Graidian Designs

TEHRAN (AFP) –
Top Iranian dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri has died, his office said on Sunday, stirring calls for opponents of the hardline Islamic regime to gather on the streets of Tehran.

Montazeri, 87, a fierce critic of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, died of a natural illness on Saturday night and is set to be buried on Monday, said his office in the holy city of Qom, where he had been based for several years.

"He was diabetic and had been using insulin for years ... He had also some lung problems and asthma. In fact he was suffering from several diseases," his doctor told state television.

The grand ayatollah was an inspiration to rights advocates and pro-reform groups and was considered by his followers as the highest living authority of Shiite Islam in Iran.

According to the opposition website Rahesabz.net, opposition supporters called for a gathering to mourn the cleric at Tehran's Mohseni square later on Sunday, adding that "sporadic gatherings" were already seen in the capital.

Meanwhile, Internet connection slowed to a crawl, as has been the case whenever the authorities anticipate opposition demonstrations.

Montazeri is to be buried in the shrine of Masoumeh, a revered Shiite figure, in Qom, his office told AFP. Foreign media have been banned from covering the ceremony.

Once designated as the successor to the founder of the 1979 Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Montazeri came out in bold support of the Iranian opposition when it rejected the re-election of Ahmadinejad in June.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei offered condolences to his family although Montazeri was also critical of him and questioned his credentials for being the country's highest religious authority.

"He was an accomplished theologian and a prominent teacher who spent a large part of his life for Imam's (Khomeini's) cause," Khamenei said in a statement carried by state television's website.

He also asked divine forgiveness for Montazeri over a "difficult ordeal" that the late cleric had undergone, alluding to his fallout with Khomeini.

The cleric had long been critical of the concentration of power in the hands of the supreme leader and called for changes to the constitution which he helped draw up after the 1979 Islamic revolution, to limit the leader's authority.

Montazeri had often criticised hardliner Ahmadinejad over his domestic and foreign policies, including Tehran's nuclear standoff with the West.

He had also called on other leading clerics to break their silence over incidents and rights abuses during the government's crackdown on opposition supporters protesting the presidential election, which they charge was massively rigged in Ahmadinejad's favour.

Controversially, he had called for direct talks between Tehran and Washington to avert conflict over Iran's controversial programme of uranium enrichment.

The grand ayatollah described the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran a "mistake" even though he said he had approved of the move at the time.

Montazeri, one of the main architects of the Islamic republic, was a student and close ally of Khomeini, whom he was set to succeed.

But the cleric fell from grace in the late 1980s after he became too openly critical of political and cultural restrictions, most notably Iran's treatment of political prisoners and opposition groups.

Montazeri resigned months before Khomeini's death in 1989, and was told by Khomeini to stay out of politics and focus instead on teaching in the city of Qom.

Unfazed by such warnings, he continued to speak out.

The grand ayatollah also questioned the theological credentials of Khamenei.

This was branded as treason, and in 1997 he was placed under house arrest.

Freed after five years on health grounds during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami, the grand ayatollah vowed that he would continue to speak out in defence of freedom and justice.

In his latest reaction to the post-vote crackdown on protests, Montazeri strongly slammed "the killing of innocent people, the arrest of political activists and freedom-seekers as well as their illegal show trials."

Iran's state news agency IRNA branded him as the "clerical figure of rioters" -- the term used by pro-government media for post-vote protesters -- and dropped his clerical title of ayatollah in its early reports.

CAEN, France – Ugly words on the playground were his first hurtful clue.
At age 12, a furtive glance at a medical record deepened Jean-Jacques Delorme's doubts about who he was. Throughout adulthood, he unearthed relics of his long-hidden history.
He was the product, he discovered, of a shame-tainted liaison between his French kitchen servant mother and an officer in the German army occupying France — one of an estimated 200,000 such children, many of whom grew up stigmatized, their identities confused.
Now, in a striking example of the healing powers of the European Union, Delorme and others like him are being offered dual German and French citizenship in a belated effort by both countries to come to terms with the past.
For Germany it is a simple matter of atonement for invading France and subjecting it to four years of brutal occupation. But France also feels a need to atone — for the ferocious score-settling that followed its liberation, in which supposed collaborators were summarily executed and women accused of "horizontal collaboration" with the enemy had their heads shaven, were paraded through jeering crowds and were jailed.
In the Normandy town of Lisieux, liberated by Allied forces after the D-Day invasion of 1944, Delorme's mother became one of those "shaven women."
"We in France have yet to work through our memories of the war. I regret that France never had its own Nuremberg trials," Delorme said, referring to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. In France, he said, "Everyone was a collaborator until April 1944; then they all became resistance fighters."
"The truth is more difficult," he said.
Delorme grew up sifting for truth amid layers of lies and silence.
No one told him of the humiliation of his mother, "whose only crime was to love someone." The man she married adopted him, yet shunned him. Schoolmates and even his own uncles called him a "bastard" or "son of a Boche," a slur word for Germans.
Delorme didn't understand the words — "I thought it just meant 'idiot'" — but he knew how it felt to be an outcast.
His suspicions about his real father were aroused when he was 12, but it took more than 10 years before he confronted the family at a Sunday dinner.
"I said, 'I'm an adult now, I deserve to know. Who is my father?'" he recalled.
His mother stormed out. His grandmother summoned him to an old wardrobe, where she extracted an envelope from under a pile of sheets.
Inside were photographs: A grinning brunette woman in a tidy double-breasted coat, gazing up at a man with heavy brows, broad shoulders and a military orchestra uniform; the same man in civilian clothes, mustachioed, standing beneath a weeping willow.
"It was a great emotional shock. My papa had a face," Delorme said, stroking his father's carefully combed hair in a yellowed snapshot.
That discovery came in 1967. It would take four decades of searching before he found his father's family, in Mainz in southwest Germany.
Many French children of the war are only now learning about their fathers, as their mothers die and letters and mementos of their wartime loves come to light. Many don't research their history until relatives with lingering animosity toward Germans or ambivalence about their own collaboration are dead.

