Evidence: Fong Lee unarmed when shot by Mpls police “Contrary to what Minneapolis police have claimed, Fong Lee didn’t have a gun in his right hand when a patrolman chased him and then shot him eight times,” according to a nationally recognized video forensics expert who reviewed surveillance camera photos, reports David Haners in the PiPress. Testimony unfolding in the civil suit against the city and police officer over the teen’s death paints a picture quite different from that drawn by Mpls police after the incident. Continue reading
Tag Archives: immigrants
News Day: Gunned down by Mpls cop / Eight workers for every opening / Coleman concedes, sort of / more
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News Day: Doing the recount math / Autism in Somali kids / Secret U.S. assassination squads / High school sports money / more
If you’re reading this … then the mega-worm has not killed the internet yet.
Doing the math Let’s see — if Al Franken leads by about 225 votes, and the court has ordered another 400 ballots opened and counted, where does that leave Norm Coleman? Probably beating the bushes for money to finance endless appeals. To outpoll Franken, The Norm would have to win more than 300 of the 400 ballots, which seems highly unlikely. Counting day — April 7.
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News Day: MN unemployment up to 8.1% / Liberian countdown / Best AIG advice / Civil rights in Minneapolis / more
UPDATED: Minnesota’s unemployment hit 8.1 percent in February, matching the national rate, as the state shed 13,300 jobs during the month, according to the Department of Employment and Economic Development. January’s MN unemployment rate was 7.6 percent (NOT including “discouraged” workers, who have given up looking for full-time jobs, or those who are involuntarily working part-time because they can’t find full-time work.)
Nationwide, new unemployment insurance benefit claims last week were down to “only” 594,121, a decrease of 58,515 from the previous week. For a little perspective — there were 335,917 initial claims in the comparable week in 2008, and the total number of people claiming state unemployment insurance benefits was 6,332,272, up from 3,297,238 in 2008. Full federal report here.
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News Day: Coleman campaign circus / “Don’t do anything embarrassing” / Water bill / Recount and more
Where do you get your news? The mainstream media is now jumping on board with two stories that the independent media reported first and best — the Coleman campaign caught with its donors’ credit card info hanging out on the internet and the MN House of Reps’ outrageous attempts to decide what press gets freedom of the press. If you’re reading this, you’re already reading independent media. Tell a friend!
Coleman campaign lawbreaking or “hacking”? As the mainstream media belatedly begins to cover the Coleman donor database story, ably reported by the Minnesota Independent in January and now, some are ignoring plain facts: the Coleman site was not hacked; the Coleman campaign carelessly put donors’ credit card numbers and security codes out on the internet for anyone to scoop up; the Coleman campaign violated its own promise to donors not to store their credit card numbers; the Coleman campaign probably violated MN law by not notifying donors of the security lapse back in January.
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News Day: Following the (Governor’s) money / Liberian plea / EFCA job creation / Legislature looks at hijabs, foreclosures / more
Following the money for T-Paw staff The Governor’s staff is paid by money from other state agencies, reports Mark Brunswick in the Strib. The office takes money to pay for $30,000 of senior policy adviser Josh Gackle’s $72,000 annual salary from the Ag Department, PCA, DNR and at least four other agencies. The accounting practice shifts money from other state agencies to pay for parts of at least five other T-Paw aides, reducing his office budget.
[Governor Pawlenty] has said he will reduce his office budget by $360,000 a year, or 5.1 percent, and he points out that his office is planning for 38 full-time equivalent positions for the next two budget years while previous administrations had 55 positions at their peak.
The arrangements that pay for Gackle and the other staffers will continue to help make this apparent frugality possible. So-called interagency agreements reduced the governor’s office budget by more than $700,000 last year, about 19 percent.
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Educating Minnesota’s immigrant students
“Immigrant students have been at the center of a political firestorm,” says the Citizens League report, Educating Minnesota’s Immigrant Students. At a panel presentation of the report on February 27, study committee member Matt Musel said that they found “little data, but lots of politics and passion” surrounding the issue of immigrant students. The Citizens League is a non-partisan, citizen-based and multi-issue organization working to shape public policy in Minnesota since the 1950s.
