The 270 Times

It was reporteded in the Star Tribune, by Paul Walsh, that three small-town eighth-graders in Minnesota were suspended by their principal for not standing Thursday morning for the Pledge of Allegiance, violating a district policy that the principal now says may soon be reworded to protect free speech rights.

“My son wasn’t being defiant against America,” said Kim Dahl, mother of one of the students, Brandt, who attends Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton Junior High School in northwestern Minnesota. (Read the rest of the story).

Brandt told the Forum newspaper in Fargo that Thursday’s one-day in-school suspension, “was kind of dumb because I didn’t do anything wrong. It should be the people’s choice.”

Kim Dahl said the “punishment didn’t fit the crime. If they wanted to know why he didn’t stand, they should’ve made him write a paper.” She said her son has been declining to stand all school year, offered no reason for sitting and was not obligated to explain his actions.

The school’s handbook says all students are required to stand but are not required to recite the pledge. The same is true for all four schools in the district, a school official said.

“These three [students] didn’t, and they got caught,” said Mel Olson, the district’s community education director. He said he backs the punishment, “being a veteran and a United States of America citizen, absolutely.” Olson served in the Marines in Japan during the Vietnam War.

The head of the Minnesota American Civil Liberties Union said that the school’s actions against the students are unconstitutional, and his office informed the district of that today in a strongly worded letter.

“The school can’t do that; that’s illegal,” said Chuck Samuelson, the civil liberties group’s executive director. “Wow.”

Samuelson said that numerous U.S. Supreme Court rulings dating to the 1940s say in “well-settled constitutional law” that “students who refuse to participate in the pledge cannot be punished for refusing to participate.”

Samuelson said he’s surprised that any public school district would have such a pledge requirement, given that state law allows for students and teachers to decide not to participate. Most states have the same “opt-out” provision.

In St. Paul, said district spokesman Howie Padilla, “Students can respectfully not participate in the Pledge of Allegiance.” Minneapolis schools treat pledge participation the same way.

Colleen Houglum, the principal who suspended the three, acknowledged in a statement late this morning that the policy requirement that ” ‘all students will stand’ may need to be modified to address the protection of the individual’s form of expression.”

Kim Dahl said Houglum called her this morning and informed her of the possible accommodation. “I think they are handling it quite professionally,” Kim Dahl said, adding that Houglum told her that school officials “are taking some steps to take the [suspensions] off their records.”

That possible shift was met with disappointment from Olson. While he said he’ll fall in line with whatever change may occur, “I still have my beliefs.”

Earlier today, Olson said that a “very nice announcement” was made at the start of the junior high school day reminding the students that they must stand for the pledge.

Houglum said that all students this morning were “involved in some fashion” during the pledge, adding that no additional suspensions were needed.
However, the family of 14-year-old Bishop Edens told the Forum that he was suspended from school today (Friday) because he wouldn’t stand for the pledge, but he was quickly invited back once Houglum said a policy change might be needed. Edens had said Thursday that he would sit in support of the other three.

“Our social studies teacher led the pledge, and that was kind of a nice change of pace,” Houglum said.

Kim Dahl asked Brandt why he has been remained seated all school year, but “he didn’t have an answer … he doesn’t get in trouble; he’s just a normal 13-year-old.”

As for today, she told Brandt to take his cell phone with him to school and text her should he run into trouble again. “I said you should probably just stand if you’re not protesting something.”

They were all young men of college age who disappeared, usually after a night in the bars, and were later found dead in rivers and lakes.

In 40 cases over the last decade, police in several states in America’s mid-west and north-east concluded that the victims had drowned, often after student drinking binges.

But two retired New York police detectives last week went public with a startling and macabre alternative explanation for the series of apparent drownings. They say that they have evidence that a gang of serial killers is responsible for the deaths. (Read the rest of the story).

More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week while the government stalls in granting returning troops the mental health treatment and benefits to which they are entitled, veterans advocates told a federal judge Monday in San Francisco.

The rights of hundreds of thousands of veterans are being violated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, “an agency that is in denial,” and by a government health care system and appeals process for patients that is “broken down,” Gordon Erspamer, lawyer for two advocacy groups, said in an opening statement at the trial of a nationwide lawsuit.

He said veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day - a number acknowledged by a VA official in a Dec. 15 e-mail - and the agency’s backlog of disability claims now exceeds 650,000, an increase of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003.

Justice Department lawyer Richard Lepley countered that the VA runs a “world-class health care system.” He said the changes the plaintiffs seek in their lawsuit - better and faster mental health care, and more rights for veterans appealing denials of benefits - are beyond the judge’s authority.