Today, France and Germany have the same currency, they have troops in Afghanistan, their border is barrier-free, and they share diplomatic chores.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, born six months before Germany invaded France, has a German diplomat working in his Paris office.

But Kouchner recognizes that many wounds have not healed.

"France and Germany have remained up to now deaf to the distress of the last innocent victims of a conflict that they never saw. ... These children-turned-adults are asking us 60 years later to recognize their value, their lives and above all their identity," he said in a speech last year that set the German citizenship offer in motion.

"This identity, made of war and of suffering, of love and hatred, is also the identity of Europe."

In February German lawmakers approved a law offering citizenship to those who can prove their fathers served in German wartime forces. Eleven have since received citizenship, according to the German Embassy in Paris. Delorme submitted his application in August. It is not an attempt to relinquish his Frenchness — all applicants keep their French nationality.

It took months of efforts, aided by dedicated researchers and the WASt military archives in Berlin, for Delorme to track down the man in his mother's photographs.

He learned that his father, Hans Hoffmann, was a married man when he met Delorme's mother in 1941, and had a family back in Mainz. In 2006, Delorme found his half brother and half sister and visited them.

The picture of Hoffmann under the willow tree convinced them; they had a near-identical photo.

"I speak no German. They speak no French. We stayed up until 3 in the morning," reconstructing their father's wartime double life, Delorme said. "We cried a lot." They took him to the grave of his father, who was killed in a clash with American troops days before the Germans surrendered in May 1945.

Delorme has formed an association for others like him, and they gather annually in Caen, the Normandy city where he lives and which was heavily damaged in the war.

"All that goes unsaid in families, the well-guarded secrets ... leave a feeling of guilt," said Denise, a participant in the latest meeting, describing her mother's affair with her German father in a textile factory near the English Channel port of Le Havre.

Her mother told the story in fragments over the years — "a sentence here, a sentence there" — but ordered her not to let her adoptive father know. Denise is not seeking German citizenship, and did not want to be identified by her last name because her family members still don't know her real father was a German.

The German citizenship offer for now only extends to France, home to the largest number of German-fathered war children. But across Europe, up to 800,000 people are believed to have been born of German occupiers, and others are hoping the French program could lead to a Europe-wide gesture to recognize the children of war.

Those people who win German citizenship are entitled to German pensions and other benefits, but German officials say no one has asked for any so far, and besides, French benefits are comparable to those in Germany. Applicants themselves say they are not in it for money, only for recognition of their German identity.

Delorme's mother died in the 1990s. He has no children of his own and spends part of every Christmas holiday season, including this one, with his newly found siblings in Mainz.

He wears a pin of interlinked German and French flags and is optimistic about getting German citizenship.

But he has already found what he was looking for throughout his life.

Though he never knew the man under the willow tree, Delorme said, "I feel French and German."

"I am at ease."

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – A teenage Dutch sailor who made headlines when she went to court to fight for the right to sail solo around the world has gone missing, police said Sunday.
Laura Dekker's boat, Guppy, is still moored at its usual berth and the 14-year-old appears to have left her father's home on her own, Utrecht police spokesman Bernhard Jens told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
"We do not believe this is a crime," Jens said.
Utrecht District Court refused in October to let Dekker embark on her attempt to become the youngest person to sail alone around the world, and placed her under the supervision of child care authorities.
Jens said Dutch authorities have alerted neighboring countries to monitor airports.
"That happens with missing minors — if she is seen somewhere else or tries to leave via an airport or something like that, authorities know we are looking for her," he said.
Dekker has joint Dutch and New Zealand citizenship because she was born on a yacht in New Zealand waters. She said earlier this year she might try to go there if Dutch authorities refused to let her sail.
Jens would not comment on a report in Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant that Dekker withdrew euro3,500 ($5,000) from her bank account a few days ago.
"We are doing everything we can to make sure we can get her back," Jens said. "We are certainly concerned about her health — we are talking about an underage girl."
Dekker's spokeswoman Mariska Woertman did not return repeated calls seeking comment.

OKLAHOMA CITY – An Oklahoma County judge has extended a temporary restraining order that blocks enforcement of a strict abortion law. The law would require doctors to report personal information about women who seek abortions and for the information to be posted on a public Web site.
The law was to have taken effect Nov. 1. District Judge Daniel Owens said Friday the restraining order would remain in force until a lawsuit seeking to throw out the law is resolved. A hearing is set for Feb. 19.
The Center for Reproductive Rights and two women sued in September, saying the legislation violated a rule in the Oklahoma constitution that requires one piece of legislation deal with only one issue.
Supporters have said the measure deals only with abortion.

