Cops could face death in post-Katrina shootings

Enjoy Cops could face death in post-Katrina shootings

NEW ORLEANS – Four police officers are accused of gunning down two unarmed people in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the latest twist for a corruption-plagued police department that already faces several federal investigations.
The four officers could face the death penalty. They were charged along with two others in a 27-count indictment unsealed Tuesday. Five former New Orleans police officers already have pleaded guilty to helping cover up the shootings on the Danziger Bridge that left two men dead and four wounded just days after the August 2005 hurricane. In one instance, a mentally disabled man was shot in the back and stomped before he died.
Prosecutors say officers fabricated witness statements, falsified reports and planted a gun in an attempt to make it appear the shootings were justified. It was a shocking example of the violence and confusion that followed the storm.
The case is one of several probes of alleged misconduct by New Orleans police officers that the Justice Department opened after the August 2005 storm. Last month, five current or former officers were charged in the shooting death of 31-year-old Henry Glover, whose burned body turned up after Katrina.
With 80 percent of New Orleans underwater, officers from a department with a history of corruption were forced to battle rampant crime, and some became criminals themselves. Dozens of officers were fired or suspended for abandoning their post.
The latest indictments have come shortly after the city's new mayor replaced its former police chief and invited a Justice Department team to overhaul the police department.
Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department is working with city officials to restore residents' trust in the police department.
"Put simply, we will not tolerate wrongdoing by those who are sworn to protect the public," Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday in New Orleans.

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9 killed, 10 missing as typhoon lashes Philippines

The fist typhoon 9 killed, 10 missing as typhoon lashes Philippines

MANILA, Philippines – The first typhoon to lash the Philippines this year killed at least nine people and left 11 others missing Wednesday after flooding streets in the capital and toppling power lines.
Typhoon Conson slammed into northeast Quezon province with winds of 75 miles (120 kilometers) per hour late Tuesday and weakened into a tropical storm as it crossed rice-growing Luzon Island and buffeted the sprawling capital with strong gusts and heavy rain for about two hours, said weather forecaster Bernie de Leon.
The storm blew out of Manila before dawn Wednesday, leaving downed branches, trees and scattered trash. Winds ripped tarpaulin billboards along the main roads and blew away roofs of coastal shanties.
Workers rushed to fix damaged power lines that left more than half of the main northern island without electricity. The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines said it would take two to three days to normalize the situation, with Manila getting only half its needs and hotels and malls running their own generators.
Conson moved into the South China Sea and was projected to make another landfall on the Chinese mainland west of Macau later this week.
Among the fatalities were a woman and her daughter who were hit by a falling tree in Cavite province's Trece Martires city south of Manila, regional disaster operations officer Fred Bragas said.
Provincial spokesman Filomeno Maligaya told DZBB radio that another child drowned after falling into a raging river.
A 12-year-old girl and her 4-year-old brother also were killed when a large mango tree crashed into their home as they were sleeping in nearby Batangas province, Bragas said. A 47-year-old woman was electrocuted by a power line that snapped at the height of the typhoon, he said.
In coastal Camarines Norte province, southeast of Manila, at least three people were killed, said military spokesman Maj. Harold Cabunoc. He gave no details.
He said that local authorities and civilian volunteers on Wednesday rescued nine of 19 fishermen who had disappeared when big waves churned out by the typhoon overturned their boats off the island province of Catanduanes.
The national disaster council reported that some communities in Manila were flooded by knee-deep waters. Up to 3,100 people were stranded in ports waiting for the weather to clear.
Despite preparations by disaster relief agencies to avoid the repetition of last year's calamity when nearly 1,000 people were killed in typhoon-triggered floods in and around Manila, the newly elected President Benigno Aquino III scolded the weather bureau for failing to predict that the storm would hit the capital.
"I hope this is the last time we are all brought to areas different from where we should be," Aquino told officials during a meeting of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, noting that government agencies were relying on the weather bureau for their preparations.

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Gulf oil to keep flowing while cap is analyzed