“Of course we’re obliged to provide health care,” Lepley said, but “the court does not have standards to determine the speed or the scope or the level of that care.”

U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti is presiding over the nonjury trial, scheduled to last two weeks. Conti, a conservative jurist and World War II veteran appointed to the bench by President Richard Nixon, ruled in January that the case could go to trial. In doing so, he rejected the government’s argument that civil courts have no authority over the VA’s medical decisions or how it handles grievances.

If the advocates can prove their claims, Conti said in his ruling, they would show that “thousands of veterans, if not more, are suffering grievous injuries as the result of their inability to procure desperately needed and obviously deserved health care.”

He also ruled that veterans are legally entitled to five years of government-provided health care after leaving the service, despite federal officials’ argument that they are required to provide only as much care as the VA’s budget allows in a given year.

But at a later hearing, Conti indicated he was uncertain about his authority to require spending on particular types of health care. The lawsuit plaintiffs - Veterans for Common Sense in Washington, D.C., , which claims 11,500 members, and Veterans United for Truth, a Santa Barbara group with 500 members - want him to order the VA to provide immediate treatment for suicidal veterans and prompt care for those suffering from post-traumatic stress.

The trial follows publication of a Rand Corp. study last week that estimated 300,000 U.S. troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, or 18.5 percent of the total, suffered from major depression or post-traumatic stress.

The lawsuit is a proposed class action on behalf of 320,000 to 800,000 veterans or their survivors. The advocacy groups say the VA arbitrarily denies care and benefits to wounded veterans, forces them to wait months for treatment and years for benefits, and gives them little recourse when it rejects their medical claims.

“The time delays are staggering,” Erspamer, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, told Conti on Monday. Although the VA says it decides the typical claim for benefits in six months, he said, the agency takes far longer to review post-traumatic stress claims, and four years or more for the government to hear veterans’ appeals of denied treatment.

Veterans who seek benefits within the VA’s grievance system have no right to a lawyer and no right to demand records or question opposing witnesses, Erspamer said. The plaintiffs want Conti to grant those rights and to require the agency to set a timetable for deciding claims.

Lepley, the government’s lawyer, said the VA has undertaken a “huge staff increase” - 20 percent in mental health, 25 percent in claims-processing - and now provides one mental health staff member around the clock at every VA center, as well as a suicide-prevention hot line.

For those who do not need immediate care, he said, the agency has a policy of scheduling a mental health appointment within two weeks, and has reached that goal at 80 percent of its facilities.

“These kinds of medical decisions are not something that this court can inject itself into,” Lepley said. He referred to the plaintiffs as “single-interest groups” and said the legal rights they seek in the VA benefit system, such as the involvement of lawyers, are “not in the patients’ interest.”

Reprinted with permission by Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, April 21, 2008

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

by and with permission from Nima R. Taylor Binara

SF Chronicle, April 8, 2008

As a Tibetan, it is bittersweet to see Tibet on the front pages. The world is finally seeing Beijing’s repressive rule there, but the tragedy is that it has required such bloodshed. As Chinese forces now attempt to crush the protests, the crisis in Tibet has laid bare two important issues: the Tibetan people’s unresolved demands, and how these aspirations impact Tibet, the world and China itself.

For more than 50 years, Tibet has been a land of simmering resentment. Tibetans have various grievances, but the common thread is that Tibetans want what all nations want: to control their own lives, society and religion. Tibetans are not simply protesting specific policies; they are demanding their right to self-determination. It is no coincidence that in many protests, Tibetans are attacking symbols of state power, ripping down the Chinese flag and replacing it with the banned Tibetan one.

Unlike the demonstrations in the 1980s, the protests have spread far beyond the capital, Lhasa, to towns and villages across Tibet. Tibetan exiles are staging sympathy protests worldwide, including when Beijing’s Olympic torch comes through San Francisco today. These actions feed off one another, thanks to the Internet, digital cameras, cell phones and shortwave radio. This unity among Tibetans inside and outside Tibet represents a far stronger challenge to Chinese rule than before, and will give Tibetans renewed inspiration regardless of whether the protests in Tibet are temporarily suppressed.

For the international community, it is now impossible to accept Beijing’s narrative that Tibetans are happy as part of China. The economic growth that Beijing touts in Tibet is exposed as a synonym for Chinese colonization. The world now sees that, like East Timor and other former colonies, the Tibetan people’s demand for freedom may be temporarily repressed but is destined to boil over. The only question is whether the world will do anything to support these legitimate aspirations.