YANGON, Myanmar – Myanmar's new constitution, adopted last year despite criticism it is undemocratic, cannot be changed before next year's planned elections, the country's state media said in a commentary Sunday.
The article, which appeared Sunday in the New Light of Myanmar and other newspapers, appeared to be warning the National League for Democracy party of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi that its complaints will not be heeded.
The party has not yet committed itself to taking part in the polls because it claims the new charter is unfair. It is seeking a dialogue with the military government.
Commentaries in state-run media normally reflect the view of the military government, or sometimes take more extreme positions to test public and international reaction without the regime officially committing itself.
Sunday's commentary confirmed the government's previously stated position that it will not change the terms of the charter, which guarantees 25 percent of parliamentary seats to the military and allows the president to hand over all power to the military in a state of emergency.
It also has clauses that and would bar Suu Kyi from holding office.
The article also said that the constitution can only be amended by the new parliament that will emerge from the 2010 election.
Myanmar's military government has said it will hold a general election next year, but has not yet set an exact date or passed the necessary laws. Suu Kyi's party won the last election in 1990, but the military refused to allow it to take power.
"The demand for amendment to the constitution through discussions and a dialogue with them is beyond fulfillment," said the commentary. "A group of people has no exclusive right to amend the constitution that has been approved in a democratic way."
The article did not mention any group or individual but Suu Kyi's party and several other democratic groups have charged that the constitution was illegally approved by force, and urged the government to review it.
Suu Kyi recently asked for a meeting with junta leader Senior Gen. Than Shwe but did not mention anything about the constitution, saying only that "she wanted to explain how she can cooperate with the junta in the interest of the country."
The commentary said the constitution was approved by the people and that ambassadors and military attaches in Myanmar were allowed to observe the voting and the result has been recognized.
Myanmar's generals claimed the constitution received the approval of more than 92 percent of voters in last year's referendum, conducted in the wake of devastating Cyclone Nargis.

Last evening I watched on C-SPAN a panel discussion on partisanship in our political system and how to reduce the "poison" in public discourse. One speaker said that as long as conflict equals press coverage, then there will be an incentive for political views to be outrageous and noisy, since those are the qualities that get attention. I would be interested in your opinion about this, i.e., whether conflict is what journalists are most interested in.

This e-mail arrived in my mailbox the other morning from one of my most thoughtful friends, and it set me to thinking: How much of the current political discord, the soundtrack of our time, is the fault of the press? Is it possible that a class of Americans whose job it is to observe, not to participate, has in fact affected the way we live today as much as it has covered it?

This is an important question, but a complicated one. It is a question that gets to the heart of what the press believes, what the press does and what effect the press has on the culture that it covers. It challenges our precepts and principles, and it forces us to confront truths that we oftentimes prefer to ignore.

I begin my answer with an anecdote from my youth, when I was a town reporter for a small newspaper and required to cover local government meetings. Often these meetings were long and almost always dry, and I remember that a young man's attention sometimes wandered to baseball, the beach and girls, three far more beguiling topics than variances and valuations.

But what I remember most vividly was a wise man in the back of the room, who told me as the officials droned on that if I really wanted this meeting to end swiftly I should simply leave, as the windbags around the table would stop talking the minute the local newspaper was not there.

I think there is something to that -- a kind of Heisenberg Theory of public life, positing that the very act of observing something changes the object being observed.

I have no doubt that some of the bickering in Congress would subside if the lawmakers doing the bickering were doing so without the presence of C-SPAN or reporters. They are playing to the crowd -- and to the people who supply them with campaign funding or votes.

But the press ought not to be pilloried merely for following Woody Allen's principle that 80 percent of success consists merely of showing up. We're supposed to show up -- at congressional hearings, at press conferences, at debates. But at forums that we control, whether on television or in the pages of our newspapers or online, we do no one any service by setting up confrontations for our own ratings or, let it be said, for our own amusement or pleasure.

This occurs more often than you might think. Almost every point-counterpoint session, every set of pro/con columns, is a lazy artifice the press uses that simplifies debate into one of two sides -- oppose abortion rights or support them, oppose an Iraq surge or support it, oppose protectionism or support it. John F. Kennedy was right when he said that to govern is to choose, but by that he did not suggest the choices had to be shallow and binary. While some difficult questions are black and white, many smart answers are gray.

I am often asked at public events whether it is true that the press is biased. This question usually assumes that the bias is liberal, which is generally more true than false but neither fully true nor fully false. (It is not a coincidence that sensible clothes are often gray.) But I go on to say that our true bias isn't to the right or to the left, no matter what the screaming critics on both sides insist. Our real bias is toward change.

We not only believe in change, we also need change. We need change because if today's world is unchanged from yesterday's, we have nothing for our front page, nothing for our newscasts, nothing for our blogs, nothing for our radio broadcasts. We need news.

We also need controversy -- to spice up the dull business of government and commerce, to add some interest to our program or paper, to make our pages, telecasts and Web sites attractive to readers, viewers and advertisers. This addiction to change and to controversy is the bias that dare not speak its name.

But the blame isn't only on our side. The political class, with which the press is in an uncomfortable and oftentimes unseemly embrace, bears a good deal of the responsibility as well, particularly in recent years.

The big change in our time is the development of ideologically rigid political parties. In our parents' and grandparents' times there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, two liberal presidents, made common cause with liberal Republicans and battled conservative Democrats to win the twin pillars of American aging, Social Security and Medicare, and, in LBJ's case, civil-rights legislation.