We are see this Gulf oil to keep flowing while cap is analyzed

NEW ORLEANS – The plan to start choking off oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico was suddenly halted as government officials and BP said further analysis must be done Wednesday before critical tests could proceed.
No explanation was given for the decision, and no date was set for when testing would begin on the new, tighter-fitting cap BP installed on the blown-out well Monday.
In the meantime, oil continued spewing into the Gulf.
The oil giant had been scheduled to start slowly shutting off valves Tuesday on the cap, aiming to stop the flow of oil for the first time in three months. BP was initially ahead of schedule on its latest effort to plug the leak. The cap was designed to be a temporary fix until the well is plugged underground.
A series of methodical, preliminary steps were completed before progress stalled. Engineers spent hours on a seismic survey, creating a map of the rock under the sea floor to spot potential dangers, like gas pockets. It also provides a baseline to compare with later surveys during and after the test to see if the pressure on the well is causing underground problems.
An unstable area around the wellbore could create bigger problems if the leak continued elsewhere in the well after the cap valves were shut, experts said.
"It's an incredibly big concern," said Don Van Nieuwenhuise, director of Professional Geoscience Programs at the University of Houston. "They need to get a scan of where things are, that way when they do pressure testing, they know to look out for ruptures or changes."
It was unclear whether there was something in the results of the mapping that prompted officials to delay. Earlier, BP Vice President Kent Wells said he hadn't heard what the results were, but he felt "comfortable that they were good."
National Incident Commander Thad Allen met with the federal energy secretary and the head of the U.S. Geological Survey as well as BP officials and other scientists after the mapping was done.
"As a result of these discussions, we decided that the process may benefit from additional analysis," Allen said in a statement. He didn't specify what type of analysis would be done, but said work would continue until Wednesday.
Assuming BP gets the green light to do the cap testing after the extra analysis is finished, engineers need to shut off lines already funneling some oil to ships to see how the cap handles the pressure of the crude coming up from the ground.
Finally, they would shut the openings in the 75-ton metal stack of pipes and valves gradually, one at a time, while watching pressure gauges to see if the cap would hold or if any new leaks erupted. The operation could last anywhere from six to 48 hours, once it gets started.

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French parliament approves ban on face veils

We are see this French parliament approves ban on face veils

PARIS – France's lower house of parliament overwhelmingly approved a ban on wearing burqa-style Islamic veils Tuesday, part of a concerted effort to define and protect French values that has disconcerted many in the country's large Muslim community.
Proponents of the law say face-covering veils don't square with the French ideal of women's equality or its secular tradition. The bill is controversial abroad but popular in France, where its relatively few outspoken critics say conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy has resorted to xenophobia to attract far-right voters.
The ban on burqas and niqabs will go in September to the Senate, where it also is likely to pass. Its biggest hurdle will likely come after that, when France's constitutional watchdog scrutinizes it. Some legal scholars say there is a chance it could be deemed unconstitutional.
Spain and Belgium have similar bans in the works. In France, which has Europe's largest Muslim population, about 5 million of the country's 64 million people are believed to be Muslim. While ordinary headscarves are common in France, only about 1,900 women are believed to wear face-covering veils.
The main body representing French Muslims says such garb is not suitable in France, but it worries that the ban will stigmatize all Muslims.
In Tuesday's vote at the National Assembly, there were 335 votes for the bill and just one against it. Most members of the main opposition group, the Socialist Party, walked out and refused to vote, though they in fact support a ban. They simply have differences over where it should be enforced, underscoring the lack of controversy among French politicians on the issue.
The bill passed Tuesday bans face-covering veils everywhere that can be considered public space, even in the street, but the Socialists only want it in certain places, such as government buildings, hospitals and public transport.
France's government has sought to insist that assimilation is the only path for immigrants and minorities, and last year it launched a grand nationwide debate on what it means to be French. The country has had difficulty integrating generations of immigrants and their children, as witnessed by weeks of rioting by youths, many of them minorities, in troubled neighborhoods in 2005.
At the National Assembly, few dissenters spoke out about civil liberties or fears of fanning anti-Islam sentiment. Before the vote, Greens lawmaker Francois de Rugy said the conservatives "are throwing oil on the fire — you are reviving tensions just to win votes."
Legislator Berengere Poletti, of Sarkozy's party, said face-covering veils "are a prison for women, they are the sign of their submission to their husbands, brothers or fathers."
The niqab and burqa are also seen here as a gateway to extremism and an attack on secularism, a central value of France for more than a century.
Discussions in France have dragged on for more than a year, since Sarkozy declared in June 2009 that the burqa is "not welcome" in France.
There has been some concern the bill could prod terror groups to eye France or its citizens as potential targets. Following Sarkozy's comments, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb issued a statement on Web sites vowing to "seek vengeance against France."

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U.S. First lady Michelle Obama

We saw this U.S. First lady Michelle Obama

U.S. First lady Michelle Obama flashes two thumbs-up to the crowd, as she is introduced by Panama City Beach Mayor Gayle Oberst, on Panama City Beach, Florida July 12, 2010. Obama visited the area to show support for the people and businesses impacted by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

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Obama faces growing credibility crisis

decleration Obama faces growing credibility crisis

Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama’s chief spokesman, got into hot water this week for daring to speak the truth – that the Democrats could lose control of the House of Representatives in November. But it could be even worse than that.

