by the El Reportero news services

A U.S. jury awarded punitive damages to Nicaraguans who claimed pesticides made them sterile.

­On Thursday the jury found that American food giant Dole should pay $2.5 million in punitive damages to five workers who claimed they were made sterile by use of a pesticide on Nicaraguan banana plantations in the 1970s.

The Superior Court jury awarded $3.3 million in actual damages to six workers last week, most of it to be paid by California-based Dole Fresh Fruit Co. and the remainder by Dow Chemical Co. of Michigan. The jury’s finding that Dole acted maliciously in harming five of the six allowed punitive damages to be considered for the five.

The punitive damages were to be split evenly among the five workers exposed to the pesticide known as DBCP.

Lawyers for both sides called it a win. Duane Miller, the workers’ attorney, said it sends a message that multinational corporations such as Dole are accountable for what they do, even overseas.

Nicaragua foreign minister to discuss closer trade in Moscow

­MOSCOW – Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Samuel Santos Lopez arrives on an official visit to Moscow Sunday to discuss closer trade and the possibility of larger defense and machinery product deliveries from Russia.

At the Russian-Nicaraguan political consultations held in May at the level of deputy foreign ministers, the parties expressed their desire to expand cooperation in the energy sphere, the construction of hydropower facilities, tourism development, transport infrastructure modernization and an increase in Russia’s exports of machinery, equipment and technologies.

During his visit, which will last until November 21, López is expected to discuss “measures to make trade more stable and balanced through diversification of its commodity structure, especially via the deliveries of engineering and defense products from Russia,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said.

by Marc Heller

Rubén Salazar

As director of Latinos Against the War, Carlos Montes plans demonstrations against U.S. military involvement in Iraq. So why is he talking about immigration?

“A lot of people don’t see the link,” Montes explains to Weekly Report. Making t:he connection between the Iraq war and the mass movement of people is one way he is trying to stir the Hispanic community to speak out against the conflict, he says.

The Latino anti-war movement could use more spark, say organizers with Hispanic and non-Hispanic anti-war groups. The Hispanic appetite for war protests East Los Angeles made headlines. Journalist Ruben Salazar was killed by police while covering that event for KMEX-TV.

Montes makes this link between immigration and war: U.S. foreign policy whether it’s war or free trade or other positions—leads to globalization, which leads to poverty and unemployment in other countries, which results in mass migration and perhaps more undocumented immigrants coming to the United States.

It’s not that Latinos are absent from the war debate, Montes says. His own group played a part in a Sept. 15 march in Washington against the war and organized an anti-war encampment at the Westwood Federal Office Building in Los Angeles in September.

Latinos Against the War also has helped organize protests against discriminatory U.S. immigration policies.

“Every anti-war demonstration I go to in Los Angeles, I see hundreds of Hispanics,” Montes says. “l always see lots of Latinos marching.”

But he acknowledges that the sight of Hispanics marching may not indicate Hispanic participation in leading roles: “Some antiwar groups don’t have leadership among Hispanics, or blacks for that matter, and we’ve brought that concern up.

Several anti-war groups contacted by Hispanic Link struggled to list Hispanics in leadership positions, saying they had few or none. Of more than 1,400 groups in the coalition called United for Peace and Justice, only a small percentage are Latino-oriented, and the 29-member steering committee has no Latinos, concedes Leslie Cagan, national coordinator.

“There should be. That’s a weakness on our part,” Cagan says.

“The history of antiwar work is that a lot of organizations are white or predominantly white, and we’re struggling to be more multiracial.”

One reason for the low representation may be the military’s success at recruiting Hispanics, says Rafael Sencion, lead organizer of Latinos and Latinas for Peace and Justice, in New York City.

Some Hispanic youths see the Army as a quick way out of rough neighbor-hoods~ he suggests.

Latinos Against the War highlights that issue on its Web site’ bashing the government for “Affi rmative Action programs that heavily and discriminatorily recruit our youth into the military.”

Neighborhoods themselves might even discourage young Latinos from protesting the war, Sencion says’ if young Hispanics don’t see the bigger picture outside their own communities.

Language barriers may discourage them from joining non-Hispanic anti-war groups, he observes.

But, Sencion quickly adds, “Participation is very alive and I think that the Latino community in New York is very much against the war.
­Hispanic Link.

by Billy Blackwell II

­Mission High School, built in 1926, was declared a landmark in June 7, 2006

Even as stan­dardized test scores across the board rise, Latinos, along with African- North Americans, students have been consistently underperforming white and Asian students in reading and math tests. This gap in achievement, which has been going on for decades, is now the focus of statewide and national concern.

“In a state with 6.3 million public school students — nearly half of whom are Hispanic, 25 percent still learning the English language and 40 percent struggling against poverty — closing the achievement gap is essential to a secure future,” California’s State Superintendent of Public Education Jack O’Connell said.

A new report tackles the issue and O’Connell invited San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Carlos García as one of the educators, community and business leaders to speak to an estimated 4,000 attendees at a two-day summit this week to discuss the issue.

­According to O’Connell, his is a complicated and controversial issue that won’t be solved overnight or even during his administration.

Jennie Oakes

The achievement gap has often been discussed as a culture issue that lays the problem back at the feet of the under-performing communities, which caused  researchers at UCLA to respond.

“So many people seem to respond to this discussion as if there was a cultural problem, as if there much be something wrong with African-North American and Latino communities that makes them score lower on standardized tests,” said Professor Jeannie Oakes, Director of UC ACCORD and Co-Director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access, co-author of the 2007 Education Opportunity Report. “California’s white students also score far lower than white students throughout the state, although nobody seems to be asking why white students are scoring so low.”

The problem started almost 30 years ago when Californians voted in Proposition 13, which capped property taxes, according to Professor John Rogers, co-director of UCLA’s IDEA and co-author of the report.

Carlos García

“California is spending less money on its students that most states and the results are that all students are falling behind,” Rogers said.

The 2007 Education Opportunity Report examined unequal educational achievement in light of the conditions in public schools. Supplemental reports show that throughout the public school system Latino and African-North American communities suffer disproportionately from lack of school funding, leaving them with more overcrowded classrooms, fewer qualified teachers and not enough college preparatory courses.

“The achievement gap is mirrored by an opportunity gap for Latinos and African Americans,” researchers said. When they looked at the data throughout the state, drops in test scores by Latino were mirrored lack of basic fundamental educational resources. Low-test scores in Latino and African American communities happened in areas in school where they received fewer resources, according to the reseachers.

• 35 percent of Latino students attend overcrowded high schools, which is almost twice as many as white high school student.
• Latino students are two and a half times more likely than white students and three times more likely than Asian students to experience serious shortages of qualified teachers.
• 65 percent of Latino students attend high schools with too few college preparatory courses for all students to enroll in college preparatory curriculum.

“These research results demonstrate that closing the opportunities gap faced by African American and Latino students will have tremendous benefits for the state as a whole,” Oakes said.

The two-day Achievement Gap Summit in Sacramento this week marks the first time a comprehensive statewide effort has been made to focus on why the gap exists and develop sustainable, systematic solutions for closing it.

The Summit is part of a yearlong effort by O’Connell, in partnership with the California Department of Education, educators, researchers and community leaders through the  state and nation to focus on this controversial issue.

SFUSD Superintendent García spoke on a panel of Latino and African-North American school superintendents to discuss this controversial issue. He is a member of O’Connell’s P-16 council, a statewide assembly of education, business, and community leaders charged with developing strategies to better coordinate, integrate, and improve education for preschool through college students.­

García told El Report­ero that several programs have been put in place to provide additional resources to underperforming schools in his district. And even though performance among SFUSD students improved overall, the achievement gap keeps widening. For example, in 2001, 15 percent of Latino students in SFUSD were profi cient and 33 percent of all students were profi cient in the district overall. In 2007, 28 percent of Latino students were profi cient and 49 percent of all students were profi cient, García said.

by the El Reportero news services

Felipe Calderón

The final state elections of the year on 11 November produced a win for the leftwing Partido de la Revolución Democrática in the most important of them, Michoacán.

The result is another blow for the Partido Acción Nacional which has now won only one (Baja California) of the five gubernatorial elections since President Felipe Calderón won the presidential elections in July 2006.

The PAN’s series of poor performances raises the fear that it will suffer big losses in then mid-term congressional elections in 2009: if this happens, Calderón, with his weak mandate, would become a lame duck.

In the municipal and state congress elections, which have also been held this year, the PAN has been walloped, most by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional which still governs the majority of Mexican states, but also, in some places, by the PRD.

Castro cheer Chávez for his latest outburst

HAVANA — Fidel Castro broke two weeks of silence Sunday, applauding his close friend Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez for having ‘’leveled devastating criticisms at Europe’’ during a summit of leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal.

In a brief essay published on the front pages of state newspapers, the ailing 81- year-old Castro also praised speeches by leftist presidents Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Eva Morales of Bolivia during the Ibero-American summit, which wrapped up Saturday in Santiago, Chile.

He blasted conservative leaders at the meeting, singling out El Salvador’s President Tony Saca, a U.S. ally.

Castro did not discuss a phone call he placed to the Venezuelan leader Saturday after the summit closed, but wrote that “Chávez leveled devastating criticisms at Europe, the same Europe that pretended to offer lessons on good governance at this Latin American summit.’’

Nor did he mention that the gathering ended with a heated exchange between Chávez and King Juan Carlos of Spain, who told the Venezuelan president to “shut up.ʼʼ

Nebraska ag industry scores deal with Cuba

Gov. Dave Heineman returned to Nebraska on Tuesday after a successful trade mission to Cuba that resulted in $10 million in agricultural sales.

While in Cuba, Heineman attended the opening of the 25th annual Havana International Trade Fair.

The deal signed on Monday was for $10 million in U.S. wheat that will be sourced from Nebraska. The agreement was signed between Louis Dreyfus and Alimport Chairman­and Chief Executive Officer Pedro Alvarez.

With this latest contract, Heineman said, Nebraska has sold more than $70 million in agricultural products to Cuba since the state’s export relationship was established in 2005.

Heineman said he appreciated the positive reception Nebraska agricultural products have received there.