Today, President Barack Obama has no liberal Republicans, or darn few of them, to woo to his side, and the result is a political debate that not only is impassioned but also deeply partisan.

Political scientists taught a generation of Americans that what the country really needed was a set of ideologically aligned parties rather than the mushy parties we had. Now they have their wish, and the result, which makes many of us yearn for another time and another sense of civility, reminds us that politics is too important to be left to the political scientists.

So back to the question my friend asked.

Yes, conflict produces press coverage, because of our own peculiar temperaments, needs and biases. But conflict also is part of democracy and a result of the peculiar ways American politics has developed, giving us a rarity in American political culture: a robust liberalism and a robust conservatism at the same time.

Some of the American political conversation is uncivil, to be sure, but incivility has been a part of American political life for centuries, sometimes resulting even in spitting and caning on Capitol Hill. But for all the incivility, our yeasty life is evidence of a great political civilization. It is ugly, but it is also beautiful.

WASHINGTON (AFP) –
The US Congress on Saturday sent US President Barack Obama a massive annual military spending bill that funds current operations in Afghanistan and pays for the troop withdrawal from Iraq.

In a rare weekend vote, the Senate approved the 636.3-billion-dollar package, which cleared the House of Representatives 395-34 on Wednesday, by an 88-10 margin.

Obama is expected to send Congress an emergency spending measure of at least 30 billion dollars early next year to pay for his recently announced decision to send 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan.

The bill includes 101.1 billion dollars for operations and maintenance and military personnel requirements in Iraq and Afghanistan and to carry out the planned withdrawal of all US combat forces from Iraq by August 2010.

The package also funds the purchase of 6,600 new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) armored vehicles configured to better resist improvised explosive devices -- roadside bombs used to deadly effect by insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The bill includes 80 million dollars to acquire more unmanned "Predator" drones, a key tool in the US air war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

That campaign deploys unmanned Predator and larger Reaper drones equipped with infrared cameras and armed with precision-guided bombs and Hellfire missiles.

With little public debate in the United States, the pace of the drone bombing raids has steadily increased, starting last year during ex-president George W. Bush's final months in office and now under Obama's tenure.

The spending bill upholds Obama's ban on torture of detainees in US custody, continues a general provision forbidding the establishment of permanent bases in Iraq or Afghanistan, and provides no funds to close the prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Saturday praised the bill's passage.

"In addition to giving our troops a pay raise and funding more than 100 million dollars for operation of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, this bill extends unemployment and makes health insurance more affordable for unemployed Americans," Reid said.

"We're keeping our country safe with critical investments in our defense and giving an important boost to our economy."

Reid took a swipe at rival Republicans, accusing them of "political maneuvering" to slow down passage of the bill in order to delay debating health care reform, the next measure the Senate will be handling.

ISLAMABAD – Pakistani police said they arrested five U.S. citizens Wednesday in a raid in the east of the country, but declined to give a reason for the detentions.
The men were picked up at a house in Sarghoda in Punjab province, police officer Tahir Gujjar said.
He said three of the men are of Pakistani descent, one is of Egyptian descent and the other is of Yemeni heritage.
U.S. Embassy spokesman Rick Snelsire said officials there were aware of the reported arrests, but could not confirm them.
A report on the Web site of the Pakistani newspaper The News said one only one of the men was American.
Quoting a senior police officer, the report said it "was quite a possibility that they (the five men) were engaged in acts of terrorism."

In all developed countries, entry-level medical education programs are tertiary-level courses, undertaken at a medical school attached to a university. Depending on jurisdiction and university, entry may follow directly from secondary school or require pre-requisite undergraduate education. The former commonly take five or six years to complete. Programs that require previous undergraduate education (typically a three or four year degree, often in Science) are usually four or five years in length. Hence, gaining a basic medical degree may typically take from five to eight years, depending on jurisdiction and university.

Following completion of entry-level training, newly graduated medical practitioners are often required to undertake a period of supervised practice before full registration is granted, typically one or two years. This may be referred to as "internship" or "conditional registration".

Baltimore Back Pain

BRUSSELS (AFP) –
Baroness Catherine Ashton officially took office on Tuesday, becoming the European Union's foreign policy supremo, a post already dubbed "EU foreign minister".

The EU's first president, Herman Van Rompuy, also started his new job as the bloc's reforming Lisbon Treaty entered into force, giving the European project a human face as it enters a new era.

The treaty, drawn up to replace the aborted EU constitution, is designed to boost the bloc's global standing and streamline the institutions which represent half a billion people.

The 27 EU heads of state and government chose Van Rompuy, who was the serving Belgian prime minister, for the top jobs at a summit this month after much behind-the-scenes horse-trading.

His post, the President of the European Council is for a two-and-a-half year term renewable once.

One goal is to give the EU a more stable leadership than the current system, whereby the EU presidency rotates among the member states every six months.

The leaders also chose British peer Ashton, who was EU trade commissioner, to become the bloc's high representative for foreign and security affairs for a straight five years.

She replaces Spaniard Javier Solana, who steps down as head of European diplomacy after 10 years. However the role is significantly expanded under the treaty and comes with a huge new diplomatic corps.

The choice of the relatively unknown pair leaves them plenty of convincing to do if they are to stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of the US and China in negotiations.

Europe's first president will be "more of a 'chairman president' than a leader president'," according to the Robert Schuman Foundation think-tank.

It may suit some of the bigger EU nations not to have a political big beast presiding over them.

