“Arpaio, top deputy blame left-wing agenda for agency woes - AZCentral.com” plus 3 more |
- Arpaio, top deputy blame left-wing agenda for agency woes - AZCentral.com
- Harvey Nelson, Minnesota conservation giant, dies - Minneapolis Star Tribune
- In The Works - Texarkana Gazette
- Haiti: Now What? - Post Chronicle
| Arpaio, top deputy blame left-wing agenda for agency woes - AZCentral.com Posted: 21 Feb 2010 06:34 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it.
A racial-profiling lawsuit against the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office is still months from going to trial, if ever, but preparations offer unique, if one-sided, insight into the influential agency. After more than 15 hours of combined deposition testimony, two things emerge: Deputy Chief David Hendershott runs the day-to-day operations of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office, and both men blame the agency's troubles - including a U.S. Department of Justice civil-rights investigation announced last March - on a left-wing conspiracy among the White House, civil-rights organizations, attorneys and Valley media. "I believe also that it has become clear that you, (attorney) Bill Strauss, (Phoenix Mayor) Phil Gordon, members of the Anti-Defamation League . . . have a political agenda that you are trying to push with this," Hendershott said to Phoenix lawyer David Bodney during the interview. "Your members and others have worked in concert with the Department of Justice in producing what amounts to large amounts of enflamed media that we have learned . . . is basically the only basis that the Department of Justice sent us this letter." Hendershott and Arpaio were interviewed at length in connection with a civil-rights lawsuit filed in federal court alleging that sheriff's deputies targeted five plaintiffs for arrest or citations because of their race. Bodney, who represents several local media outlets including The Arizona Republic, separately represents plaintiffs in the civil-rights lawsuit, filed in December 2007 by the American Civil Liberties Union. The deposition proceedings are intended to uncover information for discovery. They allow attorneys leeway to ask questions on topics that might or might not come up at trial. During the two interviews - Arpaio's in mid-December, Hendershott's last week - Bodney quizzed the Sheriff's Office on allegations of racial profiling and other topics, including Arpaio's co-authored biographies and an award-winning set of stories in the East Valley Tribune. Transcripts and videotapes of the testimony offer a look into an agency that is in the national spotlight on immigration issues and finds itself at the center of at least three state and federal investigations examining potential civil-rights and campaign-finance violations. The testimony illuminates contradictions in how deputies are trained on racial profiling, with Hendershott saying updates on the topic are posted in sheriff's facilities and Arpaio saying he's never seen written materials on racial profiling. Bodney generated responses indicating the Sheriff's Office is unconcerned by racial-profiling allegations that have dogged the agency since a decision to more actively pursue illegal immigrants in Maricopa County. "Racial profiling is a state of mind," Hendershott said. "We can only deal with facts." Hendershott repeatedly told Bodney the Sheriff's Office has policies and practices in place to investigate racial-profiling complaints and hold employees accountable when warranted. The agency has conducted three investigations in two years, finding no wrongdoing. But the sheriff's chief deputy was adamant that many allegations against the agency are the work of liberals who want to encourage illegal immigration. "I believe that the Obama administration has a political agenda that involves some form of either amnesty or something that does not comport or is not convenient to the current law," Hendershott said. "The high-profile nature of the sheriff has become a concern, and therefore we are dealing with this." The Republic obtained videotape of Hendershott's deposition by requesting it from the plaintiffs' attorneys after the time and date of the deposition were cited in U.S. District Court filings. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Harvey Nelson, Minnesota conservation giant, dies - Minneapolis Star Tribune Posted: 21 Feb 2010 05:37 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Nelson's first posting was at Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge in South Dakota. He served at other national wildlife refuges in the Midwest, and was promoted to key research and management positions until 1974, when he was appointed associate director of the service in Washington, overseeing the national wildlife refuge system, national fish hatcheries, wildlife law enforcement, migratory bird management and animal damage control. He returned to Minnesota in 1980 to manage Fish and Wildlife programs in eight states, and in 1987 was named executive director of the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, an ambitious state, federal and private conservation initiative. "Harvey was a doer,'' said Bob Jessen, 78, of Bemidji, who retired from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources as state waterfowl biologist in 1987. "He had some get-up-and-go." Until Friday, when he suffered chest pains and died en route to a hospital, Nelson remained active in conservation. A board member of the Minnesota Outdoor Heritage Alliance, he set up and attended the group's annual