House passes religious discrimination in Head Start
On July 25 the American Civil Liberties Union decried narrow passage in the House of legislation to reauthorize the Head Start early education program, what contains a stealth provision that would permit program providers to discriminate based on religion in their hiring and firing practices.  The ACLU said that the bill, if passed, would inevitably cost many talented teachers their jobs and deny many children quality early childhood education.
The bill contains language authorizing religious organizations that operate Head Start programs with federal funds to discriminate using religious criteria when hiring and firing.
The final vote was 217 to 216, with 12 Republicans joining 203 Democrats and one independent in opposing the bill.  There were attempts to correct the civil rights concerns with the legislation, but both failed.
“It’s up to the Senate to stop this unfair and poorly conceived piece of legislation,” Christopher E. Anders, an ACLU Legislative Counsel said.  “The classroom is meant to be a place of education and fairness, not a place where you can get a pink slip for worshiping differently than your employer.  As the one-vote margin demonstrates, this is not an overwhelmingly popular measure.” (ACLU)

Prisons to reduce hepatitis treatment
Faced with looming state budget problems, Pennsylvania prisons this fall will begin reducing by about 75 percent the number of inmates being treated for the potentially deadly hepatitis C virus.
Pennsylvania now has 8,030 state inmates infected with hepatitis C and is treating 550, said Fred Maue, chief of medical services for the Department of Corrections. He said those 550 would get their medicines, which cost $16,000 per patient for a 48-week course of treatment.
But beginning in September, he said, prisons will apply stricter rules for treating infected inmates. He estimated that 130 a year would receive medicines and that that number eventually might be cut to fewer than 100. He said the number of infected inmates is likely to remain constant -- about 23 percent of the prison population.
“We were facing medical cutbacks. We were faced with having to live with a limited budget,” he said. “We felt that we needed to prioritize our budget.”
Maue said much of the treatment would be focused on prisoners with a highly curable form of hepatitis C -- about 15 percent of those infected.
Nationally, hepatitis C is the leading reason for liver transplants. It has become one of the leading causes of death among Pennsylvania inmates.
The state’s secretary of corrections has said that treating the disease in prisons made inmates less likely to spread it after their release.
The reduction in treatment comes at a time when the medications are more successful in effectively curing the disease -- prompting some criticism that the state is going in the wrong direction.
Despite the reductions in treatment, Pennsylvania will still be providing more care than many states. New Jersey, for example, is currently treating 33 inmates -- a dramatic change from last year, when it was treating one. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Homeland Security Department seeks proposals to create university centers
The US Department of Homeland Security has issued guidelines for university-based homeland-security centers that will receive millions of dollars in federal grants. The recipient of the first grant will be announced in November.
The House of Representatives has proposed spending $35 million, and the Senate $55 million, on the centers and related fellowships during the 2004 fiscal year.
In its call for proposals, the department said likely areas of research could include economic modeling on the impact and consequences of terrorism, behavioral research on terrorists and countermeasures, public safety, technology transfer, agroterrorism countermeasures, and research and development on security technology.
In addition to the first center, the department plans to select nine more by the end of 2004. The first center will focus on economic strategies to help the government understand the consequences of terrorism.(The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Computer voting is open to easy fraud, experts say
The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers say.
“We found some stunning, stunning flaws,” said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States.
The systems, in which voters are given computer-chip-bearing smart cards to operate the machines, could be tricked by anyone with $100 worth of computer equipment, said Adam Stubblefield, a co-author of the paper.
“With what we found, practically anyone in the country — from a teenager on up — could produce these smart cards that could allow someone to vote as many times as they like,” Stubblefield said.
The move to electronic voting — which intensified after the troubled Florida presidential balloting in 2000 — has been a source of controversy among security researchers. They argue that the companies should open their software to public review to be sure it operates properly.
A spokesman for Diebold said the company’s voting-machine source code, the basis of its computer program, had been certified by an independent testing group. Outsiders might want more access, he said, but “we don’t feel it’s necessary to turn it over to everyone who asks to see it, because it is proprietary.”
The list of flaws in the Diebold software is long, according to the paper, which is online at avirubin.com/vote.pdf. Among other things, the researchers said, ballots could be altered by anyone with access to a machine, so that a voter might think he is casting a ballot for one candidate while the vote is recorded for an opponent.
The kind of scrutiny that the researchers applied to the Diebold software would turn up flaws in all but the most rigorously produced software, Stubblefield said. But the standards must be as high as the stakes, he said. (NY Times)