The national leaders will certainly have been attracted by Van Rompuy's ability to keep a fragile Belgian coalition government together during his 11 months in office.

Ashton, who proudly asserts she is not an "ego on legs," has nonetheless quickly built up a reputation in Brussels as a quiet but effective negotiator.

But she in particular has come in for criticism due to her lack of diplomatic experience and doubts have been cast over the wisdom of choosing someone from Britain, given its failure to embrace key European concepts such as the euro and the Schengen open borders zone.

A ceremony to mark the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, and the positions it creates, will take in the Portuguese capital Tuesday, where the text was first signed, with Van Rompuy and Ashton attending.

The treaty also enshrines a European charter of fundamental rights -- though Britain, Poland and the Czech Republic have secure full or partial opt outs.

In another innovation, the text gives Europe's citizens the possibility of directly initiating policy ideas, if a million signatures are collected.

The treaty also sets up a process whereby a country can leave the group altogether.

Once a qualified lead exists, additional operations may be performed such as background research on the lead's employer, general market of the lead, contact information beyond that provided initially or other information useful for contacting and evaluating a lead for elevation to prospect, the next sales step.

Sales leads are generic leads that are generated on the basis of demographic criteria such as FICO score, income, age, HHI, etc. These leads are often resold to multiple advertisers. Sales leads are typically followed up through phone calls by the sales force. They are commonly found in the mortgage, insurance and finance industries.

http://www.buyemail-list.com/about-us.html

New York –
Imagine what an intern strike might look like. Close your eyes and picture a day without unpaid interns. Phones wouldn't stop ringing, e-mails would not be answered. No one would tweet or update the website, and then, just maybe, someone, somewhere, would remember the dollar value of an honest day's work.
Hard times have hit potential interns. "They are competing with laid off employees with far more experience," writes a paid intern in his New York Times exposé on America's most unreported "job" loss.
Internships have become a hot commodity. So hot, that there are agencies charging a pretty penny to help young hopefuls secure the unpaid jobs of their dreams. And, as our new economy prompts career changes, those collecting unemployment may choose to subsidize their own unpaid labor, as earned income may be deducted from unemployment checks anyway.
Now, I'm not an economist, but when banks get a bailout and the middle class works for free, I wonder who really benefits?
Still, it was not until I read that Pizza Hut was looking for a Twitter intern that I knew something had to be done to save the world from these unpaid internships, which have come to replace entry-level jobs.
The verb "intern," once used to describe the eager toil of wealthy college students who wouldn't miss a buck or two, has taken on its former more sinister meaning. Intern: to restrict to or confine within prescribed limits, as prisoners of war, enemy aliens, or combat troops who take refuge in a neutral country.
As a writer, I am trapped, interned if you will, by internships. Every writing job has been delegated to a stigmatized workforce of interns who, even if paid, must know their subemployee rank on the food chain.
"Volunteer" was a term once used to describe free laborers, but perhaps it was too aggrandizing. Volunteers work for free out of the goodness of their hearts and are praised in songs with dramatic lyrics like: "If you want someone who's willing/ To lay down their hearts/ Someone to dry your tears/ I'm here/ I volunteer."
Or the more whimsical, "Let's Hear It for the Volunteers," which includes a verse about Kathy in the yellow pants who writes grants and loves music but can't dance. This rousing volunteer anthem ends with a joyful take on unpaid labor, saying, "It ain't for money, 'cause they work for free," and that it's "all for the music and the company. Let's hear it for the volunteers!"
A positive take on volunteering is nearly universal. On YouTube, a young Obama campaign volunteer can be seen singing "All for you Barack," an anthem he wrote to sanctify his difficult yet rewarding work on the campaign trail.
Interns, on the other hand, are often the butt of jokes. Monica Lewinsky didn't help matters, and I haven't heard a rousing intern anthem ever. Still, in the unpaid workforce, the title of "intern" has eclipsed "volunteer."
Interns are valuable. And as part of the workforce, they are expected to do many of the same tasks that professionals do (along with the menial jobs that no one cares to do).
Many people have, at some point in their lives, worked without pay. Some start businesses, others devote time to charities or nonprofits, and still more apprentice in lucrative mechanical fields. I am all for entrepreneurs, mechanics, and bleeding hearts.
However, conceiving of the unpaid internship as a means to secure paying jobs is as archaic as the corporate ladder model of employment itself. We no longer live in a society where hard work at one company ensures that we will someday reach the zenith of the American dream.
I recently got a letter from the government stating that the Social Security plan I have paid into may not be fully solvent to greet me when I need it. People say that the young must pay their dues, but if we are not even going to collect on the ones we pay literally, should we also work for free?
My philosophy is this: If you don't pay me, I will not work. I encourage you to join me. Think of this as a new and radical form of union organizing. In the 1930s, we fought for a minimum wage and, years later, we will stand together and refuse to work for free.
Elizabeth Daley is a freelance journalist. She will work for money.
------

