By Rachel Uranga
Staff Writer

Continued immigration and a stubborn high school dropout rate have stymied efforts to improve literacy in Los Angeles County, where more than half the working-age population can’t read a simple form, a report released Wednesday found.
Alarmingly, only one in every 10 workers deemed functionally illiterate is enrolled in literacy classes and half of them drop out within three weeks, said the study by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles.

“It’s an emergency situation,” said Mayor James Hahn, adding that poor literacy rates could jeopardize the region’s economy by driving out high-tech businesses and other industries that pay well.

In the Los Angeles region, 53 percent of workers ages 16 and older were deemed functionally illiterate, the study said.

That percentage dropped to 44 percent in the greater San Fernando Valley — which includes Agoura Hills and Santa Clarita — but soared to 85 percent in some pockets of the Valley.

The study measured levels of literacy across the region using data from the 2000 Census, the U.S. Department of Education and a survey of literacy programs taken from last September to January.

It classified 3.8 million Los Angeles County residents as “low-literate,” meaning they could not write a note explaining a billing error, use a bus schedule or locate an intersection on a street map.

And despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent in public schools over the past decade to boost literacy rates, functional illiteracy levels have remained flat because of a steady influx of non-English-speaking immigrants and a 30 percent high school dropout rate, authors of the report said.

The last available national study was conducted in 1992 by the National Adult Literacy Survey, which found that 48 percent of the nation’s working-age population was functionally illiterate.

LA Daily News
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by Rupert Cornwell

Seven out of 10 Americans are worried about the worsening of their country’s image around the world, suggesting that global dislike of George Bush and his foreign policies could have an impact, albeit indirect, on the outcome of the presidential election.

That is the most striking finding of a new set of polls released yesterday by the Globscan group and the University of Maryland. Of Americans polled, 40 per cent said that foreign antipathy to the US was a big problem, and 30 per cent “somewhat of a problem.” Although almost three-quarters said world opinion would have no impact on their vote. But 18 per cent said they would be more likely to vote for the candidate preferred by most people in the world – who in 2004 is overwhelmingly the Democratic challenger John Kerry.

According to a separate Globescan survey of public opinion in 35 countries, in 30 of them a majority wanted Mr Kerry to win, on average by a more than two to one margin. Only in Poland, Nigeria and the Philippines among countries surveyed was Mr Bush preferred. In two others, India and Thailand, opinion was more or less split.

Everywhere else however, from Europe and Latin America to Asia and Africa, Mr Kerry is the desired winner, by far. Support for him is particularly strong among traditional US allies, even those who joined the Bush coalition in Iraq.

Full Article: Independent UK

A coalition of Rastafarian groups in Jamaica said yesterday that it wanted to go to the UN to persuade Europe to pay billions of dollars to the followers of the faith in reparation for slavery.

The Rastafarian Nation in Jamaica said European countries once involved in the slave trade, especially Britain, should pay $129bn (£72.5bn) to resettle 500,000 Jamaican Rastafarians in Africa.

“It’s a matter of human rights and justice for a crime that was committed 300 years ago and whose repercussions are still being felt today,” said Barbara Makeda Blake-Hannah, a member of the group.

More than 90% of the former British colony’s 2.6 million people are descended from African slaves. The coalition, made up of six Rastafarian “houses”, presented the reparations figure at a conference in Kingston, Jamaica, at the weekend.

Full Article:Guardian UK

by Bassem Mroul
 
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – At Sheik Omar Clinic, a big book records 10,363 violent deaths in Baghdad and nearby towns since the war began last year – deaths caused by car bombs, clashes between Iraqis and coalition forces, mortar attacks, revenge killings and robberies.

While America mourns the deaths of more than 1,000 of its sons and daughters in the Iraq campaign, the U.S. toll is far less than the Iraqi. No official, reliable figures exist for the whole country, but private estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000 killed since the United States invaded in March 2003.

The violent deaths recorded in the leather ledger at the Sheik Omar Clinic come from only one of Iraq’s 18 provinces and do not cover people who died in such flashpoint cities as Najaf, Karbala, Fallujah, Tikrit and Ramadi.

Iraqi dead include not only insurgents, police and soldiers but also civilian men, women and children caught in crossfire, blown apart by explosives or shot by mistake – both by fellow Iraqis or by American soldiers and their multinational allies. And they include the victims of crime that has surged in the instability that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Full Article: myway.com

By Eric Schmitt and Steven R. Weisman
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 – As American military deaths in Iraq operations surpassed the 1,000 mark, top Pentagon officials said Tuesday that insurgents controlled important parts of central Iraq and that it was unclear when American and Iraqi forces would be able to secure those areas.

As of late Tuesday night, the Pentagon’s accounting showed that 998 service members and three Defense Department civilians had been killed in Iraq operations.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that the American strategy in retaking rebel-held strongholds hinged on training and equipping Iraqi forces to take the lead.

Mr. Rumsfeld said Iraqi officials understood they must regain control of the insurgent safe havens. “They get it, and will find a way over time to deal with it,” he said.

