Reporter, Marine Die in Afghan Blast
By ROD NORDLAND
Copyright by Reuters
Published: January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/world/asia/11afghan.html?ref=global-home
KABUL — An embedded British journalist and an American Marine accompanying him were killed in Ghazni province when the vehicle they were traveling in struck a roadside bomb, the British Ministry of Defense announced Sunday.
The journalist killed Saturday was Rupert Hamer, a defense correspondent from the British newspaper the Sunday Mirror who was accompanying a U.S. Marine patrol near the village of Nawa. The American soldier was not identified pending notification of next of kin. A photographer traveling with Mr. Hamer, Philip Coburn, was seriously wounded but was in stable condition.
Mr. Hamer was the first British journalist killed while covering the Afghanistan conflict in recent years, but the second Western journalist to die in the past two weeks. A Canadian journalist, Michelle Lang, died along with four Canadian soldiers in Kandahar province on Dec. 30.
In Saturday’s incident, an Afghan soldier was also killed in the blast, and four U.S. Marines were wounded as well, according to the British ministry statement.
In Tarinkot, the capital of Uruzgan province in western Afghanistan, three Afghan aid workers employed by a German relief agency, JTZ, when the pickup truck they were in struck a landmine, provincial police chief Juma Gul Himat said.
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from Kandahar.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
China Becomes Biggest Exporter
China Becomes Biggest Exporter
Copyright By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/10/world/AP-AS-China-Trade.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
BEIJING (AP) -- China overtook Germany as the world's top exporter after December exports jumped 17.7 percent for their first increase in 14 months, data showed Sunday, in another sign of China's rise as a global economic force.
Exports for the last month of 2009 were $130.7 billion, data from the General Administration of Customs showed. That raised total 2009 exports to $1.2 trillion, ahead of the 816 billion euros ($1.17 trillion) for Germany forecast by its foreign trade organization, BGA.
China's new status is largely symbolic but reflects the ability of its resilient, low-cost manufacturers to keep selling abroad despite a slump in global consumer demand due to the financial crisis.
December's rebound was an ''important turning point'' for exporters, a customs agency economist, Huang Guohua, said on state television, CCTV.
''We can say that China's export enterprises have completely emerged from their all-time low in exports,'' Huang said.
Stronger foreign sales of Chinese goods could help to drive the country's recovery after demand plunged in 2008, forcing thousands of factories to close and throwing millions of laborers out of work.
Boosted by a 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus, China's economic expansion accelerated to 8.9 percent for the third quarter of 2009 and the government says full-year growth should be 8.3 percent.
Economists and Germany's national chamber of commerce said earlier the country was likely to lose its longtime crown as top exporter.
German economist Volker Treier predicted recently that Germany was set to lose the ''world export championship'' because of China's bigger size and higher population.
''By 2010, this title will be history, because the Chinese will simply outdo us due to their bigness,'' Treier told the German news agency DAPD.
He said it may not be a bad thing, either, ''because if China grows, this pushes the world's economy -- and that's good for export-oriented Germany as well.''
China is best known as a supplier of shoes, toys, furniture and other low-tech goods, while Germany exports machinery and other higher-value products. German commentators note that their country supplies the factory equipment used by top Chinese manufacturers.
China surpassed the United States as the biggest auto market in 2009 and is on track to replace Japan as the world's second-largest economy soon. China passed Germany as the third-largest economy in 2007.
China's trade surplus shrank by 34.2 percent in 2009 to $196.07 billion, the customs agency said. That reflected China's stronger demand for imported raw materials and consumer goods while the United States and other economies are struggling and demand is weak.
The United States and other governments complain that part of China's export success is based on currency controls and improper subsidies that give its exporters an unfair advantage against foreign rivals.
Washington has imposed anti-dumping duties on imports of Chinese-made steel pipes and some other goods, while the European Union has imposed curbs on Chinese shoes.
The U.S. and other governments also complain that Beijing keeps its currency, the yuan, undervalued. Beijing broke the yuan's link to the dollar in 2005 and it rose gradually until late 2008, but has been frozen since then against the U.S. currency in what economists say is an effort by Beijing to keep its exporters competitive.
The dollar's weakness against the euro and some other currencies pulls down the yuan in markets that use them and makes Chinese goods even more attractive there, adding to China's trade surplus.
Even though China overtook Germany as top exporter, the customs agency said total 2009 Chinese trade fell 13.9 percent from 2008.
Commodities were among China's key imports, the agency said, with the country bringing in 630 million tons of iron ore last year, up 41.6 percent from the previous year, and 200 million tons of crude oil, an increase of 13.9 percent, as prices for both commodities fell.
Economists say China has been rushing to build up stockpiles at bargain prices since crude oil and other commodity prices plunged in 2008. That motive, more than a revival in actual industrial demand, has driven its recent import boom of oil, copper and other metals.
Associated Press Writer Gillian Wong contributed to this report.
Copyright By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/10/world/AP-AS-China-Trade.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
BEIJING (AP) -- China overtook Germany as the world's top exporter after December exports jumped 17.7 percent for their first increase in 14 months, data showed Sunday, in another sign of China's rise as a global economic force.
Exports for the last month of 2009 were $130.7 billion, data from the General Administration of Customs showed. That raised total 2009 exports to $1.2 trillion, ahead of the 816 billion euros ($1.17 trillion) for Germany forecast by its foreign trade organization, BGA.
China's new status is largely symbolic but reflects the ability of its resilient, low-cost manufacturers to keep selling abroad despite a slump in global consumer demand due to the financial crisis.
December's rebound was an ''important turning point'' for exporters, a customs agency economist, Huang Guohua, said on state television, CCTV.
''We can say that China's export enterprises have completely emerged from their all-time low in exports,'' Huang said.
Stronger foreign sales of Chinese goods could help to drive the country's recovery after demand plunged in 2008, forcing thousands of factories to close and throwing millions of laborers out of work.
