Florida’s Riviera Beach is a poor, predominantly black, coastal community that intends to revitalize its economy by using eminent domain, if necessary, to displace about 6,000 local residents and build a billion-dollar waterfront yachting and housing complex.
“This is a community that’s in dire need of jobs, which has a median income of less than $19,000 a year,” said Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown.
He defends the use of eminent domain by saying the city is “using tools that have been available to governments for years to bring communities like ours out of the economic doldrums and the trauma centers.”
washtimes.com

Sounds like Gaza.

Nearly 100,000 California 12th graders — or about 20% of this year’s senior class — have failed the state’s graduation exam, potentially jeopardizing their chances of earning diplomas, according to the most definitive report on the mandatory test, released Friday.

Students in the class of 2006, the first group to face the graduation requirement, must pass both the English and math sections of the test by June.

The exit exam — which has come under criticism by some educators, legislators and civil rights advocates — is geared to an eighth-grade level in math and to ninth- and 10th-grade levels in English.

But the report by the Virginia-based Human Resources Research Organization showed that tens of thousands of students, particularly those in special education and others who speak English as a second language, may fail the test by the end of their senior year despite remedial classes, after-school tutoring and other academic help.

Teachers, according to the report, said that many students arrive unprepared and unmotivated for their high school courses and that their grades often reflect poor attendance and low parental involvement.

The group reviewed the test results as part of a report ordered by the Legislature when it instituted the exit exam several years ago.

Among its findings: 63% of African Americans and 68% of Latinos in the class of 2006 have passed both parts of the exam.

By comparison, 89% of Asians and 90% of whites have passed. The report recommended that the state keep the exam but consider several alternatives for students who can’t pass.
latimes.com

Yeah and guess the educational status of the majority of jail inmates.

Locked Away Forever After Crimes as Teenagers
About 9,700 American prisoners are serving life sentences for crimes they committed before they could vote, serve on a jury or gamble in a casino – in short, before they turned 18. More than a fifth have no chance for parole.

…The United States is one of only a handful of countries that does that. Life without parole, the most severe form of life sentence, is theoretically available for juvenile criminals in about a dozen countries. But a report to be issued on Oct. 12 by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found juveniles serving such sentences in only three others. Israel has seven, South Africa has four and Tanzania has one.

…Juvenile lifers are overwhelmingly male and mostly black. Ninety-five percent of those admitted in 2001 were male and 55 percent were black.

The brush-covered landscape of buttes and desert just west of the Rockies, already dotted with oil and gas rigs, could be in store for another resource boom as the energy industry turns a fresh eye toward developing oil shale.

A reserve estimated at nearly 1 trillion barrels of oil buried deep in rock formations stretching from western Colorado into northeastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming may be a way to ease U.S. dependence on shrinking foreign oil supplies. The newly enacted energy bill was written to help open the way for research programs and commercial leasing of federal land containing oil shale.

Yet shale isn’t a quick panacea to the nation’s energy woes. This is oil that is locked up in rock, not deposits of liquid crude that are relatively easy to tap.

Companies have spent years researching how to melt oil out of rock, but it could be 2010 before any decide whether shale mining is commercially and environmentally feasible. It takes a large amount of water to recover the oil and the process can take months.
guardian.co.uk

A Quest for Oil Collides With Nature in Alaska

…But current and former officials say Goss does face problems stemming from the agency’s reliance on a robust private contracting market for skilled intelligence and security workers that has grown more lucrative since the September 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“Goss realizes he has a major problem in the (clandestine service) because he’s having major bailouts among the old guard and also retention problems all the way down the ranks,” said a former clandestine officer.

Experienced spies have been surrendering their blue staff badges and leaving the CIA in droves, often to return the next day as better paid, green-badged private contractors, current and former officials say.
breitbart.com

Near the end of a round table discussion on ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos dropped this bomb:

Definitely a political problem but I wonder, George Will, do you think it’s a manageable one for the White House especially if we don’t know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a report or have indictments but if he is able to show as a source close to this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in some of these discussions.

This would explain why Bush spent more than an hour answering questions from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. It would also fundamentally change the dynamics of the scandal. President Bush could no longer claim he was merely a bystander who wants to “get to the bottom of it.” As Stephanopoulos notes, if Bush played a direct role it could make this scandal completely unmanageable.
thinkprogress.org

Video

It seems there’s no stopping Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. He’s already curbing the power of the big oil companies operating in Venezuela. Now he’s stepping up a program of expropriation that could bedevil a number of businesses, both locally owned and foreign. The moves come just as Chávez seems prepared to further consolidate his power at legislative elections in December. The pro-Chávez coalition hopes to increase its majority in the 167-member National Assembly by more than 20 seats, to around 110. “It’s going to be a battle for us,” concedes Gerardo Blyde, a legislator from the opposition First Justice Party.

The opposition has pledged to join forces for the elections, but remains discredited after last year’s defeat in a referendum that attempted to oust Chávez from office. If voters reward Chávez with a big win, as expected, the way will be clear for sweeping new moves in his Bolivarian revolution — his populist effort to tap Venezuela’s oil wealth to impose socialism in the country. “Chávez is dead set on his revolution; there’s no turning back,” says Aníbal Romero, a political scientist at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas. “The question is how fast and how far.”

