Tech worker group files complaints over H-1B job ads
Complaints accuse U.S. companies of violating U.S. Immigration and Naturality Act
By Grant Gross, IDG News Service
June 22, 2006

The Programmers Guild, a group representing IT workers, has begun filing what will amount to about 380 legal complaints against U.S. companies advertising that they prefer to hire foreign workers with H-1B visas.

The group has filed about 100 complaints since May and plans to file about 280 more over the next six months, said John Miano, founder of the Guild. The complaints, made to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), accuse several companies of advertising that they specifically want H-1B workers, a violation of U.S. law.

It's always amusing when you recognize the local scenery.

blac(k)ademic asks

why are we all so hostile?

i've been blogging for a little bit under 6 months now and what i've noticed, is that along with blogging, comes so much anger, hostility and down right rudeness on the part of all us bloggers (myself included). when someone disagress with us, we hurry to write a posting, with such scathing sarcasm masked by a passive aggressive intellectual retort, just falling short of name calling, like small children. i rarely visit blogs now, where someone isn't ridiculing, shaming, mocking, or humiliating someone else, simply because that someone else had a typo, misspelled a word, or had an individual thought (gasp!).

Iraqi Government Declares State of Emergency
By JOHN F. BURNS and JOHN O'NEIL

The gunmen had released all the workers they believed to be Sunni, along with a number of women and children, and 17 more were rescued by Iraqi police on Thursday on a raid on a farm north of Baghdad. After the five bodies were found today, about 30 people remain missing from the Wednesday incident.

The abduction, involving 40 or 50 gunmen, some wearing police uniforms, represented a sharp intensification of a tactic that has become increasingly common in Iraq.

Sounds familiar. 

U.S. Blacks Hear Better Than Whites, women better than men
21:43:30 EDT Jun 23, 2006

(HealthDay News) - Listen up, America: A new study finds that blacks have better hearing than whites, and women of all races tend to hear better than men.

Researchers at the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health also found that, even with significant advances in hearing technology, Americans' hearing levels remain stuck at where they were about 30 years ago.

The Cincinnati-based team studied the results of hearing tests administered across the United States between 1999 and 2004. Results of the study were presented at a recent meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Providence, R.I.

Healing Monks of Ewu
Daily Champion (Lagos)
EDITORIAL
June 23, 2006
Posted to the web June 23, 2006
Lagos

A milestone was reached May 30 when monks at the Benedictine Monastery in Ewu, Edo State, officially opened their new state-of-the-art Laboratory for the production of herbal drugs. Simultaneously, they launched perhaps the first quarterly journal of African medicines, The Herbal Doctor.

The PAX Herbal Laboratories, commissioned by Governor Lucky Igbinedion, is the brain-child of Fr. Anselem Adodo and his band of Christian monks numbering more than 33 who come from 15 Nigerian tribes and 12 states.

Monastries are usually erroneously associated only with prayers, fasting and other austerities and deprivations that are supposed to bring monks and nuns closer to God. Which all may be true.

Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says
The Number of People Who Say They Have No One to Confide In Has Risen
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 23, 2006; Page A03

Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, and a sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States.

Yeah.

Lots of people spend more time working (including the commute) than they do at home. Lots of people get the majority of their sensory input from electronic devices. And everyone is the competition.

The fact is, not "some" polls, but virtually every major poll shows that American have long declared that going to war against Iraq was a mistake.

And far more than "independent voters" are drawn to withdrawal. Every major poll reveals that a majority of Americans advocate withdrawals from Iraq, with large numbers wanting this to be quite speedy, and most wanting a full pullout in a year or so (Kerry's idea) or by the end of next year.

This is hardly a "some" position.

Polls, Pundits and Pols
You'd never know it from some of the reporting and bloviating on the debate over an Iraq withdrawal, but all major polls show that the public favors withdrawals, with strong support for a timeline or total pullout within a year.
By Greg Mitchell

A Crucial Gatekeeper

Swift's database provides a rich hunting ground for government investigators. Swift is a crucial gatekeeper, providing electronic instructions on how to transfer money among 7,800 financial institutions worldwide. The cooperative is owned by more than 2,200 organizations, and virtually every major commercial bank, as well as brokerage houses, fund managers and stock exchanges, uses its services. Swift routes more than 11 million transactions each day, most of them across borders.

It's been a long, long time since I was corporate. Back in those days I worked on an interface between SWIFT and the trust and custody operation system, and between SWIFT and the system we received trading instructions from the dreaded home office in Japan.

Because Republicans will do it for you...they can't help themselves. And they'll do it is a way that will anger Black folks pretty much everywhere.

