Undernews For July 22, 2009

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21 June 2009

THE MOUSSAVI HIS SUPPORTERS DON'T REMEMBER

CNN - He's been labeled by many as the "reformist," a man who can take Iran beyond the truculent anti-Western rhetoric of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

So, when Iran's government announced over the weekend that Mir Hossein Moussavi had lost in his bid to become the country's next president, young Iranians took to the streets by the thousands alleging ballot fraud.

Thousands of others around the globe championed the cause on social-networking Web sites and agreed to wear green on Monday in solidarity with Moussavi's supporters.

But what is often lost in the outrage is whether Iran would look different under a Moussavi presidency.

Though the 67-year old is credited for successfully navigating the Iranian economy as prime minister during a bloody eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, he also was a hard-liner whom the Economist described as a "firm radical."

He, like most Iranians in power, does not believe in the existence of Israel. He defended the taking of hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979, which led to the break in ties between the countries.

He was part of a regime that regularly executed dissidents and backed the fatwa against British author Salman Rushdie.

And as late as April, he opposed suspending the country's nuclear-enrichment program but said it would not be diverted to weapons use. . .

Moussavi was named prime minister in 1980. A year earlier, Iran had become an Islamic republic after the ruling monarchy was overthrown and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was forced into exile.

The same year, a group of students in support of the Islamic revolution took 52 Americans hostage and held them for 444 days.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1981, Moussavi defended the hostage-taking as the beginning of "second stage of our revolution."

"It was after this that we rediscovered our true Islamic identity," he said. . .

In 1988, author Salman Rushdie released his fourth novel, 'The Satanic Verses,' which Iran said insulted Islam. The country's supreme leader called for the death of Rushdie. And Moussavi, in a radio broadcast, said the order would be carried out.

Moussavi told the Financial Times in April that he would not halt Iran's uranium enrichment program if he were president. "No one in Iran would accept suspension," he said.

Since his stint as prime minister, Moussavi has been absent from politics. For the past 10 years, his official job has been to head the state-owned Art Center. He is a painter.

The long "20 years of silence," as the Iranian media dubbed it, is working to Moussavi's advantage.

Of Iran's population of 70 million, almost 60 percent are younger than 28 -- too young to have lived through the 1979 revolution. To them, Moussavi represents a sea change from Ahmadinejad.

While the president calls the Holocaust a myth, Moussavi has condemned the killing of Jews.

While Ahmadinejad has unleashed the morality police to ensure that women cover their hair in public, Moussavi has pledged his support for women's rights.

Most importantly, the youth are unhappy about the faltering economy under Ahmadinejad, with the unemployment rate topping 30 percent by some accounts. They are hungry for anyone who represents change, analysts have said.

"We have really an interesting moment of historic irony here," Afshin Molavi, a fellow at the New America Foundation, said on the CNN talk show Fareed Zakaria GPS.

"Moussavi is a child of the revolution. Moussavi was never a real reformer, either, when he was prime minister.

"And now he's being faced with the question: Should he unleash the young people out onto the streets who supported him -- thus threatening the very system that he fought for?"

ATLANTA DESTROYING ALL PUBLIC HOUSING

NY Times - In 1936, Atlanta built Techwood Homes, the nation's first housing project. By the 1990s, a greater percentage of the city's residents were living in housing projects . . . than in any other city in America.

Now, Atlanta is nearing a very different record: becoming the first major city to knock them all down. By next June, officials here plan to demolish the city's last remaining housing project. . .

Over the past 15 years, Atlanta has bulldozed about 15,000 units, spread across 32 housing projects. . .

The elimination of housing projects does not mean the abandonment of public housing. The Atlanta Housing Authority pays for more residents' housing these days than it did in the 1990s. But they are scattered throughout the city in mixed-income communities and private housing financed with vouchers through the government's Section 8 program.

Still, critics of the demolitions worry about the toll on residents, who must qualify for vouchers, struggle to find affordable housing and often move to only slightly less impoverished neighborhoods. Especially in a troubled economy, civil rights groups say, uprooting can lead to homelessness if more low-income housing is not made available. Lawsuits have been filed in many other cities, generally without success, that claim that similar relocations violate residents' civil rights and resegregate the poor. . .

Over all, 195,000 public housing units have met the wrecking ball across the country since 2006, and over 230,000 more units are scheduled for demolition, according to the Housing and Urban Development Department. .