Boosted by a 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion) stimulus, China's economic expansion accelerated to 8.9 percent for the third quarter of 2009 and the government says full-year growth should be 8.3 percent.
Economists and Germany's national chamber of commerce said earlier the country was likely to lose its longtime crown as top exporter.
German economist Volker Treier predicted recently that Germany was set to lose the ''world export championship'' because of China's bigger size and higher population.
''By 2010, this title will be history, because the Chinese will simply outdo us due to their bigness,'' Treier told the German news agency DAPD.
He said it may not be a bad thing, either, ''because if China grows, this pushes the world's economy -- and that's good for export-oriented Germany as well.''
China is best known as a supplier of shoes, toys, furniture and other low-tech goods, while Germany exports machinery and other higher-value products. German commentators note that their country supplies the factory equipment used by top Chinese manufacturers.
China surpassed the United States as the biggest auto market in 2009 and is on track to replace Japan as the world's second-largest economy soon. China passed Germany as the third-largest economy in 2007.
China's trade surplus shrank by 34.2 percent in 2009 to $196.07 billion, the customs agency said. That reflected China's stronger demand for imported raw materials and consumer goods while the United States and other economies are struggling and demand is weak.
The United States and other governments complain that part of China's export success is based on currency controls and improper subsidies that give its exporters an unfair advantage against foreign rivals.
Washington has imposed anti-dumping duties on imports of Chinese-made steel pipes and some other goods, while the European Union has imposed curbs on Chinese shoes.
The U.S. and other governments also complain that Beijing keeps its currency, the yuan, undervalued. Beijing broke the yuan's link to the dollar in 2005 and it rose gradually until late 2008, but has been frozen since then against the U.S. currency in what economists say is an effort by Beijing to keep its exporters competitive.
The dollar's weakness against the euro and some other currencies pulls down the yuan in markets that use them and makes Chinese goods even more attractive there, adding to China's trade surplus.
Even though China overtook Germany as top exporter, the customs agency said total 2009 Chinese trade fell 13.9 percent from 2008.
Commodities were among China's key imports, the agency said, with the country bringing in 630 million tons of iron ore last year, up 41.6 percent from the previous year, and 200 million tons of crude oil, an increase of 13.9 percent, as prices for both commodities fell.
Economists say China has been rushing to build up stockpiles at bargain prices since crude oil and other commodity prices plunged in 2008. That motive, more than a revival in actual industrial demand, has driven its recent import boom of oil, copper and other metals.
Associated Press Writer Gillian Wong contributed to this report.
Banks Prepare for Bigger Bonuses, and Public’s Wrath
Banks Prepare for Bigger Bonuses, and Public’s Wrath
By LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10pay.html?ref=global-home
Everyone on Wall Street is fixated on The Number.
The bank bonus season, that annual rite of big money and bigger egos, begins in earnest this week, and it looks as if it will be one of the largest and most controversial blowouts the industry has ever seen.
Bank executives are grappling with a question that exasperates, even infuriates, many recession-weary Americans: Just how big should their paydays be? Despite calls for restraint from Washington and a chafed public, resurgent banks are preparing to pay out bonuses that rival those of the boom years. The haul, in cash and stock, will run into many billions of dollars.
Industry executives acknowledge that the numbers being tossed around — six-, seven- and even eight-figure sums for some chief executives and top producers — will probably stun the many Americans still hurting from the financial collapse and ensuing Great Recession.
Goldman Sachs is expected to pay its employees an average of about $595,000 apiece for 2009, one of the most profitable years in its 141-year history. Workers in the investment bank of JPMorgan Chase stand to collect about $463,000 on average.
Many executives are bracing for more scrutiny of pay from Washington, as well as from officials like Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, who last year demanded that banks disclose details about their bonus payments. Some bankers worry that the United States, like Britain, might create an extra tax on bank bonuses, and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, is proposing legislation to do so.
Those worries aside, few banks are taking immediate steps to reduce bonuses substantially. Instead, Wall Street is confronting a dilemma of riches: How to wrap its eye-popping paychecks in a mantle of moderation. Because of the potential blowback, some major banks are adjusting their pay practices, paring or even eliminating some cash bonuses in favor of stock awards and reducing the portion of their revenue earmarked for pay.
Some bank executives contend that financial institutions are beginning to recognize that they must recalibrate pay for a post-bailout world.
“The debate has shifted in the last nine months or so from just ‘less cash, more stock’ to ‘what’s the overall number?’ ” said Robert P. Kelly, the chairman and chief executive of the Bank of New York Mellon. Like many other bank chiefs, Mr. Kelly favors rewarding employees with more long-term stock and less cash to tether their fortunes to the success of their companies.
Though Wall Street bankers and traders earn six-figure base salaries, they generally receive most of their pay as a bonus based on the previous year’s performance. While average bonuses are expected to hover around half a million dollars, they will not be evenly distributed. Senior banking executives and top Wall Street producers expect to reap millions. Last year, the big winners were bond and currency traders, as well as investment bankers specializing in health care.
Even some industry veterans warn that such paydays could further tarnish the financial industry’s sullied reputation. John S. Reed, a founder of Citigroup, said Wall Street would not fully regain the public’s trust until banks scaled back bonuses for good — something that, to many, seems a distant prospect.
“There is nothing I’ve seen that gives me the slightest feeling that these people have learned anything from the crisis,” Mr. Reed said. “They just don’t get it. They are off in a different world.”
The power that the federal government once had over banker pay has waned in recent months as most big banks have started repaying the billions of dollars in federal aid that propped them up during the crisis. All have benefited from an array of federal programs and low interest rate policies that enabled the industry to roar back in profitability in 2009.
This year, compensation will again eat up much of Wall Street’s revenue. During the first nine months of 2009, five of the largest banks that received federal aid — Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley — together set aside about $90 billion for compensation. That figure includes salaries, benefits and bonuses, but at several companies, bonuses make up more than half of compensation.
