The Morning Call - In pursuit of an Eagle Scout badge, Kevin Anderson, 17, has toiled for more than 200 hours over several weeks to clear a walking path in an east Allentown park.
Little did the do-gooder know that his altruistic act would put him in the cross hairs of the city's largest municipal union.
Nick Balzano, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told Allentown City Council Tuesday that the union is considering filing a grievance against the city for allowing Anderson to clear a 1,000-foot walking and biking path at Kimmets Lock Park.
"We'll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails," Balzano told the council.
Balzano said Saturday he isn't targeting Boy Scouts. But given the city's decision in July to lay off 39 SEIU members, Balzano said "there's to be no volunteers." No one except union members may pick up a hoe or shovel, plant a flower or clear a walking path.
"We would hope that the well-intentioned efforts of an Eagle Scout candidate would not be challenged by the union," said Mayor Ed Pawlowski in an e-mail Friday. "This young man is performing a great service to the community. His efforts should be recognized as such."
Balzano said Saturday the union is still looking into the matter and might cut the city a break.
"We are probably going to let this one go," Balzano said .
The possible entanglement of a local Boy Scout in a union dispute underscores the frustration and anger SEIU members feel after being the lone city union to suffer layoffs in the ongoing financial crisis. It may also serve as a preview of future labor battles as the city tries to outsource some necessary jobs as a result of the layoffs.
Anderson, a junior and varsity soccer player at Southern Lehigh High School, is a member of Boy Scout Troop 301 of Center Valley.
He got the idea for the trail while taking hikes along the partially complete, 165-mile Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor. He noticed there were a few missing connections to the trail in Kimmets Lock Park, which is on the Lehigh River near Dauphin Street. He already has logged 250 hours trying to carve out a walking and biking trail along the river.
"I decided to do my part in completing this part of the trail. In that way, others could enjoy walking along the river, without having to walk on the busy road," Anderson said in an e-mail Friday.
During last week's budget hearings, where City Council reviewed the Public Works and Park and Recreation departments' funding requests, it was made clear that the layoffs and early retirements -- all of which have led to the lowest city staffing levels in two decades -- are bound to create union disputes in the weeks and months ahead.
NYTimes - President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.
At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.
“There was an assessment by the leaders that it is unrealistic to expect a full internationally, legally binding agreement could be negotiated between now and Copenhagen, which starts in 22 days,” said Michael Froman, the deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. “I don’t think the negotiations have proceeded in such a way that any of the leaders thought it was likely that we were going to achieve a final agreement in Copenhagen, and yet thought that it was important that Copenhagen be an important step forward, including with operational impact.”
With the clock running out and deep differences unresolved, it has, for several months, appeared increasingly unlikely that the climate change negotiations in Denmark would produce a comprehensive and binding new treaty on global warming, as its organizers had intended.
The agreement on Sunday codifies what negotiators had already accepted as all but inevitable: that representatives of the 192 nations in the talks would not resolve the outstanding issues in time. The gulf between rich and poor countries, and even among the wealthiest nations, was just too wide.
Among the chief barriers to a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen was Congress’s inability to enact climate and energy legislation that sets binding targets on greenhouse gases in the United States. Without such a commitment, other nations are loath to make their own pledges.
Administration officials and Congressional leaders have said that final legislative action on a climate bill would not occur before the first half of next year.
After his breakfast meeting in Singapore, Mr. Obama was scheduled to meet with Asian leaders and to hold a number of one-on-one sessions, including one with the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev.
AFP - The United States voiced opposition Monday to unilateral Palestinian moves to seek recognition for an independent state, saying negotiations with Israel were the best way forward.
A State Department spokesman reiterated US commitment to a future Palestinian state but poured cold water on an initiative to ask the United Nations Security Council to recognize a state unilaterally.
"We support the creation of a Palestinian state that is contiguous.... We are convinced that has to be achieved through negotiations between two parties," said spokesman Ian Kelly.
On Sunday, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said they would "go to the UN Security Council to ask for recognition of an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital and with June 1967 borders."