The housing authority says the overwhelming majority of residents support the relocations. But critics say unsuspecting residents are forced into only marginally better neighborhoods. The vouchers, which usually provide families with $568 to $758 per month, according to the housing authority, are not available to residents with certain criminal backgrounds and are often viewed suspiciously by landlords in wealthier communities.

A large majority of displaced residents settle in 10 of Atlanta's poorest ZIP codes, according to an analysis of housing authority data by Creative Loafing, an alternative newspaper. Only about 20 percent return to their communities once the property becomes a mixed-income development, Mr. Boston said.

"Until you have alternative housing that is affordable, available and appropriate, you have no business going into these communities and destroying them," said Anita Beaty, the executive director of the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. "To disperse these people without giving them alternatives is wrong."

The real winners, Ms. Beaty said, are business developers who make fortunes once the projects are torn down and the neighborhoods gentrify. For years, wealthier Atlantans, frustrated by long commutes, have been moving closer to their jobs downtown and, critics say, displacing poorer residents to outlying suburbs. . .

TESTING THE TWITTER TWADDLE

NY Times - Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland. And Twitter, the newest social-networking tool, has been identified with two mass protests in a matter of months - in Moldova in April and in Iran last week, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to oppose the official results of the presidential election.

But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology? Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means - individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites - were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists' access to events, the protesters have used Twitter's agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. .

Washington Post - Citizens who once had little public voice are using cheap Web tools to tell the world about the drama that has unfolded since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of Iran's disputed election. The government succeeded last week in exerting control over Internet use and text-messaging, but Twitter has proven nearly impossible to block. . .

Yet for all their promise, there are sharp limits on what Twitter and other Web tools such as Facebook and blogs can do for citizens in authoritarian societies. The 140 characters allowed in a tweet are not the end of politics as we know it -- and at times can even play into the hands of hard-line regimes. No amount of Twittering will force Iran's leaders to change course, as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made clear with his rebuke of the protesters, reportedly followed by the security forces' use of tear gas, batons, water cannons and gunfire to break up demonstrations yesterday. In Iran, as elsewhere, if true revolution is coming, it must happen offline.

First, Twitter's own internal architecture puts limits on political activism. There are so many messages streaming through at any moment that any single entry is unlikely to break through the din, and the limit of 140 characters -- part of the service's charm and the secret of its success -- militates against sustained argument and nuance. . . What's most exciting is the aggregate effect of all this speech and what it reveals about the zeitgeist of the moment, but it still reflects a worldwide user population that skews wealthy, English-speaking and well-educated. The same is true of the blogosphere and social networks such as Facebook.

Second, governments that are jealous of their power can push back on cyberspace when they feel threatened. The Iranian state runs one of the world's most formidable online censorship regimes. In the past week alone, officials have blocked access to YouTube, Facebook and the majority of Web sites most often cited by reformist segments of the Persian blogosphere. They supplement this censorship with surveillance and the threat of imprisonment for those who speak out. Even if they fail to block political speech or organizing activities, the possibility of future retaliation can chill the most devoted activists and critics.

Paradoxically, the "freedom to scream" online may actually assist authoritarian regimes by serving as a political release valve of sorts. If dissent is channeled into cyberspace, it can keep protesters off the streets and help state security forces track political activism and new online voices. As Egyptian democracy activist Saad Ibrahim said last week during a discussion at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, this appears to be part of a long tradition for governments in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, where dissent is channeled into universities and allowed to thrive there, as long as it does not escape the university walls.

Third, the blogosphere is not limited to young, liberal, anti-regime activists; state sympathizers are increasingly active in the battle for online supremacy. Our research into the Iranian blogosphere shows that political and religious conservatives are no less prominent than regime critics. While the Iranian blogosphere is indeed a place where women speak out for their rights, young people criticize the morality police, journalists fight censorship, reformists press for change, and dissidents call for revolution, it is also a place where the supreme leader is praised, the Holocaust denied, the Islamic Revolution defended and Hezbollah celebrated. It is also a place where Islamist student groups mobilize and pro-establishment leaders, including President Ahmadinejad, reach out to their constituents within the Iranian public. Our most recent research suggests that the number and popularity of politically conservative and Islamic bloggers has grown over the past year, relative to the number of secular reformists, possibly due to the events leading up to the presidential election.