Goldman broke with its peers in December and announced that its top 30 executives would be paid only in stock. Nearly everyone on Wall Street is waiting to see how much stock is awarded to Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, who is a lightning rod for criticism over executive pay. In 2007, Mr. Blankfein was paid $68 million, a Wall Street record. He did not receive a bonus in 2008.
Goldman put aside $16.7 billion for compensation during the first nine months of 2009.
Responding to criticism over its pay practices, Goldman has already begun decreasing the percentage of revenue that it pays to employees. The bank set aside 50 percent in the first quarter, but that figure fell to 48 percent and then to 43 percent in the next two quarters.
JPMorgan executives and board members have also been wrestling with how much pay is appropriate.
“There are legitimate conflicts between the firm feeling like it is performing well and the public’s prevailing view that the Street was bailed out,” said one senior JPMorgan executive who was not authorized to speak for the company.
JPMorgan’s investment bank, which employs about 25,000 people, has already reduced the share of revenue going to the compensation pool, from 40 percent in the first quarter to 37 percent in the third quarter.
At Bank of America, traders and bankers are wondering how much Brian T. Moynihan, the bank’s new chief, will be awarded for 2010. Bank of America, which is still absorbing Merrill Lynch, is expected to pay large bonuses, given the bank’s sizable trading profits.
Bank of America has also introduced provisions that would enable it to reclaim employees’ pay in the event that the bank’s business sours, and it is increasing the percentage of bonuses paid in the form of stock.
“We’re paying for results, and there were some areas of the company that had terrific results, and they will be compensated for that,” said Bob Stickler, a Bank of America spokesman.
At Morgan Stanley, which has had weaker trading revenue than the other banks, managers are focusing on how to pay stars in line with the industry. The bank created a pay program this year for its top 25 workers, tying a fifth of their deferred pay to metrics based on the company’s later performance.
A company spokesman, Mark Lake, said: “Morgan Stanley’s board and management clearly understands the extraordinary environment in which we operate and, as a result, have made a series of changes to the firm’s compensation practices.”
The top 25 executives will be paid mostly in stock and deferred cash payments. John J. Mack, the chairman, is forgoing a bonus. He retired as chief executive at the end of 2009.
At Citigroup, whose sprawling consumer banking business is still ailing, some managers were disappointed in recent weeks by the preliminary estimates of their bonus pools, according to people familiar with the matter. Citigroup’s overall 2009 bonus pool is expected to be about $5.3 billion, about the same as it was for 2008, although the bank has far fewer employees.
The highest bonus awarded to a Citigroup executive is already known: The bank said in a regulatory filing last week that the head of its investment bank, John Havens, would receive $9 million in stock. But the bank’s chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, is forgoing a bonus and taking a salary of just $1.
By LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/business/10pay.html?ref=global-home
Everyone on Wall Street is fixated on The Number.
The bank bonus season, that annual rite of big money and bigger egos, begins in earnest this week, and it looks as if it will be one of the largest and most controversial blowouts the industry has ever seen.
Bank executives are grappling with a question that exasperates, even infuriates, many recession-weary Americans: Just how big should their paydays be? Despite calls for restraint from Washington and a chafed public, resurgent banks are preparing to pay out bonuses that rival those of the boom years. The haul, in cash and stock, will run into many billions of dollars.
Industry executives acknowledge that the numbers being tossed around — six-, seven- and even eight-figure sums for some chief executives and top producers — will probably stun the many Americans still hurting from the financial collapse and ensuing Great Recession.
Goldman Sachs is expected to pay its employees an average of about $595,000 apiece for 2009, one of the most profitable years in its 141-year history. Workers in the investment bank of JPMorgan Chase stand to collect about $463,000 on average.
Many executives are bracing for more scrutiny of pay from Washington, as well as from officials like Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, who last year demanded that banks disclose details about their bonus payments. Some bankers worry that the United States, like Britain, might create an extra tax on bank bonuses, and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, is proposing legislation to do so.
Those worries aside, few banks are taking immediate steps to reduce bonuses substantially. Instead, Wall Street is confronting a dilemma of riches: How to wrap its eye-popping paychecks in a mantle of moderation. Because of the potential blowback, some major banks are adjusting their pay practices, paring or even eliminating some cash bonuses in favor of stock awards and reducing the portion of their revenue earmarked for pay.
Some bank executives contend that financial institutions are beginning to recognize that they must recalibrate pay for a post-bailout world.
“The debate has shifted in the last nine months or so from just ‘less cash, more stock’ to ‘what’s the overall number?’ ” said Robert P. Kelly, the chairman and chief executive of the Bank of New York Mellon. Like many other bank chiefs, Mr. Kelly favors rewarding employees with more long-term stock and less cash to tether their fortunes to the success of their companies.
Though Wall Street bankers and traders earn six-figure base salaries, they generally receive most of their pay as a bonus based on the previous year’s performance. While average bonuses are expected to hover around half a million dollars, they will not be evenly distributed. Senior banking executives and top Wall Street producers expect to reap millions. Last year, the big winners were bond and currency traders, as well as investment bankers specializing in health care.
Even some industry veterans warn that such paydays could further tarnish the financial industry’s sullied reputation. John S. Reed, a founder of Citigroup, said Wall Street would not fully regain the public’s trust until banks scaled back bonuses for good — something that, to many, seems a distant prospect.
“There is nothing I’ve seen that gives me the slightest feeling that these people have learned anything from the crisis,” Mr. Reed said. “They just don’t get it. They are off in a different world.”
The power that the federal government once had over banker pay has waned in recent months as most big banks have started repaying the billions of dollars in federal aid that propped them up during the crisis. All have benefited from an array of federal programs and low interest rate policies that enabled the industry to roar back in profitability in 2009.
This year, compensation will again eat up much of Wall Street’s revenue. During the first nine months of 2009, five of the largest banks that received federal aid — Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley — together set aside about $90 billion for compensation. That figure includes salaries, benefits and bonuses, but at several companies, bonuses make up more than half of compensation.