banquet Wednesday. A busy retirement The consummate volunteer, Nelson organized the recent statewide waterfowl symposium held in Bloomington and was a key figure in passage of the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment in 2008. "Even now, in retirement, every time I talked to him he was either going to or coming from a meeting or symposium,'' said Ray Norrgard, DNR wetland wildlife program leader. A 600-acre wetland complex was bought in his name near Evansville in 1996, and in 2000 he was named Man of the Year by the Outdoor News. Not bad for someone who as a kid wanted only to set a few traps and hunt canvasback ducks near his home on Lake Christina. "The future poses some difficult challenges,'' Nelson said in his autobiography. "Constant vigilance is required to maintain habitat quality and quantity, as well as populations of birds desired not just by the hunting public, but the public at large. When you put all this together, it's equally critical to other species, ground nesting birds, other resident mammals, a whole host of wildlife species and fish species that come together, supported by habitat.'' Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| In The Works - Texarkana Gazette Posted: 21 Feb 2010 05:44 AM PST [fivefilters.org: unable to retrieve full-text content] NEW YORK—A longtime journalist's "inside account" of Tiger Woods is being published in June. Atria Books announced Thursday that Robert Lusetich's "Unplayable: An Inside Account of Tiger's Most Tumultuous Season" will tell "how golf ... |
| Haiti: Now What? - Post Chronicle Posted: 21 Feb 2010 05:08 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. The satirical newspaper The Onion reported recently that "American anthropologists have confirmed the discovery of a small, poverty-stricken island nation, known to its inhabitants as 'Haiti.'" The Onion quoted a made-up expert: "Of course, there have been rumors in the past about a long-forgotten Caribbean nation whose people struggle every day to survive, live in constant fear of a corrupt government, and endure such squalor and hunger that they have resorted to eating dirt. But never did we give them much thought. "Had it not been for this earthquake, I doubt we would have ever noticed Haiti at all." Satire often reveals truths too uncomfortable to speak. The challenge for the world today, more than a month after the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed at least 230,000 people and leveled the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, is what to do about it. France, which first colonized Haiti, and the United States, which long exploited its natural resources, have a particular obligation. Both nations, and their individual citizens, have responded magnanimously to the disaster. To cite but one example, the Post-Dispatch's Phillip O'Connor and J.B. Forbes reported Feb. 7 on the ingenuity of Pat Bradley of Oakville, Mo., who runs a small humanitarian organization, and a company of U.S. Marines. The Marines had landed with food, water and emergency supplies to deliver, but had grown frustrated with the slow response of the United Nations. Mr. Bradley and Dennis Russell, a pastor from suburban Atlanta, scrounged up some trucks and, with the 3/2 Marines, began loading and delivering supplies. "Two men and truck," the Marines called them. Their partnership became a template for U.N. emergency operations once the United Nations, hampered by jurisdictional disputes, access to airports and seaports and the complete disappearance of Haitian government control, finally got started. It's tempting to blame the United Nations, with its vast, acronym-happy bureaucracy, but Haiti has long defied either control or simple solutions. The Clinton administration encouraged a chaotic and feckless democracy under Jean-Bertrand Aristide; the Bush administration saw Mr. Aristide as a Marxist and encouraged a kind of neo-colonialist approach. Neither did much for the people. On Thursday, The Boston Globe reported that Paul Farmer, a Harvard physician who has worked in Haiti since 1983 and now is U.N. special envoy to Haiti, suggested that the earthquake might offer a chance to put things right. "Might addressing the acute needs of the displaced and injured afford us a chance to address the underlying chronic conditions?" he asked at a conference at Harvard's Medical School. Anyone who read "Mountains Beyond Mountains," Tracy Kidder's 2004 biography of Dr. Farmer, was left with the idea that the 50-year-old epidemiologist is at once both a genius and a saint. At once skeptical of government programs and open to them, he told Mr. Kidder, "God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot.... You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that's where he is." What's needed in Haiti, he said, are 500,000 paying jobs and systems to deliver services effectively. Those needs could be met by governments, individuals, a U.N. protectorate or an international commission led by former President Bill Clinton. Absent its own functioning government - President Rene Preval did not inspire confidence by admitting that for the first two week after the quake, he was too shocked to lead - it's not likely Haiti can manage itself. What's important is that the work begins, and more important, that it continues. As Dr. Farmer once said, "For me, an area of moral clarity is: you're in front of someone who's suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act." REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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