Online chatter has enormous value when it offers a window into an otherwise closed society, but much of the cyber conversation in Iran has absolutely nothing to do with politics or revolution. Religion is a major topic for bloggers -- and not necessarily the politics of religion, but rather its historical, theological and personal aspects. And the most frequently discussed topic on Iranian blogs? Poetry.

Authoritarian regimes are also eager to employ the Web for their own brand of political activism. In Iran, for example, the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary force under the authority of the Revolutionary Guard, pledged to create 10,000 blogs to combat what it described as foreign elements that are trying to foment revolution online. (The effort ultimately failed.) Government supporters have also carried out increasingly sophisticated attacks against popular Persian Web sites deemed not sufficiently supportive of the government or critical of Israel's actions in Gaza last winter.

THE MYTH OF URBAN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Nothing illustrates the faillure of traditional urban economic development planning than Washington's new baseball stadium funded with nearly $700 million of public dollars. DC has spent several billions on a stadium, a sports arena and two convention centers, among other things. The payoff: fewer DC residents employed than in the mid 1980s.

Washington Examiner - It was not supposed to be this way. When Major League Baseball awarded ownership of the Washington Nationals to Theodore Lerner and his family on May 3, 2006, the team's prospects never looked brighter. Finally under local control after years of neglect in Montreal and during its first season in the District, the franchise promised to really take off in 2008, when a brand-new stadium would be built on the banks of the Anacostia River. The minor-league system would soon be stocked with homegrown talent, and when the club was ready to win, it could go after select free-agent stars.

Last month, Ted Lerner and his family marked their three-year anniversary as stewards of Washington baseball. But their plan is not working - at all. The Nats are again awful, headed for a second consecutive 100-loss season. Attendance has plummeted in the second year at Nationals Park, dropping from 19th in the majors to 27th. And television ratings - while up 56 percent as of last month - are still the sport's worst (12,000 households per game). . .

OBAMA'S FINANCIAL PLAN ISN'T CLOSE TO WHAT THE NEW DEAL DID

Joe Nocera, NY Times - Three quarters of a century ago, President Franklin Roosevelt earned the undying enmity of Wall Street when he used his enormous popularity to push through a series of radical regulatory reforms that completely changed the norms of the financial industry. Wall Street hated the reforms, of course, but Roosevelt didn't care. Wall Street and the financial industry had engaged in practices they shouldn't have, and had helped lead the country into the Great Depression. Those practices had to be stopped. To the president, that's all that mattered.

On Wednesday, President Obama unveiled what he described as "a sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system, a transformation on a scale not seen since the reforms that followed the Great Depression."

In terms of the sheer number of proposals, outlined in an 88-page document, that is undoubtedly true. But in terms of the scope and breadth of the Obama plan - and more important, in terms of its overall effect on Wall Street's modus operandi - it's not even close to what Roosevelt accomplished during the Great Depression.

Rather, the Obama plan is little more than an attempt to stick some new regulatory fingers into a very leaky financial dam rather than rebuild the dam itself. . .

On the surface, there was no area of the financial industry the plan didn't touch. . . Among other things, it would give new regulatory powers to the Federal Reserve, create a new agency to help protect consumers of financial products, and make derivative-trading more transparent. It would give the government the power to take over large bank holding companies or troubled investment banks - powers it doesn't have now - and would force banks to hold onto some of the mortgage-backed securities they create and sell to investors.

But it's what the plan doesn't do that is most notable.

Take, for instance, the handful of banks that are "too big to fail"- and which, in some cases, the government has had to spend tens of billions of dollars propping up. In a recent speech in China, the former Federal Reserve chairman - and current Obama adviser - Paul Volcker called on the government to limit the functions of any financial institution, like the big banks, that will always be reliant on the taxpayer should they get into trouble. Why, for instance, should they be allowed to trade for their own account - reaping huge profits and bonuses if they succeed - if the government has to bail them out if they make big mistakes, Mr. Volcker asked.

Many experts, even at the Federal Reserve, think that the country should not allow banks to become too big to fail. Some of them suggest specific economic disincentives to prevent growing too big and requirements that would break them up before reaching that point.

