The Washington Post retracts its claim that wages are rising and Kerry’s just a downer on the ecnony:

On June 19 we wrote that wage increases had kept pace with inflation in the year to May, and criticized Sen. John F. Kerry for suggesting that wages had fallen behind. We were wrong and Mr. Kerry was right: Hourly wages for non-supervisory workers rose 2.2 percent, while the consumer price index rose 3.1 percent.

Then again, I’m sure that wages for members of the editorial board of the Post are rising faster than inflation, so one can see how it could be easy for them to get confused.

One of the initiatives unveiled at SEIU’s convention last week was a new website, Purple Ocean, to mobilize the community of allies of SEIU’s work. Check it out.

The Bush administration finally gives up on its campaign to convince the United Nations that war crimes prosecutions should only apply to other people:

“The United States has decided not to proceed further with consideration and action on the draft at this time in order to avoid a prolonged and divisive debate,” the deputy American ambassador, James B. Cunningham, said on emerging from the council. The envoys from the 15-member council had spent the morning in closed session discussing a rewritten version of the American troop exemption resolution circulated among them Tuesday night to try to meet the widespread objections. A resolution granting a year’s exemption had passed the council the past two years, but this year the attempt to renew it ran into difficulties because of the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq and a strong statement of opposition from Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Harold Meyerson on Andy Stern and John Lewis:

This level of global union cooperation is new, but much about this campaign takes a leaf out of John L. Lewis’s 70-year-old book on industrial organizing. Like Lewis, whose United Mine Workers funded the rise of such new unions as the United Auto Workers, the SEIU and UNITE-HERE envision a new union rising for the workers in these three companies. Like Lewis, who signed the first company-wide contracts with General Motors and U.S. Steel, Stern and UNITE-HERE’s leaders, Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm, believe the only way to build back union strength is to organize entire companies at a time, rather than go facility by facility.

And like Lewis, whose frustration at the American Federation of Labor’s opposition to industrial organizing led him to break away and found the CIO in 1935, Stern called on Monday for the AFL-CIO (the two groups got back together in 1955) to radically change its structure. Currently, the AFL-CIO has 65 member unions, the vast majority too small to fund organizing campaigns, though some — or their locals — have been known to pick up new members when employers, facing the prospect of real unionization by the likes of the SEIU, have cut sweetheart deals with them. Stern would like to see the unions consolidated into about 15, with clear sectoral responsibilities and enough resources to organize. On Monday Stern told his delegates that it was time either to “change the AFL-CIO or build something stronger.” At that, the floor erupted; delegates stood and whooped for a full minute.

The international community ponders whether to identify the genocide in Darfur by name:

The Brussels-based International Crisis Group says Darfur can “easily become as deadly” as the Rwanda genocide of 1994. Then, soldiers, militiamen and civilians of the Hutu majority killed more than 500,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus in 100 days. All along, Sudan has denied allegations of complicity with the Arab militias and has blamed rebels for rights violations. In February 2003, the Zaghawa, Fur and Masalit black tribes rebelled against what they regarded as unjust treatment by the Sudanese government in their historic struggle over land and resources with their Arab countrymen. Countless thousands of tribesmen have died in a brutal counterinsurgency. The conflict has uprooted more than 1 million, and the U.S. government believes this many could die unless a peace settlement is reached and relief supply deliveries are greatly accelerated. Sudanese cooperation has been limited but is improving. The Muslim-vs.-Muslim conflict is separate from the 21-year war between ethnic Arab Muslim militants in northern Sudan and the black African non-Muslim south. That three-decade-long struggle may be ending thanks to peace accords signed last month.

A U.S. interagency review is aimed at judging whether the Darfur tragedy qualifies as genocide under a 1946 international convention that outlaws the practice. “I believe what is occurring in Sudan approaches the level of genocide,” says Jim Kolbe, a Republican lawmaker. He and several colleagues are pushing for $95 million in emergency assistance for Darfur’s victims…A role for the United Nations is made clear under Article 8 of the Genocide Convention: “Any contracting party may call upon the competent organs of the U.N. to take such action under the Charter of the U.N. as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.”U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he wasn’t ready to describe the situation in Darfur “as genocide or ethnic cleansing yet,” but he called it “a tragic humanitarian situation.” For now, the U.S. government seems to be tilting against the genocide label but is sticking with ethnic cleansing to describe the situation.

Meanwhile, as Human Rights Watch reports, the killing is spreading:

Human Rights Watch documented at least seven cross-border incursions into Chad conducted by the Janjaweed militias since early June. The Janjaweed attack villages in Chad and refugees from Darfur, and also steal cattle. The same Arab and African ethnic groups live on both sides of border in Chad and Darfur. Meanwhile, Chadians living near the border are organized into self-defense groups to protect their families and livestock from Janjaweed raids. These self-defense groups have reportedly clashed with the Janjaweed militia. “The Sudanese government must take full responsibility for the militia raids into Chad,” said Jemera Rone, Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Janjaweed are the government’s militia, and Khartoum has armed and empowered it to conduct ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Darfur.”

The National Priorities Project assesses the impact of Bush’s education cuts:

While the Bush Administration has identified education as a priority…programs across the educational spectrum have experienced cuts or been under-funded and unable to meet demand.

Connecticut Governor-to-be Jodi Rell, interviewed in the Times, spends a lot of time talking about ethics rules and bipartisanship and public trust and doesn’t devote much attention to policy issues. But then again, it’s not like anyone in the media seems to be either:

Mrs. Rell, in a series of interviews on Tuesday, said she and Gov. John G. Rowland had a working relationship, not a personal one, and that she should not be held accountable for his conduct. “If I had known, I can assure you I would have spoken up and things would not have gone this far,” said Mrs. Rell, sitting at a small table in her usually quiet Capitol office, which was crowded with reporters, cameras and added security staff on Tuesday. “At least I hope they would not have.” Mrs. Rell said her staff members were so strict about their ethical standards that they did not exchange birthday or Christmas gifts, and she noted that the two times she or her family has come under scrutiny – once when her husband accepted free state military-surplus items, once when her son was found with a motorized water scooter that turned out to be stolen – investigators found “no wrongdoing.” “It is ‘case closed,’ ” she said.

…On the day that Mrs. Rell, a Republican, becomes governor, Kevin B. Sullivan, a Democrat who is the Senate president pro tempore, will replace her as lieutenant governor. The party divide between the two offices will be the first time in nearly 60 years that the major parties have shared the two highest executive offices. “Kevin and I actually have a good working relationship,” she said. “We need to come out working together.” But Mrs. Rell made clear that she does not expect to share power. She noted that Mr. Sullivan acknowledged in a radio interview on Tuesday that the state can have just one governor. “He’s absolutely correct,” she said, “and I appreciate that.”

William Greider on the Washington Post on Ronald Reagan:

My condolences to the staff and management of The Post. I had no idea you felt so deeply about Ronald Reagan. I was a reporter and editor at The Post during the launch of Reagan’s “revolution,” and we had a somewhat different take on his presidency then…A disturbing meanness lurked at the core of Reagan’s political agenda and was quite tangible at the time, though evidently forgotten now. We wrote tough stories about that and other contentious questions; I remain proud of the coverage. I would rank Reagan’s place in history right up there with Warren G. Harding’s. You want to put him in the company of FDR, maybe even Lincoln. Future historians will decide who’s right. Meanwhile, I read your funeral coverage as a lengthy, lugubrious correction.

The Bush administration corrects itself after caught manipulating the facts to bolster its claim that it’s made Americans safer:

Correcting an inaccurate report, the State Department announced Tuesday that acts of terror worldwide increased slightly last year and the number of people wounded rose dramatically. The department also reported a decline in the number of people killed — to 625 from 725 during 2002. But in April, the department reported 307 people had been killed last year — a much bigger decline. The findings had been used by senior Bush administration officials to bolster President Bush’s claim of success in countering terrorism.