Contrary to pretty much every projection until now, Democratic control of the Senate is also starting to coming into question. While Mr Obama’s approval ratings have continued to fall, and now hover at dangerously close to 40 per cent according an ABC-Washington Post poll published on Tuesday, the fate of his former colleagues in the Senate looks even worse.

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In the past few days polls have shown Republican challengers taking the lead over previously safe Democratic incumbents, such as Barbara Boxer in California and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. Indeed, given the uniformly negative direction in the numbers, it is now quite possible the Republicans could win the Senate seats formerly held by both President Obama in Illinois, and Joe Biden, vice-president, in Delaware.

Add to that the continuing woes of Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic majority leader, in Nevada, where the Republican party’s recent nomination of Sharron Angle, a far-right and highly eccentric Tea Party supporter, appear to have had no positive effect on Mr Reid’s prospects, and the Grand Old party has a good shot at taking control of both houses of Congress. Worse for Mr Obama, political scientists say that at this stage in the calendar, there is almost nothing he can do about it.

“If you ask me where the silver lining is for President Obama, I have to say I cannot see one,” says Bill Galston, a former Clinton official, who has been predicting for months the Democrats could lose the House. “Just as BP’s failure to cap the well has been so damaging, Obama’s failure to cap unemployment will be his undoing. There is nothing he can do to affect the jobless rate before November.”

The direction of the data could hardly be worse. According to Democracy Corps, a group headed by Stanley Greenberg, a liberal pollster who is a close friend of Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama’s chief of staff, a majority of US citizens see Mr Obama as “too liberal”.

Astonishingly, 55 per cent of citizens think Mr Obama is a “socialist” against only 39 per cent who do not share that diagnosis. The same poll shows 48 per cent support for Republicans against just 42 per cent for Democrats. The numbers are eerily similar to 2006, except that it was George W. Bush’s Republicans who were on the receiving end four years ago.

“The bottom line here is that Americans don’t believe in President Obama’s leadership,” says Rob Shapiro, another former Clinton official and a supporter of Mr Obama. “He has to find some way between now and November of demonstrating that he is a leader who can command confidence and, short of a 9/11 event or an Oklahoma City bombing, I can’t think of how he could do that.”

In private, informal advisors to Mr Obama are almost as negative. According to one, the US public’s loss of confidence in Mr Obama’s leadership is a factor above and beyond their dissatisfaction over the state of the real economy, which continues to slow as last year’s $787bn stimulus starts to run dry. The adviser, who asked to remain anonymous, said the public did not know what Mr Obama really believed. Examples include his lukewarm support last year for a public option in the healthcare bill and his equally lukewarm support today for a Senate bill that would extend unemployment insurance and aid state governments to keep teachers in their jobs.

In both cases, Mr Obama has offered only token, negotiable, support. “I never thought I would say this, but even I’m unsure what President Obama really believes,” says the adviser. “Instead of outsourcing decisions to Congress, he should spell out his bottom line. That is what leaders are for.”

Next week, Mr Obama is likely to sign a historic Wall Street re-regulation bill into law. Earlier this year he did the same for healthcare. But polls show the public either does not care, or even opposes these otherwise big reforms. “The longer this goes on, the more it looks like Obama wasted his first year on healthcare,” said the outside adviser. “It’s still the economy, stupid.”

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2010.

NAACP moves to make Neverland a state park

See the NAACP moves to make Neverland a state park

As home to pop legend Michael Jackson, Neverland Ranch housed a working locomotive, a Ferris wheel and other amusement park rides, a 10,000-volume library and a zoo.

But could the opulent Santa Barbara County estate become home to California's newest state park?

A resolution is in the works to order state parks officials to study converting the roughly 2,600-acre property into a state park. The state NAACP is backing the idea, and a lawmaker has signaled he is on board to carry the legislation.

"I think Michael's history is world history and I think it would become the No. 1 attraction for the state parks if we could pull it off," said state NAACP President Alice Huffman, who also serves on the state Parks Commission.

Huffman said in addition to celebrating Jackson's contributions to music and pop culture, Neverland would join Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park as state parks honoring African Americans. Those factors, she said, would make Neverland a "great, great addition to the state parks system."

Assemblyman Mike Davis, who chairs of the Assembly Committee on Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism, and Internet Media, said while details of the resolution still need to be worked out, he thought the idea made "great sense" when it was first proposed to him at a recent reception.

"If they want to do it, I think it would be a great venture for the Parks Department of the state given the worldwide success (of Michael Jackson) and the fact that the state is lucky to have this property in our state," the Los Angeles Democrat said.



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