Thursday, December 5, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com


News Clips For The Day

A country gripped by fear: Survey finds majority of Afghans afraid of US troops, voting – NBC
By Aarne Heikkila and Alexander Smith


KABUL, Afghanistan – More than three out of four Afghans live in fear of the U.S. troops sent to liberate their country from the Taliban, according to a survey released Thursday.

The annual poll was conducted by the Asia Foundation, a non-profit international development group. It also found that while an increasing number of Afghan citizens feel that their country is heading in the right direction, more than half of those questioned said they were afraid to exercise basic democratic rights such as voting and attending peaceful protests.

An Afghan protester is approached by security as she holds up a banner reading "Signing Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with the USA is a Treason" during the first day of a four-day meeting of around 2,500 Afghan tribal elders and leaders, in Kabul on Nov. 21.

About 46,000 U.S. troops remain in the country more than 12 years after the invasion triggered by the 9/11 attacks, making Afghanistan the longest conflict in U.S. history.

And while President George W. Bush vowed in 2001 that "the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies," the survey suggests that vision has failed to materialize despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in the country.

Some 77 percent of respondents said they would "be afraid when encountering international forces."  Respondents were far more confident in their dealings with the Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army. Almost nine-in-ten said the NATO-trained ANA was "honest and fair with the Afghan people" and helped "improve security," while 72 percent felt the same about the police.

Michael Keating, a senior consulting fellow of the Asia program at London's Chatham House think tank, said it was "not that surprising" that many Afghans were wary of coming face-to-face with troops.

"It's not a very relaxing experience," he said. However, Keating also pointed out that Afghans in some parts of the country "do not want [Western forces] to leave."
The Asia Foundation conducted face-to-face interviews with a total of 9,200 Afghans, with respondents living in all of the country's 34 provinces. The San Francisco-based organization has carried out the survey annually since 2004.

According to the poll, 59 percent of respondents said they would "experience some level of fear" when voting in an election. The Taliban has targeted polling stations in recent years. The country will elect a new president in April.

But Geeta, a 22-year-old teacher in Sheberghan Jawzjan, said she believed the ballot box was crucial to "bring a change" to Afghanistan. "Our country is in need of educated and honest leaders. And in order to bring a person of the mentioned qualities into power, I voted for the candidate of my choice," she told NBC News. "I have also encouraged all my friends to go to polls and vote."

A clear majority of respondents – 68 percent – said they would be afraid to participate in a peaceful demonstration.
Geeta said she had demonstrated to remove a local governor who was not living up to some residents' expectations.

"I'd like to see more of these peaceful demonstrations in the future because I think it is good for our country," she added.

An Afghan woman shows a voter registration card she got at a mosque being used as a mobile registration office in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Nov. 9.

Attaullah, a 26-year-old administrator at a hospital in Kabul, said he did not agree with protests because they have the potential to be hijacked by other causes.
"Often demonstrations are planned out for a purpose and then it results in something else very bad that one can never expect," he said.

The survey highlighted decreased support for "armed opposition groups" such as the Taliban, with 35 percent of people saying they had a little or a lot of sympathy for them. That's a drop from 56 percent in 2009.

On the role of women in society, 90 percent of Afghans polled said they agree with equal rights, but just 54 percent said state courts treat women and men equally.
More than three-quarters of respondents said corruption remained a problem in the country as a whole. This is the highest level since the Asia Foundation's 2006 survey. 

Farhad Amiri, who owns a small business selling carpets and antiques in Kabul, said corruption has become endemic.

"In Afghanistan more than 90 percent of our dealings involve corruption," the 40-year-old said. "If you want to get your things done in a governmental department you will have to bribe them. If you don't bribe them, your work will either be delayed or they will create problems for you."

But the majority of Afghans polled – 57 percent – believed their country was heading in the right direction, up from 46 percent in 2011 and 52 percent in 2012.
Twelve years after the beginning of the war, Afghanistan faces external pressure to reform as well as ongoing internal conflicts.

The survey has been released as Afghanistan remains locked in negotiations with the U.S. about the bilateral security agreement which will shape America's military presence in the country after 2014.

Without an agreement, the U.S. could withdraw all its troops and leave the Afghan administration, currently led by President Hamid Karzai, to fight the Taliban alone.
More than 2,100 American troops have died and almost 20,000 have been wounded during the conflict, according to the Department of Defense.