This in turn drew a warning from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that: "Any unilateral action will undo the framework of past accords and lead to unilateral actions from Israel."
Kelly said he was not aware the Palestinians had sought American support for their initiative and refused to be drawn on whether the US, if it had to, would veto any bid at the Security Council.
"I think that the thing we have to do is get the two parties to sit down and that is what we're putting all of our efforts behind," he said.
US Senator Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said Washington was likely to veto such a proposal, which he said would be "a waste of time.
"I hope and presume that the United States would veto such an attempt when and if it ever came to the Security Council," he told a press conference in Jerusalem.
The move for UN recognition is the latest in a series of options the Palestinians have warned they could take if the Middle East peace process remained stalled.
Others include unilaterally declaring independence, asking the UN to determine final borders of their promised state, dissolving the Palestinian Authority and seeking equal rights within Israel.
The administration of US President Barack Obama has so far been unable to convince Israelis and Palestinians to resume their peace talks amid deep disagreements on the issue of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
The Palestinians insist on a freeze of all settlement activity before talks restart, while Israel is offering a temporary and limited ease on construction, saying the issue will be resolved during the negotiations.
Any state recognition bid would have to wait until a ministerial meeting of the Arab League before it could be proposed at the UN Security Council, the league's permanent observer to the UN Yahya Mahmassani told AFP on Monday.
Washington Post - In 1982, a Pakistani military C-130 left the western Chinese city of Urumqi with a highly unusual cargo: enough weapons-grade uranium for two atomic bombs, according to accounts written by the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and provided to The Washington Post.
The uranium transfer in five stainless-steel boxes was part of a broad-ranging, secret nuclear deal approved years earlier by Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto that culminated in an exceptional, deliberate act of proliferation by a nuclear power, according to the accounts by Khan, who is under house arrest in Pakistan.
U.S. officials say they have known about the transfer for decades and once privately confronted the Chinese — who denied it — but have never raised the issue in public or sought to impose direct sanctions on China for it. President Obama, who said in April that "the world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons," plans to discuss nuclear proliferation issues while visiting Beijing on Tuesday.
According to Khan, the uranium cargo came with a blueprint for a simple weapon that China had already tested, supplying a virtual do-it-yourself kit that significantly speeded Pakistan's bomb effort. The transfer also started a chain of proliferation: U.S. officials worry that Khan later shared related Chinese design information with Iran; in 2003, Libya confirmed obtaining it from Khan's clandestine network.
China's refusal to acknowledge the transfer and the unwillingness of the United States to confront the Chinese publicly demonstrate how difficult it is to counter nuclear proliferation. Although U.S. officials say China is now much more attuned to proliferation dangers, it has demonstrated less enthusiasm than the United States for imposing sanctions on Iran over its nuclear efforts, a position Obama wants to discuss.
Although Chinese officials have for a quarter-century denied helping any nation attain a nuclear capability, current and former U.S. officials say Khan's accounts confirm the U.S. intelligence community's long-held conclusion that China provided such assistance.
"Upon my personal request, the Chinese Minister . . . had gifted us 50 kg [kilograms] of weapon-grade enriched uranium, enough for two weapons," Khan wrote in a previously undisclosed 11-page narrative of the Pakistani bomb program that he prepared after his January 2004 detention for unauthorized nuclear commerce.
"The Chinese gave us drawings of the nuclear weapon, gave us kg50 enriched uranium," he said in a separate account sent to his wife several months earlier.
China's Foreign Ministry last week declined to address Khan's specific assertions, but it said that as a member of the global Non-Proliferation Treaty since 1992, "China strictly adheres to the international duty of prevention of proliferation it shoulders and strongly opposes . . . proliferation of nuclear weapons in any forms."
Asked why the U.S. government has never publicly confronted China over the uranium transfer, State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said, "The United States has worked diligently and made progress with China over the past 25 years. As to what was or wasn't done during the Reagan administration, I can't say."
