House adopts bill to allow federally funded discrimination
As the House of Representatives has narrowly passed legislation to permit federally funded religious organizations to discriminate against employees based on their beliefs, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called on the Senate to preserve current civil rights protections in federal job-training programs. The ACLU said that House legislation includes unnecessary provisions that will undo key federal protections for potential employees.

The Workforce Reinvestment and Adult Education Act allows religious organizations that receive certain federal job-training funds to discriminate against their employees based on religion. By providing this exemption, the House reversed long-standing protections against discrimination based on religion by recipients of federal job-training funds. These civil rights provisions were first included in federal job-training legislation that was adopted 21 years ago. Such provisions have not been an obstacle for the numerous religious groups that currently participate in federally funded job-training programs.

The legislation does not have a specific companion bill in the Senate and it seems likely that similar provisions will not be included in the Senate version. Opposition to the Workforce Reinvestment Act parallels concerns raised in the Senate to similar provisions in the President’s faith-based initiative, provisions that were ultimately eliminated from the Senate’s bill several weeks ago. (ACLU)

White House refuses to release Sept. 11 info
The Bush administration and the nation’s intelligence agencies are blocking the release of sensitive information—for national security reasons—about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, delaying publication of a 900-page congressional report on how the terrorist assault happened. But some of the information is already broadly available on the Internet or has been revealed in interim reports on the investigation, leading to charges that the administration is simply trying to avoid enshrining embarrassing details in the report.

A Congressional investigation over ten months last year detailed security lapses, bad communication, and missed clues by the CIA and FBI that preceded the Sept. 11 attacks. In Dec., the joint inquiry produced a summary of findings and recommendations on how to improve intelligence, but the complete report was withheld so agencies could review and declassify some portions of it. The report is now expected to be released on Memorial Day. (Miami Herald)

Secret Service questions students over classroom comments on Bush
Teachers are rallying behind two school students who were interrogated by the Secret Service after the students made remarks about Pres. Bush during a class discussion about the war in Iraq at Oakland High School in California. The students’ teacher felt the comments—with the exact wording up for debate—to not only be mere criticism, but a direct threat to Bush and called the Secret Service. Other teachers are coming to the aid of the students and criticizing the tattling teacher for making a poor judgment. The union representing Oakland teachers requires that students be afforded legal council and parental guidance before they’re interrogated by federal authorities—something that did not occur in this case. Oakland teachers say it is something they will carry with them for years. (KRON)

Senate panel votes to lift ban on small nuclear arms
A sharply divided Senate Armed Services Committee voted today to repeal a ten-year-old ban on the development of small nuclear weapons, asserting the US must begin looking at new ways of deterring terrorist groups and so-called rogue nuclear powers like North Korea. The Bush administration, which requested the repeal, said it had no plans to develop a new low-yield nuclear weapon. But it contends that the existing prohibition has had a chilling effect on weapons research at a time when the US is trying to reconfigure its military to address post-Soviet threats. The measure goes before the full Senate in two weeks where opponents, mainly Democrats, have vowed to fight it. (NYT)

Newsletter documents Iraq war resistance
The latest Nuclear Resister newsletter details more than 7,500 arrests reported in the US during anti-war protests between November 2002 and mid-April 2003 at more than 300 actions in at least 115 cities and towns in 35 states. This chronicle of resistance published in the latest newsletter reveals the extent to which, early on, protest included active resistance to an invasion of Iraq. A deeply held conviction against military action in Iraq was shared by many people who had never protested before. Marches, rallies, protests, and acts of non-violent civil disobedience were occurring even before US troops arrived in Iraq. While many unpermitted actions—blockades, sit-ins, marches—expected to result in arrest did not end that way; police in city after city were quick to arrest people who strayed from sidewalks or “protest pens” and, on several occasions, simply surrounded large groups of peaceful, legal protesters and arrested everyone. The full report is available at www.nonviolence.org/nukeresister. (Nuclear Resister)

Cop takes controversial photos of teacher’s classroom
Police officer John Mott photographed student projects in the classroom of controversial history teacher Tom Treece in Barre, VT last month. Treece, a passionate pacifist, has been skewered publicly by critics who say he is peddling his personal views to his students. Part of the proof, critics say, is in the photographs which Mott—on duty, but on break, in uniform, and out of his jurisdiction—took on April 9 at 1:30 am after he persuaded a custodian to unlock the door to Treece’s classroom.