Reading this article I didn't find a statement as to why the Afghans are afraid of US troops. Does this mean they fear being killed or they fear being harassed? American soldiers invading Afghan homes to find Taliban fighters or sympathizers is one of the things that Karzai wants to stop, and it would certainly cause fear among the people for their home to be entered by armed troops.

According to the poll only 35% of the people said they agreed with the Taliban, and 90% agreed with women's rights. That looks like progress. Still, they trust the Afghan forces to be fair more than they do the Americans. I'm sure there are language difficulties enough to cause misunderstandings on such encounters, and a potentially friendly Afghan citizen probably looks very much like a Taliban, which will tend to make Americans nervous enough to shoot first and ask questions later. It's a bad situation.





400,000-year-old human DNA adds new tangle to our origin story – NBC
Alan Boyle, Science Editor


The Sima de los Huesos people lived about 400,000 years ago in Spain.
The oldest human DNA ever recovered is throwing scientists for a loop: The 400,000-year-old genetic material comes from bones that have been linked to Neanderthals in Spain — but its signature is most similar to that of a different ancient human population from Siberia, known as the Denisovans.

The researchers who did the analysis said their findings show an "unexpected link" between two of our extinct cousin species. Follow-up studies could crack the mystery — not only for the early humans who lived in the cave complex known as Sima de los Huesos (Spanish for "Pit of Bones"), but for other mysterious populations in the Pleistocene epoch.

"Ancient DNA sequencing techniques have become sensitive enough to warrant further investigation of DNA survival at sites where Middle Pleistocene hominins are found," the research team, led by Matthias Meyer and Svante Pääbo of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, wrote in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. ("Hominin" is the currently accepted term for humans and our close evolutionary cousins.)

As anthropologists are getting better at extracting DNA from ancient bones, genetic mysteries are cropping up more frequently: Last month, researchers at scientific meetings talked about not-yet-published findings that hinted at interbreeding among Neanderthals, Denisovans and previously unknown populations of early humans.
A new standard

The age of the mitochondrial DNA analyzed for the Nature study sets a new standard: Researchers used statistical analysis of the DNA and other samples to estimate that the material was roughly 400,000 years old. That meshed with the estimated age for similar DNA extracted from bear bones found in the same cave.

More than 6,000 human fossils, representing about 28 individuals, have been recovered from the Sima de los Huesos site, a hard-to-get-to cave chamber that lies about 100 feet (30 meters) below the surface in northern Spain. The fossils are unusually well-preserved, thanks in part to the undisturbed cave's constant cool temperature and high humidity.

The thigh bone of a 400,000-year-old hominin yielded mitochondrial DNA for analysis.
Researchers drilled a series of tiny holes into the cracks in a human femur recovered from the cave to obtain nearly 2 grams (0.07 ounce) of powdered bone. At first, they looked for the signature of ancient nuclear DNA, which could have provided information about the genome of the individual behind the femur — but that information was overwhelmed by the signature of modern-day human contamination.
Then they turned their attention to the mitochondrial DNA, which lies outside the cell's nucleus and is passed down from a mother to her children. That strategy was more successful.

Unusual finding
Previous analysis of bones from the cave had led researchers to assume that the Sima de los Huesos people were closely related to Neanderthals on the basis of their skeletal features. But the mitochondrial DNA was far more similar to that of the Denisovans, an early human population that was thought to have split off from Neanderthals around 640,000 years ago. The first Denisovan specimens were identified in 2010, based on an analysis of 30,000-year-old bones excavated in Siberia.
This skeleton from the Sima de los Huesos cave has been assigned to an early human species known as Homo heidelbergensis. However, researchers say the skeletal structure is similar to that of Neanderthals - so much so that some say the Sima de los Huesos people were actually Neanderthals rather than representatives of Homo heidelbergensis.

The latest DNA analysis sent scientists scrambling for an explanation.
"This unusual finding could be due to at least two different scenarios, both relating to the material inheritance of mtDNA [mitochondrial DNA] and the ease with which it can be lost in a lineage," Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum who was not involved in the Nature study, wrote in an email.
One scenario could be that the DNA was passed down the maternal line from a population that was ancestral to the Sima de los Huesos humans as well as the Denisovans, but that the lineage died out among Neanderthals and modern humans.
The other scenario is that an as-yet-undetermined population interbred with ancestors of the Spanish cave-dwellers as well as the Denisovans. Meyer, Pääbo and their colleagues tentatively favor that scenario. "Based on the fossil record, more than one evolutionary lineage may have existed in Europe during the Middle Pleistocene," they write.