The Associated Press - Federal prosecutors Thursday took steps to seize four U.S. mosques and a Fifth Avenue skyscraper owned by a nonprofit Muslim organization long suspected of being secretly controlled by the Iranian government. In what could prove to be one of the biggest counterterrorism seizures in U.S. history, prosecutors filed a civil complaint in federal court seeking the forfeiture of more than $500 million in assets of the Alavi Foundation and an alleged front company.
CNN - A handful of Republican senators have proposed a constitutional amendment to limit how long a person may serve in Congress.
Currently, there are no term limits for federal lawmakers, but Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, and several of his colleagues are advocating that service in the Senate be limited to 12 years, while lawmakers would only be allowed to serve six years in the House.
"Americans know real change in Washington will never happen until we end the era of permanent politicians," DeMint said in a statement released by his office. "As long as members have the chance to spend their lives in Washington, their interests will always skew toward spending taxpayer dollars to buyoff special interests, covering over corruption in the bureaucracy, fundraising, relationship building among lobbyists, and trading favors for pork -- in short, amassing their own power."
Two-thirds of the House and Senate would need to approve the amendment -- a stumbling block that short-circuited the idea 14 years ago. The new proposal echoes the Citizen Legislature Act, part of the original Contract with America proposed by Republicans before they won control of Congress in 1994.
That measure, which would have allowed both senators and members of the House to serve just 12 years, won a majority in the Republican-controlled House in 1995, but failed because it did not meet the constitutionally-required two-thirds threshold.
"There is no question there are big obstacles in the way," said Philip Blumel, president of U.S. Term Limits, a nonpartisan organization that advocates putting time restrictions in place. "It is difficult to pass a constitutional amendment, however the goal is worthwhile and it is very important to the country. Also, if not now, when?"
This time around, proponents are not calling on lawmakers who believe in the idea to place a self-imposed term limit on themselves.
"If you are asking people to self-limit, what might happen -- and what did happen -- is that honorable politicians who made the pledge left office," while others did not, Blumel said. "The answer to the term-limit supporter is not self-limiting. It is the body as a whole."
DeMint, who is currently serving his first six-year term in the Senate, echoed Blumel's rationale for dismissing self-imposed term limits.
"I want to be clear: demanding that reformers adopt self-imposed term limits is a recipe for self-defeat on this issue," DeMint said in Tuesday's statement. "We lost the battle for term limits after the 1994 Republican Contract with America because we forced our best advocates for reform to go home, while the big-spending career politicians waited them out. We must have term limits for all or term limits will never succeed. Only when we apply the same rules to all will we be able to enact vital bipartisan reforms."
The Associated Press - A badly damaged North Korean patrol ship retreated in flames Tuesday after a skirmish with a South Korean naval vessel along their disputed western coast, the first such clash in seven years, South Korean officials said. There were no South Korean casualties, the country's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement, and it was not immediately clear if there were any casualties on the North Korean side. Each side blamed the other for violating the sea border.
"Two senior military officers from the shadowy world of Special Operations are playing a large and previously unreported role in shaping the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, a move that underscores that the internal debate has moved past a rigid choice between expansive missions to provide security for Afghan civilians and narrowly tailored missions to find and kill terrorists.
Navy Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Ft. Bragg, N.C., and Vice Adm. Robert S. Harward, the deputy leader of the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va., are attending and informing the strategy meetings that the White House began in September to refine its approach in Afghanistan. Both men have deep ties to Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the war. They are said to favor large infusions of U.S. troops to Afghanistan for performing counterinsurgency operations in select population centers, but they also advocate marshalling forces to pursue terrorists across Afghanistan’s rugged, mountainous terrain — a task in which McRaven plays a key role.
..