But General Myers said the Iraqi forces would probably not be ready to confront insurgents in those areas until the end of this year.

Their comments, which came after a two-day spike in violence in Iraq led to a surge in American military deaths, represented an acknowledgment that the Americans had failed to end an increasingly sophisticated insurgency in important Sunni-dominated areas and in certain Shiite enclaves. Fighting raged on Tuesday in Sadr City, in Baghdad, as Shiite militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr ended a self-declared cease-fire. [Page A14.]

The officials’ assessment also underscored the difficulty of pacifying Iraq in time for elections scheduled for January. The cities of greatest rebel control are Ramadi, Falluja, Baquba and Samarra, in the so-called Sunni triangle, west and north of Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein remains popular and many forces loyal to him have gathered strength.

Full Article:New York Times

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (Reuters) – More than a dozen leaders from across Africa met Wednesday hoping to draw up a battle plan to fight poverty and create jobs in the poorest continent.

Leaders from Africa’s biggest and some of its smallest economies hope to succeed where previous efforts have failed and break the twin scourges of poverty and unemployment.

“The peace and stability of our states will be built on the victories won in the field of employment,” Burkina Faso’s President Blaise Compaore told delegates at the opening ceremony.

Leaders from Algeria in the north to South Africa in the south, from Ethiopia in the east to Sierra Leone in the west of the continent converged on Compaore’s poor, landlocked country for the summit, called by the African Union (AU).

Alpha Oumar Konare, former president of neighboring Mali and now chairman of the AU Commission, painted a grim picture of a continent gripped by HIV/AIDS, malaria and malnutrition and let down by donors who failed to live up to their pledges.

“This is an embarrassing score card for a continent so richly endowed,” said Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who currently chairs the AU.

“The adoption of an investment-led poverty reducing employment strategy has become therefore a necessity,” he said.

Rodrigo Rato, on his second trip to Africa since becoming International Monetary Fund managing director three months ago, said Africa needed higher, sustainable economic growth in order to beat unemployment and poverty.

He said developed countries must help Africa by opening up their markets to African produce and contributing more development aid, but stressed that African countries themselves must act to promote private enterprise and trade.

“Trade barriers in and among developing countries themselves remain too high,” he said.

Callisto Madavo, the World Bank’s vice president for Africa, picked up the private sector baton, insisting African countries must invest in infrastructure to increase access to services, accelerate regional integration and make it easier to do business.

“It is not enough to provide workers with the skills to compete if the regulatory environment drives investors overseas.” he said.

African nations are the least friendly places to do business, the World Bank said in a report out Wednesday.

Full Article:Reuters

Yeah right. As if the ‘regulatory environment’ impeded the Europeans in 500 years of pillage. Now the IMF comes in with the stench of brimstone to finish the job.

By Jane Perlez and Evelyn Rusli

BUYAT BAY BEACH, Indonesia – First the fish began to disappear. Then villagers began developing strange rashes and bumps. Finally in January, Masna Stirman, aided by a $1.50 wet nurse, gave birth to a tiny, shriveled girl with small lumps and wrinkled skin.

“The nurse said: ‘Ma’am, the baby has deformities,’ ” Mrs. Stirman, 39, recalled in an interview. Unable to get any meaningful medical help in this remote fishing village of about 300 people, she watched as her fourth child suffered for months and then died in July.

The infant’s death came after years of complaints by local fishermen about waste dumped in the ocean by the owner of a nearby gold mine, the Newmont Mining Corporation, the world’s biggest gold producer, based in Denver. It also kicked up a political brawl pitting Indonesia’s feisty environmental groups against the American mining giant, which has been trailed by allegations of pollution on four continents.

Full Article: New York Times

by John Ross
The ambiance inside the Garden was as toxic as an Al Qaeda bioterrorist Jihad. In the spotlight, a smugly chortling Bush lip-synched doom to 20,000 beardless Caucasian conventioneers. “This will not happen on my watch” the President pandered from the podium while the Twin Towers crumbled on the big screen behind him, apparently so brain-damaged that he did not remember that it had already happened. The Caucasians zeig heiled appropriately. “Four more years!” they regurgitated.

“Four more wars!” I screamed hoarsely and my colleagues in the press corps backed off to avoid contamination by my alarming lack of journalistic objectivity. An agitated gnome in an elephant’s head hat two rows in front of me who had been haranguing the sky boxes where Al Franken and Michael Moore were quarantined to prevent a public lynching, lunged at me menacingly when I refused to stand up and cheer the bilious Bush.

Shamelessly harping on the nearly 3000 souls toasted on 9/11, the third anniversary of whose incineration would be mourned the very next week, Bushwa pumped up the paranoia as the lynch mob swooned in the aisles. Although the President often mumbles in a patois only his fellow Texans can decipher, his intentions were crystal clear. Filling the hearts and minds of the American electorate with fear and loathing is his most ballistic missile, and the malignant exploitation of national tragedy his hole card in the battle to retain the White House.

