by Marvin Ramírez

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom takes the oath of office to new SFPD Chief George Gascón at City Hall. (PHOTO COURTESY OF TODD YAMADA)

George Gascón was officially sworn in as San Francisco top cop on Friday, August 21, although he had been sworn in on June 17 when Mayor Newsom appointed him at the mayor’s office.

Surrounded by city officials and community people, Gascón, a Latino and the first outsider in 30 years, Gascón looked happy to assumed the post that former Chief Heather Fong was leaving upon retirement. (El Reportero previously reported that Gascón was the first Latino to serve as chief. However, Chief Tony Ribera served in 1992).

Gascon arrives from Mesa, Ariz., where he led that police department since 2006. Prior to that, he served 28 years in the Los Angeles Police Department.

­News reports show that San Francisco’s first female police chief, Fong, oversaw changes including the implementation of foot patrols, new zone policing strategies credited with recent drops in violence, and efforts to foster better relationships between police and the community.

Former San Francisco Police Chief Tony Ribera, who led the department from 1992 to 1996, said that by selecting Gascon to replace Fong, the mayor’s offi ce and the Police Commission signaled that “it was time for a change.”

However, he said, outsiders face particular challenges when implementing reforms.

“The track record of outsiders has not been very good,” Ribera said in an interview Wednesday. “But that doesn’t mean that Chief Gascon won’t be good.”

The most recent outsiders include Charles Gain, who was Oakland’s police chief before taking over San Francisco’s police department in 1975, and Richard Hongisto, a former Cleveland police chief and San Francisco supervisor Gain served for fi ve years. Hongisto lasted 42 days before he was fired.

During the June 17 reception, Gascón answered questions on a variety of topics, including marijuana possession, how he’ll get witnesses to crimes to come forward (through officers getting to know residents), and whether he’ll take seriously the quality-oflife crimes that plague the Tenderloin (yes, because residents and businesses want it).

However, El Reportero hit him with a hot-bottom question: car confi scations, after the newly appointed chief suggested he would follow the Constitution.

This has been violated repeatedly by the SFPD for a longtime, even though the city prides itself highly on issues of civil rights and bill of rights, especially on the City Sanctuary status. The sanctuary mandates that no city resources shall be used to assist immigration officers in the enforcement of immigration laws.

He said that if any of his officers conduct themselves unethically or outside the scope of the law, “we need to talk.”

“You’re saying you’re going to follow the Constitution, is that right,” asked El Reportero’s editor.

“Yes,” responded Garcón.

“Well, San Francisco, its mayor and the police, have been confiscating the cars of the undocumented for lack of a driver’s license, and this is unconstitutional, it is illegal,” said the reporter.

“Unconstitutional in capital letter.”

The U.S. Constitution states that no private property shall be confiscated without due process.

This reporter handed in to the new chief a copy of an article by former and highly decorated ex police officer Jack McLamb of Arizona, whose articles exposing government and police corruption, have been read and republished in dozens of media outlets.

The article’s headline states that, “Despite actions of police and local courts, higher courts have ruled that American citizens have a right to travel without state permits,” meaning no one is obligated by law to be demanded a driver’s license.

Garcón promised El Reportero to look into it, and to discuss the matter later.

The actions of the police confiscating the cars from the undocumented have been followed and covered by the El Reportero during the past three years, with both, editorials and news reports.

In conversation with El Reportero, Supervisor David Campos said that he has been meeting with city officials to deal with the issue, and have found a legal way out to the impounding of cars, but that it was still on the works before it is implemented.

“It won’t stop the impounding” all together, Campos said, “but it will allow drivers to recover their cars immediately.” (SF Weekly, SFGate, and ­www.kron.com, contributed to this report.)

Sent by Earl Koskella

Interesting new battery with tremendous potential: In a modest building on the west side of Salt Lake City, a team of specialists in advanced materials and electrochemistry has produced what could be the single most important breakthrough for clean, alternative energy since Socrates first noted solar heating 2,400 years ago.

The prize is the culmination of 10 years of research and testing — a new generation of deep-storage battery that’s small enough, and safe enough, to sit in your basement and power your home.

It promises to nudge the world to a paradigm shift as big as the switch from centralized mainframe computers in the 1980s to personal laptops. But this time the mainframe is America’s antiquated electrical grid; and the switch is to personal power stations in millions of individual homes.

