President Bush appoints Florida Congressman Porter Goss as CIA Director:

Mr. Goss’s selection is bound to be controversial. He was responsible for Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., and the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks concluded that the oversight efforts largely failed. He is considered a strong partisan, and recently took to the floor of the House to attack Senator John Kerry, the president’s opponent in November’s election. Today the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller, said he was concerned with Mr. Bush’s choice, saying that the selection of a politician for the post — “any politician, from either party” —was a mistake. He made similar comments in June, when Mr. Goss was being mentioned in the press as a candidate for the job. But Mr. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, said today that he would work to move the nomination process forward, although Mr. Goss “will need to answer tough questions about his record and his position on reform.” Within the C.I.A., views of Mr. Goss are mixed. But perhaps the biggest challenge to his nomination is the uncertainty over what kind of job he will be taking. Mr. Bush last week endorsed the creation of a national intelligence director, who will sit above the C.I.A. director and coordinate the activities of all intelligence agencies. While the C.I.A. job remains a critical one, it will therefore be much diminished, making the C.I.A. chief one among many intelligence directors.

More evidence that the Bush Administration is, to put it generously, soft on poverty:

Few Washington insiders noticed, but a switch of some import was made quietly last year. The Census Bureau chose to release its annual U.S. poverty figures not on the traditional Tuesday downtown at the National Press Club, but rather on a Friday afternoon at Census headquarters in Suitland, Md. — a place far from most newsrooms, and at a time when most sensible people are focused on matters other than demography. Reporters noticed the 3.4 percent increase in the poverty rate, though, and Congressional Democrats used it to back up their contention that the Bush administration’s economic policies had failed. Still, Democrats suspected the administration had been trying to hide something. So when the Census Bureau announced further alterations in the way it presents its annual report on poverty, Democrats immediately suspected a plot. “I don’t put anything past this administration,” said Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), the ranking member on the Government Relations subcommittee on technology, information policy, intergovernmental relations and the Census. “These people will stoop to any level to accomplish their goals — and right now that goal is to re-elect Bush.” The bureau’s plan moved this year’s release date from late September to late August — a time when Members of Congress are normally home in their districts and many journalists are on vacation. Then last week, Census officials announced yet another change: For what appears to be the first time, the figures will be released not by a career official but by the bureau’s director, a political appointee.

The Times on the sham recovery:

For months, Democrats have said that the long-delayed employment recovery was concentrated in low-wage jobs that paid far less than those that were lost. White House officials replied that the available data failed to settle the matter one way or the other. The data is still inconclusive. But the weakness in job creation and the apparent weakness in high-paying jobs may be opposite sides of a coin. Companies still seem cautious, relying on temporary workers and anxious about rising health care costs associated with full-time workers. Many economists say that over the long term, the most vulnerable positions are those at the low end of the wage scale that require fewer skills and are easily replicated.

Even now, at a time when a disproportionate number of new jobs appear to be lower-paying ones, there has been growth in some high-income occupations like accounting, architecture and software. Yet the earnings gap between the highest-paid employees and the rest of the work force is still widening, as it has over most of the last 30 years. The trend is most striking in factories, which accounted for the bulk of job losses in the last three years and tended to pay above-average wages. In contrast to previous recoveries, when companies rehired a large proportion of laid-off workers, manufacturers have added only 91,000 jobs this year, having eliminated more than two million jobs in the previous three years.

They hate us for our freedoms:

Police ordered Al-Jazeera’s employees out of their newsroom Saturday after the Iraqi government accused the Arab satellite channel of inciting violence and closed its office for 30 days. Iraqi Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib said the closure was intended to give the station “a chance to re-adjust their policy against Iraq.” “They have been showing a lot of crimes and criminals on TV, and they transfer a bad picture about Iraq and about Iraqis and encourage criminals to increase their activities,” he said. “We want to protect our people.” Al-Jazeera officials said the closure was an ominous violation of freedom of the press. Haider al-Mulla, a lawyer for Al-Jazeera, said the channel would respect the decision but study its legal options.