Goldman broke with its peers in December and announced that its top 30 executives would be paid only in stock. Nearly everyone on Wall Street is waiting to see how much stock is awarded to Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, who is a lightning rod for criticism over executive pay. In 2007, Mr. Blankfein was paid $68 million, a Wall Street record. He did not receive a bonus in 2008.
Goldman put aside $16.7 billion for compensation during the first nine months of 2009.
Responding to criticism over its pay practices, Goldman has already begun decreasing the percentage of revenue that it pays to employees. The bank set aside 50 percent in the first quarter, but that figure fell to 48 percent and then to 43 percent in the next two quarters.
JPMorgan executives and board members have also been wrestling with how much pay is appropriate.
“There are legitimate conflicts between the firm feeling like it is performing well and the public’s prevailing view that the Street was bailed out,” said one senior JPMorgan executive who was not authorized to speak for the company.
JPMorgan’s investment bank, which employs about 25,000 people, has already reduced the share of revenue going to the compensation pool, from 40 percent in the first quarter to 37 percent in the third quarter.
At Bank of America, traders and bankers are wondering how much Brian T. Moynihan, the bank’s new chief, will be awarded for 2010. Bank of America, which is still absorbing Merrill Lynch, is expected to pay large bonuses, given the bank’s sizable trading profits.
Bank of America has also introduced provisions that would enable it to reclaim employees’ pay in the event that the bank’s business sours, and it is increasing the percentage of bonuses paid in the form of stock.
“We’re paying for results, and there were some areas of the company that had terrific results, and they will be compensated for that,” said Bob Stickler, a Bank of America spokesman.
At Morgan Stanley, which has had weaker trading revenue than the other banks, managers are focusing on how to pay stars in line with the industry. The bank created a pay program this year for its top 25 workers, tying a fifth of their deferred pay to metrics based on the company’s later performance.
A company spokesman, Mark Lake, said: “Morgan Stanley’s board and management clearly understands the extraordinary environment in which we operate and, as a result, have made a series of changes to the firm’s compensation practices.”
The top 25 executives will be paid mostly in stock and deferred cash payments. John J. Mack, the chairman, is forgoing a bonus. He retired as chief executive at the end of 2009.
At Citigroup, whose sprawling consumer banking business is still ailing, some managers were disappointed in recent weeks by the preliminary estimates of their bonus pools, according to people familiar with the matter. Citigroup’s overall 2009 bonus pool is expected to be about $5.3 billion, about the same as it was for 2008, although the bank has far fewer employees.
The highest bonus awarded to a Citigroup executive is already known: The bank said in a regulatory filing last week that the head of its investment bank, John Havens, would receive $9 million in stock. But the bank’s chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, is forgoing a bonus and taking a salary of just $1.
In Malaysia, Uproar Grows Over Use of Word ‘Allah’
In Malaysia, Uproar Grows Over Use of Word ‘Allah’
By SETH MYDANS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/world/asia/11malaysia.html?ref=global-home
BANGKOK — An uproar among Muslims in Malaysia over the use of the word Allah by Christians spread over the weekend with the firebombing and vandalizing of several churches, increasing tensions at a time of political turbulence.
Arsonists struck three churches and a convent school early Sunday and splashed black paint on another church. This followed the firebombing of four churches on Friday and Saturday. No injuries were reported, and only one of the churches, Metro Tabernacle in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, suffered extensive damage.
The attacks, unlike anything Malaysia has seen before, have shaken a country where many Muslims are angry over a Dec. 31 court ruling that overturned a government ban on the use of the word Allah to denote the Christian God.
Though that usage is common in many countries, where Arabic- and Malay-language Bibles describe Jesus as the “son of Allah,” many Muslims here insist that the word belongs exclusively to them and say that its use by other faiths could confuse Muslim worshipers.
That dispute in turn was described by some observers as a sign of political maneuvering as the governing party struggles to maintain its dominance following its worst setbacks in national and state elections last March.
Some political analysts and politicians accuse Prime Minister Najib Razak of raising racial and religious issues as he attempts to solidify his Malay base. In a difficult balancing act, he must also win back Chinese and Indian voters whose opposition contributed to his party’s setback last year.
“The political contestation is a lot more intensified,” said Elizabeth Wong, a state official who is a member of the opposition Parti Keadilan Rakyat. “In Malaysia the central theme will always be about the Malay identity and about Islam. The parties come up with various policies or means to attempt to appeal to the Muslim Malay voters.”
In an interview, the main opposition figure, Anwar Ibrahim, implied that the government was behind the current tensions. “This is the last hope — to incite racial and religious sentiments to cling to power,” he said. “Immediately since the disastrous defeat in the March 2008 election they have been fanning this.”
The government has appealed the December court decision and has been granted a stay, and the dispute has swelled into a nationwide confrontation, with small demonstrations at mosques and passionate outcries on the Internet. More than 180,000 people have joined a Facebook group called “Protesting the use of the name Allah by non-Muslims.”
The tensions are shaking a multiethnic, multiracial state that has attempted to maintain harmony among its citizens: mostly Muslim Malays who make up 60 percent of the population, and minority Chinese and Indians, who mostly practice Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism.
About 9 percent of Malaysia’s population of 28 million people are Christian, most of them Chinese or Indian. Analysts say this is the first outright confrontation between Muslims and Christians.
But race has become a staple of political discourse in recent years, and religion has been its vehicle, said Ooi Kee Beng, a fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
“Religion has become a much more useful tool for parties who depend on playing on ethnic divisions,” said Mr. Ooi. “They find it difficult to talk about racial issues but possible to talk about religious issues. We are seeing the result of that political opportunism over the last two decades.”
The line between race and religion is blurred in a country where the Constitution equates Muslim and Malay identities, said Jacqueline Ann Surin, editor of The Nut Graph, an analytical Malaysian news site that covers political Islam extensively.
“Malaysia is peculiar in that we have race-based politics and over the past decade or so we have seen an escalation of this notion that Malay Malaysians are superior,” she said. “That has been most apparent from consistent attempts by the U.M.N.O. leadership to promote the notion of ‘ketuanan Melayu,’ or Malay supremacy or dominance.” The United Malays National Organization is the full name of the governing party.