Read more: -Rise of the 40-something intern

-As job market shrinks, so do college grads' grand plans

-Unpaid interns struggle to make ends meet

WASHINGTON – The couple who crashed the Obama administration's first state dinner communicated with a senior Pentagon official about going to the event, but the official denies that she helped the couple get in.
Michele Jones, a special assistant to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said in a written statement issued through the White House on Monday evening that she never said or implied she would get Michaele and Tareq Salahi into the Nov. 24 White House dinner.
"I specifically stated that they did not have tickets and in fact that I did not have the authority to authorize attendance, admittance or access to any part of the evening's activities," Jones said. "Even though I informed them of this, they still decided to come."
This is the latest twist in the unfolding mystery of how the two reality show wannabes managed to get into the highly secured event and shake hands with President Barack Obama. Also on Monday, a House committee chairman asked the couple, Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan and White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers to testify at a hearing Thursday on the incident.
The White House issued Jones' statement after questions were raised about communications between the administration and the couple prior to the dinner.
A friend of the couple, McLean, Va., real estate agent Casey Margenau, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the couple interpreted an e-mail exchange as permission to attend the exclusive party. Margenau said he did not personally see the e-mails and did not know with whom the couple was corresponding.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he wants answers about the Secret Service's security deficiencies that allowed the Salahis to attend the dinner. A White House photo showed the Salahis in the receiving line in the Blue Room with Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in whose honor the dinner was held. Obama and Michaele Salahi are smiling as she grasps his right hand with both of hers and her husband looks on. Singh is to Obama's left.
"This is a time for answers," Thompson said in a statement Monday. "This is not the time for political games or scapegoating to distract our attention from the careful oversight we must apply to the Secret Service and its mission."
Some lawmakers have called for criminal charges to be brought against the couple, but the Secret Service has not yet decided whether to refer the case for criminal prosecution.
The Secret Service declined to comment on whether Sullivan would testify on Thursday.
On Friday, Sullivan issued a statement saying that his agency is "deeply concerned and embarrassed" by the circumstances.
Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said the couple was not on the approved list for the party, but they were allowed in. "This should not have occurred," Donovan said.
"The preliminary findings of our internal investigation have determined established protocols were not followed at an initial checkpoint, verifying that two individuals were on the guest list," Sullivan said Friday. "Although these individuals went through magnetometers and other levels of screening, they should have been prohibited from entering the event entirely. That failing is ours."
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday the president shares the Secret Service director's concern about the incident.
"That's why there's an investigation," Gibbs said.
Gibbs said the president was not concerned about his safety and continues to have faith in the Secret Service.
The ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security committee, Rep. Peter King of New York, also said there needs to be an investigation into what happened. King said he wants to be sure the hearing does not give away Secret Service operations or methods that could tip someone off how to get into the White House. King said he's been to at least 40 invitation-only events at the White House — including two state dinners — and security has always been tight and thorough.
The Salahis have boasted about going to the state dinner on their Facebook page: "Honored to be at the White House for the state dinner in honor of India with President Obama and our First Lady!" they wrote.

Michaele Salahi is a reality TV hopeful trying to get on Bravo's "The Real Housewives of D.C."

The couple's publicist, Mahogany Jones, could not immediately be reached for comment about whether the Salahis would testify Thursday. But earlier Monday, Mahogany Jones said allegations that the Salahis are shopping interviews and demanding money from television networks to tell their story are false.

Mahogany Jones said the couple is not making any formal comments or arrangements to speak with the media. An appearance previously scheduled for Monday night on CNN's "Larry King Live" has been canceled.

A TV executive who spoke on condition of anonymity to publicly discuss bookings had told The Associated Press that the couple's representatives had urged networks to "get their bids in" for an interview.

___

Associated Press writers Julie Pace and Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON – The couple who crashed the Obama administration's first state dinner communicated with a senior Pentagon official about going to the event, but the official denies that she helped the couple get in.
Michele Jones, a special assistant to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said in a written statement issued through the White House on Monday evening that she never said or implied she would get Michaele and Tareq Salahi into the Nov. 24 White House dinner.
"I specifically stated that they did not have tickets and in fact that I did not have the authority to authorize attendance, admittance or access to any part of the evening's activities," Jones said. "Even though I informed them of this, they still decided to come."
This is the latest twist in the unfolding mystery of how the two reality show wannabes managed to get into the highly secured event and shake hands with President Barack Obama. Also on Monday, a House committee chairman asked the couple, Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan and White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers to testify at a hearing Thursday on the incident.
The White House issued Jones' statement after questions were raised about communications between the administration and the couple prior to the dinner.
A friend of the couple, McLean, Va., real estate agent Casey Margenau, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the couple interpreted an e-mail exchange as permission to attend the exclusive party. Margenau said he did not personally see the e-mails and did not know with whom the couple was corresponding.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he wants answers about the Secret Service's security deficiencies that allowed the Salahis to attend the dinner. A White House photo showed the Salahis in the receiving line in the Blue Room with Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in whose honor the dinner was held. Obama and Michaele Salahi are smiling as she grasps his right hand with both of hers and her husband looks on. Singh is to Obama's left.
"This is a time for answers," Thompson said in a statement Monday. "This is not the time for political games or scapegoating to distract our attention from the careful oversight we must apply to the Secret Service and its mission."
Some lawmakers have called for criminal charges to be brought against the couple, but the Secret Service has not yet decided whether to refer the case for criminal prosecution.
The Secret Service declined to comment on whether Sullivan would testify on Thursday.
On Friday, Sullivan issued a statement saying that his agency is "deeply concerned and embarrassed" by the circumstances.
Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said the couple was not on the approved list for the party, but they were allowed in. "This should not have occurred," Donovan said.
"The preliminary findings of our internal investigation have determined established protocols were not followed at an initial checkpoint, verifying that two individuals were on the guest list," Sullivan said Friday. "Although these individuals went through magnetometers and other levels of screening, they should have been prohibited from entering the event entirely. That failing is ours."
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday the president shares the Secret Service director's concern about the incident.
"That's why there's an investigation," Gibbs said.
Gibbs said the president was not concerned about his safety and continues to have faith in the Secret Service.
The ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security committee, Rep. Peter King of New York, also said there needs to be an investigation into what happened. King said he wants to be sure the hearing does not give away Secret Service operations or methods that could tip someone off how to get into the White House. King said he's been to at least 40 invitation-only events at the White House — including two state dinners — and security has always been tight and thorough.
The Salahis have boasted about going to the state dinner on their Facebook page: "Honored to be at the White House for the state dinner in honor of India with President Obama and our First Lady!" they wrote.

