LOS ANGELES (AP) – Immigration rights advocates more than 500,000 strong marched in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, demanding that Congress abandon attempts to make illegal immigration a felony and to build more walls along the border.

The massive demonstration, by far the biggest of several around the nation in recent days, came as President Bush prodded Republican congressional leaders to give some illegal immigrants a chance to work legally in the U.S. under certain conditions.

Wearing white shirts to symbolize peace, marchers chanted “Mexico!” “USA!” and “Si se puede,” an old Mexican-American civil rights shout that means “Yes, we can.” They waved the flags of the U.S., Mexico and other countries, and some wore them as capes.

Saturday’s march was among the largest for any cause in recent U.S. history. Police came up with the crowd estimate using aerial photographs and other techniques, police Cmdr. Louis Gray Jr. said.

Other demonstrations drew 50,000 people in Denver and several thousand in Sacramento and Charlotte, N.C.

Many protesters said lawmakers were unfairly targeting immigrants who provide a major labor pool for America’s economy.

“Enough is enough of the xenophobic movement,” said Norman Martinez, 63, who immigrated from Honduras as a child and marched in Los Angeles. “They are picking on the weakest link in society, which has built this country.”
guardian.co.uk

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi lectured a U.S. audience on democracy on Thursday and said Libya is the only real democracy in the world.

Via a video link, Gaddafi addressed an unprecedented gathering of U.S. and Libyan academics prompted by a thaw in relations since the former pariah state decided in 2003 to abandon nuclear weapons and took responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

He touted Libya’s political system as superior to “farcical” and “fake” parliamentary and representative democracies in the West.”

“There is no state with a democracy except Libya on the whole planet,” Gaddafi said to the conference at Columbia University in New York.

Libya’s Jamahiriyah system, under which Libyans can air their views at “people’s congresses,” is genuine democracy, said Gaddafi, who spoke through a translator and was dressed in purple robes and seated at a desk in front of a map of Africa.
reuters.com

The three peace activists freed by an SAS-led coalition force after being held hostage in Iraq for four months refused to co-operate fully with an intelligence unit sent to debrief them, a security source claimed yesterday.

The claim has infuriated those searching for other hostages.

Neither the men nor the Canadian group that sent them to Iraq have thanked the people who saved them in any of their public statements.
telegraph.co.uk

Rescue in Iraq surprises Canadians
TORONTO – While Canadians rejoiced at the news that two of their citizens were rescued from captivity in Iraq, some were surprised to learn Canadian special forces were involved in the mission and curious as to how many troops are on the ground.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters Thursday that a handful of Canadian troops have been stationed in Iraq since the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, which is still widely unpopular at home.

BAGHDAD – Iraq’s president issued a highly optimistic report Friday on progress among politicians trying to hammer out the shape of a new unity government. At least 51 more people, including two U.S. soldiers, were reported dead in rampant violence.

President Jalal Talabani said the government could be in place for parliamentary approval by the end of the month, though he acknowledged “I am usually a very optimistic person.” He spoke to reporters after a fifth round of multiparty talks among the country’s polarized political factions.

A less optimistic Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whose nomination by the Shiite bloc for a second term produced the political stalemate, has said a Cabinet list could be ready by the end of April, a full month beyond the Talabani estimate.

Jaafari’s nomination has been strongly opposed by Sunni, Kurdish and secular legislators. But in remarks aired Friday on Al-Arabiya television, the prime minister suggested he had no plans to step aside.

The rising death toll among Iraqis on Friday included five worshipers killed in a bombing outside a Sunni mosque after prayers. At least 15 were wounded in the blast in Khalis, northeast of Baghdad, the Iraqi military reported.

Baghdad police said they discovered 25 more bodies, blindfolded, shot and dumped throughout the capital. Retaliatory killings among Shiites and Sunnis have become increasingly common in the capital since the Feb. 22 bombing of an important Shiite shrine that unleashed the rash of sectarian violence.

The two U.S. soldiers were killed in combat in insurgent-ridden Anbar province, the American military reported Friday. The statement said the soldiers, assigned to the 2/28th Brigade Combat Team, were killed Thursday.
sptimes.com

No civil war risk in Iraq, says US chief
RAQ does not face the danger of civil war as Iraqis move towards a national unity government and prepare to take on more responsibility for their country, the chairman of the US joints of staff, Peter Pace, said today.

“I do not think a civil war will erupt in Iraq. What is important here are the decisions of the Iraqi people,” Mr Pace, who was in Turkey to attend a conference on global terrorism, told the NTV news channel with voice-over translation into Turkish.

The general pointed out that Iraqi leaders had called for calm and moderation since the bombing last month of a Shiite shrine north of Baghdad, which triggered reprisals against Sunnis and unleashed the worst sectarian violence in years.

“I think the Iraqi people have understood that they are at a historic turning point. The elected leaders are working to form a unity government that will include Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Iraqis,” Mr Pace said.

“This will be to the benefit of Iraqis. I foresee a very healthy 2006. They (Iraqis) will take on more responsibility” for their country, he added.

Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Revenge in Baghdad
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 25 — Mohannad al-Azawi had just finished sprinkling food in his bird cages at his pet shop in south Baghdad, when three carloads of gunmen pulled up.

In front of a crowd, he was grabbed by his shirt and driven off.

Mr. Azawi was among the few Sunni Arabs on the block, and, according to witnesses, when a Shiite friend tried to intervene, a gunman stuck a pistol to his head and said, “You want us to blow your brains out, too?”

Mr. Azawi’s body was found the next morning at a sewage treatment plant. A slight man who raised nightingales, he had been hogtied, drilled with power tools and shot.

In the last month, hundreds of men have been kidnapped, tortured and executed in Baghdad. As Iraqi and American leaders struggle to avert a civil war, the bodies keep piling up. The city’s homicide rate has tripled from 11 to 33 a day, military officials said. The period from March 7 to March 21 was typically brutal: at least 191 corpses, many mutilated, surfaced in garbage bins, drainage ditches, minibuses and pickup trucks.

In Falluja, Iraqi forces riven by sectarianism
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters) – If all goes to plan, U.S.-trained Iraqi troops and police will work together, gain the trust of volatile cities like Falluja and battle insurgents on their own as the Americans gradually withdraw troops.

But, judging by the mood of this former rebel stronghold west of Baghdad, that is wishful thinking.

Iraqi soldiers and police, charged with making sure al Qaeda-linked militants and Saddam Hussein loyalists who once took over the city never return, are deeply divided, raising questions about the prospects of stability.

This week, the mostly Arab Sunni police staged a strike to protest what they said were abuses committed by Shi’ite Muslim soldiers. The police have returned to their posts, but the mistrust remains.

“The soldiers attacked a 17-year-old grocer and took him away to an area where he was found dead two hours later,” said a police major, who asked not to be named. He said the youth had been shot in the eye and his stomach ripped open.

Ancient Rift Brings Fear on Streets of Baghdad
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 25 — The difference between Shiites and Sunnis is sometimes explained simply as a disagreement over who should have become the leader of the Muslim community after the Prophet Muhammad died nearly 1,400 years ago.

But in Iraq, the divide goes beyond that, partly because of geography and partly because of history. With sectarian tensions rising, Iraqis are paying more attention to the little things that signal whether someone is Shiite or Sunni. None of the indicators are foolproof. But a name, an accent and even the color of a head scarf can provide clues.

Complicating all of this is the reality that many Iraqis have intermarried and that for much of Iraq’s history, the two communities have coexisted peacefully. Very rarely has sectarian identity been a life or death matter, the way it is now on some of Baghdad’s streets.

Oh I see. This has to do with an ‘ancient rift.’ This is the sort of subtle bias the Times excels at.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Shas party, was quoted Friday by an ultra-Orthodox weekly paper saying that “whoever votes for Kadima in the upcoming elections will be going backwards, and into hell.”

The influential rabbi later told Shas Chairman Eli Yishai that he never made the controversial statement, adding, “Had I wanted to say such things, I wouldn’t be ashamed of doing so.”

Rabbi Yosef recently said that whomever votes for Shas in next week’s general elections is ensured a spot in heaven. In his interview with with the paper, “Hakehila” he stood by this statement. “That is the absolute truth. I’m happy people made a stink about this. I only speak the truth,” he said.

A Kadima election campaign spokesman responded saying, “Whoever votes for Kadima is voting for hope and for Sharon’s policy, and is ensuring that Israel will be a better place. That is the real Paradise.”
haaretz.com

While President Bush appears serenely confident about Iraq, the same cannot be said of the War Party propagandists who were plotting this conflict when Dubya was still a rookie governor of Texas.

William Kristol of The Weekly Standard now demands the firing of Donald Rumsfeld. William F. Buckley, whose National Review branded the antiwar Right “unpatriotic conservatives” who “hate” America, now calls upon Bush for an “acknowledgement of defeat.”

Richard Perle says the administration “got the war right and the aftermath wrong.” Self-described “humiliated pundit” Andrew Sullivan confesses to “a sense of shame and sorrow.” Michael Ledeen says of Bush’s war, “Wrong war, wrong time, wrong way, wrong place.”

Frank (“The End of History”) Fukuyama concedes that “Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.”

But it is a March 20 essay in The Wall Street Journal that suggests the neocons may be coming unhinged. Written by Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, the piece urges Bush to begin the “rejuvenation of his presidency by shocking the media and political community with a sweeping overhaul of his administration.”

The purge Barnes recommends would have caused Stalin to recoil.

Barnes calls on Bush to fire press secretary Scott McClellan, chief of staff Andy Card, political adviser Karl Rove, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary John Snow – and Vice President Richard Cheney.

“The trickiest issue is how to handle Karl Rove,” says Barnes.

I don’t think so, Fred. I think “the trickiest issue” will be how to handle Dick and Lynne when they are told by Dubya they must give up a constitutional office to which Cheney was elected by the nation, vacate the vice presidential mansion and turn the keys over to Condi Rice.
antiwar.com

WASHINGTON – Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is removing its logo from a paper about the “Israel lobby” that was co-authored by its academic dean.