Yet the Obama plan accepts the notion of "too big to fail" - in the plan those institutions are labeled "Tier 1 Financial Holding Companies" - and proposes to regulate them more "robustly." The idea of creating either market incentives or regulation that would effectively make banking safe and boring - and push risk-taking to institutions that are not too big to fail - isn't even broached.

Or take derivatives. The Obama plan calls for plain vanilla derivatives to be traded on an exchange. But standard, plain vanilla derivatives are not what caused so much trouble for the world's financial system. Rather it was the so-called bespoke derivatives - customized, one-of-a-kind products that generated enormous profits for institutions like A.I.G. that created them, and, in the end, generated enormous damage to the financial system. For these derivatives, the Treasury Department merely wants to set up a clearinghouse so that their price and trading activity can be more readily seen. . . In a recent article in The Financial Times, George Soros, the financier, wrote that "regulators ought to insist that derivatives be homogeneous, standardized and transparent." Under the Obama plan, however, customized derivatives will remain an important part of the financial system.

Everywhere you look in the plan, you see the same thing: additional regulation on the margin, but nothing that amounts to a true overhaul. The new bank supervisor, for instance, is really nothing more than two smaller agencies combined into one. . .

The regulatory structure erected by Roosevelt during the Great Depression - including the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the establishment of serious banking oversight, the guaranteeing of bank deposits and the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated banking from investment banking - lasted six decades before they started to crumble in the 1990s. . . If Mr. Obama hopes to create a regulatory environment that stands for another six decades, he is going to have to do what Roosevelt did once upon a time. He is going to have make some bankers mad.

28 MILLION PEOPLE HAVE BEEN DRIVEN FROM THEIR HOMES

Common Dreams - The number of people internally displaced within their own countries has reached a historical high of more than 28 million, the UN's refugee agency said, as conflicts in Pakistan's Swat valley and Sri Lanka compound a growing global problem. . .

Since the end of last year there has been an exodus of more than 2 million from the Swat valley, which has become a battleground between the Taliban and the Pakistani army.

More than 300,000 refugees are being held in internment camps in Sri Lanka, victims of the conflict between government soldiers and the Tamil Tigers, and 130,000 people have been displaced by fighting in the Somalian capital, Mogadishu.

Those conflicts have taken the number of internally displaced people to more than 28 million and the total number of people forcibly uprooted by conflict and persecution to 45 million, UNHCR said. . .

Colombia has one of the world's largest internally displaced populations, with estimates of 3 million. Iraq had 2.6 million internally displaced people at the end of 2008, with 1.4 million of them displaced in the past three years alone. There were more than 2 million internally displaced in Sudan's Darfur region.

The report says 80% of the world's refugees are in developing countries, as are the vast majority of internally displaced people. Since 2005 the agency has seen the number of people it cares for in the latter group double.

UPDATE; BOZEMAN CUTS BACK ON EMPLOYEE SPYING PLANS

Fox News - A flood of criticism has prompted a Montana city to drop its request that government job applicants turn over their user names and passwords to Internet social networking and Web groups. The city of Bozeman abruptly suspended the practice Friday, saying it "appears to have exceeded that which is acceptable to our community.". . . "I liken it to them saying they want to look at your love letters and your family photos," said Amy Cannata of the Montana ACLU. . .

FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON YAWNING

News release - We are proud to announce the First International Conference on Yawning. These two days meetings bring together leading international speakers to review both emerging information and its convergence with current understanding. . .

Yawning is a very common and phylogenetically old behavioral event that occurs in vertebrates under different conditions. Yawning appeared very early in vertebrate history, with contagiousness evolving much later.

Yawning has many consequences, including opening of the eustachian tube, tearing, inflating the lungs, stretching and signaling drowsiness, but these may be incidental to its primal function which may something as unanticipated as sculpting the articulation of the gaping jaw during embryonic development.

Selecting a single function from the many options may be an unrealistic goal. However, reviewing the disparate facts, we may be impressed that yawning is associated with the change of behavioral state wakefulness to sleep, sleep to wakefulness, alertness to boredom, threshold of attack, sexual arousal, switching from one kind of activity to another.

The speakers list includes Wolter Seuntjens, who spent more than two decades in graduate school studying yawning. . .