As a result, McChrystal is turning to McRaven and Harward for critical tasks in Afghanistan. McRaven runs a secretive detachment of Special Forces known as Task Force 714 — once commanded by McChrystal himself — that the NSC staffer described as “direct-action” units conducting “high-intensity hits.” In an email, Sholtis said that because Task Force 714 was a “special ops organization” he “can’t go into much detail on authorities, etc.” But the NSC staffer — who called McRaven “McChrystal Squared” — said Task Force 714 was organized into “small groups of Rangers going wherever the hell they want to go” in Afghanistan and operating under legal authority granted at the end of the Bush administration that President Obama has not revoked." (Washington Independent)
FOXNews - The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to block Tuesday's scheduled execution of sniper mastermind John Allen Muhammad.
The Court did not comment Monday on why it refused to consider his appeal.
Muhammad is scheduled to die by injection at a Virginia prison for the slaying of Dean Harold Meyers at a gas station during a three-week spree in October 2002 across Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were also suspected of fatal shootings in other states, including Louisiana, Alabama and Arizona. Malvo is serving a life sentence in prison.
Muhammad still has a clemency petition before Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine.
Meanwhile, the execution has brought back painful memories for D.C.-area residents.
When James D. Martin was shot dead seven years ago in the parking lot of a grocery store in suburban Washington, it got little attention on the nightly news.
Early the next morning, a landscaper was fatally shot in nearby Rockville, also by a .223-caliber bullet. Then a cabbie, at a gas station not far away. There was another shooting a half-hour later just up the road — a woman slain as she sat reading on a sidewalk bench. Within 90 minutes, another woman was gunned down while vacuuming her van at a service station.
By 10 a.m., it was clear that something sinister was happening. Something awful.
Then it spread.
A shooting that night in Washington moved the sniper killings south. The next day, a woman was wounded in a craft store parking lot in Fredericksburg, Va., 50 miles from D.C.
Fear reigned. People stayed indoors, afraid to go shopping or pump gas. Authorities on television recommended ways to avoid becoming targets. Schoolchildren were kept inside at recess and drilled on duck-and-cover techniques.
Then came a lull — three days without a shooting. But on Oct. 7, 13-year-old Iran Brown was shot in the chest as he was dropped off at school in Bowie, Md., just east of Washington.
"Shooting a kid — it's getting to be really, really personal now," a tearful Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose told a news conference as the nation's collective concerns settled on its capital.
There were three more fatal sniper shootings in Virginia the next week, followed by another break — three days. Four. Five. Just long enough for people to relax, at least a little.
"We were thinking everything was going to be OK," said retired school teacher Bernice Easter, of Wheaton.
It wasn't. On Oct. 19, a man was shot outside a steakhouse in Ashland, Va., about 80 miles south of Washington. Three more days passed quietly. Then bus driver Conrad Johnson was killed in Aspen Hill, Md., not far from where the shootings began.
On Oct. 24, police captured John Allen Muhammad and teenage accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo at a rest stop 50 miles northwest of D.C. The nerve-tingling terror that had gripped the region's 5.4 million people and captivated the nation was over.
Now Virginia is preparing to lethally inject Muhammad at 9 p.m. Tuesday for murdering Dean Harold Meyers at a gas station in Manassas, Va. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined without comment to consider the appeal and stop the execution.
Muhammad's lawyers also have asked Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to commute his sentence to life in prison, saying Muhammad is mentally ill and should not be executed, but Kaine typically does not respond until the court has ruled.
CHRONICLE NEWS SERVICE - An Army psychiatrist about to be deployed to a combat zone overseas shouted a religious slogan in Arabic before fatally shooting 13 people — including 12 soldiers — and injuring 28 others at this sprawling Central Texas military post on Thursday.
Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the base commander at Fort Hood, said on NBC's Today Show that witnesses heard Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan shout "Allahu Akbar!" before opening fire. The phrase means "God is great!" in Arabic.
The death toll rose by one overnight when one of the wounded died. Today, Col. John Rossi said all the wounded were in stable condition, including the suspect and the policewoman who shot him, Sgt. Kimberly Munley, 34.
“It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer,” said Cone, praising her for stopping the gunman despite already being wounded herself.
Identities of the dead and other wounded were not released this morning as notification of family members continued, Rossi said.
