Hurricanes don’t only bring out the best in us:

Roughly 600 people were arrested before the countywide curfew was lifted Friday. Though police insist that minorities were not targeted, an analysis of 455 arrests by The Palm Beach Post showed that the majority were blacks and Hispanics. More than half were under 30. Blacks and Hispanics accounted for 56.5 percent of those charged. Most of them were motorists. Palm Beach County’s driving-age population is just 22.7 percent black or Hispanic, according to the Census Bureau, and just 18.3 percent of vehicles here are owned by members of those minority groups.

My YDN op-ed on the aforementioned flag-burning amendment is on-line here:

On Saturday, Military Intelligence Specialist Armin Cruz testified that he “ordered three naked prisoners to crawl along a concrete floor, handcuffed them and stepped on at least one of them,” according to the Associated Press. His conviction represents the second sentencing — the first of intelligence personnel — in connection with the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. As The New York Times observed in an editorial Tuesday, “After months of Senate hearings and eight Pentagon investigations, it is obvious that the Bush administration does not intend to hold any high-ranking official accountable for the nightmare at Abu Ghraib.” Faced with the executive branch’s abdication in the face of this desecration of the dignity of the flag, one might look to Congress for moral leadership. Instead, the Senate is currently approaching a vote in the next month on a constitutional amendment, already approved by the House, to “prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.”

Over two-thirds of the “Citizens’ Committee” Ralph Nader hand-picked for his campaign in 2000 have joined together to call on swing state voters to vote for John Kerry:

For people seeking progressive social change in the United States, removing George W. Bush from office should be the top priority in the 2004 presidential election. Progressive votes for John Kerry in swing states may prove decisive in attaining this vital goal.

Given that actually protecting what the flag stands for would require standing up to the Flagwaver-in-Chief, Congress is instead once again mulling a Flag-Burning Ammendment that would narrow the freedoms the flag symbolizes in the name of honoring the flag. More on this particular issue from me in the YDN later this week.

The YDN reports on the talks between Yale Vice President Bruce Alexander and Mayor John DeStefano on increasing Yale’s contribution in lieu of taxes to the city:

“I think that the issues in New Haven are no different from issues across the country,” Alexander said. “As resources are constrained from time to time, a community needs to pitch in to help make ends meet.”

Funny, pitching in is what many of us have been pushing the University to do more of for a while. But as with every Yale concession, media message number one is that organizing from the involved communities had nothing to do with it:

“Frankly, efforts to bring pressure on the University has a counterproductive effect, as you might expect, because we do so many positive things in the city that we don’t feel the need to respond when people approach us in a negative or adversarial way,” Alexander said.

It’s going to take more of that pressure now to hold the University to – and expand on – its new promises.

A member of military intelligence pleads guilty to abuse:

The first American military intelligence specialist to stand trial in connection with the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison pleaded guilty here on Saturday to abusing prisoners. He was sentenced to eight months in jail. The soldier, Specialist Armin J. Cruz, 24, an Army intelligence analyst, was also demoted to private and expelled from the military with a bad-conduct discharge. He became the second soldier to be sentenced in the scandal, which was first described by the Pentagon as resulting from the misconduct of military police, not intelligence personnel.

Specialist Cruz, who was found guilty on two charges of maltreating and conspiring to maltreat prisoners, ordered three naked prisoners to crawl along a concrete floor, handcuffed them and stepped on at least one of them. He said he had begun taking part in the abuse after Specialist Roman Krol, an intelligence interrogator, called him to a high-security cell block where three prisoners were brought in. “When you walked in, did you know it was wrong?” the military judge, Col. James Pohl, asked in the trial, which was held in the heavily fortified American and Iraqi government headquarters. “Yes, sir,” Specialist Cruz said. “There’s no way to justify it.”

Donald Rumsfeld remains at large.

Evan reports an intriguing phone call:

A few days ago I got a phone call from an ‘unknown’ number so instead of screening it I decided to answer. What then followed was an hour-long survey about the community benefits agreement that basically was a tour of all the insane shit Yale New Haven Hospital has ever done in order to see what effect that had on my opinion. It also sought to feel out how I felt about an organizing rights agreement. The high point though was one exercise where the surveyor named various personalities from the area and asked me to rank them on a scale of 0 to 100.