Inside Ceramatec’s wonder battery is a chunk of solid sodium metal mated to a sulphur compound by an extraordinary, paper-thin ceramic membrane. The membrane conducts ions — electrically charged particles — back and forth to generate a current. The company calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C.

This may not startle you, but it should. It’s amazing. The most energy-dense batteries available today are huge bottles of super-hot molten sodium, swirling around at 600 degrees or so. At that temperature the material is highly conductive of electricity but it’s both toxic and corrosive. You wouldn’t want your kids around one of these.

The essence of Ceramatec’s breakthrough is that high energy density (a lot of juice) can be achieved safely controversiaat normal temperatures and with solid components, not hot liquid.

Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years. With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery’s life. Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.

Re-read that last paragraph and let the information really sink in. Five kilowatts over four hours — how much is that? Imagine your trash compactor, food processor, vacuum cleaner, stereo, sewing machine, one surface unit of an electric range and thirty-three 60-watt light bulbs all running nonstop for four hours each day before the house battery runs out. That’s a pretty exciting place to live.

And then you recharge. With a projected 3,650 discharge/recharge cycles — one per day for a decade — you leave the next-best battery in the dust. Deep-cycling lead/acid batteries like the ones used in RVs are only good for a few hundred cycles, so they’re kaput in a year or so.

How do you recharge? By tapping your solar panels or windmills. It’s just like plugging in your cell phone or iPod, only you plug in your house.

A small three-bedroom home in Provo might average, say, 18 kWh of electric consumption per day in the summer — that’s 1,000 watts for 18 hours. A much larger home, say five bedrooms in the Grandview area, might average 80 kWh, according to Provo Power. Either way, a supplement of 20 to 40 kWh per day is substantial. If you could produce that much power in a day — for example through solar cells on the roof — your power bills would plummet.

­Ceramatec’s battery breakthrough now makes that possible.

Clyde Shepherd of Alpine is floored by the prospect. He recently installed the second of two windmills on his property that are each rated at 2.4 kilowatts continuous output. He’s searching for a battery system that can capture and store some of that for later use when it’s calm outside, but he hasn’t found a good solution.

“This changes the whole scope of things and would have a major impact on what we’re trying to do,” Shepherd said. “Something that would provide 20 kilowatts would put us near 100 percent of what we would need to be completely independent.

It would save literally thousands of dollars a year.”

Taken from the Daily Herald article authored by Randy Wright.

­by the El Reportero’s news services

Daniel Ortega

Nicaragua has become illiteracy-free after reducing to 3.5 percent the number of citizens who do not know how to read and write, President Daniel Ortega has announced. Ortega made the announcement at a rally held Saturday at the Revolution Square in Managua, where Education Minister Miguel de Castilla gave him the certificate.

The President recalled that the literacy campaign had begun on August 23, 1980, a year after the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution.

At that time, the illiteracy rate was 53 percent. The Sandinistas then lowered it to 12 percent, but after 16 years of neo-liberal governments (1990-2006) the figure rose against to 30 percent.

Neo-liberal governments were not interested in teaching people how to read and write because they just want to get cheap labor force, Ortega said.

He urged the Ministry of Education to now teach people the Constitution, so they can defend their rights. Education and health are human rights, he added.

The Literacy Campaign now took almost two years. It began right after the Sandinista National Liberation Front party won the 2006 general elections. As in the fi rst literacy campaign, Cuban teachers now helped Nicaraguans to know how to read and write.

Nicaragua is the fourth Bolivarian Alliance for the People of our Americas bloc member to become illiteracy free after Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia.

U.S. more worried about Mexico than Colombia

August 20, John Feeley, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Mexico City, told a security conference that the U.S. is more worried now about the situation in Mexico than it was about Colombia when the U.S. fi rst launched Plan Colombia at the beginning of the decade.

Such a strong statement suggests that the new Barack Obama administration’s evaluation of the internal security situation in Mexico has been completed and the verdict is that the current mix of policies are not working.

Honduras high court threatens Zelaya with arrest

Honduras’s Supreme Court has rejected a Costa Rica-brokered deal that would have restored ousted President Manuel Zelaya to power and sternly warned that he faces arrest if he returns.

In a ruling late Saturday that fell in line with similar pronouncements by the military-backed regime, the high court said that Zelaya will not be allowed to return to power, and “cannot avoid having to submit to established procedures of the penal process” should he return to Honduras.

Zelaya was ousted from power in a June 28 military backed coup and replaced with interim leader Roberto Micheletti.