Prime Minister Allawi makes a plea for calm in the face of ongoing violence in Iraq:

— Protected by 100 guards, Iraq’s interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi visited the war-shattered city of Najaf on Sunday, calling on Shiite militants to lay down their weapons after days of fierce clashes with U.S. forces. But even as Allawi met with Najaf’s governor, police and the Mahdi Army militia loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr battled nearby. Gunfire and explosions could be heard as U.S. helicopter gunships circled overhead. Two Iraqi national guardsmen were killed, and 13 people wounded. “We think that those armed should leave the holy sites and the (Imam Ali Shrine compound) as well as leave their weapons and abide by the law,” Allawi said during a one-hour visit for talks with Najaf Gov. Adnan al-Zurufi. Clashes continued in other Shiite communities for the fourth straight day.

The Associated Press reports some of the risks faced by teen workers

Studies show most teens are often unaware of their rights as workers, and because they don’t have the experience of older workers, they don’t easily recognize workplace dangers. A combination of youthful energy and a reluctance to ask questions also increases the chances of an injury at the workplace. Janelle Chaplin, 17, is a co-worker of Ullmer’s at The Windmill Grill. Chaplin has been working at the restaurant since she was 16 and says being a cashier and hostess keeps her busy…when asked whether she knew what rights she had as an employee, Chaplin raised an eyebrow and hesitantly said no. She also said she received safety training but wasn’t sure it was that helpful. “They showed me not to swallow the stuff we put in the bottles that we clean the tables with,” she said. Chaplin also said that while she has considerate and helpful employers, she doesn’t feel comfortable asking them questions. Chaplin said she has hurt herself several times, but it’s not a big deal and she hasn’t reported it to her employer.

Each year, thousands of young workers are injured or killed on the job. Although there isn’t a single data source that provides a comprehensive picture of teen injuries, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimates more than 200,000 teens ages 14 to 17 are hurt at work every year. That is a higher rate than their adult co-workers, even though youths are restricted from the most hazardous of jobs, which include manufacturing and construction. According to NIOSH, an average of 67 workers under age 18 died from work-related injuries each year from 1992 through 2000. In 1998, an estimated 77,000 required treatment in hospital emergency rooms. The Institute of Medicine lists the most common injuries suffered by working teens as cuts, bruises, sprains and strains, burns and fractures or dislocations. It also notes the majority of jobs teens work are based in retail shops, restaurants and grocery stores.

Colombia’s most prominent labor leader charges its army with targeting unionists for death:

The men were killed on Thursday by troops sent to arrest them near the eastern town of Saravena, one of the most violent places in Colombia and where Marxist rebels enjoy popular support. Vice President Francisco Santos said the three belonged to the outlawed National Liberation Army, a 5,000-strong force with a strong presence in the oil-rich region near the border with Venezuela. “They were union officials. But they were also mixed up in things which didn’t have anything to do with their union work,” Santos told reporters on Friday.

General Luis Fabio Garcia said the men were carrying weapons and explosives when they were shot. But the president of Colombia’s largest labour organisation, the Central Workers’ Union, said the officials died just one day after they said there was a plot to murder them. “We consider this to be an assassination of union officials,” Carlos Rodriguez told Reuters. The office in Colombia for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights called for an investigation, as did representatives of Amnesty International, who met President Alvaro Uribe on Thursday to ask for guarantees for the security of rights workers.

One person, no vote:

Floridians worried about the reliability of touch-screen voting got more fodder for their fears Thursday: belated public scrutiny of a report on tens of thousands of ballots tossed out for irregularities in the state’s most recent general election. The Florida Division of Elections’ report found that the rate of so-called undervotes, or blank or incomplete ballots, in the 2002 gubernatorial election was nearly three times higher in counties using touch-screen machines as in those with optical scan systems. In the election, which incumbent Republican Gov. Jeb Bush won by a wide majority, more than 44,000 votes were ruled invalid because of undervotes, overvotes (when a voter chooses more than one candidate) or flawed absentee ballots, the report said. The document, the basis for an article in Thursday’s editions of the Miami Herald, was seized upon by critics of the screens, which Florida’s most populous counties have purchased to prevent a repeat of the election debacle of 2000. The report attracted little notice when it was issued last year.