"Either way, this new finding can help us start to disentangle the relationships of the various human groups known from the last 600,000 years," Stringer said. "If more mtDNA can be recovered from the Sima 'population' of fossils, it may demonstrate how these individuals were related to each other, and how varied their population was."
Update for 10:30 p.m. ET Dec. 4: Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told NBC News that the DNA findings were interesting from a technical standpoint — but he pointed out that the mitochondrial DNA alone doesn't reveal how the Sima de los Huesos people and their ancestors lived. He suspects that further DNA studies will show that the relationships between populations of early humans were messier and more tangled than the typical diagrams of human origins would suggest. That's appropriate, he said, "because I think the real world is messy."


When I was in college and taking anthropology, paleontologists and archaeologists had Carbon 14 dating, tree ring dating and comparison of artifacts found to decide how old and how closely related the materials found were. They measured bones and assigned species by the thickness and shape of the bones found. Whole skeletons were rarely found, and there was no way to know to a certainty whether a given individual was of average size and shape. They guessed and built theories on comparative studies.

It was enough to distinguish between “Lucy” and more developed forms, plus there were improvements in the stone tools found with them which could be used to judge brain development. The newest DNA studies are showing more clear-cut dating and the actual genetic background of the species. The first DNA reports several years ago on Neanderthals stated that they were too different from Homo Sapiens to have viable offspring with them.

Now, DNA studies are showing that there are not only Neanderthal genes in the modern human genome, there are also Denisovan genes. According to a Wikipedia article, that interbreeding was thought to have occurred in the Middle East before Homo Sapiens branched out and went up into Europe and Asia, so these genes are present in several specimens from as far apart as Siberia and the Australian Aborigines.

One scientist said that adding variety by such interbreeding adds survival value. Genes from Neanderthals may have made it easier for the tropical Homo Sapiens to have weathered European winters in the Ice Ages, for instance, and Neanderthals are thought to have been light-skinned which would give them more vitamin D from the northern sun. The groups probably looked fairly similar to each other, or I wouldn't think that they would have mated across the species line.

I wouldn't be surprised if DNA studies are later considered to show that they weren't even different species after all, but different races. Of course, lions and tigers will interbreed and produce “ligers”. I don't know if they are fertile, though. It's becoming a very complicated subject as more is analyzed from the standpoint of DNA, but I do think that DNA is a better way to classify human remains than the thickness of bones. It's an exciting thing to speculate about, and I hope to find more articles about it in time.





Driver in New York train crash suspended without pay, railroad says – NBC

By Andrew Siff, NBC New York, and Erin McClam, NBC News

The engineer who drove the New York commuter train that took a curve at 82 mph and flew off the tracks, killing four people, has been suspended without pay since the crash, a spokeswoman for the transit authority said Thursday.

The engineer, William Rockefeller, has told federal investigators that he was “in a daze situation” before the crash and hit the brakes too late, his lawyer told NBC News earlier this week.

The transit spokeswoman told NBC New York that Rockefeller was suspended immediately after the derailment, as soon as drug test was ordered, according to the policy of the railroad, Metro-North.

Rockefeller, 45, is a 15-year veteran of the railroad.
At least four people were killed and 63 others were injured when a Metro-North train jumped the tracks as it was rounding a curve about 100 yards from a stop.
Besides the four killed, 63 people were injured when the train, making an early-morning run from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, ran off the rails at a sharp curve and came to rest inches from the Harlem River.

The lawyer, Jeffrey Chartier, said that Rockefeller had slept from 8:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. and felt rested before he reported to work at 5 a.m. the day of the crash. He had worked an afternoon shift for years until two weeks earlier, transit sources have said.

Chartier also characterized the engineer’s state before the crash as “an autopilot kind of thing.” The chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday that fatigue has been “an insidious problem, particularly in the rail industry.”

Sleep experts have said that Rockefeller’s condition could have been similar to what is known as highway hypnosis, in which drivers zone out on long stretches of monotonous interstate drives.