“So it’s a logical progression that if the Malay is considered superior by the state to all others in Malaysia, then Islam will also be deemed superior to other religions,” she said.
In a widely quoted speech last Thursday, Razaleigh Hamzah, a former finance minister, said the governing party, founded on a formula of communal power sharing, “had ossified into what appeared to be an eternal racial contract, a model replicated at every level of national life.”
He called the March election “a watershed in Malaysian politics” as the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition lost its dominating two-thirds majority in Parliament and lost five states to the opposition.
“The entire political landscape changed overnight,” Mr. Hamzah said, and left the formerly invincible Malay-based party seeking to redefine its electoral base and its political rationale.
The political uncertainty comes against the backdrop of a flagging economy in a country that once had ambitions to lead the burgeoning economies of Southeast Asia.
In a speech in December, the second finance minister, Ahmad Husni Hanadzlah, said, “Our economy has been stagnating in the last decade. We have lost our competitive edge to remain as the leader of the pack in many sectors of the economy. Our private investment has been steadily in decline.”
He called for changes in an economic system that gives preferential treatment to Malays, saying all Malaysians should be given “equal opportunity to participate in the economy.”
At the same time, the country has seen a rise in political Islam along with continuing ethnic and religious tensions.
Hindus have protested the destruction of some temples, and Muslims paraded a severed cow’s head in the streets last November to protest the construction of a new one.
On New Year’s Day, the Islamic morality police arrested 52 unmarried couples in budget hotels — mainly students and young factory workers — who were expected to be charged with the offense of close proximity.
Earlier last year, a Muslim woman was sentenced to a public caning for drinking beer in a hotel. The sentence has not yet been carried out, with the authorities saying they have not found a female trained to carry out a caning.
In this atmosphere, there is a danger that the current furor over religious language will feed on itself, said Marina Mahathir, the daughter of former Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, who is a newspaper columnist and social activist.
“It’s only a few people who are inflamed about it, while the rest of the country is going on as if normal,” she said in an interview. “But if you keep stoking and if you keep giving these people leeway, sooner or later more and more people will think, ‘Oh, maybe we should be upset as well.”’
By SETH MYDANS
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 10, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/world/asia/11malaysia.html?ref=global-home
BANGKOK — An uproar among Muslims in Malaysia over the use of the word Allah by Christians spread over the weekend with the firebombing and vandalizing of several churches, increasing tensions at a time of political turbulence.
Arsonists struck three churches and a convent school early Sunday and splashed black paint on another church. This followed the firebombing of four churches on Friday and Saturday. No injuries were reported, and only one of the churches, Metro Tabernacle in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, suffered extensive damage.
The attacks, unlike anything Malaysia has seen before, have shaken a country where many Muslims are angry over a Dec. 31 court ruling that overturned a government ban on the use of the word Allah to denote the Christian God.
Though that usage is common in many countries, where Arabic- and Malay-language Bibles describe Jesus as the “son of Allah,” many Muslims here insist that the word belongs exclusively to them and say that its use by other faiths could confuse Muslim worshipers.
That dispute in turn was described by some observers as a sign of political maneuvering as the governing party struggles to maintain its dominance following its worst setbacks in national and state elections last March.
Some political analysts and politicians accuse Prime Minister Najib Razak of raising racial and religious issues as he attempts to solidify his Malay base. In a difficult balancing act, he must also win back Chinese and Indian voters whose opposition contributed to his party’s setback last year.
“The political contestation is a lot more intensified,” said Elizabeth Wong, a state official who is a member of the opposition Parti Keadilan Rakyat. “In Malaysia the central theme will always be about the Malay identity and about Islam. The parties come up with various policies or means to attempt to appeal to the Muslim Malay voters.”
In an interview, the main opposition figure, Anwar Ibrahim, implied that the government was behind the current tensions. “This is the last hope — to incite racial and religious sentiments to cling to power,” he said. “Immediately since the disastrous defeat in the March 2008 election they have been fanning this.”
The government has appealed the December court decision and has been granted a stay, and the dispute has swelled into a nationwide confrontation, with small demonstrations at mosques and passionate outcries on the Internet. More than 180,000 people have joined a Facebook group called “Protesting the use of the name Allah by non-Muslims.”
The tensions are shaking a multiethnic, multiracial state that has attempted to maintain harmony among its citizens: mostly Muslim Malays who make up 60 percent of the population, and minority Chinese and Indians, who mostly practice Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism.
About 9 percent of Malaysia’s population of 28 million people are Christian, most of them Chinese or Indian. Analysts say this is the first outright confrontation between Muslims and Christians.
But race has become a staple of political discourse in recent years, and religion has been its vehicle, said Ooi Kee Beng, a fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
“Religion has become a much more useful tool for parties who depend on playing on ethnic divisions,” said Mr. Ooi. “They find it difficult to talk about racial issues but possible to talk about religious issues. We are seeing the result of that political opportunism over the last two decades.”
The line between race and religion is blurred in a country where the Constitution equates Muslim and Malay identities, said Jacqueline Ann Surin, editor of The Nut Graph, an analytical Malaysian news site that covers political Islam extensively.
“Malaysia is peculiar in that we have race-based politics and over the past decade or so we have seen an escalation of this notion that Malay Malaysians are superior,” she said. “That has been most apparent from consistent attempts by the U.M.N.O. leadership to promote the notion of ‘ketuanan Melayu,’ or Malay supremacy or dominance.” The United Malays National Organization is the full name of the governing party.
“So it’s a logical progression that if the Malay is considered superior by the state to all others in Malaysia, then Islam will also be deemed superior to other religions,” she said.
In a widely quoted speech last Thursday, Razaleigh Hamzah, a former finance minister, said the governing party, founded on a formula of communal power sharing, “had ossified into what appeared to be an eternal racial contract, a model replicated at every level of national life.”