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News Day: It’s the economy (and the budget deficit and the CitiGroup and AIG bailouts)
More March 2 stories: The weather! / Facebook and Lent / Recount / Scam alert / Momos and pizza / Head scarves and gangbangers? / Some good news! / Welfare freeze / Miss North Dakota arrested in Iran
Stormy weather ahead Billions in bad news is expected when State economist Tom Stinson issues the next state budget forecast on Tuesday, writes Bill Salisbury in the PiPress. In December, Stinson forecast the $4.85 billion deficit that has had everybody from the capitol to city hall scrambling to slash budgets, and the betting is that the new prediction will be $6 or $7 billion.
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News Day 2/11/09: MN to Somali / Salting the lakes / Schools slash spending / more …
Minneapolis to Somalia Leaders in the Somali and Muslim community denied that a Minneapolis mosque had anything to do with recent disappearances of young Somali men from the Twin Cities, blaming unnamed people within the local Somali community for stirring up rumors, reports Nelima Kerré in the Twin Cities Daily Planet. While the press statement, and leaders at the press conference, did not name individuals, a commenter on MPR’s website pointed the finger at Omar Jamal. Differences within the MN Somali community reflect political and clan differences in Somalia. Jamal is related to the recently-resigned Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf, while the young men have allegedly gone to fight with Al-Shabab, the youth and military wing of the Union of Islamic Courts, which opposed the Ethiopian-backed government of Abdullahi Yusuf. A former leader of the UIC, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, was elected president in January.
Around the world in 60 seconds Taking a quick look at BBC this morning:
Drug war battles in the farming town of Villa Ahumada and in a prison in Torreon (all in northern Mexico) killed 21 people on Monday, including at least six police officers executed in Villa Ahumada before the army arrived on the scene. Yesterday Mexican army troops arrested the police chief and 36 officers in Cancun, on suspicion that they were connected to the torture and execution last week of an ex-army general who had just taken charge of a crime-fighting squad targeting drug traffickers in Cancun.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has agreed to serve as Zimbabwe’s prime minister, eleven months after the presidential elections were stolen by discredited, corrupt, but still-President Robert Mugabe. Millions of Zimbabweans remain in desperate need of food and health care, and the country has been swept by a cholera epidemic.
The commander of Azerbaijan’s air force was assassinated yesterday, shot to death outside his home. Lt-Gen Rail Rzayev had headed the country’s air force since about the time of independence in the 1990s, and was deeply involved in large-scale military acquisitions in recent years. BBC: “In October 2008, the International Crisis Group described Azerbaijan’s armed forces as “fragmented, divided, accountable-to-no-one-but-the-president, un-transparent, corrupt and internally feuding”.
Tamils in diaspora are uniting in protest over government indifference to the suffering of civilians, as Sri Lanka troops continue a major offensive aimed at wiping out the rebel Tamil Tigers.
Face of People’s Bailout Joli Stokes could lose their Richfield home this year, victims of predatorylending practices. The People’s Bailout legislation proposed by MN DFL legislators is targeted at helping Minnesotans who, like Joli, face foreclosure, as well as others facing unemployment and welfare cuts, reports Madeleine Baran in the TC Daily Planet.
The legislation proposes a two-year suspension of the current five-year limit on welfare benefits for low-income families. Currently, families are cut off welfare benefits after five years. This plan would allow families an additional two years of financial support. Low-income housing advocates say that although the welfare grants are already low, an extension would prevent homelessness for many Minnesotan families. An unemployed adult with two children receives $532 in cash assistance and $413 in food support each month.
The legislation also includes a thirteen-week extension of unemployment benefits, a moratorium on foreclosures, initiatives to secure federal funds for job-creation programs, and recommendations against state worker layoffs.
Housing starts down January building permits hit a new low, reports Jim Buchta in the Strib:
The decline in construction spending has been accelerating over the past several months, evidence of just how much money is evaporating from the local economy. It affects everyone from the crews who dig foundations to the corner-store retailer that sells grass seed.
MN Job Watch MTS Systems Corp (Eden Prairie) will cut 150 jobs, writes Liz Fedor in the Strib. The cuts represent about six percent of the MTS work force. In New Hope, 70 workers at HD Bath and Remodeling will be out of work on April 1, writes Jackie Crosby in the Strib in a ripple effect from Home Depot’s decision to shut down smaller home improvement brands.