Investigators said earlier this week that they had found no problems with the train’s brakes, the tracks or the signals. Authorities are awaiting drug and alcohol tests on Rockefeller, but a breath test at the scene was negative.


I have always heard that you can't make up the amount of fatigue that ensues from losing sleep by getting just one good night's sleep. He slept from 8:30 to 3:00 AM, which by my count is six and a half hours, not eight, but he "felt rested." He had only recently switched his sleep and work patterns, though, and I think our “biorhythms” get set in place, making it hard to change. However it happened, it's a tragedy. There is no sign that he was on drugs or was texting while driving or doing other dangerous things. He is apparently a good citizen who got caught in a lapse, with disastrous results.





Biden: I was 'very direct' with China president over air defense zone – NBC

By Michael Martina, Kiyoshi Takenaka, and Ben Blanchard, Reuters

BEIJING -- China's new air defense identification zone over the East China Sea has caused "significant" unease in the region, Vice President Joe Biden said on Thursday, adding he had stated Washington's firm objection to the move during talks in Beijing.
Biden had around five hours of discussions with President Xi Jinping on Wednesday, with both leaders laying out their perspective on an issue that has rattled East Asia. The zone, two thirds the size of Britain, covers an area that includes islands at the heart of a territorial dispute with Japan.

In response, China's Foreign Ministry said Biden had been told the zone accorded with international law and that the United States should respect it.
"China's recent and sudden announcement of the establishment of a new air defense identification zone has, to state the obvious, caused significant apprehension in the region," Biden told a gathering of U.S. executives in Beijing.

"I was very direct about our firm position and our expectations in my conversations with President Xi."

Beijing's announcement of the zone on November 23 has triggered protests from the United States, Japan and South Korea.

Under its rules, all aircraft have to report flight plans to Chinese authorities and maintain radio contact. U.S., Japanese and South Korean military aircraft have breached the zone without informing Beijing. China's military has scrambled fighter jets on at least one occasion to monitor.

The group of uninhabited islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, over which both nations claim ownership.

Japanese and South Korean commercial carriers have also been told by their governments to ignore the rules. Three U.S. airlines, acting on government advice, are notifying China of plans to transit the zone.

Xi took on board what Biden said, according to a senior U.S. administration official travelling with the vice president.

"From our perspective, it's up to China. And we'll see how things unfold in the coming days and weeks," said the official.

China has repeatedly said the zone was designed to reduce the risk of misunderstandings, and stressed that since it was set up there had been no issues with freedom of flight for civilian airlines.

"During the talks [with Biden] the Chinese side repeated its principled position, stressing that the Chinese move accorded with international law and practice and that the U.S. side ought to take an objective and fair attitude and respect it," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in a brief statement.

The United States has made clear it will stand by treaty obligations that require it to defend the Japanese-controlled islands, but it is also reluctant to get dragged into any military clash between rivals Japan and China.

Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, speaking in Tokyo, rebuffed suggestions that Washington's decision not to publicly ask Beijing to rescind the zone meant the United States was out of sync with Japan.

Biden said Washington had an enormous interest in what happens in the region.
"The United States has a profound stake in what happens here because we need, and we are, and we will remain a Pacific power, diplomatically, economically and militarily," he said.

China's stake in regional stability would also continue to grow, Biden added.
"That's why China will bear increasing responsibility to contribute positively to peace and security. That means taking steps to reduce the risk of accidental conflict and miscalculation ... and refraining from taking steps that would increase tension," Biden said.

The official English-language China Daily said the two countries had to address a serious "trust deficit".

"The U.S.' reaction to the (zone) is only the latest reminder of how difficult it is for the two nations to overcome their distrust," it said in an editorial.
But the fact neither Biden nor Xi mentioned the zone in front of reporters on Wednesday was a positive sign that both are "indeed capable of managing their occasionally volatile ties", it noted.

Biden is due to head to South Korea later on Thursday, but will meet Chinese Premier Li Keqiang before he leaves.


http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/12/how-a-tiny-island-chain-explains-the-china-japan-dispute/281995/
The Atlantic

How a Tiny Island Chain Explains the China-Japan Dispute
Beijing's imposition of an air defense identification zone is only one part of the struggle over the future of Northeast Asia.
Matt Schiavenza Dec 4 2013,

What is China trying to accomplish by instituting the zone? And, considering that it triggered immediate opposition from the United States and Japan, was this decision a mistake?

