Youth march in the Mission District for peace.­ (photo by Marvin J. Ramirez)

­1.) We are sending a message of love and peace to our youth. Speaking as ONE MISSION, we will not accept or tolerate violence as a way of life in our community.

­2.) We want to highlight the collective work that Community Based Organizations and individual members do on a daily basis; working to prevent crime in our community and empower youth and families. (Despite the Mayor and Police Department taking sole credit for the reduction of crime.

3.) We are fighting back against the Mayor’s Office for the devastating cuts, not only DCYF funded programs, but also the compolete elimination of entire programs that serve youth in our community. We are literally fighting to keep our children and youth alive and safe; ensuring them the right to a better quality of life and the pursuit of happiness.

Signed by Mission Community Peace Collaborative: Mission Beacon-Precita Center; HOMEN; Mission Girls; MiCoCo; Safety Net Boys & Girls Club; Mission Prep; SF Promise; Mission Graduates; Arriba Juntos; United Playaz; CRN; CARECEN; Instituto Familiar De La Raza; CUAV.

­

­by the University of Michigan

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Cleaner cooking fuel for parts of the developing world that still rely on wood is the goal of a University of Michigan student project. Engineering students are designing and building better biodigesters, which turn animal waste and food scraps into a biogas to power a stove.

In a biodigester tank, the waste can mix with water in the absence of oxygen, allowing the anaerobic bacteria already present in the waste to break it down into biogas and compostable material.

Cooking with biogas is healthier and more environmentally-friendly than cooking with wood.

“Fine particulates are released into the kitchen and the women who are in the kitchen all day have to breathe this in,” said Heather Dorer, an engineering undergraduate student who traveled to Nicaragua in August 2009 as part of this project.

During the 10-day trip, students learned about the biodigesters currently in use there and installed one. They have since used this knowledge to develop a new conceptual design for digesters that is appropriate for rural Nicaragua and similar cultures elsewhere. They expect to have a prototype by May, and to return this summer to continue the project.

“We’re improving the designs by increasing the user friendliness and also improving the yield of the biogas,” said Zijia Li, an undergraduate engineering student.

Students involved in this project belong to the organization BLUElab, which stands for Better Living Using Engineering Lab. BLUElab works toward sustainable solutions to development problems both domestically and internationally.

“Today’s engineering students are magicians at solving problems, but only a select few are capable of finding important problems and implementing economically and environmentally sustainable solutions in the real-world,” said associate professor Steve Skerlos, founder of BLUElab and associate chair in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

­“I’m impressed with how this team of engineering students has grasped the technical as well as human and economic dimensions of this multidisciplinary design project. Their experiences in BLUElab and the Multidisciplinary Design Program will clearly place them well among the leaders and best of our undergraduates.”

by the El Reportero’s news services

Sebastián Piñera

Sebastián Piñera won election in Chile on 17 January, becoming the first right-wing presidential candidate since 1958 to come to power by the ballot box. Piñera defeated Eduardo Frei, of the ruling Concertación, which will see its 20-year stranglehold on power since the return to democracy come to an end when Piñera dons the presidential sash on 11 March. Chile was the only Latin American country not to have experienced a post-dictatorship alternation of government. Piñera’s big challenge will be preserving cohesion in his Coalición por el Cambio. He borrowed a lot of social-democratic rhetoric during his campaign and presented himself as a pragmatic centrist, but the ultra-conservative Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI) is the senior partner in his coalition.

Bolivia’s Morales sworn in for second term

Today (22 January) Evo Morales will be sworn for a second term as president.

Morales begins his second term with a massive mandate leaving him well placed to achieve his main priority – the implementation of the new constitution which strengthens state control of the economy; enshrines indigenous rights and provides for greater decentralisation.

U.S. accused of ‘occupying’ Haiti as troops flood in

HAVANA: Retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro today called on the United Nations to assume a monitoring role in Haiti, and he decried the US military “occupation” of the quakeravaged Caribbean country.

Castro, in an opinion article published in the local newspapers, said that neither the United Nations nor Washington have given a proper explanation of the US military role in the wretchedly poor nation.

“Amid the Haitian tragedy, with no one knowing how or why, thousands of (US Marines) and paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division and other military forces have occupied Haitian territory. Even worse, neither the United Nations nor the (US government) has offered an explanation… of this movement of forces,” Castro wrote.

Castro, 83, said that the announcement of other countries to send more troops to Haiti will contribute to chaos “and complicate the international cooperation, already a complicated task.”

­In other related news: France accused the US of “occupying” Haiti on Monday as thousands of American troops flooded into the country to take charge of aid efforts and security.

The French minister in charge of humanitarian relief called on the UN to “clarify” the American role amid claims the military build up was hampering aid efforts.

Alain Joyandet admitted he had been involved in a scuffle with a US commander in the airport’s control tower over the flight plan for a French evacuation flight.

“This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti,” Mr Joyandet said.

Geneva-based charity Medecins Sans Frontieres backed his calls saying hundreds of lives were being put at risk as planes carrying vital medical supplies were being turned away by American air traffic controllers.

But US commanders insisted their forces’ focus was on humanitarian work and last night agreed to prioritise aid arrivals to the airport over military flights, after the intervention of the UN.

by Erick Galindo

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Iraqi government will pursue civil charges following U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina’s decision to throw out manslaughter charges against five former Blackwater security guards accused of killing 14 Iraqis on Sept. 16, 2007.

The decision was announced New Year’s Eve here (with time zone difference, New Year’s day in Iraq). In all, 17 Iraqis were killed and 20 wounded in the Baghdad incident.

The decision by Urbina, who sits as the first Hispanic to serve on the District of Colombia Superior Court, was met with disdain and jeers by Iraqis, many of whom view the shootings as a symbol of U.S. disregard for their lives.

Iraq called the decision “unacceptable and unjust.” It said it will ask the U.S. Justice Department to review the criminal case.

Family members of the dead and survivors called the decision a mockery of the justice that the United States was supposed to bring to their country. Officials there say the government will help victims file a lawsuit against the United States “What happened yesterday confirms that the trial was biased,” said Ali Adeeb, a top adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki.

Adeeb promised the Iraqi government will put diplomatic pressure on the United States to ensure that the victims “get justice.”

The 28-year veteran of the court said prosecutors had acted inappropriately in using the guards’ statements, acquired under the auspices of immunity, as evidence.

Judge Urbana also criticized prosecutors for withholding “substantial exculpatory evidence” from the grand jury that indicted the defendants, as well as for presenting distorted versions of witnesses’ testimony and improperly telling the grand jury that some incriminating statements had been made by the defendants were being withheld.

“The explanations offered by the prosecutors and investigators in an attempt to justify their actions and persuade the court that they did not use the defendants’ compelled testimony were all too often contradictory, unbelievable and lacking in credibility,” Urbina wrote.

Prosecutors contended the guards indiscriminately fired on unarmed civilians in an unprovoked assault near a crowded traffic circle.

One of the survivors, Mahdi Abdul Khudor, who lost an eye in the shooting, said the guards burned people inside their cars. The guards claimed they had been am bushed by insurgents and they fired in self-defense.

During the investigation into the incident, the guards, State Department contract employees at the time, were told by State Department investigators that they could be fired if they did not talk to investigators about the case and that whatever they said would not be used against them in any criminal proceeding.

In his 90-page opinion, Urbina found that in a “reckless violation of the defendants’ A panel with perspectives from across the political spectrum will address this report and other studies on the economic effects of immigration reform at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. that morning.

Last month, U.S. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez constitutional rights,” investigators and prosecutors had extensively used those statements and disregarded “the warning of experienced senior prosecutors” that “the course of action threatened the viability of prosecution.”

­The decision is considered a major blow to the Justice Department, which has struggled to distance itself from the stigma left by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzáles. It also brings to a halt one of the highest profile prosecutions to arise from the Iraq war.

The shooting had strained relations between the Iraqi government and the Bush Administration at the time and called into question United States’ growing reliance on private security contractors in war zones.

Blackwater, the much-publicized government contractor, has since been expelled from Iraq and changed its name to Xe Services.

Many of the company’s former guards have switched to other security firms and have stayed in Iraq.

by Jon Rodney

Protest and demand for back wages.­(PHOTO COURTESY BY JON RODNEY, WITH EAST BAY ALLIANCE)

No sooner had the sun risen over the Oakland hills on Jan. 16 when protestors started gathering outside of Emeryville’s boycotted Woodfin Suites Hotel. And by about 8:00 a.m. the crowd had swelled to over 60 workers, residents, and community members.

­A court ordered Woodfin to pay up some $200,000 in back wages, owed to dozens of working immigrant mothers since approximately three years ago, and still it hasn’t paid the workers.

­

por Alejandra Matos

EL PASO, Texas – With the constant violence in Mexico has come an increase in reporting about the ongoing drug war in Ciudad Juárez, the neighboring metropolis across the border, In 2009, more than 2,600 people were killed there. El Paso Times editor Chris López has dedicated himself to covering the turmoil ever since he joined the paper in 2009.

“This is one of the most dynamic stories on the border — and in the country,” he insists.

El Diario de El Paso, the sole Spanish-language newspaper here, also sees the importance of reporting on it because readers often have direct ties to Juárez.

“We try to cover the violence binationally. We talk to North American agencies and scholars to give their opinions on the phenomenon,” El Diario de El Paso editor Armando Vélez says.

His newspaper’s audience is comprised mainly of Mexican immigrants. For this reason, Vélez asks his reporters to cover other aspects of daily life, but incorporating how the violence is affecting them, he added.

“Anybody who says that the backdrop of the drug cartel war doesn’t impact every segment of society in Juárez is not over there talking to people,” López says. “You cannot tell a story in Juárez right now without giving it that context.”

KINT Channel 26, El Paso’s Univisión station, also showcases other elements of ­life in Juárez. Reports such as one Ariadna López did on an orphanage remind people that life still continues there, she says.

A lot of times people in El Paso would rather not watch the news or read the newspaper because they are tired of so much violence, and at the end of the day it’s the exact same story,” López says.

In 2009, 11 journalists were killed in Mexico, making it the second most dangerous country for journalists, according to the International News Safety Institute.

El Diario de Juárez lost its police reporter, Armando Rodríguez, in November 2008. Rodriguez was warming up his car, about to take his daughter to school, when he was shot.

Rather than back away, the newspaper is taking precautionary measures.

“The best homage we could give Armando was to continue with our work,” editor Rocío Gallegos says. “We’ve just been more careful. We don’t publish reporters names with articles that we feel may be threatening, or include the names of photographers.”

Karla Mariscal, a news anchor at Channel 26, lost her brother last November when he was ambushed and killed in Juárez.

Channel 26 no longer sends any of its staff to report on the crime across the border. Instead, it uses someone who lives and works out of the city. “We cannot put our people at risk. Our station has already suffered enough,” she says.

KVIA Channel 7, El Paso’s ABC station, sends its news teams into Juárez, depending on the type of story they choose to cover. They also have a reporter from the BELO Corporation based out of KVIA who reports on border issues.

“That is a great asset for us because she is also able to go back and forth and tell the border stories that we show to our viewers,” KVIA news director Brenda De Anda Swann says.

The El Paso Times consistently sends reporters into Juárez. Although safety is a concern, López says it will not stop him from sending reporters to the city.

In contrast, Vélez sends his reporters if need be but they work mainly with reporters from Juárez.

“We get the hard facts from the 20 or so reporters from El Diario de Juárez, and then we will modify the information to reflect how it affects our readers here in El Paso,” he says.

At the end of the day when the paper hits the press or the lights of the studio turn off, journalists are human beings. Although their work is important, the line has to be drawn at some point, Univisión’s Ariadna López says.

“For CNN reporters it is easy to go into Juárez, do their reports and leave to their homes in the U.S,” she says. “We on the other hand live in this community. We cross over daily and have family in Juárez. If we expose ourselves more than necessary we are going to get killed and our voice is going to be turned off.”

(Alejandra Matos is a journalism student at the University of Texas-El Paso. Contact her at amatos@miners.utep.edu)©2010