On the national front, General Motors announced Monday that it will cut 10,000 salaried workers. The NYT reports that the cuts come a month after buyout offers to the hourly workforce and three months after 5,100 jobs were cut. GM sales fell 11 percent in 2008. And, while Wal-Mart has generally profited during the recession, the Strib publishes an AP report that the retail giant is cutting 700-800 jobs at its Arkansas HQ.
Just what we need A huge high-voltage power line is marching toward MN, reports the Strib, at least if ITC Holdings Corp gets its way. The company wants to build a 3,000-mile, 765,000-volt, $12 billion “Green Power Express” line to take wind-generated electricity from the west to population centers like Chicago.
The bailout plan Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced a bailout that most commentators found confusing, and that investors found depressing, judging by the dive in the Dow Jones and Nasdaq, reported in the Washington Post and similar downturns in European markets, attributed to the bailout announcement by BBC. In a nutshell, the $1.5 trillion plan would “would more closely scrutinize the risks banks are facing and offer public and private capital to those that need it; create a fund, with a starting value of $500 billion, to buy up toxic real estate loans; and commit up to $1 trillion to reopen lending markets for consumer, student, small business, auto and commercial loans,” according to WaPo.
Paul Krugman quips that he was going to call the plan TANF 2 —” temporary assistance to needy financial institutions, without, you know, any of the means-testing or work requirements involved when poor people get help.” He says it’s hard to tell what the plan means at this point.
Salting 10,000 lakes A U of M study finds that hundreds of thousands of tons of road salt goes into area wetlands, ground water and lakes, reports the Strib. Well, where did you think it was going?
Schools slash spending St. Paul schools will cut 265 positions for 2009-2010, but board member John Brodrick warned that “this is not the end,” reports Doug Belden in the PiPress. The budget will be finalized in June, and school board members will meet the public at a “listening session” at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Hubbs Center at 1030 W. University Ave.
The Anoka-Hennepin school board decided to “lay off scores of teachers, reduce its textbook purchases, cut one day off the school calendar and scale back bus services to climb out of a $15.8 million budget hole,” reports Norman Draper in the Strib.
Recount – maybe some movement? The court told the Coleman and Franken lawyers to “streamline proceedings,” reports Chris Steller in MnIndy.
News Day – February 9: Stimulus and sabotage; Fletcher’s cops go to jail; St. Paul pays protester; Milking the consumer, screwing the farmer; Holocaust-denying bishop in MN; and more
Stimulus and sabotage If you want to understand the depths of the country’s economic trouble, and what to begin doing about it, Nobel Prize-winning economist Pau Krugman is must reading. He has a regular column and a blog at the New York Times. You can subscribe to either or both through a variety of RSS feeds. A sample from last Friday’s really scary column:
It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world. …
Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won’t have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that’s why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective — to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts — are so destructive.
It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.
As you think about Republicans’ attempts to sabotage the economic stimulus package, remember how well they did with with the bank bailout, per the AP report published in the Strib
The Bush administration overpaid tens of billions of dollars for stocks and other assets in its massive bailout last year of Wall Street banks and financial institutions, a new study by a government watchdog says.
The Congressional Oversight Panel, in a report released Friday, said last year’s overpayments amounted to a taxpayer-financed $78 billion subsidy of the firms.
There’s much more, if you can bear to read it. (Or you can read the official report.)
More wrong answers in MN T-Paw’s broadband committee decided that MN should not use stimulus money for ready-to-go broadband projects in MN. Steve Alexander writes in the Strib that the Pawlenty’s Ultra High Speed Broadband Task Force’s rejection of the funds came after Comcast and other private providers objected.
The list of ready-to-go broadband projects in Minnesota included a $27.5 million municipal broadband system in Monticello, a $5.4 million Minnesota Department of Health plan to expand rural health care, and a $2,500 project to extend high-speed Internet service to a library in Worthington. Other projects included a $19.6 million plan to provide high-speed Internet to 11 Minnesota communities, including Cannon Falls, Zumbrota and Lake City, and an $18.5 million Internet-TV-telephone system in North St. Paul.