Michaele Salahi is a reality TV hopeful trying to get on Bravo's "The Real Housewives of D.C."

The couple's publicist, Mahogany Jones, could not immediately be reached for comment about whether the Salahis would testify Thursday. But earlier Monday, Mahogany Jones said allegations that the Salahis are shopping interviews and demanding money from television networks to tell their story are false.

Mahogany Jones said the couple is not making any formal comments or arrangements to speak with the media. An appearance previously scheduled for Monday night on CNN's "Larry King Live" has been canceled.

A TV executive who spoke on condition of anonymity to publicly discuss bookings had told The Associated Press that the couple's representatives had urged networks to "get their bids in" for an interview.

___

Associated Press writers Julie Pace and Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON – After months of debate, President Barack Obama will spell out a costly Afghanistan war expansion to a skeptical public Tuesday night, coupling an infusion of as many as 35,000 more troops with a vow that there will be no endless U.S. commitment. His first orders have already been made: at least one group of Marines who will be in place by Christmas.
Obama has said that he prefers "not to hand off anything to the next president" and that his strategy will "put us on a path toward ending the war." But he doesn't plan to give any more exact timetable than that Tuesday night.
The president will end his 92-day review of the war with a nationally broadcast address in which he will lay out his revamped strategy from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He spent part of Monday briefing foreign allies in a series of private meetings and phone calls.
Before Obama's call to Britain's Gordon Brown, the prime minister announced that 500 more U.K. troops would arrive in southern Afghanistan next month — making a British total of about 10,000 in the country. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose nation has more than 3,000 in Afghanistan, said French troops would stay "as long as necessary" to stabilize the country.
Obama's war escalation includes sending 30,000 to 35,000 more American forces into Afghanistan in a graduated deployment over the next year, on top of the 71,000 already there. There also will be a fresh focus on training Afghan forces to take over the fight and allow the Americans to leave.
He also will deliver a deeper explanation of why he believes the U.S. must continue to fight more than eight years after the war was started following the Sept. 11 attacks by al-Qaida terrorists based in Afghanistan. He will emphasize that Afghan security forces need more time, more schooling and more U.S. combat backup to be up to the job on their own, and he will make tougher demands on the governments of Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.
"This is not an open-ended commitment," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "We are there to partner with the Afghans, to train the Afghan national security forces, the army and the police so that they can provide security for their country and wage a battle against an unpopular insurgency."
On a few of the bigger questions most on the minds of increasingly restive members of Congress and the public, such as how much the additional $30 billion to $35 billion cost will balloon the already skyrocketed federal deficit, how long the U.S. commitment will continue and how it will wind down, Obama was expected to make references without offering specifics.
Gibbs said detailed discussions on costs would be held later with lawmakers.
Even before explaining his decision, Obama told the military to begin executing the force increases. The commander in chief gave the deployment orders Sunday night, during an Oval Office meeting in which he told key military and White House advisers of his final decision.
At least one group of Marines is expected to deploy within two or three weeks of Obama's announcement and will be in Afghanistan by Christmas, military officials said. Larger deployments will begin early next year.
The initial infusion is a recognition by the administration that something tangible needs to happen quickly, officials said. The immediate addition of Marines will provide badly needed reinforcements for those fighting against Taliban gains in the southern Helmand province, and also could lend reassurance to both Afghans and a war-weary U.S. public.
Obama's overall review was launched Aug. 31, when Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the newly minted top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, delivered to Pentagon brass his assessment of the situation on the ground and what was needed to turn it around. McChrystal produced a separate resource request, first seen by Obama on Oct. 1. The president's review was anchored by 10 extensive war council meetings, starting on Sept. 13, that featured a debate between a counterinsurgency strategy focused on protecting the local population and building up the Afghanistan government or a more limited counterterrorism strategy.
The final product is neither, though it leans more toward counterinsurgency.
The length of the process drew sharp barbs. Less than two months in, Vice President Dick Cheney accused Obama of "dithering," beginning a drumbeat of criticism from Republicans. The White House shot back that the administration Cheney helped lead had given inordinate attention to Iraq while turning its back on Afghanistan.
But with U.S. casualties in Afghanistan sharply increasing and little sign of progress, the war Obama once liked to call one "of necessity," not choice, has grown less popular with the public and within his own Democratic Party. In recent days, leading Democrats have talked of setting tough conditions on deeper U.S. involvement, or even staging outright opposition.
The displeasure on both sides of the aisle is likely to be on display when congressional hearings on Obama's strategy get under way later in the week on Capitol Hill.
Obama spent much of Monday and Tuesday on the phone, outlining his plan — minus many specifics — for the leaders of France, Britain, Germany, Russia, China, India, Denmark, Poland and others. He also met in person at the White House with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

A briefing for dozens of lawmakers was planned for Tuesday afternoon, just before Obama left for New York to give his speech against a military backdrop.

