For many people, the name Timbuktu evokes ideas of a mythical city, inaccessible but wealthy in gold.

Timbuktu is an actual city in Mali in West Africa. Its heyday was from the 1200s to the 1500s when it was the capital of the Empire of Mali.

Timbuktu was also home to the University of Sankore, which was at that time one of the major universities in the world and one of the major centers of Islamic learning. At its peak, it had 25,000 students. An interesting fact is that it was founded by a woman.

[Eugene Volokh, 3:54 PM]

"The Conservative Case Against Racial Profiling" is an article by Nelson Lund, a George Mason law professor and a real conservative, as opposed to a squish like me. I thought it was a very interesting piece, and I asked him to put it on the Web; it just came up, so I'm pointing people to it. Special bonus: It's only 15 pages long, quite humane as law review articles go.

…Agricultural protectionism--the combination of quotas, tariffs, and subsidies for farm products--may be the purest example of destructive special-interest politics ever created. Rich countries--with a few exceptions, such as Australia--burden their own populations three times over. The policies cost taxpayers directly--the atrocious 2002 U.S. farm bill is slated to cost $180 billion over ten years. (Worse, annual unbudgeted "emergency" farm spending during the late 1990s accounted for a great deal of the spending boom that squandered much of the predicted budget surplus long before the first Bush tax cut took effect.) In return for their largesse, taxpayers get the privilege of paying higher prices as consumers (and, of course, inflated prices for basic foodstuffs hit the poorest proportionately hardest). And, by locking up an excess of labor and capital in an agribusiness sector that couldn't turn an honest profit on its own, agricultural protectionism inhibits productivity growth, preventing shifts in employment and investment to more productive parts of the economy.

Still, the costs agricultural policies impose on their own societies are manageable in the huge economies of the developed world. The costs they impose on the rest of the world are often devastating. By shutting off access to developed countries' markets for the goods that developing countries are most likely to produce competitively, agricultural protectionism forecloses the most likely route to development and poverty alleviation. Moreover, the artificially high prices in the rich countries encourage overproduction there; the surplus gets exported at cut-rate prices, which not only makes it hard for developing countries to compete in export markets, it typically makes poor farmers uncompetitive in their home markets as well. And as farms go out of business, unemployed and underemployed farmers migrate to sprawling cities; but often there aren't many jobs available in the cities, either. (The next rung up the development ladder after agriculture is typically textiles, which is also the subject of massive protectionism.) In the end, the damage done to poor countries by the agricultural policies of the United States, the European Union, and Japan probably far outweighs the aid they gives those countries. Liberalizers have recently begun deploying this calucllation: In a world where more than a billion people, mostly the rural poor in the developing world, live on less than one dollar per day, every cow in the European Union receives an average daily subsidy of more than twice that.

African Money Good, But Fix Politics First
The Monitor (Kampala)
August 20, 2003
Kampala

African central bank chiefs are mulling over the almost utopian thought of having a single currency for the continent. If for nothing else, the notion is a good one.

The 27th meeting of the Association of African Central Banks currently sitting in Kampala has also stated that the success of any proposed monetary union will be pegged on political backing from the respective governments.

Now, while there is on-going thinking around this idea, everyone involved must reflect on why almost all post-colonial regional bodies have ended up as talking shops for politicians with over-inflated egos.

Some Sub-Saharan African countries did try to set up an economic body, the Preferential Trade Area, in the 1980s but not very much has come out of it.

A new experiment is currently underway to revive the East African Community (EAC). The EAC collapsed in 1977 because of irreconcilable differences between the leaders of the three countries.

The Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) appears to be the only example of anything near success. Ecowas has shown promise in handling political upheaval, first in Sierra Leone and now in Liberia.

At the July 8, 2002 launching of the African Union in Durban, South Africa, that country's President, Thabo Mbeki, said it is time for the continent to "take its rightful place in global affairs". He also said that through this body, which replaced the moribund Organisation of African Unity, the marginalisation of Africa would be fought.

Mbeki's pronouncement and the bankers' noises about monetary union can become a reality only after the continent fixes its politics. Today, most of the countries are stuck with corrupt dictators, either of the benevolent sort or the more common brutal variety. With this type of leadership in place, you do not expect to build a sustainable political foundation upon which economic integration can thrive.

