get-togethers in front of me-but never actually inviting me along. My black friends were similarly respectful at school, while shying away from me at the skating rink or the mall, especially when boys came along.

As for the prom, forget it. That was a nightmare waiting to happen. A black guy might take a white girl to the prom, but taking the black girl who looked white was another story. One day in class, the cool black guys asked me who was taking me. I said, with shaky confidence, that I was going alone. I heard one of them snicker, "That's because no one's gonna take her!" In the end, I stayed home. Looking back, I can't believe I was too intimidated to go to my prom.

At a certain point, it occurred to me that I needed to "pick" my race-life would be easier if I aligned myself with a side, rather than constantly explaining myself to both. I chose the blacks. We share a heritage, and in Mississippi, there is real pride within the black community. Still, I felt the need to prove my "blackness." I started speaking slang. I began listening to rap. I thought knowing the words to songs about gold teeth, money, women, and cars would make me sufficiently ghetto.

Despite my efforts, I was still mistaken for a white girl. So I established myself with an entirely different group-the class clowns. I ridiculed myself as a way of pre-empting comments from others, joking about "not being too white to whup your butt!" Other times, I kidded about being just white enough to "claim kidnapping" if my black friends and I ever got pulled over for speeding. But underneath, it was the same old story: I was actually afraid to look at myself in the mirror.

When it came time to choose a college, I considered attending a predominantly black university. "That's what I am," I told my mom. But she was hesitant, and in the end, so was I. Instead, I chose Millsaps, a mostly white, liberal-arts college in Jackson, where I'm now a junior. Here, in the cafeteria, racial segregation lives on: Blacks and whites almost never eat at the same table. A few months ago, some black students showed up at a white fraternity party. They were turned away and told that they were a bunch of . . . well, you can imagine what they were called. Even though no one would ever call me those names, I was still furious. My loyalty is to the black community. I will never set foot in that frat house again.

It was then that I started reclaiming my identity through weave-a traditional African hairstyle. I change it once a week, creating a new identity with each look. It gives me satisfaction to know that while I cannot alter my skin color, my hair is mine to play with.

My self-esteem is a work in progress. Sometimes, I'll be talking with a black friend, then look down at my skin and feel totally exposed, like, "I'm white and everyone can see it." But I'm becoming stronger and learning it's OK to just be Nosha, all 150 pounds of smile and laughter that I am. Still, seeing girls with beautiful caramel or chocolate skin sparks envy in me.

The last boyfriend I had made me feel special-in a good way-about my albinism. The uniqueness drove him crazy, and that gave me a lot of confidence. The man I marry will have to be intrigued, too. I probably want to marry a black man-even though I know it will be strange to have children who are a different color than I am-and I'd want him to be tested for the gene. Although I'm happy with who I am today, I wouldn't wish what I've gone through on anyone.