VIRGINIA CITIZENS BEING FINED FOR SEEKING TO UNSEAT FOR SUPERVISORS

WAVY, VA - Dozens of Gloucester County residents face a hefty fine after petitioning to unseat four of their supervisors. "It's, as far as I know, unprecedented for a court to punish somebody for exercising their right to petition the government for redress of grievances. We all have that. It's in the Bill of Rights," says Steven Emmert. Emmert is the attorney for the 40 Gloucester County residents who petitioned to have four of their supervisors removed including Teresa Altemus, Michelle Ressler, Bobby Crewe, and Gregory Woodard. "The citizens all felt it was appropriate to remove the representatives of their body, because they lost confidence in them."

Some of the 40 residents rallied outside the courthouse during a 2008 hearing, upset the four supervisors were indicted for allegedly conducting county business in private. However, the charges and petition against the supervisors were withdrawn and recently, the judge ruled the residents had to pay $2,000 a piece for misusing the judicial process for political gain.
"The effect of the trial courts ruling is that you can petition the government but you better be right or else you'll have to pay.". .

PHONE CORPORADOS DENY FIXING TEXTING CHARGES

CNET - Executives from the nation's largest phone companies went to Capitol Hill to defend themselves against allegations that they've been fixing prices on text messaging. Executives from AT&T and Verizon Communications testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, saying their companies have not been involved in a conspiracy to hike text messaging rates. And they argued that competition is alive and well in the wireless market.

The hearing was called in response to a letter sent in September from Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) to the four major U.S. operators--Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile USA--asking them to explain why their text rates had all increased to 20 cents per message. Kohl noted in his letter that these rates marked a 100 percent increase since 2005.

Shortly after the letter was sent, about 37 separate class action lawsuits were filed against wireless operators alleging price-fixing on text-messaging services. Both AT&T and Verizon have denied these claims. . .

AT&T and Verizon executives dispute that they have colluded to fix prices on texts, but they also deny that texting rates have increased. Instead, they claim that prices have fallen for text messaging as a result of robust competition.

Verizon's general counsel, Randal Milch, said in his written testimony that there are more differences in text-messaging prices among wireless competitors than there are similarities. And he noted that most Verizon Wireless customers subscribe to a texting plan, and as a result they "pay less than a penny per message," a reduction of almost two-thirds since 2006.

FLORIDA PAPER DOES MAJOR STORY ON SCIENTOLOGY

St Petersburg Times - Mark C. "Marty" Rathbun left the Church of Scientology staff in late 2004, ending a 27-year career that saw him rise to be a top lieutenant in the organization. For the past four years, he has lived a low-profile life in Texas. Some speculated he had died.

In February, Rathbun posted an Internet message announcing he was available to counsel other disaffected Scientologists. "Having dug myself out of the dark pit where many who leave the church land," he wrote, "I began lending a hand to others similarly situated."

Contacted by the St. Petersburg Times, Rathbun agreed to tell the story of his years in Scientology and what led to his leaving. The Times interviewed him at his home in Texas, and he came to Clearwater to revisit some of the scenes he described.

Seeking to corroborate Rathbun's story, the newspaper contacted others who were in Scientology during the same period and have left the church: Mike Rinder, one of Rathbun's closest associates for two decades; Tom De Vocht, who Rathbun named as key to his decision to leave; and later, Amy Scobee.

Rathbun and Rinder were well known to the reporters, who had interviewed them dozens of times, sometimes combatively, through years of controversy in Clearwater. . .

Two reporters met Rinder in Denver, where he now lives, but he declined to be interviewed. About a month later, two Washington-based lawyers who work for the church showed up unannounced in Denver, informed Rinder that they had heard about the newspaper's visit and asked what he had revealed.

They reminded him that as one of the church's top legal officers, attorney-client privilege did not end when he left the church. They told him he could hurt the church by going public.

Weeks later, after the church provided the newspaper with a 2007 video of Rinder heatedly denying that [Scientology leader David] Miscavige hit him and others, Rinder decided to talk to the Times. . .

The reporters interviewed the four defectors multiple times, and met with church spokesmen and lawyers for 25 hours.

CIA WANTS TO TURN COLLEGES INTO SPY FACTORIES

Washington Post - The Obama administration has proposed the creation of an intelligence officer training program in colleges and universities that would function much like the Reserve Officers' Training Corps run by the military services. The idea is to create a stream "of first- and second-generation Americans, who already have critical language and cultural knowledge, and prepare them for careers in the intelligence agencies," according to a description sent to Congress by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair. . .