John S. Burnett on the tragic consequences of appropriating unwitting relief workers as soldiers in the War on Terror:

Before the killing of his colleagues, Mr. Gluck, an American, had expressed concern that the neutrality of all relief workers employed by nongovernmental organizations in the post- Sept. 11 world was being compromised: “The Americans are pretending that NGO’s are with them fighting the war against terror, and they are not. That puts them in danger. We want to be relevant medically and irrelevant militarily and politically.” He himself was held hostage for more than three weeks in a moldy root cellar in Chechnya because, in part, his kidnappers questioned his group’s impartiality. Neutrality has never been far from the surface in relief work. When I was worked for the United Nations World Food Program in Somalia, we distributed 50-kilogram sacks of grain emblazoned with the American flag and “Gift of the People of the United States of America.” Somalis readily accepted the aid but it was clear that our professed neutrality was suspect.

The demand on relief agencies to shed that protective cloak of neutrality – despite the dangers to those in the field – has never been more aggressive than it is today. Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing nongovernmental organizations in 2001, spelled out a revised policy on relief work: that “just as surely as our diplomats and military, American NGO’s s are out there serving and sacrificing on the front lines of freedom NGO’s are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team.” Those remarks sent shock waves through the relief community, which would rather not be part of the combat team in the war on terrorism. More recently, Secretary Powell’s words were supported in a speech by Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of Usaid, the world’s most generous food aid donor. At the Interaction Forum last year, he told relief groups that if they received American financing, they were “an arm of the U.S. government.”If aid organizations did not show a stronger link to American foreign policy he threatened, according to the forum, to tear up their contracts and find new partners.

Yet another place at which that buck is apparently not stopping:

CACI International Inc., under scrutiny over whether it contributed to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, was awarded a $15 million extension of its work in Iraq, the U.S. Army said on Wednesday. The award allows CACI’s work supporting interrogations and other intelligence operations to continue while competitive bids are sought on a new contract for these services, a senior Army contracting official said.

Looks like Bush is flip-flopping on whether results matter:

Job growth ground nearly to a halt last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, in a new sign that the economy has weakened in recent months. Employers added just 32,000 jobs in July, a small fraction of what forecasters had expected and the smallest gain this year. The government also announced that job growth in May and June was less than initially estimated…The unemployment rate fell slightly, to 5.5 percent, last month, but it is based on a smaller survey than the job growth numbers, which are widely considered the more reliable gauge of employment. Stocks fell broadly after the report was issued, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and the Dow Jones industrial average down almost 1 percent in early afternoon trading in New York. The dollar dropped against the euro, and interest rates declined, too, although many economists continue to expect the Federal Reserve to raise its benchmark short-term rate next week.

The new report creates a nettlesome political situation for President Bush, who had pointed to the strong job gains earlier this year as a result of the tax cuts he had championed. The weak job growth of the last two months means that he is now highly likely to stand for re-election with an employment level lower than when he took office, the first time that has happened in 72 years, when Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 amid Depression-era job losses far greater than any experienced in recent times…N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said that the White House was “not satisfied with today’s payroll employment number.” But he added that the fall in the jobless rate and a recent decline in claims for unemployment insurance suggested that the job market could be healthier than Friday’s report made it seem.

Human Rights Watch calls for the Arab League to take a strong stance on the genocide in Darfur:

At its emergency meeting on Sunday to discuss the situation in Darfur, the Arab League should firmly condemn the gross human rights violations by Sudanese government forces and the government-backed Janjaweed militias in this western region of Sudan, Human Rights Watch said today. The pan-Arab group should also make
public the report of its May fact-finding mission to the region. At the request of the Sudanese government, foreign ministers of the Arab League—a regional grouping of 22 countries including Sudan—will meet in Cairo to discuss and state a common Arab position on the Darfur conflict.

“Allowing the Sudanese government to hide its crimes behind Arab solidarity would be an insult to more than one million Muslim victims in Darfur,” said Peter Takirambudde, executive director for Human Rights Watch’s Africa division. “The Arab League should stand behind the victims in Darfur and take concrete steps to ensure that civilians are protected from further crimes.” In May, the pan-Arab group sent a commission of inquiry to Darfur. The investigation reportedly concluded that “massive violations of human rights [had been] committed by pro-government militias” in Darfur. However, after the Sudanese government vigorously protested the report’s findings at the Arab League summit in Tunis in late May, the Arab League report has not been made public.