Q: Well, this is going straight to him, so that’s good to know.

Telling:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld mixed up Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden with deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein twice in a speech Friday. Among other things, Rumsfeld talked about the world just before the Sept. 11 attacks, whose third anniversary is today. In Afghanistan, he told the National Press Club, ‘the leader of the opposition Northern Alliance, Masoud, lay dead, his murder ordered by Saddam Hussein, by Osama bin Laden, Taliban’s co-conspirator.’ Ahmed Shah Masoud, who opposed the ruling Taliban, was killed by suspected Al Qaeda operatives – not Hussein – two days before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Later, Rumsfeld said, ‘Saddam Hussein, if he’s alive, is spending a whale of a lot of time trying to not get caught. And we’ve not seen him on a video since 2001.’ Hussein was captured by U.S. forces in Iraq; Bin Laden has not been found. The moderator later asked Rumsfeld if he had meant Bin Laden, and the Defense secretary replied: ‘I did. I meant we haven’t seen Osama bin Laden.’

Makes you wonder what it is they’re protecting:

Officially, the Secret Service does not concern itself with unarmed, peaceful demonstrators who pose no danger to the commander in chief. But that policy was inoperative here Thursday when seven AIDS activists who heckled President Bush during a campaign appearance were shoved and pulled from the room — some by their hair, one by her bra straps — and then arrested for disorderly conduct and detained for an hour. After Bush campaign bouncers handled the evictions, Secret Service agents, accompanied by Bush’s personal aide, supervised the arrests and detention of the activists and blocked the news media from access to the hecklers.

A groundbreaking study confirms what we knew about pollution and lung problems:

In the first long-term study of the effects of air pollution on children, researchers reported Wednesday that children and teenagers in Southern California communities with higher levels of air pollution were more likely to have diminished lung function. . . The investigators found that 7.9 percent of the 18-year-olds in the highest pollution areas had lung capacities that were less than 80 percent of what they should have been. Among those subjected to the least-polluted air, 1.6 percent had underperforming lungs.

This is why the demands of folks in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood, facing a further expansion by Yale – New Haven Hospital, include an increased commitment from the hospital to studying urban diseases like athsma and diabetes and a promise to deconstruct buildings and a manner which doesn’t send debris into the local atmosphere.

The Times explores the Sudanese rebel groups whose ranks are swelling as government-backed Janjiwid continue their murderous campaign:

The men and boys of Darfur’s black communities have been driven into the arms of the rebel groups by long-simmering resentment against what they regard as official discrimination at the hands of the government, intensified by the violence exacted by Khartoum and its allied Arab militias, the janjaweed. Rebel leaders insist that their goal is not to fight Arabs as such, nor to clear Darfur of its centuries-old nomadic Arab tribes. But today the rank and file is so embittered by the violence and so emboldened by the international condemnation of the Khartoum government that the prospect of coexistence, at least for now, seems a faint possibility. “Impossible,” said Mustapha Abdul Karim, 35, the blustery commander of this crew when asked about sharing the territory where tens of thousands have died or been displaced already. “Arabs and Africans living in one village? Impossible.” His father was killed in a gun battle in Abu Gomorah in 2002, before the war had even officially started.

The rebels’ political goals remain vague – only broad demands for sharing power and wealth in the government of Sudan. Toward those goals, the rebels, too, have resorted to some unsavory tactics, including the kidnapping of aid workers in Darfur in late August. Their ranks are filled with boys under 18. Yet they have garnered enviable international support, notably from the United States government, by pointing, correctly, to the atrocities committed against black African civilians by government forces and the janjaweed. Sensing that the finger of the international community rests on their side of the scale, and distrusting promises made by Khartoum, they have also proved obstinate in talks taking place in the Nigerian capital of Abuja aimed at ending the conflict. They have insisted, for instance, that the janjaweed be disarmed before their own fighters – something the government for its part has refused.