These are important questions, but it's worth zooming out and considering the more fundamental causes for tension in Northeast Asia. Here, the issues become more complex. Is China's aggression caused by a new president trying to establish his legitimacy? Or is it, instead, an attempt to capitalize on domestic anti-Japanese sentiment? Does the conflict reflect how pre-World War II history continues to shape contemporary East Asian relations? Or is it a scramble for the rich energy resources that supposedly lie inside the disputed waters?

Since the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, China has resolved border disagreements with nearly all of its neighbors, but still has outstanding disputes with India (over Arunachal Pradesh) and several Southeast Asian countries (over the Spratly and Paracel Islands). Japan, too, is engaged in an ongoing spat with South Korea over the Takeshima Islands, known as Dokdo in Korean.

The disagreement over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands began in 1971, when, after sovereignty reverted from American to Japanese control (a legacy from the postwar Treaty of San Francisco that gave the U.S. jurisdiction over some Japanese territory), both China and Taiwan claimed ownership. But it is only in the last decade that the conflict has escalated beyond a regional issue and has attracted widespread international concern. Why has the island dispute turned into such a problem?

The Senkaku/Diaoyus are a chain of islands and rocks in the East China Sea that, since Japan's discovery of them in the 1880s, have never been inhabited. In the late 1960s, a geological survey determined that the waters surrounding the islands likely contain vast deposits of oil and natural gas, and, though this energy potential has yet to be realized, Beijing and Tokyo have a strong incentive to claim it for themselves.

More domestic resources would allow the country to disengage from potentially unstable oil exporters such as Iran, Sudan, and Venezuela. (The same logic, of course, explains interest in the U.S. for Alaskan oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing.)

Japan faces a different calculation. Over the last few decades, the country moved away from oil and natural gas imports, but the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster caused the Japanese government to shut down all 50 of its nuclear reactors and rely on fossil fuels to compensate. 

But the present military brinkmanship over the ADIZ seems to be an overreaction to a trade issue that, presumably, could be negotiated. According to Shihoko Goto, a Japan expert at the Wilson Center, "For both Japan and China, this has gone far beyond the question of who has access to the blue water, oil and other natural resources. This is about history."

The Pull of Nationalism
Since the conclusion of the Second World War, the countries in Northeast Asia have undergone perhaps the fastest, most impressive modernization process in world history. And yet, the political legacy from that conflict—and the years preceding it—continue to shape present-day relations between China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.
Beijing, Seoul, and many other Asian countries feel that Tokyo has not adequately atoned for its behavior during the first half of the 20th century, when Japan dominated the continent through its "co-prosperity sphere."

Meanwhile, China's three decades of sustained economic growth has lifted its confidence in asserting its historical dominance in the region, which over the past two centuries had eroded due to weakness, division, and foreign incursion. And as Beijing's military has grown and modernized, the government has become more assertive in enforcing territorial claims.

Last year Shintaro Ishihara, the right-wing governor of Tokyo, announced at the Heritage Foundation that he wished to purchase three of the five islands from their private owner. Alarmed, the Japanese national government purchased the islands instead, hoping that by keeping them out of Ishihara's control, they'd defuse a potential crisis with China. The ploy backfired. According to Goto, "The Chinese have been very upset by the fact that the islands were passed from one owner to another when the Chinese feel they have very legitimate claims to the islands."

The United States is bound, by treaty, to come to Japan's defense in the event the latter is attacked, and the vice president has taken great pains to insist that there is "no daylight" between Washington and Tokyo on the question of China's ADIZ. But according to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the Japanese government is privately upset that the U.S. cannot seem to decide whether to comply with the Chinese law or defy it, implying that Tokyo and Washington, quite naturally, have different incentives.

If the United States is able to maintain the status quo in Asia and help prevent China from dominating the region, then Beijing will have to focus a lot of attention on local issues, and its capacity to shape politics in other parts of the world will be constrained. By contrast, if China eventually pushes the United States out of Asia, it will have the same sort of hegemonic position in its region that the United States has long enjoyed near its own shores.

And this, ultimately, is the major story lurking beneath the crisis in the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. China doesn't assert its foreign policy claims because of nationalist, historical, or energy-related reasons, though each of these are important. The real reason is that, as China becomes more powerful militarily, its capabilities and interests will necessarily shift, and countries like the United States and Japan will have to adjust. Rather than being a discrete event that can be resolved through negotiation and diplomacy, the current trends suggest that the Sino-Japanese crisis over the Senkaku-Diaoyu islands will merely be the prelude to larger conflicts down the road.