China’s self-absorbed myth that it “liberated” grateful Tibetans has also been shattered; its central narrative justifying Tibet’s place in its empire has vanished. Its policy of “Sinicizing” Tibet through immigration of Chinese settlers and vilifying His Holiness the Dalai Lama is just adding fuel to the fire. For the first time, Beijing has actually admitted that the Tibetan protests are widespread and conducted on a large scale.

Beijing has now resorted to a new propaganda tactic, casting Tibetans as violent criminals and Chinese as victims. This is largely because Beijing needed a domestic response to images seeping into China of Chinese forces attacking Tibetan protesters. State-controlled media are now broadcasting images of Tibetans attacking Chinese settlers; ignoring, of course, that the demonstrations in Lhasa were peaceful for days, and that most other Tibetan protests have been wholly nonviolent (the same cannot be said for Chinese forces, who used live ammunition against unarmed Tibetan protesters. The result of China’s new propaganda strategy has been to create an “us versus them” backlash among many Chinese vis-À-vis Tibetans. This is a reckless and potentially dangerous incitement of Chinese nationalism, but also has the effect of changing Chinese perceptions of Tibet. Tibetans are no longer portrayed as colorful if slightly backward “minorities.” Tibetans are now ungrateful colonial subjects in open rebellion. This is significant, because recognition of the difference between Tibetans and Chinese is the first step to recognition that Tibet is not China.

Looking forward, as with many colonized nations, there comes a tipping point when a sufficient number of people rise up and say “enough.” That point has been reached in Tibet. Ngawang Sangdrol, a Tibetan nun who became a political prisoner at age 12, once declared, “There is fire inside our bodies, but we dare not let the smoke out.” Now, the smoke has escaped, and for Tibetans in Tibet and across the Tibetan diaspora, there is a renewed push for freedom. And China? China will resist losing its colony, but then so did France with Algeria, Serbia with Kosovo, and Imperial Japan with Manchukuo.

The magnitude and vociferousness of the protests across Tibet demonstrate that Beijing cannot forever contain Tibetan demands for self-rule. Trying to do so only leads to instability. Through their courage and resilience in the face of a half-century of military occupation and religious and cultural oppression, Tibetans have made it abundantly clear that they want more than ever to determine their own future. The world should stand by their side.

Nima R. Taylor Binara is a member of the board of directors of Tibet Justice Center, a not-for-profit organization based in Berkeley that advocates the Tibetan people’s right to self-determination. www.tibetjustice.org.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/09/EDE11024F5.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The global procession of the Olympic flame – a symbol of sporting values hijacked as a symbol of Chinese state pride – stumbled into abject political embarrassment for Beijing and Western governments yesterday.

The day after determined protests in London, a 17-mile torch relay through Paris dissolved into chaos, farce and, finally, cancellation. The torch, although not the master flame, was extinguished at least four times as an elaborate security screen failed to fend off pro-Tibet and human rights demonstrators.

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Three demonstrators scaled cables near the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge today and unfurled banners intended to draw attention to Chinese human rights violations in Tibet.

The protest by Students for a Free Tibet came the day before the Olympic Torch is to arrive in San Francisco for its only North American stop before this summer’s games in Beijing.

The protesters, two men and a woman, scaled the cables around 10:30 a.m., and unfurled two banners around 11:20 a.m. One banner read, “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 08,” a play on the official slogan of this year’s Olympic Games, “One World, One Dream.” The other read simply, “Free Tibet.” (See Video from CNN.)

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Reprinted with permission: By David Usborne in New York
Tuesday, 1 April 2008

Food stamps are the symbol of poverty in the US. In the era of the credit crunch, a record 28 million Americans are now relying on them to survive – a sure sign the world’s richest country faces economic crisis.

We knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families.

Dismal projections by the Congressional Budget Office in Washington suggest that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will be using government food stamps to buy essential groceries, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.

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In the 2007 calendar year, the City and County of San Francisco had more than 8,000 employees with total pay over $100,000. Find out who they were, what departments they worked for and how much they made by searching the database.

To perform a search, you can leave the fields blank or on “select” if you want broad results. For more narrow results, you can enter a person’s name or select from the drop-down menus.

(Note: This data was provided by the City of San Francisco’s Controller’s Office. The pay categories include regular pay, overtime and “other pay,” which can include compensation for special working conditions or one-time pay-outs of unused vacation and sick leave to employees leaving the city. Since it provides both city and county services, San Francisco is not directly comparable with other Bay Area cities.)