In what was described as a contentious caucus meeting, Southern Republicans complained that their states were being singled out by the act, which was originally intended to do away with the poll taxes, literacy tests and other measures that were used to deprive black voters of their rights during the Jim Crow era. Having grown up in South Carolina during the "last throes" (to quote Dick Cheney in another context) of racial segregation, I can testify that the states in question went far out of their way to earn the enhanced scrutiny the Voting Rights Act forces them to endure.

This is problematic.

The case against Solis has not been presented to a grand jury and Reposa is hoping to get the charges against his client reduced. Solis has admitted to police that he had sex with the girl, but he assumed she was older, according to Reposa. The girl's attorney, Adam Lowey , said his now 14-year-old client has suffered "horrific" harm because of Solis' actions and MySpace's "lax security policies."  

14 is old enough to get screwed in a number of states...Texas may well be among them. And my first reaction had to be tempered because I got NO IDEA what went on there. It doesn't take a lot of conversation for me to realize a woman is actually a child, but it wasn't so easy when I was 19.

Still, I get the sense everyone is full of shit on this one.

A Countersuit in the MySpace Case?
A 14-year-old girl is suing the social networking site, where she met the man charged with sexually assaulting her. Now the man she says assaulted her may pursue his own legal case against MySpace
By HILARY HYLTON/AUSTIN

 

...The defense attorney for Pete Solis, the 19-year-old Texas community college student charged with sexually assaulting the girl dubbed "Julie Doe" in her lawsuit, told TIME that if the Texas courts accept the premise that MySpace is liable because the two met there, then his client also has a claim, since the alleged victim falsely portrayed herself on the webiste as 15 years old.

I'm putting this under "Impeachable offenses" because no one even tried shit like this until the Bushistas came around. Ms. Reutty absolutely did the right thing, and attempts to bully the woman over it are just wrong.

But borough officials say Reutty intentionally stonewalled the police investigation by putting the library first...[t]he whole episode is "shocking," Reutty said Wednesday. "I followed the law. And because I followed the law, at the end of the day, the policemen's case is going to hold strong. Nobody is going to sue the library and nobody is going to sue the municipality of Hasbrouck Heights because information was given out illegally." 

Library chief draws cops' ire
Thursday, June 22, 2006
By MERRY FIRSCHEIN
STAFF WRITER

HASBROUCK HEIGHTS -- Library Director Michele Reutty is under fire for refusing to give police library circulation records without a subpoena.

Reutty says she was only doing her job and maintaining the privacy of library patrons. But the mayor called it "a blatant disregard for the Police Department," which needed her help to identify a man who allegedly threatened a child.

You must watch this clip from the Steven Colbert Show.

There's got to be a stupidity test to get on the air at Fox. 

"I saw nothing that spoke to me of any manipulation," said one member, Peter Bloomfield, a statistics professor at North Carolina State University. He added that his impression was the study was "an honest attempt to construct a data analysis procedure."

More broadly, the panel examined other recent research comparing the pronounced warming trend over the last several decades with temperature shifts over the last 2,000 years. It expressed high confidence that warming over the last 25 years exceeded any peaks since 1600. And in a news conference here today, three panelists said the current warming was probably, but not certainly, beyond any peaks since the year 900.

The experts said there was no reliable way to make estimates for surface-temperature trends in the first millennium A.D.

Science Panel Backs Study on Warming Climate
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

WASHINGTON, June 22 — A controversial paper asserting that recent warming in the Northern Hemisphere was probably unrivaled for 1,000 years was endorsed today, with a few reservations, by a panel convened by the nation's pre-eminent scientific body.

Worker Retaliation Suits Bolstered by U.S. High Court (Update2)

June 22 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court opened employers to more retaliation lawsuits, saying workers may be able to sue when they are transferred or suspended after lodging job-discrimination complaints.

The justices unanimously upheld a $43,000 jury award to a Tennessee railyard worker who said Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. punished her for complaining about gender bias. Sheila White first was shifted to more demanding job responsibilities and later was suspended for 37 days without pay.

"Many reasonable workers would find a month without a paycheck to be a serious hardship," Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court. Burlington Northern argued that the ban on retaliation should apply only to "ultimate employment decisions" such as a demotion or firing.

I didn't make that up. It came from the website for the PBS series, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.

PBS does a nice job with that sort of thing.

The Darfur Peace Agreement: Which way forward?
2006-06-22

Laurie Nathan, formerly the head of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town, was a member of the African Union (AU) mediation team based in Abuja that facilitated negotiations for the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA). In this interview he offers some perspectives on the negotiations and the Agreement.