Under the proposal, part of the administration's 2010 intelligence authorization bill, colleges and universities would apply for grants that would be used to expand or introduce courses of study to "meet the emerging needs of the intelligence community." Those courses would include certain foreign languages, analysis and specific scientific and technical fields.

The students' participation in the program would probably be kept secret to prevent them from being identified by foreign intelligence services, according to an official familiar with the proposal.

PENTAGON DEFINED LEGAL PROTEST AS TERRORISM

ACLU - The Department of Defense considers protests an example of "low-level terrorism" according to an exam DOD employees were required to take this year. According to a whistleblower that came to the ACLU, a multiple choice question on the 2009 DOD Anti-terrorism Awareness training exam asked which of the following was an example of low-level terrorism:

- Attacking the Pentagon
- Improvised Explosive Devices
- Hate crimes against racial groups
- Protests

The ACLU fired off a letter to Gail McGinn, Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, demanding that the materials be corrected immediately. The DOD responded in an interview with Fox News, admitting the question was on the test that more than 1,500 department employees took.

"They should have made it clearer there's a clear difference between illegal violent demonstrations and peaceful, constitutionally protected protests," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Les Melnyk said on Thursday.

The DOD agreed to remove the question from the test and to send an e-mail to each employee that took it "explaining the error and the distinction between lawful protests and unlawful violent protests."

FEDERAL JUDGE SAYS MILITARY CAN PRESSURE MINORS

San Francisco Chronicle - Without fanfare, a federal judge in Oakland on Thursday threw out voter-approved laws in two Northern California cities barring military recruiters from contacting minors.

U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong ruled that laws passed in the Humboldt County cities of Arcata and Eureka in November were unconstitutional and invalid.

The finding was not unexpected by proponents of the laws, which passed with 73 percent of the vote in Arcata and 57 percent in Eureka. The federal government quickly sued to overturn the laws, which have been stayed ever since.

But Dave Meserve, the former Arcata councilman behind the laws, said he was disappointed that the judge ruled without hearing arguments on the case. . . .

Opponents of recruiting have tried to keep recruiters off college campuses nationwide. Berkeley issued and then rescinded a letter calling Marine recruiters "unwelcome intruders."

And the San Francisco school board in 2006 killed the local Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, which some members saw as a recruiting tool, launching a three-year battle that ended last month with JROTC back in place.

The Arcata and Eureka laws represented a new tactic that experts said appeared to have been the first of its kind in America: a counter-recruitment law passed not by a handful of elected activists, but by a plurality of voters.

Many voters in Arcata and Eureka who supported the measures saw the laws not as anti-military, but as an expression of a community's right to set its own rules - particularly relating to children. . .

The laws made it illegal to contact anyone under the age of 18 to recruit that person into the military or promote future enlistment. Minors could still initiate contact with recruiters if they chose.

"The judge said that the question of military recruitment is a subject which must be regulated by the federal government and may not be regulated by states and localities," said Stanford Law School Senior Lecturer Allen Weiner, who read the opinion but did not take part in the case.

STUDY: SEX FOUND MAIN CAUSE OF POPULATION GROWTH

Optimum Population Trust - Sex, not religious or cultural beliefs or the quest for economic security, is what increases family size and drives world population growth, according to one of the UK's leading authorities on family planning.

Conventional economic wisdom, which says that couples in poorer societies actively plan to have large families to compensate for high child mortality, to provide labour, and to care for parents in their old age, is wrong, Professor John Guillebaud will tell a conference on sustainable population today.

Economists overlook the fact that sexual intercourse is more frequent than the minimum needed for intentional conceptions, and that half of pregnancies worldwide are unplanned. Moreover, demand for contraception increases when it is available, irrespective of a society's wealth or child survival rates.

"Having a large rather than a small family is less of a planned decision than an automatic outcome of human sexuality," Prof. Guillebaud will say. "For a fertile couple, nothing is easier.". . .

Many environmentalists argue that greener lifestyles, and reducing consumption, are the key to solving environmental challenges such as climate change. However, Dr. Martin Desvaux will disclose details of research showing that even with an 80 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, the UK will be able to sustain only 37 million people. This will make the UK "extremely vulnerable in an uncertain world", he will argue. The UK's population, currently 61 million, is projected to rise to 77 million by 2050.