Hasan is accused of attacking his fellow soldiers about 1:30 p.m. at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where troops waited to see doctors as they prepared to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan — or return from combat. Armed with two pistols, he shot more than 40 people before military police and civilian police officers responded, officials said. He was wounded by a civilian policewoman, who was injured in the exchange, police said.
Rossi said Hasan, whose assault lasted about 10 minutes, was armed with weapons that were not issued by the military.
“We’re looking into whether (the guns) were registered on the post, which was required,” Rossi said.
Col. Steven Braverman, a hospital commander at Fort Hood, said Hasan worked under him at the Carl N. Darnall Army Medical Center.
“He took care of soldiers with behavioral health problems and evaluated people with disabilities,” Braverman said.
He said there was no indication prior to the shooting that Hasan was unable to provide those services.
“We had no problems with his job performance while he worked at Darnall,” Braverman said.
Hasan had been notified before the shooting that he was going to deploy to Afghanistan, he added.
Early Thursday, Hasan showed no signs of worry or stress when he stopped at 7-Eleven for his daily breakfast of hash browns, said Jeannie Strickland, the store's manager.
“He came in (Thursday) morning just like normal,” she said.
However, surveillance video showed he was wearing religious attire rather than typical civilian or medical clothing. Strickland said that was unusual and she asked him about it, but he replied that he did that sometimes.
A few hours later, officials said, the Virginia native began his rampage on the post. Fort Hood, near Killeen, is the largest active duty post in the United States, with 340 square miles of facilities and homes. More than 50,000 military personnel and about 27,000 family members and civilian support personnel live and work there.
Calling it a “terrible tragedy,” Cone, the post commander, said officials “believe the evidence indicates it was a single shooter.”
Cone did not speculate on a motive, but the Army released a statement saying the shootings didn't appear to be an act of political terrorism. Two others were questioned and later released.
Postings drew attention
Federal law enforcement officials told the Associated Press that Hasan had come to their attention at least six months ago because of Internet postings that discussed suicide bombings and other threats.
One of the Web posts that authorities reviewed is a blog that equates suicide bombers with a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of his comrades.
“To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause,” said the Internet posting. “Scholars have paralled (sic) this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers.”
The officials say Hasan appeared to have made the postings, but they are still trying to confirm that he was the author. They say an official investigation was not opened.
Killeen police officials late Thursday said their officers were at Nidal's apartment on the outskirts of Fort Hood.
“We do have officers up there assisting the federal agents,” said Killeen police spokeswoman Carroll Smith. Smith also said that the department's SWAT officers were sent to the apartment.
In Fort Hood, Maria Treviño, who works on the post at Darnall, said she was on the phone with a woman who was at the readiness center when the shots erupted. Treviño said she heard screaming and gunshots before she hung up to get help.
“They just started screaming, ‘Don't let him in, don't let him in, they're shooting at us,' ” she said. “I pray they didn't get hurt. It was horrible. We're still scared over here.”
Treviño said that soon after the call, bloodied victims began arriving at the hospital, which was on lockdown.
The post, too, was on lockdown for several hours as authorities combed the scene and collected evidence. An online message at 3:06 p.m. from a person who lives on Fort Hood said she was “locked in my post housing. scared. don't know where the shooters are.” A few minutes later, the sender, whose My-Space page indicates she is the wife of a soldier, wrote, “All I hear are sirens telling us to stay indoors. can't hear any gunfire.”
Base doctors converged
Lt. Col. Larry Masullo, acting chief of the post's emergency hospital, said that within minutes of the first shooting report, his staff began calling every physician, nurse and medic available.
About 100 medical personnel converged at Darnall as teams were assembled into trauma bays, he said.
Sgt. Andrew Hagerman, a military police officer, had been patrolling a housing area when he heard reports of a shooting. He said he first suspected kids with firecrackers but raced toward the scene when he realized what was happening.
"You don't hesitate at all," said Hagerman, who has deployed to Iraq. "And your main goal is to take the shooter down."
Hagerman saw Hasan, unconscious shirtless and in combat pants, on the ground as paramedics treated him.