Pambazuka News: Many analysts and observers have warned that the ceasefire promised by the DPA is unlikely to be attained. What are the main problems in this regard?

Laurie Nathan: The most obvious problem is that the Agreement has not been signed by all the armed groups in Darfur. Two of the rebel movements that participated in the AU mediation – the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) that is headed by Abdul Wahid Mohammed al-Nur – refused to sign. The Agreement concluded on 5 May was endorsed only by the Sudanese government and the SLM/A faction headed by Minni Minawi. Abdul Wahid is the rebel leader with the most popular support in Darfur. Without his endorsement of the Agreement, there is little prospect of a lasting peace. [Note from Pambazuka News editors: Subsequent to this interview, reports indicate that some groups have now committed to the terms of the agreement. See http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=53837 for further details.]

In addition, there are numerous armed groups in Darfur that were not present at the Abuja negotiations. Most significantly, these groups include the Janjaweed, the rampaging militia that have been responsible for so much of the death and destruction in the region and that are used by the government to crush the rebels and their communities.

It should also be recalled that the government, JEM and the SLM/A have signed several humanitarian ceasefire agreements over the past two years and then violated these agreements repeatedly and egregiously. This constitutes fair warning of the possibility of further violations, especially if the signatories are not genuinely committed to the new agreement.

Another huge problem is that the AU peacekeeping mission in Darfur is hopelessly ill-equipped to oversee the ceasefire and protect civilians from attacks by government, militia, rebels and bandits. The AU has roughly 7,000 troops when it needs, according to the AU Force Commander, as many as 60,000 troops to cover inhospitable badlands the size of France.

Quote of note...and listen to the damn thing.

See-no-evil lawmakers
Thursday, June 22, 2006

CONSIDERING the disturbing evidence of racial discrimination in the past two presidential elections -- remember Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 -- it would seem that renewal of the federal Voting Rights Act would be a given.

Even before recent congressional hearings, it was clear that the United States still needs to scrutinize its elections for intentional and inadvertent acts of disenfranchisement. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been credited with eliminating some of the most overt forms of discrimination, such as poll taxes and literacy tests.

I'll be walking past the keyboard and even using it occasionally, but don't expect much posting activity today. I'm not feeling clever. I can keep up with comments until early afternoon, though.

It's this level of stooopididity than makes the mid-term elections so unpredictable.

The campaign is largely the work of the U.S. National Rifle Association, whose executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, warns on an NRA Web site (http://www.stopungunban.org/) of a July 4 plot "to finalize a U.N. treaty that would strip all citizens of all nations of their right to self-protection."

Gun owners accuse UN of July 4 conspiracy
Wed Jun 21, 2006 05:35 PM ET
By Irwin Arieff

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Americans mistakenly worried the United Nations is plotting to take away their guns on July 4 -- U.S. Independence Day -- are flooding the world body with angry letters and postcards, the chairman of a U.N. conference on the illegal small arms trade said on Wednesday.

“This study fits within a relatively new field of research which connects motivations of individual people to their collective behaviour,” says Turchin.

“One wishes that members of the Bush administration had known about this research before they initiated invasion of Iraq three years ago,” he adds. “I think it would be fair to say that the general opinion of political scientists is that the Bush administration was overconfident of victory, and that the Iraq war is a debacle.”

Overconfidence is a disadvantage in war, finds study
00:01 21 June 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi

Overconfident people are more likely to wage war but fare worse in the ensuing battles, a new study suggests. The research on how people approach a computer war game backs up a theory that “positive illusions” may contribute to costly conflicts.

Other efforts to chip away at the act have faltered under pressure from powerful supporters.

One such measure, sponsored by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, would have stripped a provision that requires ballots to be printed in several languages and interpreters be provided in states and counties where large numbers of citizens speak limited English...

However, Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., called that logic an effort to mix the divisive debate over immigration reform with the Voting Rights Act renewal. Three-fourths of those whose primary language is not English are American-born, he said.

House Delays Renewal of Voting Rights Act
WASHINGTON, Jun. 21, 2006

(AP) House Republican leaders on Wednesday postponed a vote on renewing the 1965 Voting Rights Act after GOP lawmakers complained it unfairly singles out nine Southern states for federal oversight, a leadership aide said.

At a private meeting, several Republicans also balked at extending provisions in the law that require ballots to be printed in more than one language in neighborhoods where there are large numbers of immigrants, said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision had not yet been made public.

They'll be running around the country pissing off their constituents over immigration, all the while pretending it wasn't them that delayed dealing with it.

Isn't THAT a lovely thought?

Iran won't respond to offer 'til August
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer
Wed Jun 21, 9:40 AM ET