He called the March election “a watershed in Malaysian politics” as the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition lost its dominating two-thirds majority in Parliament and lost five states to the opposition.
“The entire political landscape changed overnight,” Mr. Hamzah said, and left the formerly invincible Malay-based party seeking to redefine its electoral base and its political rationale.
The political uncertainty comes against the backdrop of a flagging economy in a country that once had ambitions to lead the burgeoning economies of Southeast Asia.
In a speech in December, the second finance minister, Ahmad Husni Hanadzlah, said, “Our economy has been stagnating in the last decade. We have lost our competitive edge to remain as the leader of the pack in many sectors of the economy. Our private investment has been steadily in decline.”
He called for changes in an economic system that gives preferential treatment to Malays, saying all Malaysians should be given “equal opportunity to participate in the economy.”
At the same time, the country has seen a rise in political Islam along with continuing ethnic and religious tensions.
Hindus have protested the destruction of some temples, and Muslims paraded a severed cow’s head in the streets last November to protest the construction of a new one.
On New Year’s Day, the Islamic morality police arrested 52 unmarried couples in budget hotels — mainly students and young factory workers — who were expected to be charged with the offense of close proximity.
Earlier last year, a Muslim woman was sentenced to a public caning for drinking beer in a hotel. The sentence has not yet been carried out, with the authorities saying they have not found a female trained to carry out a caning.
In this atmosphere, there is a danger that the current furor over religious language will feed on itself, said Marina Mahathir, the daughter of former Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, who is a newspaper columnist and social activist.
“It’s only a few people who are inflamed about it, while the rest of the country is going on as if normal,” she said in an interview. “But if you keep stoking and if you keep giving these people leeway, sooner or later more and more people will think, ‘Oh, maybe we should be upset as well.”’
Religion and Women
Religion and Women
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opinion/10kristof.html?th&emc=th
Religions derive their power and popularity in part from the ethical compass they offer. So why do so many faiths help perpetuate something that most of us regard as profoundly unethical: the oppression of women?
It is not that warlords in Congo cite Scripture to justify their mass rapes (although the last warlord I met there called himself a pastor and wore a button reading “rebels for Christ”). It’s not that brides are burned in India as part of a Hindu ritual. And there’s no verse in the Koran that instructs Afghan thugs to throw acid in the faces of girls who dare to go to school.
Yet these kinds of abuses — along with more banal injustices, like slapping a girlfriend or paying women less for their work — arise out of a social context in which women are, often, second-class citizens. That’s a context that religions have helped shape, and not pushed hard to change.
“Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths, creating an environment in which violations against women are justified,” former President Jimmy Carter noted in a speech last month to the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Australia.
“The belief that women are inferior human beings in the eyes of God,” Mr. Carter continued, “gives excuses to the brutal husband who beats his wife, the soldier who rapes a woman, the employer who has a lower pay scale for women employees, or parents who decide to abort a female embryo.”
Mr. Carter, who sees religion as one of the “basic causes of the violation of women’s rights,” is a member of The Elders, a small council of retired leaders brought together by Nelson Mandela. The Elders are focusing on the role of religion in oppressing women, and they have issued a joint statement calling on religious leaders to “change all discriminatory practices within their own religions and traditions.”
The Elders are neither irreligious nor rabble-rousers. They include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and they begin their meetings with a moment for silent prayer.
“The Elders are not attacking religion as such,” noted Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and United Nations high commissioner for human rights. But she added, “We all recognized that if there’s one overarching issue for women it’s the way that religion can be manipulated to subjugate women.”
There is of course plenty of fodder, in both the Koran and the Bible, for those who seek a theology of discrimination.
The New Testament quotes St. Paul (I Timothy 2) as saying that women “must be silent.” Deuteronomy declares that if a woman does not bleed on her wedding night, “the men of her town shall stone her to death.” An Orthodox Jewish prayer thanks God, “who hast not made me a woman.” The Koran stipulates that a woman shall inherit less than a man, and that a woman’s testimony counts for half a man’s.
In fairness, many scholars believe that Paul did not in fact write the passages calling on women to be silent. And Islam started out as socially progressive for women — banning female infanticide and limiting polygamy — but did not continue to advance.
But religious leaders sanctified existing social structures, instead of pushing for justice. In Africa, it would help enormously if religious figures spoke up for widows disenfranchised by unjust inheritance traditions — or for rape victims, or for schoolgirls facing sexual demands from their teachers. Instead, in Uganda, the influence of conservative Christians is found in a grotesque push to execute gays.
Yet paradoxically, the churches in Africa that have done the most to empower women have been conservative ones led by evangelicals and especially Pentecostals. In particular, Pentecostals encourage women to take leadership roles, and for many women this is the first time they have been trusted with authority and found their opinions respected. In rural Africa, Pentecostal churches are becoming a significant force to emancipate women.
That’s a glimmer of hope that reminds us that while religion is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. The Dalai Lama has taken that step and calls himself a feminist.
Another excellent precedent is slavery. Each of the Abrahamic faiths accepted slavery. Muhammad owned slaves, and St. Paul seems to have condoned slavery. Yet the pioneers of the abolitionist movement were Quakers and evangelicals like William Wilberforce. People of faith ultimately worked ferociously to overthrow an oppressive institution that churches had previously condoned.
Today, when religious institutions exclude women from their hierarchies and rituals, the inevitable implication is that females are inferior. The Elders are right that religious groups should stand up for a simple ethical principle: any person’s human rights should be sacred, and not depend on something as earthly as their genitals.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/opinion/10kristof.html?th&emc=th
Religions derive their power and popularity in part from the ethical compass they offer. So why do so many faiths help perpetuate something that most of us regard as profoundly unethical: the oppression of women?
It is not that warlords in Congo cite Scripture to justify their mass rapes (although the last warlord I met there called himself a pastor and wore a button reading “rebels for Christ”). It’s not that brides are burned in India as part of a Hindu ritual. And there’s no verse in the Koran that instructs Afghan thugs to throw acid in the faces of girls who dare to go to school.
