IT'S IN OUR HANDS

Census 2010 teams were invited to a thank you lunch at Palace Station on 21st August ‘10, as gesture of Mission Accomplished after having all the teams worked really hard to created awareness for Census 2010 and its benefits for our state.

One of the teams was Southern Nevada Asian Pacific Coalition for Census 2010 (SNAP-CC) is a collaboration of Asians and Pacific Island leaders, community organizations, businesses and advocates whose aim is to facilitate a Complete Count of their community.

Together it represents a multitude of Asian and Pacific Islander businesses, communities, and organizations including the Asian American Justice Center (AAJC), Asian Pacific Labor Alliance (APALA), Las Vegas Asian Chamber of Commerce, Hawaiian Civic Club, Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA), National Federation of Filipino Americans and Associations (NaFFAA), UNLV Rebel R.O.A.R. (Raising Our Asian Rights) and many more organizations/clubs and ethnic affiliations.

Founded by its members Vilma Gorre and Betty Atkins, and other very active community leaders including Duy Nguyen, Bessie Lee-Oh, to address the need of community to participate in the upcoming 2010 Census.

The core mobilized itself due to a sense of duty and concern on the full representation of the community, particularly those who are hard to reach and will present as a challenge to count.  Their primary goal was to partner with the Census in the Complete Count and mobilize their efforts to provide Questions and Answer Centers(QAC) and Language Assistance Centers (LAC) with the various community leaders and organizations who will be solicited to coalesce with SNAP-CC in its drive for a Complete Count of the APIA community.

Salve Vargas Spensko-Edelman, Partnership Specialists for the Native Hawaiians, Asians and Pacific Islanders was invited to meet with SNAP-CC to provide resource information and secure the partnership form required.

SNAP-CC meets regularly and engaged other members of the community to reach their goal in meeting the APIA Complete Count.  They established committees and events to ensure that these goals were met including an Asian Unity Fest to bring the ethnically diverse community to an awareness on the importance of participating in the census.

It is time now for all to come together and build a consensus to bring the benefits to hurting families on the main street in these tough economic time. Thank you for getting involved.

TIME TO ACT IS NOW!

Police in China say they have recovered more than 2,000 children in a six-month campaign against human trafficking. The ministry of public security has set up a website with pictures of some of those kidnapped, in the hope of returning them to their families.

The ministry website has pictures of 60 children, ranging from babies to young adults, who were kidnapped from their families. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children go missing in China each year.

The 2,008 rescued children come from across China, and some have already been reunited with their parents. Some of the older children on the “Babies Looking for Home” website were kidnapped years ago, according to the Ministry of Public Security. Criminal gangs steal the children and sell them to childless couples.

State media have reported a string of arrests in recent months, including 42 suspects picked up last week for allegedly selling 52 children in the north of China. In China’s patriarchal society, baby boys are especially prized, sometimes selling for as much as $6,000 (£3,670), says the BBC’s Quentin Sommerville in Beijing. Girls are sometimes sold for just $500 (£305), he says.

Children of poor farmers or migrant workers are often targeted. The parents of such children have complained in the past of official indifference to their plight. Human trafficking is seen as a growing problem in China. Some families buy trafficked women or children to use as extra labour or household servants. There have been several high-profile cases of abducted children being rescued from mines and brick kilns.

Increased wealth and freedom of movement in China have made human trafficking both more profitable and easier, analysts say. Beijing has promised to do more. A national DNA database was set up this year to help trace missing children.

PRISONER ABUSE PROBE

CIA interrogators threatened an al Qaeda prisoner with a gun and an electric drill to try to scare him into giving up information, according to a long-concealed inspector-general’s report due to be made public on Monday.

A special US prosecutor has been appointed to investigate allegations of abuse of terror suspects. The announcement of John Durham’s selection came as a report was published detailing allegations of abuse by CIA agents.

Agents threatened to kill a key terror suspect’s children and sexually assault another’s mother, it is claimed. The report was made in 2004 but only a heavily censored version appeared and a judge ordered fuller disclosure.

The sources did not want to be identified because the report, completed by the CIA’s inspector general in 2004, has not yet been made public. A federal judge in New York has ordered a redacted version of the report released Monday as part of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU.

The interrogations took place in the CIA’s secret prisons before 2006, when then-President George W. Bush moved all detainees from such facilities to the federal prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Also on Monday, the department of justice’s ethics office called for the reopening of a dozen prisoner abuse cases – mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan.

BIGGEST THEFT IN HISTORY

US prosecutors have charged a man with stealing data relating to 130 million credit and debit cards. Officials say it is the biggest case of identity theft in American history.

They say Albert Gonzalez, 28, and two un-named Russian co-conspirators hacked into the payment systems of retailers, including the 7-Eleven chain.

Prosecutors say they aimed to sell the data on. If convicted, Mr Gonzalez faces up to 20 years in jail for wire fraud and five years for conspiracy. He would also have to pay a fine of $250,000 (£150,000) for each of the two charges.