NY to open first public gay high school
New York City is creating the nation’s first public high school for gays, bisexuals, and transgender students.
The Harvey Milk High School will enroll about 100 students and open in a newly renovated building in the fall. It is named after San Francisco’s first openly gay city supervisor, who was assassinated in 1978.
“I think everybody feels that it’s a good idea because some of the kids who are gays and lesbians have been constantly harassed and beaten in other schools,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “It lets them get an education without having to worry.”
The school is an expansion of a two-classroom public school program that began in 1984. A gay-rights youth advocacy group, the Hetrick-Martin Institute, has managed and financed the program since its inception.
The new school’s principal, William Salzman, said the school will be academically challenging and will follow mandatory English and math programs. It also will specialize in computer technology, arts, and culinary arts. (AP)

Antiwar nuns sentenced to 2 1/2 years
Calling them “dangerously irresponsible,” a federal judge sentenced three nuns to at least 2 1/2 years in prison July 25 for vandalizing a nuclear missile silo during an antiwar protest last fall.
Despite his strong words, US District Judge Robert Blackburn gave the women less than the six-year minimum called for under sentencing guidelines.
Jackie Hudson was sentenced to 2 1/2 years; Carol Gilbert to two years, nine months; and Ardeth Platte to three years, five months.
Hudson, 68, Gilbert, 55, and Platte, 66, were convicted in April of obstructing the national defense and damaging government property.
The Roman Catholic nuns cut a fence and walked onto a Minuteman III silo site last October, pounding the silo with hammers and painting a cross on it with their blood. Officials said they caused at least $1,000 in damage. (AP)

White House didn’t have CIA nod for claim on Iraqi strikes
The White House, in the run-up to war on Iraq, did not seek CIA approval before charging that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, administration officials now say.
The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by President Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government.
The 45-minute claim is at the center of a scandal in Britain that led to the apparent suicide of a British weapons scientist who had questioned the government’s use of the allegation. The scientist, David Kelly, was being investigated by the British parliament as the suspected source of a BBC report that the 45-minute claim was added to Britain’s public “dossier” on Iraq in September at the insistence of an aide to Prime Minister Tony Blair — and against the wishes of British intelligence, which said the charge was from a single source and was considered unreliable.
The White House embraced the claim, from a British dossier on Iraq, at the same time it began to promote the dossier’s disputed claim that Iraq sought uranium in Africa.
Bush administration officials last week said the CIA was not consulted about the claim. A senior White House official did not dispute that account, saying presidential remarks such as radio addresses are typically “circulated at the staff level” within the White House only. (Washington Post)

California Governor faces recall
On July 24, Gray Davis prepared to undergo America’s first gubernatorial recall election in more than 80 years.
Barring an intervention by California’s Supreme Court, the Democratic Governor faces what amounts to a state-wide vote of confidence in early October -- less than nine months after he was re-elected to a second term. If a majority votes against his recall, or dismissal, he will remain in office. If not a host of potential rivals are vying to take over at the helm of a state facing the biggest budgetary crisis in its history.
The recall vote became inevitable when California’s Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley, confirmed that organizers had collected 1.3 million valid signatures for their petition, far more than the 897,158 required under the recall provision added to the state’s constitution in 1911.
So far only two candidates have declared - Peter Camejo of the Green Party, who unsuccessfully challenged Davis on Nov. 5 last year and the Republican state representative Darrell Issa, the San Diego businessman who funded the campaign for a recall.
For the moment Democrats are staying out the race, a show of loyalty to Davis.
But the bar for running is so low that the ballot could be packed with fringe candidates, who merely have to come up with 65 signatures of registered voters of their own party, and a $3,500 deposit. Theoretically Davis’s replacement could be elected with 10 per cent or less of the vote.
The embattled Governor was emphasizing that very point yesterday, and stressing that the state, facing a budget deficit of $38 billion this year, could not afford a frivolous election that would cost $35 million to organize.
Davis was widely blamed for California’s energy crisis. He is now accused of deliberately concealing from voters the true extent of the state’s budget crisis to win a second term in office. (Independent (UK))