I went to the Atlantic article to try to find out who has the better claim to the islands, but what I discovered is that both have a sort of claim to them, and that the stakes aren't merely about economic advantages, but a power struggle between the US and China. I don't expect a war over it, though, since our powers are so well balanced and there is always the nuclear threat in a war between two nuclear powers, which both will surely want to avoid. It is something to continue to watch, however, since we are so dependent on China economically, and at the same time are by treaty linked firmly with Japan. I'm glad Biden is the negotiator, because I think he is strong and intelligent, plus he has a close link to the President.





One-third of bank tellers rely on public assistance – CBS
ByAimee Picchi MoneyWatch December 5, 2013

Willie Sutton allegedly said he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” But for today’s bank tellers, that remark could appear as a cynical jibe given that one-third are on government aid due to low wages.

Taxpayers spend $899 million annually in state and federal benefits to support bank tellers and their families, according to a new report from The Committee for Better Banks. 

One-third of bank tellers receive some sort of public assistance, ranging from Medicaid to food stamps, the financial industry employee advocacy group found, citing research from the University of California-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. In New York state, almost 40 percent of bank tellers and their family members are enrolled in public assistance programs, costing the state and federal governments $112 million in benefits. 

“Bank workers in New York, across the nation and around the globe are being squeezed, very much as other hourly workers in the economy are,” the report noted. “Banks’ internal employment practices, just like their external practices, increasingly drive inequality.”

It’s not as if banks can’t afford to pay their tellers more, judging from a surge in executive pay: Compensation for the top 50 financial chief executives rose by 20 percent in 2011 and 26 percent in 2010, the study notes.

Take Wells Fargo (WFC) chief executive John Stumpf. Listed as one of the country’s most overpaid CEOs by Bloomberg, Stumpf earned $22.9 million in 2012, a raise of almost 16 percent from his 2011 pay of $19.8 million. That makes him the highest-paid top executive among the country’s top commercial banks, according to The Wall Street Journal. Profit for the company jumped 19 percent in 2012, helped by a surge in mortgage-banking income.

So what does the average teller at Wells Fargo make? Less than $11 an hour, or about $22,600 a year, according to job site Glassdoor.com. While that’s above the federally mandated baseline wage of $7.25 an hour, the pay is low enough to qualify a family of four for food-stamp benefits. 

“It’s not a livable wage,” Alex Shalom, 20, a part-time worker at Bank of America (BAC), told the Washington Post. “Bank of America is making all of this money . . . but we’re not getting paid for holidays.” 

Wells Fargo isn’t the only bank benefiting from the recovering economy. The U.S. banking industry last year posted its highest profits since before the financial crisis, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Many banks also received help from the U.S. government through its bailout program.

The report comes when fast-food workers are organizing strikes and protests against what they say is unfair pay. Bank workers, too, are planning their own protests, the Post notes. The Committee for Better Banks is organizing a rally to protest Bank of America’s increasing use of ATMs with remote tellers. 

“We have already subsidized these ‘too big to fail’ banks with almost a trillion dollars of taxpayers' money,” one commenter wrote at The Washington Post. “The banks are America's real welfare queens.”


I have always assumed bank tellers were fairly well paid. They have a responsible white collar job. $11.00 an hour isn't bad for a single person, but the needs of a family of four are a different case. I'm not surprised they are getting ready to protest. The inflated wages for the CEOs make it even worse. See the following from Wikipedia.


Office and Professional Employees International Union
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) is a trade union in the United States representing 110,416 white-collar workers in the public and private sector.

OPEIU has members in all 50 U.S. states, the district of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The union formerly had 55 locals in all Canadian provinces, but on June 20, 2004 the Canadian locals voted to leave the OPEIU.

Clerical unions began forming in the early 1900s. By 1920, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had issued charters to more than 50 clerical unions. In 1942, the locals banded together to form the International Council of Office Employee Unions. In 1945, this union received a charter from the AFL as the Office Employees International Union. At the time of its founding, the union had about 22,000 members. In 1946 and again in 1948, the union conducted major strikes in New York City that led to the organization thousands of workers on Wall Street. At roughly the same time, the union began organizing locals in Vancouver, British Columbia and Montreal, Quebec. By 1960, the union had doubled in size to nearly 50,000 members.