The court decision also accused Zelaya of “crimes against the government, treason against the nation, abuse of power” and other misdeeds, as it affirmed the legitimacy of Micheletti’s government.

Fidel Castro appears on television

Former leader Fidel Castro appeared on Sunday on Cuban television for the first time since June of last year in a video of him chatting with students from Venezuela, reported Reuters.

Castro, 83, appeared to be in good condition as he spoke with the students about the state of the world in a meeting that took place on Saturday in Havana, according to the television report.

The video followed a front-page photograph of Castro meeting with Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa published on Sunday in the state-run newspaper Juventud Rebelde.

Castro has not been in public since undergoing intestinal surgery in July 2006. He resigned the presidency last year and was replaced by brother Raul Castro.

­Does the U.S. want bases in Colombia?

One of the oddest aspects of the regional row over the proposed U.S. bases in Colombia is the U.S. administration’s lukewarm enthusiasm for the project.

This reserved U.S. attitude suggests that perhaps the U.S. does not view the deal’s enhanced access to the seven military bases in Colombia as the strategic necessity that the current Colombian government does.

by Erick Galindo

The health care debate has become a shoving match, and immigrants, legal and otherwise, are being pushed the hardest.

President Obama’s admission that immigration reform will have to wait until next year further fueled fears that, while one-f fth of the nation’s 45 million uninsured are immigrants, health reform benefits will not cover them.

“We are critically concerned,” Jennifer Ng’andu, deputy director of the Health Policy Project for the National Council de La Raza, told Weekly Report. “There are no current provisions extending public benefits to undocumented immigrants, and now legal immigrants are in danger of losing some benefits.”

Obama told Hispanic Link and nine other members of the Hispanic media invited to a “roundtable” discussion on Hispanic-related matters that the animosity around both issues will be tough to overcome at the present time.

“I think that, with respect to the debate that’s taking place around health care reform now, it is not going to be possible to provide coverage for undocumented workers,” Obama said.

Additionally, he noted that health coverage had already been extended to 11 million children includ:ing undocumented ones.

“That was a fight that had been out there for a decade. It was a huge accomplishment,” he said.

A weeks-long battle for public support of proposed reform has intensified as members of Congress have faced tough crowds peppered with hostile shouting and pushing matches at “town hall” meetings across the country.

Many detractors have made it clear they do not like “Obama’s plan” because he is a “socialist.” Encouraged by such groups as the U,S. Chamber of Commerce’ Libertarian political party and rabidly right-wing talk radio hosts, the outrage and outbursts at these meetings are part of an opposition strategy to disrupt the administration’s message Comprehensive care supporters have reacted by sending their own members to counter.

Immigration has been thrown into the fray is nativist groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform lobby vigorously for exclusion of “illegal aliens.”

Including them under the plan is unwarranted and would add billions to the price tag,’ ‘said Dan Stein, president of FAIR. “In Pennsylvania and all across the nation the public is understandably upset about the staggering costs of illegal immigration and adamantly oppose providing a full range of health benefits to illegal aliens.”

NCLR’s Ng’andu says the notion that immigrants’ legal or otherwise do not pay taxes is incorrect.

“Immigrants pay taxes like everyone else’” he added. “Everyone should be integrated and everyone should share in the responsibility.”

These hot-button issues intersect beyond 160C Pennsylvania Ave.

While Massachusetts’s Commonwealth Care program has become a reform model, the state legislature voted last month to stop covering documented immigrants with fewer than five years on their green card— all 30~000 of them.

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter who switched registration from Republican to Democrat earlier this year’ has said he will not support health legislation that covers undocumented immigrants.

­In the past Specter has supported path-to-citizenship legislation’ but assured a rowdy crowd at an Aug. 12 town hall meeting in Lebanon, Pennsylvania., that “none of the bills in Congress would provide health insurance to illegal immigrants.”

In California, the health care and immigration debates have always been intertwined.

In February, several counties, including heavily Latino Sacramento County, began to cut non-emergency care to the undocumented citing financial restraints.

The pro-immigrant Immigration Policy Center charges that the issue is being used “as a way to jam a stick into the wheels of impending reform.”

Obama reacted, “When it comes to legal immigrants, then my attitude is that’ in the same way the Children’s Health Insurance Program made sense’ we should try to provide help for those who are here legally.

“We don’t want children, or their parents for that matter, to be on a playground with tuberculosis and not have access to any health care services. Hispanic Link.