Mott says he wanted to photograph student projects that offended him as an American and a retired military man. He has refused to turn over the photos to the police department and said he is “going to speak to an attorney first.” School officials have defended Treece as a “thought-provoking” teacher who provides students with a full spectrum of political perspectives. Treece said his goal “is to get kids to think and be critical of everything they read and hear and see.”

The Citizens Advocating Responsible Education—a conservative parents’ group—has presented the school board with a petition signed by several hundred supporters suggesting revisions to the school’s policy regarding academic freedom and the appointment of community members to the school board’s curriculum committee. (The Times Argus)

Anti-choice activist found guilty of murder
James Kopp, 48, was sentenced to 25 years in prison—the maximum prison sentence—by a court in Buffalo, NY for the murder of father-of-four Dr. Barnett Slepian who was a gynecologist and obstetrician. Kopp, a militant anti-abortionist, shot Slepian in his kitchen in October 1998. He then spent the next two years on the FBI’s most wanted fugitives list until his arrest in France in March 2001. He is suspected in four other anti-choice related shootings in New York and Canada between 1994 and 1997. Kopp said given the chance, he would do it again. He has 30 days to appeal his sentence. (BBC)

Ex-corrections officer faces slew of charges
Ralph Grier, 44, a former officer at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Trenton, NJ, is charged with engaging in sexual relationships with two inmates, taking nude photos of the women, and asking a third inmate for sex. Grier, a former lieutenant and employed by the department of corrections since 1982, faces three counts of second-degree official misconduct and two counts of second-degree sexual assault. He was fired in March 2002 following a series of departmental hearings on internal charges against him. The investigation began when one of the victims came forward. The Hunterdon County, NJ statute on sexual assault provides for prosecution of a person who engages in sex acts with a person over whom they hold supervisory or disciplinary power. Two other former corrections officers at Edna Mahan have been charged with sexual assault of inmates in recent years. (The Express Times, NJ)

Veterans’ nuclear exposure underestimated
Some soldiers, sailors, and aviators who developed cancer from exposure to radiation from 1945 to 1962 were denied compensation because the Pentagon grossly underestimated their doses, a panel of independent scientists, convened by the National Academy of Scientists at the request of Congress, said last week.

Congress has classified 21 kinds of cancer as “presumptively” caused by radiation exposure. About 4,000 veterans with other kinds of cancer or other diseases applied for compensation, and all but around 50 were turned down, the study found. The study’s authors said they could not estimate how many of the others should have been compensated. It was unclear whether the doses of unsuccessful claimants would be recalculated.

Clarice Weinberg, chief of the biostatistics branch of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said that the recognition that the dose estimates were poor was not the same as saying that they were high enough to cause cancer. Studies of the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki exposed to far higher levels found that only about five percent of the cancers they suffered from were a result of radiation, she said. (NYT)

Bush admin. wants billions to update nuclear warheads
The Bush administration is proposing to spend billions of dollars rebuilding the country’s nuclear weapons manufacturing industry, resuming the production of nuclear components and materials halted after the end of the Cold War. Proposals in Bush’s 2004 budget would refurbish virtually every facet of the nuclear weapons complex, ranging from the nuclear test site in Nevada to the Savannah River plant in South Carolina. While there has been intense opposition in Washington to some aspects of Bush’s nuclear weapons policies, there has been virtually no congressional dissent or debate over the president’s proposed multi-billion-dollar resuscitation of America’s nuclear infrastructure

Bush’s budget includes $320 million to build new plutonium cores—known as “pits”—for nuclear warheads, $40 million of which would be used to design a plant capable of producing 500 such pits a year. An additional $135 million would go to restart production of tritium, which has not been produced by the government for more than a decade, and more funds would be spent in coming years.

Tritium, a gas that dramatically increases the force of thermonuclear explosions, will be produced at a commercial reactor in Watts Bar, TN—an unprecedented breaching of a long-standing policy that kept weapons work at military facilities.

While rebuilding plans were begun under Pres. Clinton, the current budget proposals advance the effort more broadly. Some arms experts say the proposals indicate the White House is planning on a far larger nuclear arsenal than that envisaged in the recently signed Moscow Treaty with Russia. The treaty, ratified by the Senate in March, mandates more than a 60 percent reduction in deployed warheads over the next decade.

The fastest growing program in the budget of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the weapons complex, is the refurbishment of the rest of the industrial machinery of nuclear warhead production. From 2001, when it was launched, through 2008, the rebuilding program is expected to cost nearly $2.5 billion. (San Francisco Chronicle)

back to top