Even if Britain's population could be capped at 70 million, as suggested by the immigration minister, Phil Woolas, last year, there would still be up to 33 million too many people in the UK for long-term sustainability, according to Dr. Desvaux.

The conference will also hear that despite the likelihood of a world population crash as a consequence of inaction on overpopulation, 21 European countries are trying to raise their birth rates.

Prof. Guillebaud will argue that in both rich and poor countries, "something active needs to be done to separate sex from conception - namely, contraception. . .

BREVITAS

JUSTICE & FREEDOM

Arstechnica - The Obama administration is making a last-minute effort to fix the controversial Real ID Act before the program's deadline is reached in December. Changes to the measure, which will be introduced soon in Congress, could add additional privacy safeguards and remove some of the program's most costly requirements. . . Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona and a vocal critic of Real ID, is said to be drafting a new proposal that will scale back the law's requirements so that it can be reasonably accomplished by states within the allotted time. The Washington Post reports that the new proposal, which is called Pass ID, could boost the program's privacy safeguards and eliminate the costly national database requirements. The law would still require the identity cards to include a machine-readable mechanism. According to the Post, the Obama administration has been in talks with the National Governors Association for months in an effort to devise a reasonable compromise.

ECO CLIPS

Guardian, UK - A rift has opened between the Obama administration and some of its closest allies - Democratic leaders and environmental organizations - over its refusal to publicly disclose the location of 44 coal ash dumps that have been officially designated as a "high hazard" to local populations. The administration turned down a request from a powerful Democratic senator to make public the list of 44 dumps, which contain a toxic soup of arsenic and heavy metals from coal-fired electricity plants, citing terrorism fears. . . Last Christmas, a retaining wall burst on a coal ash pond in Tennessee disgorging a billion gallons of waste and putting pressure on the authorities to bring in safety controls over the management of some 600 similar waste pools dotted across the country.

POLICE BLOTTER

News Tribune, IN - Jeffersonville attorney Larry Wilder was found asleep by police in his neighbor's overturned city garbage can Wednesday morning, after neighbors called police when they woke to find their trash strewn on the ground and a man inside the receptacle. . . No arrest was made as a result of the incident. . . Although police records describe Wilder as 10-47 - police code for intoxicated - upon officers' arrival, no breath alcohol or sobriety test was administered. . . A neighbor, Roberta Embry, said her husband found Wilder inside the can when walking out of the house that morning. "He (Wilder) took all the trash out and laid it (the trash can) on its side," she said

OIL WARS

PEAK OIL COMING SOON BUT WHEN?

HEALTH & SCIENCE

Boston Globe - People with robust health insurance are putting off doctors' appointments and skimping on prescriptions because they can't afford the increasing costs of copayments and deductibles, according to managers of patient-assistance hot lines in Massachusetts. Not that long ago, such dilemmas were typically faced by lower-income families, often on publicly subsidized insurance. But with many consumers struggling to pay rising healthcare costs amid today's shrinking family budgets, these tough choices are becoming commonplace - even among families with employer-provided health insurance, consumer advocates say. . . The problem appears particularly acute for people with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, asthma, and cancer. They make frequent visits to doctors and often take multiple medications. . .

Agence France Presse - Health experts have long warned of the risk of obesity, but a new Japanese study warns that being very skinny is even more dangerous, and that slightly chubby people live longer. People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found. "We found skinny people run the highest risk," said Shinichi Kuriyama, an associate professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Medicine who worked on the long-term study of middle-aged and elderly people. . . The study was conducted by a health ministry team led by Tohoku University professor Ichiro Tsuji and covered 50,000 people between the ages of 40 and 79 over 12 years in the northern Japanese prefecture of Miyagi.

FIELD NOTES

Graham E. Fuller was the CIA's Chief of Station in Kabul and later the Vice-Chair of the National Intelligence Council, where he was responsible for long range strategic forecasting. Graham has a history of thinking outside the box, which makes his comments in a podcast interview with George Kenney about Afghnistan and Pakistan particularly informative.

FURTHERMORE. . .

Austrian Times - A teenage girl was electrocuted after dropping her laptop into the bath as she twittered in the tub. Police said they believed Maria Barbu, 17, had tried to plug in her laptop with wet hands after the battery died during a long session on social networking site Twitter as she took a soak at her home in Brasov, central Romania. She was found dead by her parents with the laptop lying next to her.

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