And in another area, Met Council chief Peter Bell says he wants to use stimulus money to pay off the operating deficit, rather than to expand metro transit. MPR reports:
Bell’s suggestion for how the money could be used for something it isn’t intended for, illustrates a dilemma facing stimulus supporters — that money will be moved from account to account to keep everything legal, but in the end nothing gets done that wasn’t going to get done anyway.
Milking the consumer, screwing the farmer MPR forwards a brief report from the West Central Tribune about plunging milk prices, which fell from about $20 a hundredweight last fall to half that now. Farmers are losing money — nothing new there — and consumers haven’t even noticed. I’ve been working on an article on the food industry recently, so I can offer a little more detail.
The farmer sees very little of the consumer food dollar — about 17 cents for the wheat in a loaf of bread or ten cents for the corn in a box of corn flakes. All the rest goes to processing, marketing, advertising, and everyone else’s profits.
Milk provides the most dramatic example. There are approximately 12 gallons in a hundredweight of milk. (Farmers get paid by the hundredweight, consumers pay by the gallon.) At the tip top of the farm price cycle, the farmer got $1.71 per gallon of milk. That same gallon of milk cost $3.80 in the supermarket. The farmer’s price for milk at the beginning of 2009 had dropped to about 92 cents per gallon. The price in the supermarket? Still over $3.80.
Quote of the day Remember that Holocaust-denying Catholic bishop, who also thinks that “Judeo-Masonry brought about the first two world wars”? Turns out he headed up a seminary in Winona, and lived there from 1988-2003, according to a long and interesting article in the Winona Daily News. But the quote of the day, from a September 2001 letter written by Bishop Richard Williamson, came to me last week, courtesy of my web-surfing partner:
…[A]lmost no girl should go to any university! The deep-down reason is the same as for the wrongness of women’s trousers: the unwomaning of woman… [S]ince she is not respected and loved for being a woman, she tries to make herself a man. Since modem man does not want her to do what God meant her to do, namely to have children, she takes her revenge by invading all kinds of things that man is meant to do..…[O]nly in modern times have women dreamt of going to university, but the idea has now become so normal that even Catholics… may have difficulty in seeing the problem. […A]ny Catholic…recognizes that women should not be priests – can he deny that if few women went to university, almost none would wish to be priests? Alas, women going to university is part of the whole massive onslaught on God’s Nature [of] our times. That girls should not be in universities flows from the nature of universities and…girls.
(You read it here, and you might have trouble finding it elsewhere – the bishop or his Society of St. Pius X have removed his papers from the web.)
MN Job Watch As PiPress union employees reluctantly voted to accept management’s proposal for a one-week unpaid furlough between now and April 30, Strib employees got minimal good news, reports David Brauer in MinnPost. A bankruptcy judge reversed the Strib’s earlier position, and said that the newspaper must pay 43 workers who accepted buyouts between April and September 2008 the full amount of their buyout contracts. The Strib had asked the court for permission to make the payouts. On the other hand, Strib publisher Chris Harte warned that revenue continues to slide, and axed many benefits for non-union employees while asking union employees to accept a double-digit pay cut.
In Owatonna, SPX is laying off 100 workers, about 14% of its workforce. The cuts are part of 400 layoffs nationwide for the NC-based company, which makes tools, shop equipment and automotive components.
The Recount grinds on On MinnPost, Jay Weiner captures the mind-numbing tedium of the recount trial, without losing sight of the weight of the decisions being made. Is an end in sight? No.
We, the People “The idea of self-government is in the first three words of the Constitution. What are these words?” That’s just one of the questions on the new on-line citizenship study guide being piloted by the Minnesota Literacy Council. Katherine Glover writes in MinnPost that the new citizenship self-study materials are part of a larger project called Learner Web, which is developing programs includeing GED prep, computer skills and family literacy for eventual release to the public in the form of open source software. The MLC decided to go with citizenship prep software because of “Teacher Ron,” Ron Mazurowski, who has been teaching citizenship for more than 10 years and helped to put together the material. Check out the materials on-line.