We must first get rid of the predator regimes that are destroying many African countries before we can even begin to entertain thoughts of integration in all its aspects. To paraphrase a famous quote: It is the politics!

Reopen Dialogue On Consensus
The Post (Lusaka)
August 20, 2003
Lusaka

There's no alternative to regional integration. Chaos rules in our world, both within countries' borders and beyond.

Blind laws are offered up as divine norms that will bring peace, order, well-being and security our planet so badly needs. That is what they would have us believe while three dozen developed and wealthy nations monopolise economic, political and technological power, offering us the same recipes that have only served to make us poorer, more exploited and more dependent.

The poverty and underdevelopment prevailing in most of our nations as well as inequality in the distribution of wealth and knowledge in the world are basically at the source of the present conflicts.

It cannot be forgotten that our current underdevelopment and poverty have resulted from conquest, colonisation, slavery and plunder by the colonial powers and from the emergence of imperialism and the brutal wars motivated by new divisions of the world.

We must be aware of what we have been so far and what we cannot continue to be. There's nothing in the existing economic and political order that can serve our interests. Currently, we have accumulated enough knowledge and ethical values to move toward a new historical era of true justice and humanism.

People frequently talk about the horrors of the holocaust and the genocides that have taken place throughout the last century, but they forget that every year as a result of the current economic order, millions of people starve to death or die of preventable diseases.

They can wield statistics of apparently positive growth, but in the end things in our part of the world remain the same or even worsen. Growth often rests on the accumulation of consumer goods that contribute nothing to true development or to a better distribution of wealth.

The truth is that after several decades of neoliberalism, the rich are becoming increasingly rich while the poor are both more numerous and increasingly poor.

We have meditated a lot on these problems and have come to the conclusion that a high level of unity is required among countries if have to face what appears to be a sombre future with hope.

SUDAN: Special Report on women in the south

© UNICEF/Stevie Mann (2002)

Southern Sudanese mother attending a special class for women who have missed out on schooling

NAIROBI, 20 Aug 2003 (IRIN) - While the international community watches Sudan's leaders edge closer to a peace deal, the average southern Sudanese woman, although desperate for peace, has more immediate concerns.

Historic under-development, over 20 years of war, and inequalities in traditional power structures have left southern women in a precarious position - they now suffer some of the poorest quality of life indicators in the world.

In some war-affected areas the rate of maternal deaths rises as high as 865 per 100,000 births, according to a UNICEF-sponsored study by Nimila Chawla entitled, “From Survival to Thrival: Children and Women in the Southern Part of Sudan”. This compares with a rate of 550 per 100,000 births across the whole of Sudan, as reported in the UN Human Development Report for 2003.

In addition, estimates made by a group of major aid agencies in 1998 suggest the literacy rate among women in parts of southern Sudan could be as low as 10 percent. Even among literate women only a small number have had the luxury of attending secondary school.

Apart from deprivations resulting directly from war and underdevelopment, a drastic reduction in the male population in some areas has placed additional responsibilities on many of the women left behind.

Africans will tell Swazi king to shape up
August 20, 2003, 08:31 PM

Southern African leaders will urge Swaziland's king to improve human rights and governance in sub-Saharan Africa's last absolute monarchy when they meet next week

Aziz Pahad, South Africa's deputy foreign minister, said the 14-member Southern African Development Community (SADC) was concerned that political freedoms were being curtailed and the rule of law ignored in the landlocked kingdom.

"Clearly one issue that will be discussed is resolving the Swaziland issue, which is becoming a very serious problem and a major concern for SADC," Pahad told a news briefing in Pretoria.

"SADC and the Commonwealth are involved in trying to ease tensions there. The president of Mozambique is also talking to Swaziland's King Mswati about the issue," he said.

Opposition parties, which are illegal in Swaziland, and trade unions have become increasingly vocal in demanding greater democracy and limits to the king's power.

The SADC trade bloc comprises South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Seychelles, Mauritius, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Mozambique and Malawi.

Cohen then attempts to tie it all together by providing a laundry list of the most offensive positions taken by Bush nominees:
Yes, he has, in his article, The Redistricting Cases: Original Mistakes And Current Consequences, 24 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 103 (2000). And he produced a host of reasons for this conclusion: First, there is no evidence that the Equal Protection Clause was intended to apply to voting rights at all.

Pryor did suggest in congressional testimony in 1997 that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act should be amended or repealed. This is the section that requires DOJ "preclearance" whenever certain states do anything that might affect voting rights. I know little to nothing about the Voting Rights Act, so I'll refrain from speculating about whether Pryor's statement here was defensible. Still, I'd bet there's more to the story than Cohen lets on. (FYI: The Committee for Justice defends Pryor's testimony on pages 7-9 of this report.)Wrong. Thomas's concurrence in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris argued that the Establishment Clause -- not the "Bill of Rights" as a whole -- "may well" have less application to state government activities that do not in themselves infringe on anyone's liberty (after all, the Fourteenth Amendment speaks of protecting "liberty"). Thomas's argument is a sophisticated one, and indeed quite a few legal scholars* have noted the conceptual difficulties in applying the Establishment Clause to the states, given that one of the original purposes of the Clause was precisely to protect state governments from federal interference. In any event, Cohen is flat-out misrepresenting Thomas's opinion.

Annan Says U.N. Will Stay in Iraq
By SAMEER N. YACOUB
Associated Press Writer

2:42 AM PDT, August 20, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- FBI agents led the search for clues in the rubble of a bombed U.N. compound in Baghdad on Wednesday, while U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the deadly attack would not drive the world body out of Iraq.

United Nations workers were told to stay at home Wednesday after a cement truck packed with explosives blew up outside the offices of the top U.N. envoy in Iraq, killing him and 19 other people. At least 100 people were injured in the unprecedented attack against the world body.

Annan said he was to meet with the Security Council later in the day to discuss security arrangements for U.N. workers in Iraq.

"We will persevere. We will continue. It is essential work," Annan said at a news conference in Stockholm, where he stopped briefly before heading to U.N. headquarters in New York. "We will not be intimidated."

Annan said the U.N. plans to reevaluate its security measures.

How America Created a Terrorist Haven
By JESSICA STERN

Yesterday's bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.

Of course, we should be glad that the Iraq war was swifter than even its proponents had expected, and that a vicious tyrant was removed from power. But the aftermath has been another story. America has created — not through malevolence but through negligence — precisely the situation the Bush administration has described as a breeding ground for terrorists: a state unable to control its borders or provide for its citizens' rudimentary needs.

As the administration made clear in its national security strategy released last September, weak states are as threatening to American security as strong ones. Yet its inability to get basic services and legitimate governments up and running in post-war Afghanistan and Iraq — and its pursuant reluctance to see a connection between those failures and escalating anti-American violence — leave one wondering if it read its own report.

Bush Revises Views On 'Combat' in Iraq

"Actually, major military operations," Bush replied. "Because we still have combat operations going on." Bush added: "It's a different kind of combat mission, but, nevertheless, it's combat, just ask the kids that are over there killing and being shot at."

In his May 1 speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln, Bush declared: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country." The headline on the White House site above Bush's May 1 speech is "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended."

Since then, a search of Bush speeches on the White House Web site indicates, the president had not spoken of the guerrilla fighting in Iraq as combat until this interview; he had earlier spoken of the "cessation of combat" in Iraq

African currency seen by 2021
19/08/2003 22:53 - (SA)

Kampala - Governors of African central banks on Tuesday agreed to work toward ushering in a single currency and a common central bank for the continent by 2021.

The declaration comes after two days of talks at the annual meeting of the Association of African Central Bank Governors in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

"The governors agreed to work towards an effective implementation of the well-timed and phased convergence process, which will usher in a single currency and common central bank in Africa," the governors said in a statement.

Paul Newman Is Still HUD
By PAUL NEWMAN

The Fox News Network is suing Al Franken, the political satirist, for using the phrase "fair and balanced" in the title of his new book. In claiming trademark violation, Fox sets a noble example for standing firm against whatever.

Unreliable sources report that the Fox suit has inspired Paul Newman, the actor, to file a similar suit in federal court against the Department of Housing and Urban Development, commonly called HUD. Mr. Newman claims piracy of personality and copycat infringement.

In the 1963 film "HUD," for which Mr. Newman was nominated for an Academy Award, the ad campaign was based on the slogan, "Paul Newman is HUD." Mr. Newman claims that the Department of Housing and Urban Development, called HUD, is a fair and balanced institution and that some of its decency and respectability has unfairly rubbed off on his movie character, diluting the rotten, self-important, free-trade, corrupt conservative image that Mr. Newman worked so hard to project in the film. His suit claims that this "innocence by association" has hurt his feelings plus residuals.

Prescription Drugs Now, Day of Reckoning Later
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Aug. 18 — President Bush and Congress have agreed to spend $400 billion on prescription drugs for the elderly over 10 years. But they rarely address a basic question: Where does the money come from?

It will be borrowed from the public, officials say. In practice, economists say, workers of the future — children and grandchildren of today's Medicare beneficiaries — will have to pay much of the cost through higher taxes.

The federal government has no budget surplus to pay for the new benefits, which are the biggest expansion of Medicare since its creation in 1965. A law that required Congress to offset the cost of new benefits — either by raising taxes or by cutting other programs — was allowed to expire in September.

Set of Rules Too Complex to Be Followed Properly
By JAMES GLANZ and ANDREW C. REVKIN

he man leading the investigation into last week's blackout has come to one firm conclusion: either the rules for power transactions on the electrical grid were broken, or they were inadequate, even though they are hundreds of pages of detailed specifications covering seemingly every contingency.

Michehl R. Gent, president and chief executive of the North American Electric Reliability Council, the industry organization that created many of those rules after the 1965 blackout, is not willing to say which possibility he considers most likely at this stage, but his early conclusion has focused attention on the rules governing the power grid, a complex and, in the estimation of some experts, physically inadequate system for moving energy around the country.

Many of those rules - how much power can move in a line, when systems need to be shut down in an emergency - were drawn up long before deregulation opened the sluice gates and enabled the present transfer of billions of watts of energy around the country daily in wholesale transactions across hundreds or thousands of miles. As detailed as those rules are, according to many people in the industry, they are no match for the overwhelming scale and complexity of the grid that lost power over vast stretches of the Northeast and Canada last week.

Ben Carreras, a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who models the grid on computers, said that using the rules to control the behavior of the grid was sometimes like using a naturalists' handbook to tame a tiger.

And Terry Boston, executive vice president of transmission and power supply for the Tennessee Valley Authority, said, ``We have worked for many years developing the rules of the road.'' ``The problem is,'' he said, ``we're asking the system to go into a mode of operation that is far different than what it was designed to do. It was designed for short distances. Now, in the new open market, we're seeing transactions covering hundreds of miles.''

Adding another complicating factor is the reality that the rules are voluntary, enforced by little more than peer pressure and the potential sting of bad press after particularly bad power failures.

`I don't know of any grid that's got legally binding enforcement,'' said Charles Jenkins, vice president for transmission grid management at Oncor, a part of TXU in Dallas, a private company that moves electricity around the grid.

The Sad Tale of a Security Whistleblower
Federal prosecutors in California went too far when they put a man in prison for disclosing a website security hole to the people at risk from it.

By Mark Rasch Aug 18 2003 05:00AM PT
Previous articles in this space have discussed whether security professionals can go to jail for doing things like demonstrating the insecurity of a wireless network, or conducting a throughput test on a system without permission. Now, a new and unwarranted extension of the U.S. computer crime law shows that you can go to jail for simply telling potential victims that their data is vulnerable.

By explaining how the vulnerability worked, and why customer data was at risk, prosecutors asserted, the security specialist "impaired the integrity" of the affected network. It is now up to a federal appellate court to determine whether this interpretation of the law is to stand. If it does, it could mean a dramatic decline in postings to Bugtraq, CERT, or other public fora.

Bret McDanel was dissatisfied with his former employer, Tornado Development, Inc. Tornado provided internet access and web-based e-mail to its clients. However, McDanel apparently discovered a flaw in the web-mail that would permit malicious users to piggyback a previous secure session, grab the unique session ID and thereby read a user's e-mail-- despite the fact that the site promised that e-mail was secure. Dissatisfied with the pace at which Tornado addressed the issue (and for other reasons, undoubtedly), McDanel severed his employment with them, and went to work for another company.

About six months later, according to defensive filings, McDanel discovered that Tornado had never fixed the vulnerability he discovered. Using the moniker "Secret Squirrel" he sent a single e-mail to about 5,600 of Tornado's customers over the course of three days, staggering the release each day to prevent flooding Tornado's e-mail servers.

The e-mail told Tornado's customers about the vulnerability, and directed them to his own website for information about it.

So what did Tornado? First, they scrambled to delete their own customer's e-mails (without their permission) to prevent them from learning about the vulnerability. Then they took other steps to conceal the hole. Ultimately, they fixed the vulnerability, and upgraded their general security.

For his efforts, McDanel was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to sixteen months in the federal pokey, which he has now served. He has appealed his conviction to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Let Judges Be Judges

August 18, 2003

Federal sentencing laws, especially for drug possession, are often irrational, unfair and rigid, and judges know it. However, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft thinks the problem is that too many federal judges are falling for the sob stories criminals tell them and cutting them a break on prison time.

In a July 28 memo, Ashcroft directed all U.S. attorneys to notify him whenever a federal judge imposed a criminal sentence that was less than U.S. guidelines called for. The attorney general says he wants the case numbers and judges' names so his prosecutors can appeal these sentences. But Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Justice Anthony Kennedy and dozens of outraged federal judges regard this order as an attack on judicial independence and a veiled threat to would-be nominees.

…In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court expanded the limited ability Congress left judges to set shorter terms. About one-third of the felons sentenced since then received less than the minimum term, but in half of those cases prosecutors asked for the reduction to get defendants' cooperation.

The attorney general doesn't like those numbers and obviously wants judges to toe his automaton line, without regard to the Constitution's balance of powers. Congress should instead, as Kennedy has proposed, do away with these unworkable sentencing laws and let justice work in tandem with common sense.

And then there were 10: Marriage derby heats up
Suitors show up in Southbridge

By Peter DeMarco, Globe Correspondent, 8/18/2003

SOUTHBRIDGE -- The suitors arrived on Donna and Peter Wood's freshly mowed front lawn one by one yesterday morning, passing a horde of curious neighbors and a row of television cameras as they stepped into dating history.

Some wore hip sunglasses; some carried roses; one guy even brought his mother. Among the candidates: a Coast Guard officer, a cable installer, and a few truck drivers. But no doctors or lawyers.

The turnout wasn't quite what the Woods or their 22-year-old daughter, Kimberly Devlin, had expected.

In the past two weeks, newspapers, television stations, and radio stations have chronicled Donna Wood's plan to find a husband for her daughter by accepting applications from men ages 21 to 30 and then holding open auditions at her home. Wood has expressed dissatisfaction with her daughter's taste in men.

Given such publicity, and signs reading "Who Wants to Marry Our Daughter" posted on the front lawn, more than 100 potential suitors have inquired about Devlin, who has a 4-year-old daughter.

But in the end, only 10 brave souls were willing to put their hearts -- and egos -- on the line.

The shifting medical view on marijuana

By Lester Grinspoon, 8/17/2003

IN A RECENT poll conducted by Medscape, a website directed at health care providers, 76 percent of physicians and 89 percent of nurses said they thought marijuana should be available as a medicine. That's a big change from the attitude in the medical community a decade ago, when few health providers believed (or would acknowledge) that cannabis had any medical utility. That was not surprising; physicians receive most of their new drug education from journal articles or from drug company advertisements and promotions, and neither of these sources provides information about medical marijuana.

The dramatic change of view is the result of clinical experience. Doctors and nurses have seen that for many patients cannabis is more useful, less toxic, and less expensive than the conventional medicines prescribed for diverse syndromes and symptoms, including multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease, migraine headaches, severe nausea and vomiting, convulsive disorders, the AIDS wasting syndrome, chronic pain, and many others.

A mountain of anecdotal evidence speaks to marijuana's medical versatility and striking lack of toxicity. Even the federally sponsored Institute of Medicine has grudgingly acknowledged that marijuana has medical uses.

…The Food and Drug Administration, under pressure from a growing number of physicians and patients, approved Marinol for the treatment of the nausea and vomiting of cancer chemotherapy. Marinol is synthetic tetrahydrocannabinol, the primary active cannabinoid in marijuana, packed in a capsule with sesame oil so that it cannot be smoked.

But relatively few patients have found Marinol useful. It is less effective than marijuana for several reasons. Because it must be taken orally, the effect appears only after an hour or more. That eliminates one of the main advantages of smoked or vaporized inhaled cannabis, which works so quickly that the patient can adjust the dose with remarkable precision. Furthermore, Marinol is more expensive than marijuana, even with the prohibition tariff that raises the price of illicit cannabis.

…the primary, and for many the only, advantage of these drugs will be legality, their manufacturers will have an interest in vigorously enforced prohibition that raises the price of the competitive product, street marijuana.

The realities of human need are incompatible with the demand for a legally enforceable distinction between medicine and all other uses of cannabis. Marijuana not only has many potential medical uses, but can also safely enhance many pleasures and ease many discomforts of everyday life. In many cases what lay people do in prescribing marijuana for themselves is not very different from what physicians do when they provide prescriptions for psychoactive or other drugs.

The only workable way of realizing the full potential of this remarkable substance, including its full medical potential, is to free it from a dual set of regulations -- the laws that control prescription drugs, and the often cruel and self-defeating criminal laws that control psychoactive substances used to for nonmedical purposes. These mutually reinforcing laws strangle marijuana's uniquely multifaceted potential. The only way to liberate the potential is to give marijuana the same legal status as alcohol, a far more dangerous substance.

Marijuana should be removed from the medical and criminal control systems. It should be legalized for adults for all uses.

Nation's reaction to lesbian's slaying at issue

By Steve Strunsky, Associated Press, 8/18/2003

NEWARK -- On the night she was killed three months ago, 15-year-old Sakia Gunn and her lesbian friends had been hanging out in New York City's Greenwich Village, a place they knew they could find acceptance.

While waiting in Newark for a bus, the teenagers were approached by a man who tried to pick them up, and when they told him they were lesbians, he grabbed Sakia, witnesses said. The high school sophomore broke loose, but he lunged and stabbed her in the chest, the witnesses said. Suspect Richard McCullough, 29, has pleaded not guilty to murder. About 2,500 people attended Sakia's funeral, a gathering that gay rights advocates said revealed the numbers and commitment of Newark's young gay and lesbian community. But people working for gay rights in this predominantly black community say they're encumbered by an especially strong antigay bias.

Friends put together a support group carrying Sakia's name for young lesbians, but several students at West Side High School said Principal Fernand Williams refused their request for a moment of silence. School district spokeswoman Michelle Baldwin said she referred a request for interviews to Williams and other school officials, who did not respond.

Some in the gay community say Sakia's background as a black female from a working-class neighborhood also factors into how the nation reacted. Outraged lesbians and gays held rallies in Newark and other East Coast cities, but critics said Sakia's death didn't generate as much visible attention among mainstream gay rights groups or media organizations as the killings of two other youths, Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 2000 and Teena Brandon, the subject of the film "Boys Don't Cry," in Nebraska in 1993.

"I was shocked at the lack of response, the lack of support," said Amy Goodman, host of the "Democracy Now" news hour on New York's WBAI-FM.

The Gay City News, a New York City-based weekly newspaper focusing on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered community, or LGBT, ran an editorial about the killing with the headline, "Where is the Outrage?"

"I think there's racism in the LGBT community, and no doubt there's classism," said Mick Meenan, the paper's assistant editor, in an interview. "Whatever attitudes that occur within the community at large occur within the LGBT community."

One in 37 in US said to have done time
Record 2.1 million in prison in 2002

By Curt Anderson, Associated Press, 8/18/2003

WASHINGTON -- About one in every 37 US adults was either imprisoned at the end of 2001 or had been incarcerated at one time, the government reported yesterday.

The 5.6 million people with "prison experience" represented about 2.7 percent of the 210 million adults in the United States as of Dec. 31, 2001, the report found. The study, by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics, looks at people who served a sentence for a crime in state or federal prison, not those temporarily held in jail.

The study is the first to measure the prevalence of prison time among American adults. Last month, the bureau reported that a record 2.1 million people were in federal, state, or local custody at the end of 2002.

Between 1974 and 2001, the number of current and former inmates rose by 3.8 million, the study found. Of those, 2.7 million were previously incarcerated.

Experts say the growing numbers of former prisoners means more people in society will have difficulty finding jobs because of their felony convictions. Many cannot vote and they are more likely to have family or emotional problems that exact a toll on state and local budgets.

The number of people sent to prison for the first time tripled from 1974 to 2001 as sentences got tougher, especially for drug offenses. There are more former prisoners as well, the result of longer life expectancies and a larger US population. Prison experiences vary greatly by gender and ethnic origin.