Mr Gonzalez used a technique known as an “SQL injection attack” to access the databases and steal information, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said.

Edward Wilding, a fraud investigator, told the BBC that this method was “a pretty standard way” for fraudsters to try to access personal data. It “exploits any vulnerability in a firewall and inserts a code to gather information,” he explained.

However, he added that this case probably “involved extremely well researched, especially configured codes, not standard attack codes downloaded from the internet”.

According to the indictment, the group researched the credit and debit card systems used by their victims, attacked their networks and sent the data to computer servers they operated in California, Illinois, Latvia, the Netherlands and Ukraine.

SONIA SOTOMAYOR CONFIRMED

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who rose from the housing projects of the Bronx to the top of the legal profession, made history Thursday when the Senate confirmed her to become the nation’s first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.

Sotomayor was easily confirmed in a 68-31 vote. Nine Republicans joined a unanimous Democratic caucus in supporting her nomination.

Earlier a key Senate panel had voted in favour of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. The majority-Democrat Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13-6 to back Ms Sotomayor.

She is expected to be confirmed as the court’s first Hispanic justice next week. Her nomination has been vocally opposed by a chorus of Republicans who believe she is too liberal.

But it is said Ms Sotomayor is unlikely to alter the ideological balance on the court as she would replace retiring Justice David Souter, a liberal. The Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the US Constitution, and its nine members are given lifetime appointments, though they can voluntarily resign or retire.

It is called upon to rule on issues that spark some of the greatest controversy in US society – such as abortion, gun rights and national security issues.

VISA PETITIONS ON DECLINE

The number of petitions from employers trying to bring foreigners to work permanently in the U.S. has declined dramatically over the last two years, an Associated Press review of government data has found.

With the nation facing a deep recession and high unemployment, the government has received about half the number of employer-sponsored applications for work-based green cards in fiscal years 2008 and 2009 than it did in each of the previous years. There were almost 235,000 applications submitted in fiscal 2007, almost 104,000 the following year, and fewer than 36,000 through the first eight months of fiscal 2009, according to data obtained by the AP.

In addition to the weak job market, long waits for immigrant visa availability, deep job cuts in sectors that have traditionally lured large numbers of applicants and more competition from American job seekers have led to the sharp decline, experts say.

“It mirrors the recession. Employers aren’t hiring as much,” said Kristi Barrows, deputy director of the Texas Service Center. At the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Texas Service Center in Dallas, would-be immigrant workers once waited a year or longer for a decision. Now, with the drop in applications and addition of staff, the Texas center has trimmed the average wait for those petitions and the others it processes to about five months, a marked improvement that’s still a month shy of the agency’s target timeframe.

The Texas processing center and one in Lincoln, Neb., handle the nation’s foreign worker applications for permanent residence, known as green cards. To bring in a foreign worker, employers must prove that they couldn’t find a staffer in the U.S. who met the minimum requirements for the job, that they’re financially healthy and that they will pay the prevailing wage. The potential worker must have specialized skills, be able to fill a job Americans aren’t or have extraordinary abilities, such as those of musicians or pro athletes.

In fiscal year 2007, the latest year for which the statistics were available, most applicants came from India, Mexico, the Philippines, China and Korea, according to the Department of Labor.

PRESIDENT CLEARS THE AIR

Just when it looked like things were cooling down, President Obama said police acted “stupidly” when they arrested a black Harvard scholar outside his own home. Prof Henry Louis Gates was held last week in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to the top university where he teaches.

President Barack Obama said the US had a long history of African-Americans being disproportionately stopped by police. Officers were called to Prof Gates’s house after a woman reported seeing two black males – the professor and his driver – trying to force entry.

Although the exact facts of the incident are disputed, Prof Gates was asked to provide the officer with identification. He was then asked to step outside his house and was arrested. Mr Obama said: “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry. “Number two… the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.”

An initial disorderly conduct charge was dropped and Cambridge police called the arrest “regrettable and unfortunate”.

Maria (Maki) Haberfeld who is a professor of Police Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City told cnn.
We teach our children to think about what others feel before they act, but as grown-ups we frequently assume we understand what others do without ever having walked in their shoes.

President Obama expressed his opinion about a police officer’s interaction with Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates. “The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home,” the president said.

Was it stupid behavior or was it an understandable result of police procedure — the culture, or rather sub-culture, of this profession. People depend on police in a time of trouble but are quicker than lightning to judge harshly when things go wrong. But the most important question in this case is: Did they go wrong?

One needs to understand that the interaction between a police officer and a suspect is just part of a larger context.

Jeffrey Wright who is a stage and screen actor who has won a Tony, Emmy and Golden Globe told cnn.
President Obama expressed what many Americans feel regarding the recent arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates — that the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police responded “stupidly.”