Yet these kinds of abuses — along with more banal injustices, like slapping a girlfriend or paying women less for their work — arise out of a social context in which women are, often, second-class citizens. That’s a context that religions have helped shape, and not pushed hard to change.
“Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths, creating an environment in which violations against women are justified,” former President Jimmy Carter noted in a speech last month to the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Australia.
“The belief that women are inferior human beings in the eyes of God,” Mr. Carter continued, “gives excuses to the brutal husband who beats his wife, the soldier who rapes a woman, the employer who has a lower pay scale for women employees, or parents who decide to abort a female embryo.”
Mr. Carter, who sees religion as one of the “basic causes of the violation of women’s rights,” is a member of The Elders, a small council of retired leaders brought together by Nelson Mandela. The Elders are focusing on the role of religion in oppressing women, and they have issued a joint statement calling on religious leaders to “change all discriminatory practices within their own religions and traditions.”
The Elders are neither irreligious nor rabble-rousers. They include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and they begin their meetings with a moment for silent prayer.
“The Elders are not attacking religion as such,” noted Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and United Nations high commissioner for human rights. But she added, “We all recognized that if there’s one overarching issue for women it’s the way that religion can be manipulated to subjugate women.”
There is of course plenty of fodder, in both the Koran and the Bible, for those who seek a theology of discrimination.
The New Testament quotes St. Paul (I Timothy 2) as saying that women “must be silent.” Deuteronomy declares that if a woman does not bleed on her wedding night, “the men of her town shall stone her to death.” An Orthodox Jewish prayer thanks God, “who hast not made me a woman.” The Koran stipulates that a woman shall inherit less than a man, and that a woman’s testimony counts for half a man’s.
In fairness, many scholars believe that Paul did not in fact write the passages calling on women to be silent. And Islam started out as socially progressive for women — banning female infanticide and limiting polygamy — but did not continue to advance.
But religious leaders sanctified existing social structures, instead of pushing for justice. In Africa, it would help enormously if religious figures spoke up for widows disenfranchised by unjust inheritance traditions — or for rape victims, or for schoolgirls facing sexual demands from their teachers. Instead, in Uganda, the influence of conservative Christians is found in a grotesque push to execute gays.
Yet paradoxically, the churches in Africa that have done the most to empower women have been conservative ones led by evangelicals and especially Pentecostals. In particular, Pentecostals encourage women to take leadership roles, and for many women this is the first time they have been trusted with authority and found their opinions respected. In rural Africa, Pentecostal churches are becoming a significant force to emancipate women.
That’s a glimmer of hope that reminds us that while religion is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. The Dalai Lama has taken that step and calls himself a feminist.
Another excellent precedent is slavery. Each of the Abrahamic faiths accepted slavery. Muhammad owned slaves, and St. Paul seems to have condoned slavery. Yet the pioneers of the abolitionist movement were Quakers and evangelicals like William Wilberforce. People of faith ultimately worked ferociously to overthrow an oppressive institution that churches had previously condoned.
Today, when religious institutions exclude women from their hierarchies and rituals, the inevitable implication is that females are inferior. The Elders are right that religious groups should stand up for a simple ethical principle: any person’s human rights should be sacred, and not depend on something as earthly as their genitals.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
Recommend
Recession Spurs Interest in Graduate, Law Schools
Recession Spurs Interest in Graduate, Law Schools
By REBECCA R. RUIZ
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/education/10grad.html?th&emc=th
It took longer than some experts expected, but the recession and the resulting shortage of good jobs have spurred a jump in applications to law schools and a growing interest in graduate programs.
The number of people taking the Law School Admissions Test, for example, rose 20 percent in October, compared with October 2008, reaching an all-time high of 60,746. And the number of Americans who took the Graduate Record Examination in 2009 rose 13 percent, to a record 670,000, compared with the year before, according to the Educational Testing Service, which administers the test. The increase is a sharp reversal from 2008, when the number fell 2 percent even though the recession was already under way.
“There’s a bit of lag time between when people start to worry about the economy and when they get their applications going,” said Wendy Margolis, director of communications for the Law School Admission Council, which administers the L.S.A.T.
Jeffrey S. Brand, dean of the University of San Francisco School of Law, echoed that view.
“I think the crash was so severe that people were kind of catatonic,” Mr. Brand said. “They weren’t sure what to do. They’re coming out of that mode now.”
David G. Payne, the Educational Testing Service’s vice president and chief operating officer for college and graduate programs, said the rise in interest in graduate programs was tied to the troubled economy and increased school recruiting.
“When job creation slows, there’s an increase in the number of people who pursue a graduate degree,” Mr. Payne said.
Officials at many law schools reported substantial increases in applications over last year. Washington University in St. Louis has had a 19 percent year-to-date increase in applications to its college of law. At the University of San Francisco School of Law, applications are up 35 percent over last year, and at the University of Iowa’s College of Law, applications are up 39 percent.
Some increases are more explicable than others. Applications to the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University have risen 54 percent this year, which may be related to its rise in the U.S. News & World Report rankings to 23 in 2009, from 36 the year before.
But at Cornell University’s Law School, whose ranking has remained relatively stable, applications are up 44 percent, and no one is quite sure of the reason for such a large increase.
Richard Geiger, dean of admissions, said: “I’m a little thrown off by the fact that our increase is much bigger than expected. There’s nothing big we’re doing to explain that kind of increase.”
Prebble Q. Ramswell, 37, is among those choosing to return to school after being unable to find work.
A mother with two bachelor’s degrees, one in political science and the other in psychology and sociology, Ms. Ramswell has nearly 10 years of work experience, including six years as an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Ms. Ramswell lost her job with the C.I.A. when her contract ended last spring. She and her husband, who had also worked for the C.I.A., were both unemployed.
“We were having such a difficult time finding work,” she said. After months of searching, her husband found work in Florida, and the couple and their 4-year-old daughter moved there from Northern Virginia.