The new version of the paper also has a more prominent disclaimer warning that the paper’s views belong only to its authors.

The changes appear to be a sign that the university is distancing itself from the document in the face of a furor from faculty members, Jewish leaders, and a congressman who say it fails to meet academic standards and promotes anti-Semitic myths.

The paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” was written by the Kennedy School’s Stephen Walt and a political science professor and the codirector of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer, and published by the Kennedy School.

In the 83-page “working paper,” the professors allege that a vast network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq.

Components of or influenced by the purported network include major publications, “Christian evangelicals,” top-ranking officials in the Bush administration, and scholars at prominent think tanks. The paper has won praise from Islamist groups and white supremacist and anti-Semite David Duke.

It also has drawn sharp criticism from prominent Harvard faculty, including Kennedy School lecturer Marvin Kalb, literature professor Ruth Wisse, and law professor Alan Dershowitz; Harvard students, and Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat of New York. Many critics have called for Harvard to withdraw the paper until it can be brought up to acceptable standards of scholarship, alleging that the document is riddled with factual inaccuracies and suffers from bias and faulty research.
nysun.com

Washington Post response: ‘Of Israel, Harvard and David Duke’

How tiresomely predictable. Kill the messenger. Question the scholarship. Only KKK Nazis could possibly agree…blah blah blah

Professor Says American Publisher Turned Him Down
John Mearsheimer says that the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful that he and co-author Stephen Walt would never have been able to place their report in a American-based scientific publication.

“I do not believe that we could have gotten it published in the United States,” Mearsheimer told the Forward. He said that the paper was originally commissioned in the fall of 2002 by one of America’s leading magazines, “but the publishers told us that it was virtually impossible to get the piece published in the United States.”

Most scholars, policymakers and journalists know that “the whole subject of the Israel lobby and American foreign policy is a third-rail issue,” he said. “Publishers understand that if they publish a piece like ours it would cause them all sorts of problems.”

I grew up in a time when two-parent families were still the norm, in both black and white America. Then, as an adult, I saw divorce become more commonplace, then almost a rite of passage. Today it would appear that many — particularly in the black community — have dispensed with marriage altogether.

But as a black woman, I have witnessed the outrage of girlfriends when the ex failed to show up for his weekend with the kids, and I’ve seen the disappointment of children who missed having a dad around. Having enjoyed a close relationship with my own father, I made a conscious decision that I wanted a husband, not a live-in boyfriend and not a “baby’s daddy,” when it came my time to mate and marry.

My time never came.

For years, I wondered why not. And then some 12-year-olds enlightened me.

“Marriage is for white people.”
washingtonpost.com

SACRAMENTO — Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low-proficiency students, eliminating it.

Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.

The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.

The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.
nytimes.com

And what is the demographic of these children who ‘test below grade level’? Overwhelmingly poor and non-white. So the most deprived people in the country are now being deprived of history, art, and science in their schools. Sickness.

Exams cut by third as stress on pupils soars
The true level of pressure facing children was laid bare last night as Britain’s most senior exams official admitted pupils faced a huge and excessive exam load that had distorted the balance of what was taught in schools.
Ken Boston, chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), said he was determined to reduce the number of tests that pupils in England and Wales are forced to sit. He also admitted, however, that it was time to raise the standard of exams, with new higher-level grades and harder exams for the brightest students.

‘The assessment load is huge,’ Boston said. ‘It is far greater than in other countries and not necessary for the purpose. We are pushing for the overall burden of assessment to be reduced.’

Colleges and schools could see the exam load fall quite quickly. By 2009, A-level students will spend up to a third less time in the exam hall. The QCA plans to cut the time spent in the exam hall from 10.5 hours to a maximum of seven hours. Students will sit four papers over the two years rather than six.

That, argued Boston, would allow room for longer, essay-style questions that would pick out the most talented.

It would also reduce the stress for students facing competitive exams in four out of their five final years at school, he added. ‘We need to look critically at the assessment regime,’ said Boston. ‘Assessment for learning is critical but stacks of [tests] can distort the balance of the curriculum and put too much emphasis on what is examined. I think this has been happening.’

…The push to stretch the brightest children was welcomed by parents’ groups. Margaret Morrissey, chair of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, said: ‘Parents worry that if their child is bright they don’t get special attention that would lead them to a higher level. This is good news and a sign that the QCA is becoming more parent- and learning-focused.’

And what is the demographic of ‘the most talented’? Guess.

Earlier this year, a pregnant Pittsburgh Steelers fan told local reporters that she had asked her doctor to induce labor early so she could watch the Super Bowl. Once her obstetrician determined that the procedure would be safe, and that the Steelers were in fact headed to the big game, he consented. (Ultimately, the woman went into spontaneous labor and gave birth naturally.)

While her request may be unusual for its frivolity, American obstetricians are inducing labor more and more often, sometimes for no other reason than that the mother wants it. As of last count, in 2003, one out of every five American births was induced — double the figure for 1990. It is a surprisingly high rate given induction’s increased risk of fetal distress or a ruptured uterus. Inductions also make more likely a Caesarean birth — major abdominal surgery, with a long recovery period.
nytimes.com