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Last Updated: Apr 6th, 2009 - 11:30:04 |
Report: Communities of Color Bear Heaviest Burden in Recession
This weekend AIG said it would pay $450 million in bonuses despite receiving a $173 billion dollar bailout that’s given the US government an eighty-percent stake. On Monday, the Treasury said it would withhold $165 million dollars from the next installment of AIG’s taxpayer money.
The AIG controversy is the latest to exemplify the near unfettered flow of government money to corporations that helped cause the financial crisis. As AIG uses the bailout to hand out bonuses, a new report says people of color continue to bear the heaviest burden in the current economic recession. According to the Center for Social Inclusion, communities of color continue to be disproportionately deprived of infrastructure spending, job creation and other key government services. The report’s authors call for the government to use some of the billions in federal stimulus money to focus on the needs of communities of color.
The report is called One Region: Promoting Prosperity Across Race [Download pdf] by the Center for Social Inclusion.
Lawyers Group Urges Bush Be Arrested or Barred from Canada in First Trip Abroad Since Leaving Office
Former President George W. Bush is making his first trip abroad today since leaving the White House. Bush is expected to receive a six-figure fee to speak at a private event in the Canadian city of Calgary. Organizers say Bush will address an invite-only crowd on “eight momentous years in the Oval Office” and “the challenges facing the world in the 21st century.” Protests have been underway in the week leading up to Bush’s appearance. A group calling itself People Versus Bush has organized a series of events culminating in a rally outside the lecture site later today.
Meanwhile, a group of Canadian lawyers are trying to block Bush’s entry into their country. Lawyers Against the War says Bush should be either barred or detained for condoning the use of torture at overseas jails. If Canadian officials won’t deny Bush entry, the lawyers say Bush should be arrested and tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Under Canadian law, foreign nationals who’ve committed war crimes or crimes against humanity are “inadmissible” to Canada. The Canadian government has so far ignored the request.
Red Cross Report: US Committed Torture at CIA Black Sites
The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report two years ago that the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners “constituted torture” in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The findings were based on interviews with prisoners once held in the CIA’s secret black sites. The Red Cross said the fourteen prisoners held in the CIA prisons gave remarkably uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding. The author Mark Danner published parts of the secret Red Cross report in the New York Review of Books. Danner said the Red Cross’s use of the word "torture” has important legal implications. Danner said, “It could not be more important that the ICRC explicitly uses the words ‘torture’ and ‘cruel and degrading.’ The ICRC is the guardian of the Geneva Conventions, and when it uses those words, they have the force of law.”
Report: 3 Percent Of Washington, D.C. Population Has HIV or AIDS
Health officials in Washington, D.C. say three percent of the city’s population now has HIV or AIDS. Shannon Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration, said, “Our rates are higher than West Africa. They’re on par with Uganda and some parts of Kenya.” Hader said the HIV rates in Washington are twice as high as New York City and five times as high as Detroit.
Richard Aoki, Former Black Panther, 1938-2009
And the civil rights activist Richard Aoki has died at the age of seventy-one. He was an early member of the Black Panther Party and later served as a field marshal for the Panthers. He was the only Asian American to hold a leadership role in the group. Aoki was born in 1938 in California and spent part of his childhood living in an internment camp during World War II.
Obama Vows to Overhaul Food Safety System
President Obama has vowed to change fundamentally how the nation handles food safety issues, saying the current system is a “hazard to public health.” On Saturday, Obama announced the creation of a Food Safety Working Group to advise him on which laws and regulations need to be changed.
President Obama: “This Working Group will bring together cabinet secretaries and senior officials to advise me on how we can upgrade our food safety laws for the twenty-first century; foster coordination throughout our government; and ensure that we are not just designing laws that will keep the American people safe, but enforcing them."
President Obama has also nominated Margaret Hamburg, a former New York City health commissioner, to be commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Becomes Web-Only Newspaper
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is printing its final edition today and becoming an online-only news site known as SeattlePI.com. The 146-year-old newspaper will become the largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product. The paper’s owner, the Hearst Corporation, made the official announcement Monday. The vast majority of the paper’s 167 employees are losing their jobs in the transition. The closing of the Post-Intelligencer comes just days after Gannett announced the closing of the Tucson Citizen. Last month, Scripps closed the Rocky Mountain News. Many media analysts say the San Francisco Chronicle may be the next paper to cease publication. On Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged the Justice Department to consider giving Bay Area papers more leeway to merge or consolidate business operations to stay afloat.
FMLN’s Mauricio Funes Wins El Salvador Election
In El Salvador, leftist presidential candidate Mauricio Funes has claimed victory, ending twenty years of conservative rule. Funes’s party, the FMLN, is a former guerrilla group that fought El Salvador’s US-backed military government for close to twenty years. Funes defeated Rodrigo Avila of the ARENA party by three percentage points. During a victory speech, Funes promised “safe change” in the mold of Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Mauricio Funes: “That is why I invite, from this moment, different social and political forces to help us build this unity, which should be based on tolerance, on respecting differences and the identification of common objectives.”
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