In 1965, the union adopted its current name. In the 1990s, OPEIU began major organizing drives in the insurance industry, organizing several thousand workers at CUNA Mutual and Prudential. A similar organizing drive at Allstate ended after the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the 10,000 workers were independent contractors. OPEIU also began organizing in the health care industry, organizing office workers at a number of health insurers. But it also began organizing registered nurses and other health care workers in limited numbers around the United States. In 1998, the much-raided collective bargaining arm of the Pennsylvania Nurses Association affiliated with OPEIU, adding 2,500 nurses to the union's rolls. By 2005, OPEIU represented about 5,000 RNs, making it the sixth largest nurses' union in the AFL-CIO.


I have worked at only one unionized office, and that is the National Bank of Washington of Washington, DC. Their main client was the National Mine Workers, so they organized the bank. I can remember feeling that I was reasonably well-compensated, and there was a fairly relaxed atmosphere between the managers and the rank and file workers – I stayed there several years and enjoyed it.




Pope Francis forms panel to advise on sex abuse – CBS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Norah O'Donnell reports.

VATICAN CITY -- Pope Francis is assembling a panel of experts to advise him on sex abuse in the clergy - a task that will involve looking at how to protect children from pedophiles, how to better screen men for the priesthood and how to help victims who have already been harmed.

But it remains unclear if the experts will take up one of the core issues behind the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal: how to make bishops who shelter abusive priests accountable.

Cardinal Sean O'Malley, the archbishop of Boston, announced the creation of the commission Thursday at the conclusion of a meeting between Francis and his eight cardinal advisers who are helping him govern the church and reform the Vatican bureaucracy.

Pope Francis addresses church sex abuse scandal
For the first time, Pope Francis publicly addressed the biggest scandal facing the Catholic Church: clergy sex abuse.

Boston was the epicenter of the 2002 clerical sexual abuse scandal in the U.S.
O'Malley told reporters that the commission, made up of international lay and religious experts on sex abuse, would study current programs to protect children, better screen priests, train church personnel and suggest new initiatives for both the Holy See to implement inside the Vatican City State and for bishops to implement around the world.

He said, to date, the Vatican's involvement in the sex abuse crisis has been largely judicial in nature, with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2001 taking over church trials for priests accused of raping and molesting children.
Now, he said, Francis wants input for a pastoral response, as well.
He said he didn't know if the matter of bishop accountability would be undertaken by the new commission.

Advocates for victims of clerical abuse have long denounced the Vatican's refusal to sanction bishops who shielded abusive priests and moved them from parish to parish rather than report them to police.

That practice, coupled with the church's culture of secrecy and fear of scandal, enabled pedophiles to continue molesting children for decades while the Vatican turned a blind eye.

"Quite frankly that's something that the church needs to address," O'Malley said, when asked if the commission would take up the issue. "I'm not sure whether it will be this commission or the CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) or the Congregation for Bishops."

The commission was announced just days after the Vatican submitted its responses to a U.N. committee monitoring its implementation of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Vatican dodged many of the committee's questions about sex abuse by arguing that it's up to bishops and dioceses to implement programs to protect children, not the Holy See.

Asked about the seeming contradiction, O'Malley said competence for such issues still lies with local church leaders.

"The Holy See will try and help to identify best practices," he said. "Certainly we hope that the Holy See will be able to model what those best practices are as a way of helping other dioceses and bishops conferences to have a response that is truly adequate and pastoral."


Quoting from this news article, “The Vatican dodged many of the committee's questions about sex abuse by arguing that it's up to bishops and dioceses to implement programs to protect children, not the Holy See.” Also, “Asked about the seeming contradiction, Cardinal Sean O'Malley said competence for such issues still lies with local church leaders.” This makes sense, in that the crime of sexually molesting children and others is committed on the local level and must be controlled there.

For the church hierarchy to fail to fire the priests and turn them over to police authorities for a possible jail term, rather than “disciplining” them internally, is a miscarriage of justice, however. Child molestation is a crime as well as a sin. Hopefully this commission will come up with some stricter regulations against Bishops who allowed the criminals to avoid being defrocked. Hopefully more information will emerge soon.