I longed for an overripe tomato to toss at this dangerous bozo strutting around down below on the circular stage but the sentries at the Garden gates, perhaps remembering an earlier Eden, had proscribed all round fruit from being carried onto the premises.

The craven spectacle that profaned the hallowed home court of the Knicks and countless classic championship slugfests, was my first stop on a campaign trail I will cover for the next months as I wend my way across the country from right coast to left, reminding my fellow Americans of their true his and herstory as depicted in my latest instant cult classic, “Murdered By Capitalism”, a personal memoir of life and death on the U.S. Left.

Indeed, I had just touched down at LaGuardia en route from tropical Chiapas where I had been celebrating the first anniversary of the Zapatista “caracoles” (political/cultural centers) and the “Juntas de Buen Gobierno” (JBGs or Good Government Commissions) that now administer the five autonomous regions and 29 autonomous municipalities in the highlands and jungle of Mexico’s southernmost state. The anniversary week had been filled with many cumbia dances and basketball tournaments and earnest evaluations of the JBG’s first year of work. They still made a lot of mistakes, the members of the Juntas confessed but 50 rebel schools had been built in the autonomous zones in recent seasons and they were learning each day how to apply the Zapatista ethos of “mandar obedeciendo” or “governing by obeying the will of the people”, a concept so foreign to Bushite brains that the rebels might as well be discoursing in Martian. Above all, the Zapatistas spoke from their hearts, an organ which Bush and his boys, despite their claims of “compassionate conservatism”, have never been able to locate. The contrast between the toxic megalomania at the Garden and the unselfish, heroic resistance of the Indians was as stark as a sudden plunge into Dante’s Inferno.

The Zapatistas, and for that matter the legions of oppressed who take up most of the space on this lonely planet, were in fact keeping close tabs on the blasphemy in the Garden. Much as protestors proclaimed in Chicago 1968 during another party’s perverted presidential convention, the whole world was watching. They know that what happens here in the north from now until November could very well prove to be a life and death decision for them.

Full Article: counterpunch.org

I just read a good book by John Ross called War Against Oblivion, a history of the Zapatistas. The indigenous people of America have a firm hold on democratic principles: they have not been still in the face of this 500-year conquest, not for a single day.

By Amy Lorentzen

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday warned Americans about voting for Democratic Sen. John Kerry, saying that if the nation makes the wrong choice on Election Day it faces the threat of another terrorist attack.

The Kerry-Edwards campaign immediately rejected those comments as “scare tactics” that crossed the line.

“It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,” Cheney told about 350 supporters at a town-hall meeting in this Iowa city.

If Kerry were elected, Cheney said the nation risks falling back into a “pre-9/11 mind-set” that terrorist attacks are criminal acts that require a reactive approach. Instead, he said Bush’s offensive approach works to root out terrorists where they plan and train, and pressure countries that harbor terrorists.

Cheney pointed to Afghanistan as a success story in pursuing terrorists although the Sept. 11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden, remains at large. In Iraq, the vice president said, the United States has taken out a leader who used weapons of mass destruction against his own people and harbored other terrorists.

“Saddam Hussein today is in jail, which is exactly where he belongs,” Cheney said.

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards issued a statement, saying, “Dick Cheney’s scare tactics crossed the line today, showing once again that he and George Bush will do anything and say anything to save their jobs. Protecting America from vicious terrorists is not a Democratic or Republican issue and Dick Cheney and George Bush should know that.”

Edwards added that he and Kerry “will keep American safe, and we will not divide the American people to do it.”

The candidates are campaigning hard for Iowa’s seven electoral votes. Democrat Al Gore narrowly won the state in 2000. Bush has campaigned in the state five times in the last month, and Cheney has made three stops.

Hours before Cheney spoke, the Congressional Budget Office said this year’s federal deficit will hit a record $422 billion. Cheney, in praising Bush’s tax cuts, noted that the CBO said this year’s projected deficit will be smaller than analysts had expected.

Full Article: myway.com

By Hamza Hendawi
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – U.S. military deaths in the Iraq campaign passed the 1,000 milestone Tuesday, with more than 800 of them during the stubborn insurgency that flared after the Americans brought down Saddam Hussein and President Bush declared major combat over.

A spike in fighting with Sunni and Shiite insurgents killed seven Americans in the Baghdad area on Tuesday, pushing the count to 1,002. That number includes 999 U.S. troops and three civilians, two working for the U.S. Army and one for the Air Force. The tally was compiled by The Associated Press based on Pentagon records and AP reporting from Iraq.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cited progress on multiple fronts in the Bush administration’s global war on terrorism and said U.S. enemies should not underestimate the willingness of the American people and its coalition allies to suffer casualties in Iraq and elsewhere.

“The progress has prompted a backlash, in effect, from those who hope that at some point we might conclude that the pain and the cost of this fight isn’t worth it,” Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference. “Well, our enemies have underestimated our country, our coalition. They have failed to understand the character of our people. And they certainly misread our commander in chief.”

Full Article: myway.com