He also was to call Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari — two leaders on whom the success of the plan will depend heavily.

In Afghanistan, rampant government corruption and inefficiency have made U.S. success much harder. Obama was expected to place tough conditions on Karzai's government, along with endorsing a stepped-up training program for the Afghan armed forces in line with recommendations this fall by U.S. trainers.

That schedule would expand the Afghan army to 134,000 troops by next fall, three years earlier than once envisioned.

The president faces a tricker task in talking tough on Pakistan.

Though extremist fighters and al-Qaida leaders are believed to be based in its western region near the border with Afghanistan, public scoldings from Washington can hurt as well as help Pakistani efforts because of pervasive anti-American sentiment. The U.S. cannot send troops into Pakistan, and rarely discusses the anti-terrorist missile strikes conducted inside Pakistan from U.S. drones.

Military officials said the speech is expected to include several references to Iraq, where the United States still has more than 100,000 troops. The strain of maintaining that overseas war machine has stretched the Army and Marine Corps and limited Obama's options.

He is expected to at least implicitly pledge not to return to the worst days of the Iraq war, when the Army was resorted to 15-month tours with little time at home between deployments and when National Guard and reserve troops were subjected to lengthy tours.

___

Associated Press writers Anne Gearan, Pamela Hess and Robert Burns contributed to this report.

Creators Syndicate –
With the House debate on health care at its hottest, the U.S. Catholic bishops issued a stunning ultimatum: Impose an absolute ban on tax funds for abortions, or we call for defeat of the Pelosi bill.

Message received. The Stupak Amendment, named for Bart Stupak of Michigan, was promptly passed, to the delight of pro-life Catholics and the astonished outrage of pro-abortion Democrats.

No member was more upset than Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, son of Edward Kennedy, who proceeded to bash the Church for imperiling the greatest advance for human rights in a generation.

Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin responded, accusing Kennedy of an unprovoked attack and demanding an apology. Kennedy retorted that Tobin had told him not to receive communion at Mass and ordered his diocesan priests not to give him communion.

False! The bishop fired back.

He had sent Kennedy a private letter in February 2007 saying that he ought not receive communion, as he was scandalizing the Church. But he had not told diocesan priests to deny him communion.

As Rhode Island is our most Catholic state, Kennedy went silent and got this parting shot from Tobin: "Your position is unacceptable to the Church and scandalous to many of our members. It absolutely diminishes your communion with the Church."

The clash was naturally national news. But Tobin's public chastisement of a Catholic who carries the most famous name in U.S. and Catholic politics is made more significant because it seems to reflect a new militancy in the hierarchy that has been absent for decades

Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., just informed the city council that, rather than recognize homosexual marriages and provide gays the rights and benefits of married couples, he will shut down all Catholic social institutions and let the city take them over. Civil disobedience may be in order here.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York sent an op-ed to The New York Times charging the paper with anti-Catholic bigotry and using a moral double standard when judging the Church.

During the "horrible" scandal of priest abuse of children, wrote the archbishop, the Times demanded the "release of names of abusers, rollback of the statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records and total transparency."

But when the Times "exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuses in Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish Community ... 40 cases of such abuses in this tiny community last year alone," wrote the archbishop, the district attorney swept the scandal under the rug, and the Times held up the carpet.

Dolan singled out a "scurrilous ... diatribe" by Maureen Dowd "that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish or African-American" faith.

Dowd, wrote Dolan, "digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription ... into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics and his recent welcome to Anglicans."

Dowd, said Dolan, reads like something out of the Menace, the anti-Catholic Know Nothing newspaper of the 1850s.

The Times' refusal to publish the op-ed underscores the archbishop's point.

Nor are these the only signals of a new Church Militant.

The Vatican has reaffirmed that Catholics in interfaith dialogues have a moral right if not a duty to convert Jews, and reaffirmed the doctrine that Christ's covenant with his church canceled out and supersedes the Old Testament covenant with the Jews.

When Abe Foxman, screech owl of the Anti-Defamation League, railed that this marks a Catholic return to such "odious concepts as 'supercessionism,'" he was politely ignored.

The new spirit was first manifest last spring, when scores of bishops denounced Notre Dame for inviting Barack Obama, a NARAL icon, to give the commencement address and receive an honorary degree.

Among the motives behind the new militancy is surely the wilding attack on Pope Benedict for reconciling with the Society of St. Pius X, one of whose bishops had questioned the Holocaust. The pope was unaware of this, and the bishop apologized. To no avail. Rising in viciousness, the attacks went on for weeks. Having turned the other cheek, the church got it smacked.

In his May address to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, Archbishop Raymond L. Burke said, "In a culture which embraces an agenda of death, Catholics and Catholic institutions are necessarily counter-cultural."

Exactly. Catholicism is necessarily an adversary faith and culture in an America where a triumphant secularism has captured the heights, from Hollywood to the media, the arts and the academy, and relishes nothing more than insults to and blasphemous mockery of the Church of Rome.

Our new battling bishops may be surprised to find they have a large cheering section among a heretofore silent and sullen faithful who have been desperate to find a few clerical champions.

Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book "Churchill, Hitler and 'The Unnecessary War." To find out more about Patrick Buchanan, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM