by the El Reportero’s news services

On President Rafael Correa insisted after a meeting on July 15 with José Miguel Insulza, secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), that Ecuador could not accept the return of Honduras i­nto OAS. Insulza is desperately trying to bridge the continuing damaging divide between the US and most of South America over Honduras.

The US has long since taken a pragmatic stance, arguing that it’s sensible to move on and support the new Honduran government. Correa and others insist that the coup d’état simply cannot just be written into the history books and that the region needs to signal strongly that it cannot be tolerated.

Insulza is trying to arrange a compromise ahead of a planned OAS assembly to discuss the issue (tentatively fixed for July 30). Lately, he has been touting the notion of an international ad hoc tribunal to hear the pending criminal charges against the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya .

Prensa Latina: War in Iran motivated by military and fi nancial interests

President of the Academy of Geopolitical Affairs of Russia Leonid Ivashov associated US war plans against Iran with the interests of military, industrial and fi nancial sectors.

After assuring that there is a high probability of a military attack against Iran, Ivashov said in statements to Prensa Latina that all the signs of a major confl ict in the Persian Gulf and in the vicinity of Iran are visible.

To Ivashov, the premises for a confrontation underlie a powerful global clash of two empires trying to determine the global historical processes.

Ivashov defined the center of power of the Rockefeller dynasty (based primarily in the USA), which controls the world’s production, including military production,and the financial empire.

World dominance and control are the main goals of this war that is being promoted by the militaristic neo-conservatives on both sides, said Ivashov.

According to Ivashov, Israel, supported by the US government and the Zionist lobby in Barack Obama’s administration, is the third country interested in a con- fl ict with Teheran.

Role of Church and State comes under spotlight across Latin America

Relations between Church and State were central to key developments across Latin America over the course of the last week.

In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez reminded the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in no uncertain terms of the principle of the secular State enshrined in the constitution after lacerating criticism of his Bolivarian Revolution from the Cardinal Archbishop of Caracas, Jorge Urosa. Roles were reversed in El Salvador where the Church reminded the government about the secular State by condemning the proposed imposition by congress of Bible readings in schools in a bid to curb violence.

by Jonathan Farrell Nurses protest reduction of health services.

As the struggle between California Pacific Medical Center and labor union representatives continues on, a youth rally was staged on July 15 to protest the future plans CPMC has for St. Luke’s Hospital.

On that Thursday afternoon rally participants gave testimony and delivered over 1,000 post cards to CMPC officials pleading that the proposed plans not reduce health care services to the community by down-sizing the hospital.

“CPMC with its proposed plans for St. Luke’s wants to reduce services by 60 percent,” said Emily Lee, speaking for Chinese Progressive Association, as the group who sponsored the rally.

Lee told El Reportero that the plan to reduce St. Luke’s would impact the community by denying access to healthcare. A reduction in the number of beds and the shifting of services to other CPMC locations would only over burden existing hospitals in the area like San Francisco General.

Lee also said that SF General and St. Luke’s are the only hospitals in the Mission District and surrounding areas that serves a major portion of the City. Most of that population is working class and low income. SF General is already overcrowded and under funded in its efforts to serve the entire City.

Lee pointed out that CPMC as a non-profit entity it receives tax breaks in the millions, which would allow CPMC to continue St. Luke’s tradition of providing health care to low-income people.

“She is perfectly right when she says CPMC has an obligation to provide affordable or charity care for the community,” said CPMC media rep Kevin McCormack. “ It’s an obligation we take very seriously. In fact in 2009 we spent $10 million on charity care,” he said

Nato Green, labor rep for the California Nurse Association said that CPMC wants to make St. Luke’s “a permanent charity case hospital,” forcing patients to go else where for specialty needs.

McCormack said that the labor unions and nurses associations  have presented a distorted view of the proposed plans. CPMC is building a brand-new hospital at St. Luke’s precisely because CPMC wants to create a strong future for the facility. There are many people in that part of San Francisco – stretching from Noe Valley and the Mission to Visitacion Valley and Bayview/Hunters Pt. – who have health insurance and would gladly use St. Luke’s as their medical home,” he said.

Nato still sees the new plans as “lipstick on a pig,” he said. Plans are not final yet.

By José de la Isla

HOUSTON — My friend Alice called while she had several hours’ layover, awaiting processing before returning to Iraq. The civilian contract worker was home on leave but is now returning.

She wanted to tell me how upset she was about Arizona. In her monologue, she had tales to tell about regional U.S. attitudes showing up in the conflict zone and how Bosnians  who are Muslims, staunch allies and contract workers  know to push back when pushed. There are stories about Filipinos who signed on for five years who will not see their families during the whole time.

She talks about her deceased mother, from a native Texan rancher family with limited English ability and her courage to speak up when that needed doing. What would she think about Arizona? How would she feel about the aspersions that she doesn’t look or sound “American” enough? It bothers Alice, and she says it will continue annoying her in Iraq.

She has to go, Alice tells me. The PA system says an assembly is about to begin before deployment.

She leaves me in mid-thought about how politics catches you. Bernard Malamud,the acclaimed author, once pronounced that to be alive is to be political. It is a hard truth to accept, especially by nice, mild-mannered apolitical people when they face astringent attitudes.

Also hard to understand is how the air for serious discussion over immigration issues got so sulfuric. The shank was already being heaved as far back as May 2006 when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, interviewing Attorney General Alberto Gonzáles, asked: “Tell our viewers who aren’t familiar your personal story, how you got to where you are, your grandparents, your parents… I don’t know if they came here legally or illegally. But give us the story.”

Gonzáles fell into the trap. The aspersion was cast not on who Gonzáles was but who his grandparents were. He said three of his grandparents went to Texas from Mexico. Both his parents were born in Texas. But that wasn’t enough for Blitzer, who persisted: “When they came to Texas, were they legally documented, were they unlegally documented?”

Gonzáles said, “It’s unclear. It’s unclear.”

Actually it’s very clear. The Attorney General is a U.S. citizen. Otherwise, what is the CNN relevance of pursuing this questioning about a time when “docu- ments” and visas were probably not required the way they are now?

It is faintly reminiscent of the thinking that domi- nated for three centuries in the New World when a ra- cialism sought to fi nd im- pure Jewish blood among the Spanish-surnamed.

Again, the impulse is to pry into the personal, to find a “questionable” background. The purpose served is not to get an- swers but to defi ne a sus- picious class of people, then find the “legal” and “illegal” among them, as if that defi nes who’s loyal and who isn’t.

The inquisition raises the question of legitimacy, as if to ask which ones are bastards? There is also oneupsmanship here, be- cause the element of doubt feeds the suspicion. Even when someone knows the other person is licit, just by having questioned the legitimacy is to bring up an element of doubt, likely association with a disdained class, making ethnicity in a democracy matter more than respect. After all, it is all about getting the upper hand.

Even in giving, there is a lot of taking. That happened recently when Alfredo Corchado of the Dallas Morning News received the prestigious Lovejoy Award for courage in journalism for his cover- age of drug trafficking in Mexico. Twenty-one jour- nalists reporting on these stories have been murdered since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The press release announcing the award said Corchado’s family “legally immigrated” to the United States when he was six years old.

How tasteless, unthink- ing, uncouth, demoralizing. orrected, how far will this go?

I think it’s already reached Iraq.

[José de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. His 2009 digital book, sponsored by The Ford Foundation, is available free at www.Day NightLifeDeathHope.com. He is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at joseisla3@yahoo.com.

Constitutional right flies out the door

by Marti Hiken

<IT HAPPENED EARLY THIS YEAR>

The words we hear in so many movies and television shows when someone is arrested, “Read him his Miranda rights,” no longer have meaning. These rights are dead because the courts have “interpret  ed” them out of existence. Throughout our country, if you don’t say the right words during police interrogations, your rights to remain silent and to a lawyer don’t kick in. This leads to unfettered police power when any arrestee tries to protect herself in a powerless situation when confronted by the police. And in a courtroom, all your statements are admissible against you.

This is about the only phrase left to ensure that you retain your rights: “I want to remain silent. I want a lawyer.” Again, another way: “I don’t want to speak to you anymore without my lawyer being present.” It is important not to answer further questions after asserting these rights; instead, merely repeat the statement.

The reason for the Miranda warnings in the first place was that the torture and cruelty inflicted on prisoners in this country decades ago and especialy in the South, brought a public outcry. It resulted in the Miranda v. Arizona, (384 U.S. 436) decision in 1966.

In that decision, the Court attempted to strike the appropriate balance between law enforcement interests in obtaining a confession and a suspect’s Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate him- self. “….[T]he decision mandated that the suspect be informed prior to any custodial interrogation that he has the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney and that no inter- rogation can occur until the suspect waives these rights. Moreover, the sus- pect can assert these rights any point during the inter- rogation and, if he does, questioning must imme- diately cease.” (Strauss, Marcy, “The Sounds of Silence: Reconsidering the Invocation of the Right to Remain Silent Under Mi- randa,” “William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal,” March 2009. In her article Strauss lists the status of the courts’ interpretations of Miranda warnings state- by-state.)

Custodial police in- terrogations can go on for hours on end and the Miranda Court “recog- nized that they were so inherently coercive as to create a presumption that a resulting confession was involuntary unless the suspect was explicitly told prior to questioning that he need not answer questions and that he had the right to consult with an attorney for advice.” (Ainsworth, Janet, “‘You have the right to remain silent…’ but only if you ask for it just so: the role of linguistic ideology in American police interro- gation law.” The Interna- tional Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, Vol. 15.1, 2008, p. 3)

The problem is that “ambiguous” statements aren’t enough, and in actuality, everything you say will be interpreted by the courts to be ambiguous other than the sentences: “I want to remain silent. I want a lawyer.” Invoking the Miranda rights means clear, unequivocal and unambiguous declarations in the interrogation room. Of course, in jail there is a power disadvantage in that the tempo, timing, and level of brutality are set by the police.

So, no hedged or indi- rect language invokes the rights.

• No theoretical comments about the availability of counsel, such as “Could I get a lawyer?” or “May I call a lawyer?”
• No language that softens the demand for a lawyer:
• “It seems like I need a lawyer.”
• No logistic questions:“Could you get me my wallet and bring my lawyer’s business card to me?”
• No imploring ambiguous language:“I don’t want to talk about it.” or “I won’t talk anymore.”
• No being and remaining silent (you must be defi nite and utter words)
• No combining demands:“Screw you, talk to my lawyer.” or “I don’t feel like I can talk with you without any attorney sitting right here to give me some legal advice.”bleaker, however, in the case Davis v. United States (1994) U.S. 452:

– “Give me a lawyer” or “I want a lawyer” are not deemed by the police or courts as kicking in your constitutional rights. (Note that wanting and requesting a lawyer is not the same thing as your right to remain silent by taking the Fifth.)

– Refusing to sign a form indicating a waiver of your rights when coupled with incriminating statements to the police does not invoke your rights. (The incriminating statements obtained by the police are proof that your rights were waived.) To state simply: Make an incriminating  statement and your rights are waived.

Underlying all of this is that judges now have no compunction regarding the role of unlimited and brutal interrogation, torture, and intimidation by the police. They also ignore the context that language plays when someone communicates in an abusive situation. Finally, the social context of the arrestee and his intentions become blurred by language. Losing our Miranda rights is simply another step in the wrong direction.

Marti Hiken is the exec- utive director of Progressive Avenues. She can be reached at mlhiken@comcast.net

by the University of Michigan

NN ARBOR, Mich.— In findings that took the experimenters three years to believe, University of Michigan engineers and their collaborators have demonstrated that light itself can twist ribbons of nanoparticles.

The results are published in the current edition of Science.

Matter readily bends and twists light. That’s the mechanism behind optical lenses and polarizing 3-D movie glasses. But the opposite interaction has rarely been observed, said Nicholas Kotov, principal investigator on the project. Kotov is a professor in the departments of Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering.

While light has been known to affect matter on the molecular scale, bending or twisting molecules with sizes of a few nanometers, it has not been observed causing such drastic mechanical twisting to large particles.

The nanoparticle ribbons in this study were between one and four micrometers long. A micrometer is one-mil- lionth of a meter.

“I didn’t believe it at the beginning,” Kotov said. “To be honest, it took us three and a half years to re- ally fi gure out how photons of light can lead to such a remarkable change in rigid structures a thousand times bigger than molecules.”

Kotov and his col- leagues had set out in this study to create “superchi- ral” particles—spirals of nano-scale mixed metals that could theoretically fo- cus visible light to specks smaller than its wavelength. Materials with this unique “negative refractive index could be capable of pro- ducing Klingon-like invis- ibility cloaks, said Sharon Glotzer, a professor in the departments of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering who was also involved in the experiments. The twisted nanoparticle rib- bons are likely to lead to the superchiral materials, the professors say.

To begin the experiment, the researchers dispersed nanoparticles of cadmium telluride in a water-based solution. They checked on them intermittently with powerful microscopes. After about 24 hours un- der light, the nanoparticles had assembled themselves into flat ribbons. After 72 hours, they had twisted and bunched together in the process. But when the nanoparticles were left in the dark, distinct, long, straight ribbons formed.

“We discovered that if we make fl at ribbons in the dark and then illuminate them, we see a gradual twisting, twisting that in- creases as we shine more light,” Kotov said. “This is very unusual in many ways.”

The light twists the rib- bons by causing a stronger repulsion between nanopar- ticles in it.

The twisted ribbon is a  new shape in nanotechnol-ogy, Kotov said. Besides superchiral materials, he envisions clever applica- tions for the shape and the technique of creating it.

Sudhanshu Srivastava, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab, is trying to make the spirals rotate.

“He’s making very small propellers to move through fluid—nanoscale submarines, if you will,” Kotov said. “You often see this motif of twisted structures in mobility organs of bacteria and cells.

This newly-discovered twisting effect could also lead to microelectromechanical systems that are controlled by light. And it could be utilized in lithography, or microchip production.

Glotzer, and Aaron Santos, a postdoctoral researcher in her lab, performed computer simulations that helped Kotov and his team better understand how the ribbons form. The simulations showed that under certain circumstances, the complex combination of forces between the tetrahedrally- shaped nanoparticles could conspire to produce ribbons of just the width observed in the experiments. A tetrahedron is a pyramid-shaped, three-dimensional polyhedron.

“The precise balance of forces leading to the self-assembly of ribbons is very revealing,” Glotzer said. “It could be used to stabilize other nanostructures made of non-spherical particles. It’s all about how the particles want to pack themselves.”

Letter by National Association of Hispanic Journalist

Washington — The National Association of Hispanic Journalists called on the U.S. government to reverse its decision to deny a visa to Colombian journalist Hollman Morris so he can join this fall’s class of the prestigious Nieman fellowships at Harvard University.

With this request, NAHJ joins the chorus of human rights and civil liberties organizations and fellow journalists throughout Latin American and the United States who have raised concerns about the denial of a visa for Morris. The veteran journalist, whose work has been praised by U.S. State Department officials, received the 2007 Human Rights Defender Award from Human Rights Watch.

Morris was denied a visa under the USA Patriot Act’s “terrorist activities” section. Some human rights groups question whether the Obama Administra- tion was influenced by Colombian President Al- varo Uribe’s government, a frequent target of Morris’ journalistic work. Human rights groups say Colom- bia’s intelligence agencies have started a campaign to discredit Morris by tying him to the Revolutionary Armed Forced of Colom- bia (FARC), the country’s largest rebel group.

“Mr. Morris is a dis- tinguished journalist who, at great personal risk, has strived to report in an unbiased fashion o the bloody conflict tearing apart his country,” NAHJ stated to U.S. Ambassa- dor in Colombia William Brownfi eld and Assistant Secretary of State Janice Lee Jacobs in a letter signed by NAHJ President Michele Salcedo.

“His television pro-gram “Contravía” docu- ments the suffering of victims of human rights abuses committed by all parties, whether they be left-wing guerrillas, Co- lombian armed forces or paramilitary units,” the letter stated. “To accu- rately report the facts he – as would any reputable journalist – had to establish links with representatives of all those groups.

In the letter, NAHJ acknowledges that Mor-ris’ investigative journal- ism has bothered some in the government and “it is well documented that he, his collaborators and his family have been the targets of orchestrated harassment, surveillance and threats.”

Other colleagues from Colombia have been cho- sen for this prestigious fel- lowship. Colombia’s Presi-dent-elect Juan Manuel Santos was a Nieman Fel- low in 1988. And there is precedent for U.S. govern- ment offi cials to rescind a similar type of visa denial. Eight years ago, Stanford University successfully appealed the denial of a visa for Alberto Molano, a columnist for Bogotá’s El Espectador, chosen to be a Knight Fellow.

“Mr. Morris has been granted visas to visit the United States in the recent past to attend academic and journalistic events. He should not be denied one now,” NAHJ stated.