Obama is catching some flak for that, but I applaud him for having had the courage to speak his heart and mind.

I wonder if the president himself has ever experienced the blunt end of racial profiling, or if he personally knows of anyone who has. Among African-American males in this country, the small minority is those who have not or do not.

Did some prior experience or knowledge inform his response about the Gates incident? I have no facts to back this up, but, to me, it seemed personal. If it was, I understand.

US President Barack Obama has told America’s oldest civil rights organisation that African Americans should take charge of their own lives.
He told the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) there were “no excuses” for minority children not to succeed.
Mr Obama’s comments came in a speech at a dinner marking the 100th anniversary of the NAACP.

It is his first speech focusing on race since he became US president. The BBC’s Jon Donnison in Washington says the tone of the speech was passionate, even preacher-like.

It seems like its time to turn the temperature down on the racial issue in the country and bridge the divide and work together on dealing with larger issues that are more important to the families all across the country.

NEW JERSEY SHOCKED

More than 40 people, including politicians, officials and several rabbis have been arrested in a major FBI operation in the US.

Three hundred agents raided dozens of locations in New Jersey and New York as part of a 10-year probe into corruption and money laundering. Three mayors from the state of New Jersey and two members of the state legislature were among those held.

One man is accused of kidney trafficking involving Israeli donors. Prosecutors say the arrests were part of a “dual-tracked” investigation. Acting US Attorney Ralph Marra told reporters there were 29 suspects on what he termed the “public corruption” side of the investigation, including the politicians.

On the other side, he said, there were 15 suspects in connection with alleged international money-laundering, including the rabbis and their “associates”. Prosecutors accuse one man of dealing in human kidneys from Israeli donors for transplant for a decade.

It is alleged that “vulnerable people” would give up a kidney for $10,000 (£6,000) and these would then be sold on for $160,000 (£97,000).

Among the 15 are five rabbis, including the national leader of the Syrian Jewish community. They are alleged to have laundered more than $3 million in a “high-volume, international money-laundering conspiracy,” Marra said. Their alleged dealings stretched to Israel and Switzerland.

“These complaints paint a disgraceful picture of religious leaders heading money-laundering crews, acting as crime bosses. They used purported charities … as vehicles for laundering millions of dollars in illicit funds,” Marra said.

The rabbis named in the criminal complaints are accused of setting up charitable tax-exempt organizations at their synagogues that they used to launder money.

According to the criminal complaints, a confidential witness working for federal authorities approached the rabbis and offered to make donations to the charities in return for the rabbis writing back a check to the undercover agent. The rabbis collected a fee for the service by writing a smaller check back, sometimes returning $45,000 for a $50,000 donation to the charity, the complaints said.

Attorney General Latif Khosa read a statement confirming the decision and congratulated Sharif. A meeting between Sharif and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari will take place Friday at the Nawaz family residence in Lahore, presidential spokesman Farhat Ullah Babar said.

He was banned after being found guilty of hijacking then army chief General Pervez Musharraf’s plane in 1999. Mr Sharif was prime minster when he sacked Gen Musharraf. He was toppled in an army coup soon afterwards.

Mr Sharif was tried by the Sindh high court. He has always maintained that the charges were politically motivated. Mr Sharif’s government had ordered officials to divert Gen Musharraf’s plane away from Karachi and to a smaller city in Sindh. While he was imprisoned, Mr Sharif agreed to go into exile under a deal with Gen Musharraf who had taken over as Pakistan’s president.

Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N political party, returned to his homeland in November 2007.

Nine embassy staff were held in Tehran last weekend. Britain says all but two have now been freed. EU governments are to summon Iranian ambassadors to protest against the detention of the embassy staff. An EU official told the BBC that, in addition, visas for Iranians holding Iranian diplomatic passports would be suspended.

The officials said other measures, including the withdrawal of EU ambassadors from Iran, would be considered if the remaining two British embassy staff were not released.

The employees have been accused of helping to incite some of the post-election protests that swept through the country.

Ayatollah Jannati at Friday prayers saying, “The British foreign office had said last March that there may be riots during the elections in Iran and they said that they should warn their citizens to be careful.

“What do these predictions mean? And then some people in the UK embassy, who had a hand in the disturbances, were arrested and will surely be put on trial.”

Iran’s intelligence minister has blamed Western powers for stirring up protests over its disputed presidential election, singling out Britain and saying the British Embassy in Tehran “played a heavy role in the recent disturbances.”

Ayatollah Jannati did not say how many employees would be tried or on what charges.

“In these incidents, their embassy had a presence, some people were arrested,” he told the thousands of worshippers at Friday prayers, according to news agencies.

Ayatollah Jannati said on Friday: “After the election, the enemy could not stand people’s joy. The enemy made an effort to poison the people. They had planned a velvet revolution before the election.”

He said the UK Foreign Office had warned of possible “street riots” around the 12 June election and had advised its nationals to avoid public places.