“I still had no luck finding anything, so I said to myself, ‘What is it in my life that I have wanted to do, that could make something good of a situation that has turned horribly wrong?’ ”
Ms. Ramswell is now applying for a master’s degree in liberal arts, looking to leverage her background in social science and, ultimately, to become a psychotherapist.
“I’ve realized that it will make me more marketable and open more doors,” she said.
Stephanie E. Neal, 24, also said she was hoping to increase her appeal to employers by returning to school. She graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology in 2008 and has since completed a paralegal certificate and a victim’s assistance certificate. But she has been unemployed since May and is now preparing to take the G.R.E. She lives with her parents in Southern California and said “desperation” has pushed her back toward academia.
“With every job going to someone who has more experience and who is willing to take a pay cut to have a job, I’m left with what amounts to slim pickings,” she said. “With no income, I’ve turned to the idea of higher education.”
Collins Byrd, dean of admissions at the University of Iowa’s College of Law, said he had seen many applicants like Ms. Neal.
“I think people spent the past year in a bit of shell shock,” Mr. Byrd said. “I don’t think people applied at as high a rate because they just didn’t know what to do. They sat there and did nothing.
“Now they’re seeing what they can do, seeing if they can take out loans or mortgages on housing. I think people are coming to grips with reality.”
By REBECCA R. RUIZ
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/education/10grad.html?th&emc=th
It took longer than some experts expected, but the recession and the resulting shortage of good jobs have spurred a jump in applications to law schools and a growing interest in graduate programs.
The number of people taking the Law School Admissions Test, for example, rose 20 percent in October, compared with October 2008, reaching an all-time high of 60,746. And the number of Americans who took the Graduate Record Examination in 2009 rose 13 percent, to a record 670,000, compared with the year before, according to the Educational Testing Service, which administers the test. The increase is a sharp reversal from 2008, when the number fell 2 percent even though the recession was already under way.
“There’s a bit of lag time between when people start to worry about the economy and when they get their applications going,” said Wendy Margolis, director of communications for the Law School Admission Council, which administers the L.S.A.T.
Jeffrey S. Brand, dean of the University of San Francisco School of Law, echoed that view.
“I think the crash was so severe that people were kind of catatonic,” Mr. Brand said. “They weren’t sure what to do. They’re coming out of that mode now.”
David G. Payne, the Educational Testing Service’s vice president and chief operating officer for college and graduate programs, said the rise in interest in graduate programs was tied to the troubled economy and increased school recruiting.
“When job creation slows, there’s an increase in the number of people who pursue a graduate degree,” Mr. Payne said.
Officials at many law schools reported substantial increases in applications over last year. Washington University in St. Louis has had a 19 percent year-to-date increase in applications to its college of law. At the University of San Francisco School of Law, applications are up 35 percent over last year, and at the University of Iowa’s College of Law, applications are up 39 percent.
Some increases are more explicable than others. Applications to the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University have risen 54 percent this year, which may be related to its rise in the U.S. News & World Report rankings to 23 in 2009, from 36 the year before.
But at Cornell University’s Law School, whose ranking has remained relatively stable, applications are up 44 percent, and no one is quite sure of the reason for such a large increase.
Richard Geiger, dean of admissions, said: “I’m a little thrown off by the fact that our increase is much bigger than expected. There’s nothing big we’re doing to explain that kind of increase.”
Prebble Q. Ramswell, 37, is among those choosing to return to school after being unable to find work.
A mother with two bachelor’s degrees, one in political science and the other in psychology and sociology, Ms. Ramswell has nearly 10 years of work experience, including six years as an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Ms. Ramswell lost her job with the C.I.A. when her contract ended last spring. She and her husband, who had also worked for the C.I.A., were both unemployed.
“We were having such a difficult time finding work,” she said. After months of searching, her husband found work in Florida, and the couple and their 4-year-old daughter moved there from Northern Virginia.
“I still had no luck finding anything, so I said to myself, ‘What is it in my life that I have wanted to do, that could make something good of a situation that has turned horribly wrong?’ ”
Ms. Ramswell is now applying for a master’s degree in liberal arts, looking to leverage her background in social science and, ultimately, to become a psychotherapist.
“I’ve realized that it will make me more marketable and open more doors,” she said.
Stephanie E. Neal, 24, also said she was hoping to increase her appeal to employers by returning to school. She graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology in 2008 and has since completed a paralegal certificate and a victim’s assistance certificate. But she has been unemployed since May and is now preparing to take the G.R.E. She lives with her parents in Southern California and said “desperation” has pushed her back toward academia.
“With every job going to someone who has more experience and who is willing to take a pay cut to have a job, I’m left with what amounts to slim pickings,” she said. “With no income, I’ve turned to the idea of higher education.”
Collins Byrd, dean of admissions at the University of Iowa’s College of Law, said he had seen many applicants like Ms. Neal.
“I think people spent the past year in a bit of shell shock,” Mr. Byrd said. “I don’t think people applied at as high a rate because they just didn’t know what to do. They sat there and did nothing.
“Now they’re seeing what they can do, seeing if they can take out loans or mortgages on housing. I think people are coming to grips with reality.”
Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail
Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10detain.html?th&emc=th
Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.
But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.
The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.
The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.
But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.
As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.
In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.
The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.
Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”
In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.
In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.
But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.
While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.
One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.
Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.
Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.
Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.
On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.
Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”
In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”
Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.
Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.
But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.
“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.
The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.
But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.
“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”
That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.
Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.
Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.
According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.
“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”
In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.
A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled deportation. He died of a heart ailment weeks after his last appeal was dismissed.
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: January 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10detain.html?th&emc=th
Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.
But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.
The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.
The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.
But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.
As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.
In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.
The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.
Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”
In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.
In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.
But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.
While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.
One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.
Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.
Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.
Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.
On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.
Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”
In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”
Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.
Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.
But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.
“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.
The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.
But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.
“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”
That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.
Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.
Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.
According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.
“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”
In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.
A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled deportation. He died of a heart ailment weeks after his last appeal was dismissed.
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