Food fight
Chávez is moving quickly. He has been boosting spending on health and education since coming to power in 1999, but he is now increasing government control of the economy, to investors’ dismay. Oil companies with operating contracts in Venezuela, such as Chevron (CVX ) and BP PLC. (BP ), have been ordered to set up joint ventures controlled by state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), and royalties have been hiked from 16.7% to 30%. Chávez now has targeted more than 700 plants, particularly in the food industry, that are idle or not operating at capacity for possible expropriation. On Sept. 26 the state seized control of a plant operated by Alimentos Polar, the country’s No. 1 private food manufacturer. “This is an unfair and arbitrary expropriation,” Polar President Lorenzo Mendoza told reporters, adding that the facility was operational. The move followed the seizure of a shuttered H.J. Heinz Co. (HNZ ) tomato processing facility. The company is negotiating to sell the plant to the state. Chavez defends the moves. “We will only expropriate what is necessary,” he said in a recent speech.

The President is also going after rich landowners. Authorities recently began taking control of 21 large ranches spread over hundreds of thousands of acres. Chávez has threatened to hand part of the land to poor Venezuelans unless owners legally document their ownership and show that their spreads are being productively used. In another shock to investors, Chávez disclosed plans to review — and possibly revoke — mining concessions and create a national mining company. The news caused shares in Canada’s Crystallex International Corp., (KRY ) which has operations in Venezuela, to plunge 52% from Sept. 19 to Sept. 28. “What happens here in Venezuela will undoubtedly have some impact on the commercial decisions of companies, not just from the U.S. but from all over the world,” U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield told reporters in Caracas. “Nationalization is a step backward,” adds a State Dept. official in Washington.
businessweek.com

Well then, he must be stopped. The ironic problem facing Bush’s corporate oil buddies is that unless oil goes down $20 a barrel, Chavez will have plenty of money to transform his country. Chavez points the way for every country with resources the Yankees want.

Lucas E. Nikkel, a Dartmouth graduate, wants to be a doctor, but for now he is teaching eighth-grade chemistry at a middle school in North Carolina, one of nearly 2,200 new members of Teach for America.

“I’m looking at medical school, and everybody says taking time off first is a good idea,” he said. “I think I’m like a lot of people who know they want to do something meaningful before they start their careers.”

For a surprisingly large number of bright young people, Teach for America – which sends recent college graduates into poor rural and urban schools for two years for the same pay and benefits as other beginning teachers at those schools – has become the next step after graduation. It is the postcollege do-good program with buzz, drawing those who want to contribute to improving society while keeping their options open, building an ever-more impressive résumé and delaying long-term career decisions.
nytimes.com

How totally creepy. Before they start their meaningless careers they go to ‘teach to the poor’ to experience meaning. And to build their resumes.

…Given his background, it is easy to view Mr. Jal as more of a metaphor than an artist – a Christian seeking peace with Muslims, a product of violence who rejects violence, a refugee turned spokesman. In Britain last year he became a cause célèbre with a thick press packet even though his sole recording, the religious-minded 2004 LP “Gua,” was (and still is) available only as an obscure Kenyan import. The publicity even helped earn him an invitation to perform in the multicity Live 8 concerts organized by Sir Bob Geldof to raise awareness of global poverty – although Mr. Jal was relegated to a tiny satellite event for African artists that never made the broadcast.

“I met Bob Geldof and he told me I have to sell four million copies of my CD before I can perform at Hyde Park,” Mr. Jal recalled, referring to the event’s main location in London. “I was thinking someone like me needs to be exposed so people would hear the message I have. And if they like my music, they could buy it – it would be a good chance for practicing fair trade,” he added, laughing.
nytimes.com

“More of a metaphor than an artist”…more imperialist discourse. It’s always what blacks represent, and never who they are.

…Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, is warning of the geopolitical consequences of delivering a rebuff to Turkey. “We’re concerned about a so-called clash of civilisations,” he told The Politics Show, to be broadcast on BBC1 at noon today. “We’re concerned about this theological-political divide, which could open up even further down the boundary between so-called Christian-heritage states and those of Islamic heritage. We need to see Turkey in the European Union and not pushed the other way.”
independent.co.uk

It’s so 21st century: instead of fighting the alien Ottomans we remove their dread threat by turning them into collaborators.

Dear Tony,
I’m writing to you as the leader of the party from which I am now resigning. I joined the Labour party in 1964 but this week is the first time I have felt ashamed of my membership. You will say it was an accident that two men were viciously bundled from the conference hall on Wednesday. But then you lie as you breathe. It is impossible that you do not know that when you took power as Labour leader you were determined to stamp out all public dissent and discussion within the party. It is impossible, in a more recent time frame, that you did not know and approve of the decision that there would be no debate on Iraq.

Even as I write this phrase, its absurdity, its grotesqueness hits me again. No debate on Iraq, no debate on the most important foreign policy issue that has confronted Britain since World War Two. No debate on Iraq, which has brought such a fear of violence to London. No debate on Iraq – on the national disaster with which the names of Guantanamo and Britain will be linked in infamy for our generation and probably beyond.

It is unthinkable that the Labour party could not debate the Iraqi war. But, of course, it is equally unthinkable that it could. For the situation there is so dire, the peril in which you have placed the nation is so acute that if even the smallest murmurs of evidence and argument were to be heard they would soon become a gale that would sweep you from office. It was telling that you did not even dare to speak to the old geezer they roughed up. But you had only to take one look at Walter Wolfgang and you could see Old Labour incarnate. An Old Labour that believed in swaying democratic opinion by fact and reason. An Old Labour that believed in debate. Given 60 seconds in front of the television cameras with Wolfgang and you’d have been mincemeat. You presided over a government which suborned its security services to provide false headlines for you to mislead the Commons into voting for the war. Worse, you ignored every lesson of our last imperial disaster in Mesopotamia – a campaign which became a byword for our soldiers being slaughtered to satisfy the vanity of politicians.
observor.guardian.co.uk

ouch.