"At every age, men have higher chances of going to prison than women, and blacks and Hispanics have higher chances than whites," statistician Thomas P. Bonczar said in the report.

Almost 5 percent of men in 2001 had done prison time, compared with less than 1 percent of women.

Help Wanted
By WALTER KIRN

…This talk about jobs as the be-all and end-all of American economic welfare has a fundamental limitation, though: except for certain hardcore puritans, it isn't jobs that people want; it's money. In the summer of 1978, when I was 16 and starting my working life, my goal was not to find a job at all, but to own a tricked-out Camaro with custom chrome wheels. Short of devising a surefire blackjack system, the only practical way to reach this dream was to take paid employment. The job I landed, pumping gas, was not only tedious, it turned out, but also, as self-service stations have proved, unnecessary in the scheme of things.

I hate to seem cold, but as far as I'm concerned, there are plenty of jobs that foreigners can have. Assembling Happy Meal toys, for starters. Filling snow globes with whatever that clear liquid is. For a while, that was the major type of work they did over there, and no one I know appeared to miss it much -- if it ever even existed in America. Cheap overseas labor has created products that costly labor would never have bothered with -- those flexible phosphorescent light sticks, say. Those jobs weren't stolen but invented.

But when Asians start doing our good jobs, it's another story. According to company executives, I.B.M. is considering shifting white-collar positions to India, where a competent novice computer programmer costs $5,000 a year instead of $60,000. Such a move would help keep the firm competitive and mean lower prices for consumers. But which consumers, you might ask. Laid-off I.B.M. managers? I wish the candidates would address this paradox instead of recycling rah-rah capitalist nostrums and nostalgic tariff schemes: at what point does remaining competitive dry up and dissipate the disposable incomes being competed for?

Such troublesome macroeconomic conundrums as how China's gains can't, in some sense, be our losses -- at least in the short term and to a degree -- are just what the politicians are avoiding by talking asininely about ''jobs'' when they ought to be talking about wealth, which is the only reason people take jobs other than to get away from nagging spouses. Sure, someday globalism and free trade may lift all boats equally, and to the heavens, but until our economies reach that blessed point of exalted, utopian equilibrium, isn't it true that more goodies in others' stockings naturally calls for fewer goodies in ours? No one will ever get elected for saying so, but don't tides go out before they rise again?

…If the work that remains when the money washes away mostly involves swabbing toilets at Dunkin' Donuts, even full employment will be no blessing. Yet the mantra never changes: more jobs, more jobs. But what jobs, and paid for out of whose accounts? Bailing water from a sinking ship is a job that could keep us all busy for years to come, but will it help buy that Camaro I still want?

Walter Kirn is the author, most recently, of ''Up in the Air,'' a novel.

As Iraqis die, hate for U.S. spreads
Families left bitter by relatives' deaths
By Gary Marx
Tribune foreign correspondent

August 17, 2003

BAGHDAD -- Ezhar Mahmood Ridha and her sister-in-law were on their way to a wake when they met their deaths at the hands of U.S. soldiers.

As their broken-down car stood stranded on a dusty overpass, a guerrilla fighter nearby detonated a huge explosive device at a passing U.S. military convoy. As the soldiers turned and fired, the car carrying the assailant sped away, according to witnesses and U.S. military officials.

The Americans hit the only object left on the overpass: Ridha's blue 1982 Mitsubishi sedan.

Bullets ripped through Ridha's body. She slumped over in the back seat, eyes frozen, as her 6-month-old baby slipped from her arms, witnesses said. Ridha's sister-in-law was hit in the stomach.

The shooting at dusk on Aug. 1 was just one of dozens of cases in which civilians have been caught in the crossfire of Iraq's guerrilla war. The firing was over in minutes and warranted only a five-paragraph statement from the U.S. military public affairs office in Iraq.

But the tragedy and its aftermath reveal much about the chaotic, unpredictable nature of combat here and how the deaths of civilians can turn residents of an entire village, once sympathetic to the U.S. occupation, into bitter enemies.

For each civilian killed--neither Iraqi nor American officials have attempted to keep count of the mounting casualty toll--a new circle of family, friends and tribespeople learns to revile the U.S. soldiers who came to liberate them.