St. Paul pays protester The city will pay $5,000 to anti-war activist Mick Kelly, who sued the city after he was arrested while passing out leaflets outside a Barack Obama rally at the Xcel Energy Center in June. The leaflets promoted RNC protests, and Kelly was later shot by police with a non-lethal weapon during the RNC. Kelly plans a second lawsuit over that incident. City Attorney John Choi emphasized that the settlement did not include any admission of wrongdoing by the city, reported Laura Yuen on MPR.
Ramsey County Sheriff’s employees sent to jail Two employees caught taking money in an FBI corruption sting were sentenced to nearly three years in prison on Friday, reports David Hanners in the PiPress. The two were close friends and confidants of Sheriff Bob Fletcher. Their attorney continued to insist that the two had only taken the $6,000 as a joke, writes James Walsh in the Strib, but U.S. District Judge Patrtick Schiltz “told the men that their actions were no laughing matter, but a violation of the public trust.” Fletcher declined to comment.
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ACLU vs. TIZA
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy and the MN Department of Education, alleging that TIZA violate separation of church and state, reports Tom Weber at MPR. ACLU state director Charles Samuelson was quoted in the Strib as saying the ACLU investigation of TIZA was sparked by former Strib columnist Katherine Kersten’s columns. Kersten repeatedly attacked TIZA last year in columns dated March 9, April 9, September 8, and October 26, while also publishing an email Q and A with TIZA’s principal on April 9.
TIZA serves mostly immigrant, mostly Muslim students, offering Arabic classes and setting aside optional prayer times. The ACLU claims that classroom time is lost and not made up, that a prayer is posted at the school’s entrance, and objects to its dress code. The dress code, says the complaint, prohibits girls, but not boys, from wearing short sleeves, requires older girls to wear ankle-length skirts or skirts with trousers underneath, and female teachers to be “covered from neck to wrist and ankle.” The complaint also alleges that TIZA makes excessive lease payments (which ultimately go to the Muslim American Society of MN) and that TIZA pays large salaries to the CEO and Board Chair ($100,000) of TIZA and to its Executive Director ($90,000), despite bylaws saying they shall serve without salary.
The MN Department of Education investigated TIZA last year and found it was not breaking the law, though it needed better separation of religious observances from the school day. As a charter school, TIZA is a tax-supported public school.
In the PiPress, Megan Boldt reports:
TiZA students, many of them recent immigrants, have had better than average success on state-required exams.
At the Inver Grove Heights campus, 86 percent of students are low income and about 70 percent are English language learners, according to state data for the 2006-07 school year.
In 2008, 80 percent of the students were proficient in math, compared with the statewide average of 66 percent.
In the Minneapolis E-democracy forum, Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at the Humphrey Institute of the University of Minnesota, writes:
As a American Jew who strongly believes in the separation of church and state, I’d strongly oppose any public school promoting a religion. I’d
oppose public funds going to promote Judaism, Muslim, Christianity or
any other religion.Having spent hours at Tarek, I’d say it is anything BUT a school devoted
to promotion of a single religion.Moreover, the director of the MCLU acknowledged in a conversation today
that neither he nor anyone else had ever visited the schools. Fairness
would seem to dictate that before making allegations about a school (and
filing an expensive law suit, a complaining organization should visit
the school.The MCLU director also acknowledged that there were not Muslim,
Hispanic-American or Asian American members on his board of directors.
“What difference does that make,” he asked.
Last year’s attacks in the press also resulted in death threats and other threatening emails and phone calls to TIZA. In a TC Daily Planet article, a Muslim ex-marine described sending his daughter to TIZA after she encountered anti-Muslim prejudice in her St. Paul public school.
Christian connections for charter schools meet with considerably less public attention and criticism. Several Twin Cities charter schools sponsored by Friends of Ascension use a “classical curriculum,” that Minnesota Independent’s Andy Birkey describes as “tinged with Christianity.” Nova Academy, in particular, made the news in 2005, with charges of elitism and of moving toward “a more Christian-centered philosophy” after it fired school director Dick Nunneley. (The January 21, 2005 Star Tribune article is no longer on-line, but is quoted in exchanges on Minneapolis E-Democracy.
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Mary Turck